The SAF Podcast
Welcome to The SAF Podcast, the only podcast on the internet that exclusively covers sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). So if you want to find out the real issues and challenges are for commercialising and scaling SAF production, look no further.
Every week we will be hearing from senior industry leaders who are actively shaping the future of SAF and aviation.
Hosted by Oscar Henderson and brought to you by the team at SAF Investor. Connect with us at www.safinvestor.com
The SAF Podcast
The SAF Podcast: Emerging Fuels Technology - Why Biogas is more than just hot air for SAF
In this episode of The SAF Podcast, David Lloyd from Emerging Fuel Technology joins Oscar to discuss sustainable aviation fuel production, biogas feedstocks, and the challenges of scaling renewable fuel projects. Lloyd, a former airline strategy executive turned SAF technology entrepreneur, shares his transition from Qantas to the emerging fuels sector and explains why biogas represents an untapped opportunity in sustainable aviation fuel production.
The conversation explores Fischer-Tropsch technology's century-long history, from World War Two applications to its modern applications in renewable fuel production. Lloyd argues that biogas and renewable natural gas offer significant advantages over traditional SAF feedstocks, potentially providing 30% of US jet fuel supply from existing landfills alone. He challenges conventional thinking about project scale, advocating for smaller, replicable facilities rather than massive billion-dollar plants that face lengthy development cycles and higher risks.
Key topics include the economics of different SAF pathways, the role of government mandates versus subsidies in driving adoption, and why the "green premium" terminology may need revision. Lloyd discusses power-to-liquid fuels, comparing eSAF production costs with biosynthetic alternatives, and examines how renewable natural gas infrastructure creates opportunities for distributed SAF production.
The episode addresses critical industry challenges including capital expenditure optimization, investor expectations, and the technology valley of death that many startups face. Lloyd's insights on replicating successful models from the ethanol industry provide valuable perspectives on scaling sustainable aviation fuel production efficiently while managing financial and technical risks in the rapidly evolving clean energy sector.
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Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the SAF podcast. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by David Lloyd from Emerging Fuel Technology, and we are going to be talking about biogas, renewable natural gas, feedstocks, the relationship that different feedstocks have and the challenges they all have compared to each other, and looking at the typical challenges around capex receiving investment and scaling production, whilst also reducing the sometimes criticised phrase green premium. So we're going to get into all of that stuff with David, but before that, david, how are you?
Speaker 3:I'm very well. Thank you, oscar, and thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2:No, absolute pleasure, Thanks. Thanks so much for giving your time. So before we get into all the good stuff, typically we like to sort of get into what people's backgrounds are, how they ended up in their current positions, and also give a brief overview about what emerging fuel technology is, what it does and what its technologies and products are.
Speaker 3:Sure, okay, starting with how I got into the space, I'm a bit of a career airline nerd. In fact I've been in aviation since I ran away from home to join the Air Force at age 17 and a half. Been in aviation since, specifically in airlines since about 2000,. Working in strategy roles and across all the general sort of airline strategy stuff fleet and network planning, alliances and what have you. And funnily enough, I got to this stage not long before the gfc when we had this guy, quantus, who was my employer at the time, started talking about this thing called esg and sustainability. We're all scratching our heads saying what the hell is that, all scratching our heads saying what the hell is that? Um and we um. You know he sort of educated us and um, I guess a penny dropped for me that you know I've sort of been there, done that in airline strategy and here was something that was completely new and it was strategy with a capital s um sustainability. You know we had to have a business which was going to be around in 50 years. Quanta celebrated a hundred year anniversary, um a couple of years ago. The was going to be around in 50 years. Qantas celebrated a 100-year anniversary a couple of years ago. The objective is to be around for another 100. But if we cook the planet and people don't want to fly, we're out of a business. So I sort of looked at this and said, well, that's probably going to be the most interesting thing on the airline strategic agenda for the next couple of years, and so part of my role was to help.
Speaker 3:Originally I sat down in a room with the CEO now CEO Vanessa Hudson and Rob Markley and the CFO to work out well, what the hell is ESG, how do we measure it? What do we need to actually do? And it became pretty clear that we needed to set up a sustainability function, which we duly did and started running through. Well, what are the different levers for airlines to decarbonize? And again I had a moment where I looked at SAF and said, well, that's got to be it, because it's just going to be a very, very long time, if ever, before electrification and hydrogen have any impact. Offsets may not be that socially acceptable for that long and obviously fuel efficiency only gets you so far. Um, again, I said, well, if there's something for me to focus on the next few years at saf, and I essentially attached myself to the then saf team to make myself the expert on saf technologies and feed stocks, which and I'm very grateful for quants for giving me the rope um to to devote basically two years of um of doing that and having a very good poke around every corner of the SAF industry. I think I made a bit of a serial pest of myself with every founder in the SAF technology space asking them about their technology and how it would work. And to cut a long story short, emerging Fuels Technology is the company that I liked best in terms of, I guess, the right blend of technology which is mature and actually works and, you know, and at a stage where I could participate in equity because, you know, I thought I wanted to go somewhere in this business with a startup rather than join a big company and be another sort of link in the chain up, rather than join a big company and be another sort of link in the chain. And EFT's technology is its own take on fissure trops.
Speaker 3:And EFT itself has a very long and interesting history. Its predecessor company actually started up in the mid-1980s. It was called Centroleum and that was at the time when everyone thought the world was going to run out of oil. And so the US in particular had been hit by the OPEC oil embargoes and was looking at alternatives to make itself self-reliant and this was before the fracking revolution. And so they were looking at things like gasification of coal or using natural gas to liquid. And Centralean was at the forefront of that, and in 2006, it actually produced about 400,000 gallons of jet fuel from fossil natural gas, which was flown by the US Air Force in a B-52. And that was sort of the first time outside of South Africa, which had its own long history in FT, that an aircraft had flown on fuel made by Fischer-Tropsch. And so EFT oh sorry, centraleum, for reasons I won't bore your listeners with sort of went its own way and the founders re-established EFT. They bought Centraleum's lab and the key staff working on FT stayed became the genesis of EFT. So it's been around now since 2007.
Speaker 3:But again, ft it's celebrated. Fischer-tropsch technology celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2023. That's when it was invented in. Sorry, yeah, it was invented in 1923 by Messrs Fischer and Tropsch in Germany. So that technology has been around a very long time, but it's only ever worked from an economic perspective in times of duress.
