Christopher M. Ryan
Thanks, Paul. Let me review some key operating results for the second quarter. Our team at Gevo, North Dakota continues to keep the plant running well, and the production numbers through second quarter support that point. In the second quarter, we ground 5.7 million bushels of corn to produce 17 million gallons of low-carbon fuel-grade ethanol. And that's around 3 gallons per bushel yield, which is good. That also equates to about a 67 million gallon per year run rate on ethanol. We produced 52,000 tons of high-protein animal feed and over 5 million pounds of distillers corn oil, which is about 1 pound of oil per bushel of corn ground. In our carbon capture and storage business, we sequestered over 40,000 metric tons of CO2 in the second quarter. That CO2 being sequestered is a small fraction of the capacity of the reservoir that we sit on top of in North Dakota. We have a lot of extra capacity to sequester CO2, and we're actively talking to third parties to do that. All these numbers equate to approximately equal amounts by weight of ethanol, high-protein feed and CO2 with some corn oil on top. This is a good diversification for our business. At our RNG business in Northwest Iowa, where we have partnered with 3 dairy farms, we produced about 92,000 million BTUs of renewable natural gas during the second quarter. And we continue to optimize that process to push production higher. This year has been a great year for growing corn. This year's harvest in the United States is projected to be another record year, and that's great for us, but the farmers really need to see some new uses for corn. That brings me to our synthetic aviation fuel or SAF platform. We've been building our SAF platform because we see a substantial and expanding market ahead, one where we believe Gevo is strongly positioned to lead. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration data, U.S. jet fuel demand is projected to rise by more than 2 billion gallons per year over the next decade. We have a great opportunity to help meet that demand with domestic production using agriculture and rural communities as the backbone to do that. At Gevo, we've developed a template for doing that using ethanol as a feedstock to produce SAF or jet fuel in a modular plant. It would only take a few dozen of our ATJ facilities to process roughly 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol into more than 2 billion gallons of competitively priced domestically produced jet fuel, channeling billions of dollars in investment into rural agricultural communities and creating a new use for corn, which the agricultural industry really needs. It's worth noting that traditional fossil-based jet fuel makes up only about 9% of the output from traditional U.S. refineries, whereas the ATJ process that we've designed can produce more than 90% jet fuel from its production stream. To capture this opportunity, we've created 3 standardized plant designs. We call them ATJ30, ATJ60 and ATJ150, all convert low-carbon ethanol into SAF. Gevo, North Dakota stands out as a promising ATJ30 location, thanks to our existing carbon capture and storage infrastructure and reservoir, access to low-cost, low-carbon ethanol and the large acreage we have at our site. We have leveraged our ATJ design from South Dakota and our engineers are busy editing it for the ATJ30 design to be deployed at our site in North Dakota. For ATJ60, this project in South Dakota, we remain in active discussions with the U.S. Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office to advance the $1.63 billion loan guarantee for our South Dakota project, and we're pacing our development spend to align with the financing time line. In the future, once our ATJ process is operational, we intend to expand the business by leveraging our SaaS platform and proprietary systems through multiple business models, including joint ventures, licensing and build own operate. With about 180 existing brownfield ethanol plants in the United States, plus additional greenfield sites domestically and worldwide, we see significant potential for scaling. With that, I'll hand it over to Pat.