Speaker 3:So, for example, in Germany in World War II. Under wartime conditions. It worked and it scaled. It made a lot of the fuel for the German armed forces in World War II and then in apartheid South Africa, when there was an oil embargo and the South Africans needed to be self-reliant. So the technology has always been there and it's always been applied to fossil feedstocks like coal and natural gas. But what's making the difference for the Fisher-Tropsch technology now is obviously the push for renewables and the fact that FT is a reliable, mature technology that can be applied to multiple renewable feedstocks, including gasification of biomass, renewable feedstocks, including gasification of biomass biogas itself which is what actually convinced me to join EFT, and we can talk about that later and also power to liquid. We actually have a full fissure, trops and upgrading and distillation column set up in our car park to which the client was attached its prototype units, syngas units. So we're doing power to liquid in our car park at demonstration scale. So there you go sure.
Speaker 2:I want to take a step back to a couple of things you you mentioned in your answer there.
Speaker 3:So yeah, sorry for the monologue it's absolutely fine.
Speaker 2:It makes my life very easy, so keep that going. Um, what sort of prompted you to make the transition from the airline side into the sort of technology side, because you mentioned that eft was the most appealing of the sort of the company? Yeah, why did you make that?
Speaker 3:well, yeah, this is um, actually this is deeply personal. I don't think I've shared this with many um, so here it goes to the world. But, um, um, I was a consultant at bosta consulting group, um, with quantus as a client back in the 2000s when low-cost carriers first started up, and at the time, um, the advice from bcG to Qantas was you need to start your own low-cost carrier because the model is here to stay. It's you know, you can't beat them. Join them. And Qantas twice basically ignored that advice. The third time they took the advice and established Jetstar, which went on to become wildly successful. But after Qantas turned down the idea the second time, which was the project I was directly involved in, sitting across the table from someone who I crossed swords with many years later and this person was spitting across the table Qantas as a full-service airline will never do low cost. I thought at the time well, qantas, you know, you guys have lost the plot. The LCCs are going to be here. And I stayed with BCG company I really enjoyed working with at the time and I worked exclusively with airline clients. I was having a good time.
Speaker 3:But when, when I did eventually move on to Virgin Blue, which was the LCC which succeeded in australia. I got there too late to um get into the round, the the management equity round, if you like. So I was a direct report to the chief commercial officer at the time, um, and then within about two years, I was a direct report to the ceo. I was a general manager, but I didn't get any equity in the starter. And I kicked myself because I'd I'd you know, I'd I'd said in the Qantas boardroom to this Qantas executive and his team this is going to succeed and Qantas is going to pay dearly if it doesn't join. And I didn't have the courage of my convictions at the time. That's the time when I should have got up and picked up the phone to my contact at Virgin Blue and said I'd like to join you guys. I left it a year too long.
Speaker 3:And so when I saw the movement of renewable fuels and sustainability if you go back to my comments earlier I said well, sustainability is an existential issue for airlines and SAF is the only real answer for that sustainability.
Speaker 3:It has to succeed. That's when I said well, david, if you believe yourself, you've got to act and go and get into that space. And, as I say, I was fortunate that I'd had two years at Qantas to survey that space and come up with a pretty short list of companies that I thought I'd be interested in joining at that stage. And not to say there aren't other great companies operating in the space, but something where I could have the level of impact that I'd like to believe I'm having at um, at emerging fuels technology and also something which um had, frankly, not a great valuation that I think I could turn into a great valuation. You know I'm not driven by money but um, but just seeing you know it's a um, it's a barometer of success to see the valuation of the company go up and say, yeah, the market's acknowledging the value of what's being done.
Speaker 2:Thanks for sharing that. That is very much appreciated. And I want to go to the second point.
Speaker 2:You mentioned Fischer-Tropsch working in times of distress world war ii, apartheid very much when domestic technically, but not economically correct sure, um and when sort of domestic supplies required in order to sort of get the get end products, and that's when it works. Do you think currently you've mentioned the urgency of the climate crisis and what we need to do to achieve this. Do you think there's similarities with that or are we in a totally different form of distress because we don't have the necessarily national boundary situation?
Speaker 3:I mean it and other SAF technologies work in very different circumstances In the EU. Effectively, you've got that duress, if you like, which is the SAF mandate, which says you have to use SAF or you're going to cop a big fine. So that's a pretty easy case in some respects economically, because you've actually attached a value to it and you can say this SAF is worth more than fossil jet, and so you can close the gap because the airlines are willing to pay more and because every other this is important because every airline is subject to exactly the same. No airline is. It's not a voluntary market like the US where you get a really funny dynamic. In the US, you know, we've had some airlines that will remain anonymous say to us look, we just can't buy SAF for any more than fossil jet price. Our, you know we can't for competitive reasons. In some cases there are board policies that prohibit that and so their aim. So they'll buy as much SAF as they can as long as it's priced at fossil jet. And the only way you can close that particular gap is through the generosity of the US taxpayer, through subsidies, or it's not necessarily a subsidy per se, but through the renewable fuel standard and the RINs, which is paid for by the oil companies and, indirectly, by American consumers at the end of the day. But unless you've got that subsidy in there in that market, no, none of those um saf technologies work either.
Speaker 3:Um, you know, personally, I think the eu is a a better model. It's more. At least it's transparent. Everyone can see the price. Um, you know the the airlines are not going to like the fact that, and coming from many, many decades in airlines myself, no airline CFO is going to vote for having higher fuel prices, but the reality is, if you're using 10% SAF by 2030 and paying, say, double the price of fossil jet for that 10%, that's not adding a whole lot to your cost base compared to the movements of fossil jet within the past couple of decades anyway. Um, so you know, I think you know the least airlines could do is all commit to 10 by 2030, which most of them have done. Um, but the important thing is, uh, you're not not making losers on on the sort of the price aspects.
Speaker 2:One of the sort of most interesting conversations we had I know you were at our London conference earlier this year. Gene Gibolas from World Energy said lots of people don't like the word green premium because it suggests premium for a very similar product when in actual fact they're two very different products SAF and jet fuel.
Speaker 3:Yeah, green premium was actually invented by Bill Gates, when, in actual fact, they're two very different products SAF and jet fuel. Yeah, green Premium was actually invented by Bill Gates, who now says that he regrets using that.
Speaker 2:But in terms of justifying airline CFOs saying no, they won't pay for it unless it's the same price as jet fuel. Does the narrative that you know SAF people or you know airlines that everyone uses about this green premium need to change? Does there need to be a more thorough conversation around the decarbonisation aspect and the inherent costs that this has?
Speaker 3:I think so and I was talking very specifically about US airlines. So, for example, again, qantas has recognised there's going to be a cost to decarbonisation and that's facing up to it. Qantas is odd because the market here you don't have either the carrots of the US subsidies or the sticks of the EU mandates, and there are obviously mandates developing in other markets around Asia Pacific as well. But Australia at present is a bit of a policy-free zone on SAF, which isn't helpful for airlines trying to do the right things like Qantas and, to be fair, virgins also would like to do the right thing as well. But again, with the US, I think it's unreasonable that airline CFOs think that they should pay nothing for decarbonizing, that it should be a cost-free exercise for them.
Speaker 3:The reality is there is a cost which we've called the green premium and at present that's all being effectively paid for by the US taxpayer. And there's going to be a day when I don't know when mini-me Donald Trump gets into power. Who says what the hell? What are we paying these billions of dollars? Because at present the subsidies don't amount to much out of the US budget, because there's bugger all SAF being produced. But you imagine what happens when SAF becomes I don't know 10, 20, 30% of the fuel supply. Imagine the size of the subsidies it would take to keep all of that at fossil jet price. So either the cost of production needs to go down, because otherwise it's going to become a day when the US president or Congress is going to say we're just paying too much to keep people flying on their summer holidays to Florida, keep people flying on their summer holidays to Florida.
Speaker 2:I want to take a step back and talk about your technology, specifically in the feedstocks you guys are using. So why are you so focused on biogas, renewable natural gas, as a feedstock? Because you've got sort of your own project, you've got your licensed project, because you've got sort of your own project.
Speaker 3:You've got your licensed project.
Speaker 2:So explain that justification and also what the technologies, how those sort of are applied differently depending on what the feedstocks are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay. So as a business, we've got two sides of our business. One side is licensing our technology to others who want to use it to make SAF, and 12 is a good example of that and they, you know, at that SAF investor presentation they got a lot of airplay because they're a flagship for IAG, who was obviously a big presence at that conference. We have other e-fuel producers who are licensed to as well Nordic Electrofuels, for example and then we've got a bunch of other companies that have various ways of processing biomass into gasifying it, which can then use FT as well. Raven SR is an example of that.
Speaker 3:On top of that, a project that's being built at present in the north of Canada is taking it's reconditioned an abandoned gas well, natural gas, and it's taking that natural gas and running it through our process to produce diesel, because that's a lot lower emissions than trucking it up from the south of Canada, for example.
Speaker 3:It provides energy security and a bunch of other economic benefits for remote Inuit tribes you security and a bunch of other economic benefits for remote Inuit tribes. So we're also we do have a license, if you like, in the fossil world, but we'd like to think that it's a pretty good cause. It's better than the alternative because if you're stuck up in the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter, you want your diesel Most economically or the most ecologically friendly way to do that is locally, from that natural gas supply. I'm sure there'll be people who would like to pick a fight on that issue. So we have all of these licensees and if you go to, if you look at any chart in a that's produced by one of the consultancies about, you know where's SAF going to come from in the future. They all say the same thing there's going to be a bit of heifer which is going to top out when we stop eating enough fish and chips. There's going to be alcohol to jet.
Speaker 2:That's not going to happen in the UK. Not in the UK. No, I promise you that no.
Speaker 3:And then there's going to be alcohol to jet, which has its limits. We won't talk about the politics of corn and GMO, but in the EU, effectively, you won't be able to use alcohol to jet which comes from field corn, so there's going to be some limits there. And then you have gasification of biomass, which is sort of the great white hope, and then power to liquid, because theoretically, if we can produce energy cheaply enough and greenly enough and enough of it, then you can get some. You know low cost SAF and that that's still a long time away. But there are pioneers, like you know, our client 12 or Infinium, who are trying to do that now.
Speaker 3:Who is starting to produce now as the pioneers um, but something which has been completely missing from any of the literature on sources of um, of feed store feedstocks, if you like, for saff has been biogas or renewable natural gas. So biogas is farts. If you've ever ever seen someone light a fart, that's just biogas. It's methane, co2, a little bit of hydrogen sulfide perhaps, but it's basically ch4, methane and co2. And that's what also bubbles up out of the ground from a landfill, landfill gas. A few contaminants, but it's, you know, roughly half methane, half co2 and a present in australia, for example, and in a lot of the us. That's just flared off. You light a match and just burn that methane and the methane produces co2 and water and the existing co2 all ends up in the atmosphere. You know, complete waste, because that methane is exactly the same from a chemical perspective as natural gas. And, as I mentioned earlier, um, yeah, there are. There are very large projects, such as the one um, the qatar pearl project in qatar, which is using natural gas feedstock to produce um. I think it's mostly specialty chemicals and some diesel, but that's's a very mature, very large scale project. And I mentioned a moment ago that we're doing the same thing. We're turning fossil natural gas into diesel up in Arctic Canada. So it's very, very easy to turn methane into SAF or renewable diesel.
Speaker 3:And I'm sure most of your readers are aware that they're almost interchangeable. It's very easy to switch between SAF and RD, so we sort of use the terms interchangeably. But looking through the literature, no one's been talking about it. I saw one study which just dismissed it. It said, oh yeah, there's not enough of it and the technology doesn't really exist. It just got dismissed.
Speaker 3:But if you look at the numbers. Um, if you took all of the just the existing landfills in the us and took that landfill gas and converted that into saf, that's 30 of the whole us jet fuel supply just from existing landfills. Now that's not including all of the other ways you can produce biogas, such as anaerobic digestion of agricultural wastes and food wastes. So if you look at the scale of, there are various reports about the size that are in that the renewable natural gas market could be in the US and they're all huge. And all of that renewable natural gas is coming from either landfills or anaerobic digesters where they basically scrub out the contaminants, vent the CO2 into the atmosphere and then put the cleaned up methane into the natural gas grid where it's chemically the same as the existing natural gas.
Speaker 3:So it's a huge untapped resource. So it's a huge untapped resource. And for companies that say, well, you can't build projects at a large enough scale because natural biogas supplies aren't big enough, well, the aggregation is already happening. That's what RNG is. It's aggregation of all of those small supplies. So you can take a known technology like fissure trops and plant it at the end of a big rng pipeline and make a good scale plant, um, and that's, and what's more, because of such simple technology, um and um, simple proven technology, it ends up actually being the lowest cost way to make staff as well. Um, and that's before adding all of the incentives, and in the US, in particular, natural, renewable, natural gas gets some very generous incentives which help.
Speaker 2:Why do you think it's so missing in all the sort of in the conversation, considering all the reasons you've outlined? Is it because no one can come up with a good headline for it using the word far the?
Speaker 3:reasons you've outlined. Is it because no one can come up with a good headline for it using the word far? Look, I think a lot of cases you get these original reports. Um. So sky energy is a company I I admire a lot, but you know, if you they sort of, if you look at reports about saff, everyone ends up going back to source documents from sky energy, for example, and there's some presentation they did back in I don't know, 2017 which outlined those four feed stocks and basically everyone just goes back and references those same things and doesn't even think about what else may be out there. Um, and look, each of those existing those um, you know, heifer and alcohol to jet, and gasification, and um, and and power to liquid they're all all good scale feedstocks that have their own challenges. So there's plenty of things to occupy people.
Speaker 3:So people just haven't thought about how do you address the issues of biogas, which historically have been just how do you aggregate it? Well, that problem's solved In the US and in the EU. In australia it's not. There's one demonstration project are present here which injects biomethane into the grid, one um and so, um, you know, we may end up with a different model here, but what eft does? Um, you know, the reason why I got so excited about eft is everyone knows fisher-Tropsch works at large scale and the pearl plant in Qatar is 140,000 barrels a day. That's huge. And if you speak to people in oil and gas and there are people at a company, an engine manufacturer, whose sustainability team are all oil and gas, like Exxon and Shell, you say FT to them and they say, well, yeah, that only works if it's huge. So we just don't think it's worth looking at biogas because biogas is small. Well, the first reason they were wrong is you can aggregate the biogas through the gas supply and use book and claim, which is what RNG has done. But the reason I like EFT or liked EFT was they've basically worked out how to make FT work at much smaller scale and for it to be economic.
Speaker 3:My screen just went blank. Sorry, my screen just went blank and rebooted. I'm not sure if I dropped out there, so I'll restart that section. The reason I asked I like EFT is because it's got technology which has been proven to work, not just technically but economically at small scale. So we can actually take a relatively small fissure trops plant and stick it at the site of a landfill and make SAF at a competitive price. And in the US there's thousands of landfills that are potential candidates for that, and globally there are obviously thousands as well. And then on top of that you can get large agricultural anaerobic digesters or food waste disposal. So there are just going to be so many opportunities to deploy this technology.
Speaker 3:Now there's no doubt that there's a ruling airlines. Um, um that someone introduced me to very early on, um, after I started working with virgin blue, and this person said lowest cost per seat only counts if you can fill the seats. And that's like saying large scale only works if you've got enough feedstock. And, as I mentioned, the aggregation through pipelines does allow you to build at a larger scale. So if we've got the choice as a company of building a 200 barrel a day plant at a landfill gas site or building a thousand barrel a day at, you know, because it's fed by a pipe which has five landfill gases, putting 200 barrels a day worth of feedstock into the pipe, then clearly the capex is going to be better to build the one central plant. So that's the area that we're focusing on initially. The one central plant. So that's the area that we're focusing on initially.
Speaker 3:Um, yeah, we're trying to find we've got a sweet spot, um that we're looking at. Um, um, that we we think works really well, attractively, but is small in terms of capex. We're talking well under 200 million dollars of capex to make a thousand barrels a day of saff, for example. Um, and you know, you compare that to some of the projects which are costing four and a half billion to produce only a few thousand barrels a day. We just think they're just too big, too risky, too complex. We think we're in a bit of a sweet spot.
Speaker 2:On this sort of idea of chicken and egg. The sort of traditional thought of scale means sort of this sort of idea of chicken and egg. The sort of traditional thought of scale means sort of cost reduction. But equally with that comes the issue, as you just pointed out around, that being extremely risky for achieving any investment. How do you? How do you solve that? Because there is going to be a requirement for these smaller scale facilities, but also these large scales facilities, because there needs to be a lot more production than there currently is now.
Speaker 3:So and you absolutely want to scale up? Yeah, it's. And and the answer, I think, is going to change over time yeah, when you're doing a demonstration, clearly you do at the smallest scale you can, but I think there's also something of a. Independently of that, I think there's a, there's a sweet spot and again, the airlines were really interesting. Or aircraft is really interesting. Analogy if you ask um, you know, is bigger always better? Um, you know, I can tell you, if you're flying between london and paris, you don't want to be doing it in a380, you want to be doing it in an a320, which is a much smaller aircraft, but it's actually designed for that mission and so it has a lower cost per seat, even though nominally the a380, everyone look at that and say, well, it's bigger, so it should be a lower unit cost. It's not, but if you keep going down in size and you go down to, say, a business jet, the cost starts going up again. So if you look at the cost, it's sort of like a U-shape. There's a sweet spot. And I think the same is going to be true when it comes to SAF projects, for completely different reasons, but they are to do with the trade-off of the economies of scale versus you do start getting into some real diseconomies versus risk. And I'll give you an example. You couldn't go and build a 100,000-barrel-a-day plant, say, in the middle of the US that's being fed by the natural gas network, because the natural gas network isn't big enough. You'd have to go and lay huge new pipes to be able to aggregate that demand. So the actual size of existing natural gas mains in the US limits to what size plant can you aggregate the gas supply so you can physically supply that plant and supply the electricity to operate it and supply and the water and deal with everything. So again, for us we think 1,000 to 2,000 barrels a day is a really good sweet spot where we know the economics are fantastic but it's all still physically manageable without having to go and put in new infrastructure.
Speaker 3:If you look at something like, again, qatar Pearl, they actually had to basically build a town to build the plant. Our model is everything is fabricated in shops, in skids which fit on the back of a normal truck, not an extra wide load where you have to go and close highways or have a man flag up front. You just can truck these things to a site and bolt them together and away you go, as opposed to a stick build and there are certain sizes above which that approach wouldn't be practical. If we were trying to build a 20,000 barrel a day plant, we couldn't fabricate everything in a workshop and just truck it. Normally We'd have to go and start closing highways or getting special cranes to erect it. To go and start closing highways or getting special cranes to erect it. So we certainly think for our technology there's a sweet spot which happens to work really neatly with all of these issues of construction and delivery and infrastructure and supply of all of the bits and pieces.
Speaker 2:Is there an element of scaling over a longer period of time than people initially thought? You can't go straight in with these huge plant facilities because they come with a host of challenges, so you start smaller, then you scale the technology, but it might take 10 years, as opposed to five, to actually get to this large amount.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I, I mean you start running into limits like um, the, the. Let's talk gasification. So there are plenty of plants around which are talking about gasification of bio, of biomass, and where you start running into limitations there are. Biomass is not very energy dense. You have to gather a lot of biomass to gasify, to make syngas, to stick through the FT process and you can only realistically gather from a relatively small area of feedstock before the energy you're expending on bringing the feedstock to the plant is more than the energy in the feedstock. Feedstock to the, to the plant is more than the energy in the feedstock. And you start blowing out your ci because you're using diesel or something else to truck in your um, your, your wood waste, um. So you know, we think in general plants are probably going to be um smaller um than than might have then been by, especially people. If you come from oil and gas, they're always going to say bigger is better and that's certainly true in oil and gas. But when you're talking about renewable feedstock supplies, especially biomass and biogas, yeah, I think that doesn't apply. If it's heifer and it's aggregation, you just get. You know, heifer's quite, it's got a very energy dense feed stock, the, the, the cooking oil, right, you can transport that big distances. Like you know, use cook oil from asia to the us, and it still makes sense from an economic perspective and also from a carbon intensity perspective. And so you can make huge heifer facilities because basically they're just repurposed oil and gas, your oil refineries anyway. But the same doesn't apply for biomass and biogas. And then when you start looking at power to liquid, you get a different set of problems, which is you know, how can you get a physically a big enough energy supply and and transmit it to get to a large scale ptl plant?
Speaker 3:So each of these technologies, I think, will have its own sort of sweet spot of scale and it's always going to be lower risk to build something small as a demonstration and then and you have to to demonstrate so people can say great, now I know it, let's build as big as you can for the available feedstock. And I think that as big as you can for the available feedstock will evolve. Over time It'll get bigger. And again back to my favorite aircraft analogies. You look at how, say, the Boeing 737 has grown from a. You know it was basically a 100-seat aircraft when the 737 was invented. You know, up to the 737 MAX 10, which is an over 200 seat aircraft, and you look at the A320 family and now the success of the A321XLR. You know stretches of aircraft extending up to the biggest size has always been a dominant strategy for airlines and I think, gradually, we're going to start seeing plants stretched up as they evolve for each of those different technologies and feedstocks that I've talked about.
Speaker 2:I like how you've given both Boeing and Airbus aircraft a shout out. So keep in mind, you've just got to get Umbrella in now and then you've got all of them. So that's the challenge of this conversation.
Speaker 3:I've done Uraer enough favors. When I was at Virgin Blue I did the business case to bring the E190 to Australia, so that got that type launched here and ironically Qantas has now acquired a whole bunch of them to operate effectively its charter operations.
Speaker 2:So they've had enough love now. So they've also now inadvertently got their shout out too. So that's all good.
Speaker 3:Brazil, I mean, their home market is a pretty interesting market itself, given their history of ethanol and sugar cane. So yeah, there's a bit to learn in that part of the world.
Speaker 2:That is absolutely true, and it kind of sort of builds into sort of my next question, which is looking at how the sort of SAF industry, with its quest for scale, can learn from, you know, the renewable natural gas and the ethanol scale in the US and how that, as a case study, can be applied in certain areas and what potentially isn't quite the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah, pity it's not visual. I've got a nice little chart to show you of how quickly the ethanol industry scaled in the US. I know you've seen it your viewers haven't, but they can track this down easily enough.
Speaker 2:So we can put it out on socials.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is a great chart that I have which shows that the US ethanol industry went from almost nothing. It tripled in size in five years, between 2005 and 2010, and that's the sort of growth that we need in the saf industry. Um, yeah, we need to to be tripling every five years for for um, for a few decades, right, and if you look at the way that happened with the ethanol industry in the us, if you look at the way that happened with the ethanol industry in the US, there's now about 200 plants and the average cost of those plants was 129 million. I saw reported somewhere 129 million. That's actually a pretty small scale plant, but there's 200 of them and that's clearly worked In some ways.
Speaker 3:Going back to my comments about what limits the size of projects it the feedstock. Well, ethanol plants are coming from corn, so they're sort of limited by the size of the corn farms. But you know, in my view, we could be building 200 rng projects, um, your saff projects based from rng, by following that strategy, um, rather than trying to build, you know, individually massive projects which take years, because the bigger the projects always seem to take longer as well, because you've got more risks, whereas if you can get your first of a kind of a replicable project like a 200 barrel a day or in our case, a thousand barrel a day replicable project and you get that first one done, you can then take the identical project and just pop them out at other sites and your, your risks and your issues all become just local site issues. You know the technology and the whole business model and off-take model and aggregations of feedstock, all work you can. You can solve all of that once and then repeat right, because at present pretty well every SAF project is bespoke and and a one-off. You know people talk about replicating but they're years off getting the first one done and then the second one. And there's a good example in the US that I won't name. They've got a multi-billion dollar project which they announced and now they're announcing more multi-billion dollar projects before the first ones even got close to feed.
Speaker 3:In fact, I don't, I'm not sure if it's even in. Oh, yeah, it is in feed, um, but yeah, that to me I mean, yeah, that that's going to be way too late. Um, you know, I think the better strategy in the early days in particular, where you're trying to get the market established and you're trying to get policies, but you've got to get production in quickly and I think and you've trying to get policies, you've got to get production in quickly and you've got to get it ramped up. You've got to get confidence and I think that's best done by a lot of small projects and bearing in mind they have to be big enough, due to economies of scale, to be able to work. And the problem is they're unicorns. There aren't many projects like that. We think RNG is a unicorn in that respect. It's the right trade-off of being able to have solid economics for small capex, being replicable and very low risk and that you're looking at going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this has got a really good potential for, you know, reduction of CapEx, opex and helping sort of these. The cost step downs, as it were, as things scale. Or are there sort of other sort of areas where you're looking at going this?
Speaker 3:could be really exciting, Well as I say we're licensed to anyone, and there are some companies doing some really funky stuff, for example in power to liquid. There are companies that are looking, for example, at ways to integrate. One of our licensees, sora, got accepted into AIG's accelerator program I think it's Hangar 51 or something and these guys their technology, they use DAC and then from the DAC they directly produce syngas. They don't go through, they don't just sort of capture the CO2 and then have to convert the CO2 into CO which another of our clients does and generate hydrogen separately. They do it in one step. So there's lots of stuff like that happening upstream of us in syngas and it's exciting to collaborate with those players, but they're not things that we can build our own projects with yet.
Speaker 3:Whereas gas to liquid, our company's already built projects that turn methane into jet fuel. We've done it at 100 barrel a day scale and there's a project, as I mentioned, under construction which is 625 barrels a day, taking fossil methane and turning that into diesel. So for us that's something that we can execute ourselves. We've got control of the whole technology stack. We can go do it. Whereas if you're talking funkier things like alcohol to jet or gasification, that's not technology that we know and and are good at.
Speaker 3:That said, we do have um some really interesting collaborations, um and I'll give an example um caffeinia, who are based in germany. They have a really interesting reactor they're developing that will take co2, ch4, h2o2o that is, water and renewable electricity and zap all of that together and produce perfect syngas. And for us that's really exciting and we're working very closely with them. You'll see an announcement maybe by the time this goes to air about an agreement we have with them and a demonstration we're doing with them. And that's very exciting because that particular technology produces a.
Speaker 3:It's a hybrid. It produces, if you mass balance it, you get some biosaf out of it from the biomethane and you get some esaf from the renewable electricity and the CO2. And you get some ESF from the renewable electricity and the CO2. And that, to us, is very exciting because that represents like an interim step before pure PTL, which is still horrendously expensive. So we think that the combination of our technologies will produce ESF, which is going to be a fraction of the cost of ESF being made by the traditional chain, where you get your CO2 and convert that to CO and you electrolyze your water to get your hydrogen and you mash those together. Doing this one stop with biomethane will give a much lower cost syngas that we can then make much lower cost Biosaf and ESAF cost Syngas that we can then make much lower cost on BioSaf and ESAF.
Speaker 2:On the PTL heavy cost advantage, the sort of the number seven times the premium sort of gets. It gets thrown around a lot and we sort of mentioned the sort of earlier. The difference in products between SAF more generally and and just Jete fuel. Is there an argument that e-SAF with that extreme premium needs to be dealt with as a separate product from Heifer and other pathways because you know it's made in such a different way and you know the costs are so high and with that is there a way that it can become more cost competitive with heifers so you don't necessarily need to deal with it as a different product for airlines?
Speaker 3:Well, that sort of different product has already been recognised, for example in the UK where you've effectively got you've got the cap on heifer and you've got the mandates different mandates on other biosafs and on ESAF. So it's sort of recognition is um is starting to happen and um yeah, and for example, corn based um alcohol to jet not being allowed in the eu. So there's already differentiations being made between the different classes of saf. But the argument for um you know there's two arguments for esaf um. The first is that in theory, if you can generate enough renewable electricity, it scales the best and has the least environmental impact. You're not having to least land use change and the like. But the other thing is, nominally it's the best reduction in CI as in it has the lowest net effect. So the reasons that you want to do ESAF in the long term is that scalability and have the maximum sustainability impact. And the only reason people wouldn't jump straight to ESAF is because of that cost. And so the question is what is going to make people move towards ESAF? Wouldn't jump straight to eSaf is because of that cost, and so you know, get the. You know the question is what is going to make people move towards eSaf. Well, it's going to be, either because it gets cheaper, because they've got a stick held over their heads and the the US. You know the EU has the stick, the US. You know there aren't any additional incentives. In facts, we um.
Speaker 3:You know our plan for the, for the, what we're producing, um. If we use well, we will use caffeinia technology from for projects in the us. We would sell the esaf in the eu and the biosaf in the us, because the actual biosaf in the us gets more subsidies than the esaf, while you've got the mandates in the EU. So you're already getting these market recognitions. The things are being treated differently, which, in our case, is creating an arbitrage opportunity which probably isn't optimal. It's great for us, probably not optimal for market development.
Speaker 3:You really want the US is such a powerhouse you really want to have incentives. Us is such a powerhouse you really want to have incentives for um, for esaf to be produced there, if you want to move the whole industry along. Um. Yeah, because you um and you know the ira, the 45 um, 45v, for example, um was a great help, but obviously that's been, that's been killed, um. So that's quite. You know that's interesting. But the other thing which has been killed or at least there's a good attempt to strangle it is the whole renewable electricity industry, which someone in high office clearly doesn't like very much, because power to liquid fundamentally what's going to drive the economics of that is cheap power and if the and if impediments are being put in the way of making cheap power, that's going to mean impediments are in the way of esaf and why.
Speaker 2:For esaf specifically, is scale and project size an important factor Because, as you just mentioned, getting the renewable energy is so critical for the cost but equally, getting access to that renewable electricity is one of the biggest challenges.
Speaker 3:Again, I'll go back to my sweet spot. The answer's always I mean the answer's sort of you know, the biggest scale that makes sense for the available feedstock and the like. You know, if I look at um again, I'll come back. So, funnily enough, um another sort of how I came to eft story, um, I told you the story about how I looked at sustainability and said, well, that's going to be the biggest strategy issue for airlines, so I've got to dive into that. And then I looked at saf and said, well, that's going to be the biggest um, the biggest element of sustainability. So I dived into that. And then I looked at saf and said, well, that's going to be the biggest um, the biggest element of sustainability. So I dived into that. And then, when I was looking at saf particularly given australia's natural endowments with um space and sunshine and wind I came to the conclusion pretty early on that esaf has got to be the long-term objective. It needs to be the dominant form of SAF if we're going to hit the decarbonisation goals, notwithstanding that the economics don't pencil out very well at present.
Speaker 3:But I looked at ESAF and it was actually while I was researching. Well, I was building my models of ESAF, a techno-economic model, and trying to work backwards engineer. Well, what do we need electricity costs to be? What do we need the capex of these different technologies to be, to arrive at a cost? And I targeted US $1,300 to $1,400 a ton, which was at the time still is roughly double the cost of fossil jet, and I said that's a reasonable target. You know, if the jet price just doubles in the long term, you know, allowing for things like a carbon tax, like if you added a carbon tax to the actual cost of jet, you ended up at around US $1,300 to $1,400 a ton target as well. So that's what I set as my arbitrary target and worked to reverse engineer it.
Speaker 3:And then I started looking at the technologies, um and the companies that I spoke to, um when I was sort of trying to work out, well, who's doing the f? So all the companies I spoke to were the ones doing the upstream stuff, the synthesis gas. So companies like 12 and um, dimensional energy, lydian, for example, and sora. Now these are the companies I spoke to and I was saying, well, um, okay, but who's turning the syngas into saff? Who's actually, you know, doing making the fuel? And everyone kept.
Speaker 3:I kept hearing eft, emerging fuels technology. These guys, you know, know what they're building. Our demonstration and that's when I first came to eft was to talk to them about um, about ft in the context of PTL. And it was only after getting deeply engaged with them that one of them, mark, one day said let me talk to you about biogas, which Australia. So I wrote actually, yes, two days ago a report was released about how do we make ESAF in Australia to send to Germany, and a very good friend of mine, florence Lindhouse, sort of was the coordinator of that report, which is done by Adelphi. It's available online. Of was the coordinator of that report, which is done by Adelphi. It's available online, and she gives me a nice acknowledgement up front because I'd written a I did my own power to liquid roadmap for SAF in Australia.
Speaker 3:You know I've got a lot of sort of models and the like. Anyway, when I came down to it, it sort of became obvious to me that there are only going to be two viable models for power to liquid projects in Australia and sorry, this is a very long winded way of getting to answer your question about scale and there's either going to be something which is completely vertically integrated, operating off grid. So in the middle of Northwest Australia where there's lots of land and nothing else, I think you're going to get these projects which are vertically integrated, and these projects are going to because they're vertically integrated. They either have to yeah, they're off grid. They need to be able to cope with the variability of sunshine and wind right, so they're going to have to have things like buffering technologies or technologies that can work easily variably. So the other type you might get might be on a utility like a, might be a solar station, for example, that is connected to the grid and this and this PTL plant will use its main source will be rejected energy. So solar, for example, gets very cheap in the middle of the day.
Speaker 3:There are a lot of solar farms or, you know, it's just a lot of generators that just need to dump cheap energy into in the middle of the day category of PTO plants which will operate by soaking that up and then paying for other energy at other times or storing it. They might have their own behind the meter battery, for example, but in both cases, especially the grid connected one, you're going to be limited by things like the size of that utility generator that you're connecting to and its transmission back to the rest of the grid. You can't build as big as you'd like because you're not going to be able to get the electricity supply without having to invest in infrastructure, whereas if you go out into the middle of nowhere, that's where you might end up with enormous projects. So you might have heard, we've had in the news here recently a project called Sun Cable which is aiming to be the world's biggest solar farm and running the world's biggest extension cable between Darwin and Singapore to deliver renewable electricity to Singapore. And Sun Cable will have wind and solar generation and battery backing so that it can dispatch a steady load to Singapore. It's going to have a ton of energy that it needs to dump or find something to do with, and that would be a great candidate for somewhere where you'd put a power to liquid project.
Speaker 3:But that's where you might end up with, you know, these standalone, really large scale projects where, because it's self-contained, you're not relying on an external power grid or an external gas line or something. You can do it all yourself by being self-contained. But that has its own challenges. If you're in the middle of Australia, you're going to have to be it's going to have to be DAC. You're going to have to get your co2 out of the atmosphere, because there's not much greenery in the middle of australia and you're not going to have your own, you're not going to have a water supply, so you're going to have to condense that water out of the atmosphere as well. So you end up with, um, but yeah, you have got the luxury of space and lots of sunshine and wind. So that's where you could end up with very, very large-scale PTL projects.
Speaker 3:But no one's going to start with that. They're going to, and you look at where they're starting. There are niches, like what 12 is carving out in Washington State or what Infiniium's doing down in Texas. And Infiniium is yeah, they've got two. They've got a 50-barrel-a-day Pathfinder and a 500-barrel-a-day Roadrunner plant, and they're pretty manageable scales. And 12 is even smaller than that. Their first plant at Moses Lake is smaller, single-digit barrels a day, and that's. You know, everyone just needs to grow those as quickly as you can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, fulcrum interestingly we've had a couple of Fulcrum engineers in our lab working on the project in the car park and it's really interesting at Fulcrum because they did do demonstration projects.
Speaker 3:But then when they scaled up, I'm told. I haven't checked this myself, but I'm told the scale up was about 20 times and engineers who work in process you know process engineers and chemical engineers will tell you you can usually reliably scale up by about six times without running scale. You get things you just didn't think of or unintended unexpected things happening and in the case of Fulcrum, for example, they got a lot of coking up of the gasifier which they hadn't experienced when doing it at smaller scale. They had an experience when doing it at smaller scale. So, yeah, every one of these companies needs to have a plan to how can they reliably get from one scale to the next size. Or you do what EFT is doing, where we're saying you know we can build 1,000 barrel a day plant now with no risk and we can just go and replicate those and we can do that a lot quicker than people who are trying to scale up.
Speaker 2:About a month ago now we did a very good episode with Jim Stone for Cypher on the Fulcrum the challenges that Fulcrum had around their scale-up. That was a fascinating conversation, so if anyone wants to know more about Fulcrum, I would recommend going and listening to that if you haven't already.
Speaker 3:Tell me he didn't quite what I just said.
Speaker 2:He was fundamentally in agreement. We got in a very long conversation about lego um it was okay it was, um, really interesting. So, um, and on the the scale up side we've you've talked a lot about the feedstock and energy requirement challenges, but on the other side of the coin you've got the demand requirements. If there is not enough demand, there is no rationale for building these massive plants, unless you can convince airlines to actually buy the fuel that that's being produced and actually demand that fuel as well.
Speaker 3:So there's issues on that side as well, yeah, well, you know it either needs the mandate, like the EU, or at least temporary incentives for the US. I think what's missing from the US is that I think airline CFOs in the US are tending to believe that the existing levels of incentives are just going to stay, particularly the renewable fuel standard, for example. Particularly the renewable fuel standard, for example. And, as I said earlier, if, if the volumes ramp up, you're going to start making a serious dent in the US government budget. So I think if, if you have not got a path to get your costs down to, you know you can sell at, say, roughly double. If you can't sell below fourteen1,400 a ton without subsidies, you're going to be in trouble long term.
Speaker 2:And on this sort of the development cycle and the time that it takes to get these projects up and running and mitigate all these risks that appear in sort of the technology development, the construction, to get all these risks that appear in sort of the technology development, the construction, and all meanwhile managing the challenges around raising capital, managing the investor expectations and the challenge around maintaining solvent. There's all sorts of financial challenges that go along with these technological and these technological issues. So how do so? How do you see balancing those and the challenge that balancing those represents?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a tightrope. Well, it is balancing. It's a tightrope and it's so different for every project. But I mean, the basic answer has to be um, you know understanding those different forces and the you know how much leeway you have with each of those stakeholders to be able to push the envelope. Yeah, how can you? Can you get a bit more, um for your um staff revenue from this airline or can you get a bit more from your scope? Threes, or is there a subsidy or a grant? Because most of these, at the end of the day, they tend to reduce to financial challenges. Well, they're the first order, but the companies that are really stuck are the ones who have got big technical challenges where they don't actually know what it's going to cost, for example, to develop. So, if you're dealing, so if you're a real, and this is where venture capital should play a role, that's what it's sort of designed for. But it's funny, venture capital sort of seemed to really come of age in the internet era, where they're used to investing in software and investing in hardware is, I think, a different skill set and different appetite. Um, and like we see vc money being put into things which we know are just cannot work because you know there's.
Speaker 3:There's really interesting exchanges on linkedin, um, which often refer to things like the laws of thermodynamics. You know, if you, if you're trying, if you've got, if someone's selling you a perpetual motion machine, um, you know it doesn't work, no matter, you know what sort of bullshit things right. And there there are people that claim things where their system has more energy coming out than you put in, and you know that's just impossible. And yet there are companies like that who are getting funding and we just scratch our heads. Or there's another one that claims to have a technology platform where they've got, if you like, this technology platform should have three pieces, and the one they're missing is the one in the middle, which is the hard one. They're saying, oh, we'll just buy that in. And we're saying, well, no, guys, that's not how. Yeah, if you've got this thing here and this thing here, and not the bit which connects them, you have not got a technology platform. You've got two disparate bits of technology and you're looking for a home.
Speaker 2:There are some really interesting models. So I had a recent conversation with Greg Constantine from Airco and they're sort of famous for their vodka, their perfume, their hand sanitizer and the applications of their technology into other products which led them to be able to sort of one refine the technology to develop some revenue which lowers the requirement for continual capital raises. So they're a really good example of a company that's not overly reliant on this venture capital that potentially, you know, is more typically traditionally used to slightly smaller turnaround times to see you know returns and they can actually get build some revenue alongside technology development there's some yeah, I know there's a company, um that I know, um, calledesolis, for example, who do something similar.
Speaker 3:They're producing isoprene, which is valuable in the rubber industry. So they're sort of using their technology to produce revenue with other industries. If you like, and we have an example of that we can take natural gas out of the grid today and use that to make base oils and drilling fluid. So that is something we've looked at. Is you know, should we do a project which is done just to make money using fossil product sorry, fossil feedstock and making product which is not, which is, you know, nothing to do with the renewable fuel, which is nothing to do with the roofed renewable fuel? And again, I mentioned earlier that part of what is produced by the project in Qatar, the Pearl project, part of that are these lubricants, base oils, for example, that go into what you put into the engine of your car. So we could do that as well.
Speaker 3:That is a strategy and, to the extent that can get you the cash and relieve you of the VCs, that's an attractive strategy. In our particular case, we think we've got a very attractive project blueprint that we can replicate, that we can get financing for directly. We're hoping not to have to rely on VC by being able to jump because we've got. Well, actually, we're probably a great business in the sense that we've got our licensing revenues, which are off there making money for us. And look, that's small. There's not too many plants in operation around the world yet that are not heifer right. So, um, so, we've got licenses out there, but the paydays are a fair way off.
Speaker 2:but we do have an income stream from licensing to others that can at least support us to help us develop our own project to the point where we can get the financing direct into those that is a that is becoming a more and more common strategy that people are looking at that have the technology or a part of the technology that can be put into a process rather than pursuing it themselves. Do the licensing.
Speaker 3:We're lucky. Yeah, well, we're lucky because our FT technology obviously has so many different feedstocks or upstream Syngest units we can plug into and there's also a steady demand for demonstrators. So, because we can make technology which we've got, a five, we can make a few gallons a day using a full scale commercial sort of FT tube and everything commercial size, but using one tube, for example, instead of thousands which are in a commercial reactor. But we can build at any scale because, again, if you look at what a fixed bed FT reactor is, it's a metal tube jammed with catalyst that you just push the syngas through, and an FT unit is basically just those tubes bundled together with hot water running between them, and so it's very easy to scale up and down.
Speaker 3:We can do a reactor with one tube or a reactor with a thousand tubes, and so we get companies who say, well, we need a reactor of this size to go with our syngas technology, this size to go with our syngas technology, and we can say, sure, we can build, here's what it'll cost, and we can build it for them and ship it off and they can. They can, um, you know, do their own little integrated demonstration. So there's a little business for that for us. But that's not gonna. You know, that keeps us alive, it doesn't.
Speaker 2:doesn't make us and equally, you don't have the challenges if you're not looking at huge scale. You're not looking for this. The, the valley of death, as it were, becomes shallower because you're not looking for this incredible influx of capital, whether it's sort of, you know, seeking massive debt financing or huge rounds of equity because you're eliminating that, because you're at such a smaller scale. So that's another challenge yeah, vcs.
Speaker 3:I mean I remember one, a friend of mine, I went and had a chat with about their position and he was saying his reaction was well, you know you're positioning yourselves wrong. You're calling yourself a startup, but you've been post revenue for a decade, you've shown that, you've got customers, you've got this great demand out there for SAF projects and FT. I mean we're talking about those four types of technologies which are heifer and alcohol to jet, and then gasification and FT. Well, sorry, ptr I should say. And FT can be used basically for any feedstock except for an oil. I mean you can buy anything which has lived or passed through something that lived, and I mean there, like sewage, anything which is, or any sort of organic waste can be processed by FT. It is the most flexible pathway. So that's in one of our investor slides. Or any sort of organic waste can be processed by FT. It is the most flexible pathway. So and that's when one of our investor slides are saying you know, unless you've got used cooking oil, we can process everything else. You know corn, we can take corn and gasify. You don't have to make ethanol. If corn's your feedstock, you could gasify that, make it into directly into renewable fuel as well, like any other crop for that matter. So it's a very versatile technology.
Speaker 3:So for us we're saying we've got that market there for, for, for licensing, and that's going to grow without us lifting a finger. Fun fact for your listeners by our calculation we've got as many licensees and as many projects to feed as all of the other FT licensees put together. And the reason for that is we can do it at small scale. We can grow. We can build a demonstrator or a pilot, we can build a demonstration. We can build a small commercial unit, we can build a large commercial unit. Typically, the big boys just don't want to be bothered with the the small scale so you've got a nice, a nice niche.
Speaker 2:And it'll be interesting if you actually compare the, the amount that's gotten through to FID and then the amount of fuel that's produced on either side, because that's an interesting comparison. It wouldn't necessarily tell the same story but it's sort of a different side of the same sort of overall narrative.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's no doubt that all of those companies we've licensed to at present, we need them to be moving to their scale up five or ten times from where they are now. Yeah, absolutely. But again, that's one of the reasons for doing our own projects is, you know, have our destiny in our own hands. We're not waiting for someone else to. We're not relying on someone else to develop a SAF project. We've got all the technology we need to go and do our own SAF projects.
Speaker 2:David, we've covered so much ground and I think we've actually ticked over to being the longest episode of this podcast we've done yet, so I congratulate you on that.
Speaker 3:If you'll edit me, well, hopefully you'll edit my monologues down.
Speaker 2:No, I think we're going to leave the monologues intact. I thought they were excellent and very insightful. I think people will gain a lot of value from them. So thanks so much for being so candid and for giving up all your time to to share everything about EFT and the wider sort of market challenges, and trajectory has been a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 3:My pleasure Oscar.