Overview of Carbon Counts, Episode 11
A conversation with Alex Clayton, Chief Carbon Officer at Gevo, and Pawan Gupta, VP of Environmental Markets at Frontier Carbon Solutions.
When people talk about carbon dioxide removal, the conversation usually turns to direct air capture facilities or experimental biomass power stations in Europe. It rarely turns to a corn ethanol plant in rural North Dakota. That may be about to change.
In Episode 11 of Carbon Counts, EcoEngineers hosted a conversation with two practitioners working at the center of what may be the most scalable near-term form of carbon removal operating in the United States today: bioenergy carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS, from ethanol fermentation. The discussion was led by David LaGreca, a carbon markets specialist at EcoEngineers whose work spans project development, life cycle assessment, and market strategy across the renewable fuels and CDR space. He has worked directly with both Gevo North Dakota and Frontier Carbon Solutions on MRV design, Puro.earth certification, and feedstock integrity analysis.
Alex Clayton is Chief Carbon Officer at Gevo, the company behind the first permitted, operational ethanol BECCS project in the country. Pawan Gupta is VP of Environmental Markets at Frontier Carbon Solutions, which is building the carbon dioxide (CO2) storage and transportation infrastructure that could allow dozens more plants to follow. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Part 1: Why Ethanol, and Why Now
David LaGreca, EcoEngineers:
For readers unfamiliar with BECCS, what makes an ethanol plant a natural fit for carbon capture? You have facilities here that were not built with CCS in mind, and yet they keep coming up as the leading opportunity in the CDR space.
Alex Clayton, Gevo:
Ethanol fermentation is unusual in that roughly one-third of the grain going into the process comes out the other end as CO2, and it is nearly pure, around 99 percent. That is different from a cement plant or a coal boiler, where you are dealing with a dilute, mixed gas stream requiring energy-intensive separation. At an ethanol plant, the CO2 is already concentrated and separated. The capture technology is largely commoditized at that point. The challenge has always been what comes next: how you move the gas and where you store it.
There is also the biogenic piece. When ethanol is combusted in a vehicle, the CO2 released was originally drawn from the atmosphere by the corn crop. So, when you capture the fermentation CO2 and store it geologically, you are taking carbon that was in the air, running it through a biological cycle, and locking it underground permanently. That is carbon dioxide removal, not avoidance of a fossil emission.
Pawan Gupta, Frontier Carbon Solutions:
There is also a scale argument worth emphasizing. There are roughly 200 ethanol plants in the United States, most of them concentrated across the Midwest. Each produces a meaningful stream of biogenic CO2. If a fraction of those add CCS, the result would be millions of tons of removals per year, deliverable now or within a few years. At Frontier, our starting premise was that capture was not the bottleneck. The bottleneck was the transportation and storage infrastructure that did not yet exist.
Part 2: Gevo North Dakota and Going First
David LaGreca, EcoEngineers:
Gevo North Dakota, formerly Red Trail Energy, was the first ethanol plant to achieve permitted, operational BECCS in the U.S. I was involved with that project in its early days and watched it come together from a position where a lot of the pieces were still unproven. What did it actually take to get there, and what does Gevo see as its role now?
Alex Clayton, Gevo:
Red Trail Energy was built in 2007 in Richardton, North Dakota. The geology directly beneath the plant turned out to be well-suited for Class 6 storage, which is the U.S. designation for permanent geological sequestration in saline aquifers. North Dakota was also the first state to receive primacy, meaning it could run its own Class 6 permitting program rather than go through the EPA. Red Trail was the first project permitted under that program. The plant, the geology, the state regulatory structure, and the people willing to take the first step all came together in the same place at the same time.
What drove the project initially was less about carbon markets and more about proving the concept was feasible. The California LCFS program was part of the commercial picture, but the markets were not fully formed. EcoEngineers was involved early on, and one of the pivotal moments came when Puro.earth published its methodology for geologically sequestered biogenic CO2. That opened a voluntary CDR revenue pathway that the project team had not originally anticipated.
Since Gevo acquired the project roughly 15 months ago, the goal has been to demonstrate that the business model is real and repeatable: carbon optionality, revenue across compliance and voluntary markets, and continued operational investment can all function within a single project. Gevo North Dakota will not be the biggest ethanol BECCS project or the last, but it will always have been the first.
Part 3: Frontier’s Open-Source Infrastructure Model
David LaGreca, EcoEngineers:
Pawan, Frontier is not building its own ethanol plants or trying to own the whole chain. You are coming at this from the infrastructure side. Can you explain the model and why you think that approach is what moves the industry forward?
Pawan Gupta, Frontier Carbon Solutions:
Our model is built on three principles. First, the economics have to work for every participant in the chain: farmers, grain elevators, refiners, transportation partners, and us as the storage operator. That is the baseline. Second, we focused on the infrastructure that is most constrained and hardest to replicate. Our answer was geological storage and CO2 transportation. The capture side is commoditized. The downstream infrastructure is where the real barrier sits. Third, we built around where our team’s expertise actually lives: our people bring 40 to 50 years of cumulative experience in subsurface CO2 management and more than 15 years in carbon project development.
The result is a transportation and sequestration as a service model. Frontier holds three Class 6 well permits in Wyoming, including what is now the deepest well ever drilled in North America. We have a joint venture with Union Pacific for rail transport of CO2. Rail already has established rights-of-way and has been used for industrial CO2transport for decades, which avoids the permitting challenges that have slowed pipeline proposals in the Midwest. The hub-and-spoke design means that once the infrastructure is in place, bringing on additional projects is primarily a question of per-ton economics rather than repeated rounds of large capital investment.
Our first project, Project Sprint, involves capturing CO2 at ethanol refineries in and around Wyoming, liquefying it, transporting it by rail via Union Pacific, and sequestering it permanently in our Wyoming wells. The intent is to use that project as catalytic capital: prove the model, build the infrastructure, and then expand to additional sources and feedstocks.
Part 4: MRV, Supply Chain Data, and Feedstock Integrity
David LaGreca, EcoEngineers:
This is an area I spend a lot of time on. The supply chain for ethanol BECCS runs from an individual farm field all the way to a geological formation thousands of feet underground. There are farmers, elevators, refiners, logistics providers, and storage operators all in that chain, and each one holds a piece of the data picture. How do you actually track all of it in a way that holds up to scrutiny from buyers and registries?
Alex Clayton, Gevo:
The LCA boundary for our CDR credits is manageable once you have drawn it clearly. CO2 is released during fermentation, captured at that point, moved across the site to be compressed and lightly processed, and injected into storage. At the end of the chain it is a molecule through a meter. The complexity is upstream, at the agricultural end.
In a given year we might work with 100 to 200 farmers, each supplying grain from 4 to 10 fields. Each field delivers roughly 25 truckloads of grain annually, which means the number of data nodes multiplies quickly. To manage that volume, Gevo built an upstream MRV platform called Verity. It originates field-level data, attributes it through the supply chain, and apportions it across the compliance programs we participate in simultaneously: Oregon LCFS, British Columbia LCFS, CARB in California, and our Puro.earth CDR certification. Each program has different boundary requirements. You cannot run the plant one way for one quarter and differently for the next. The compliance stack is layered and simultaneous.
On feedstock sustainability, we worked with EcoEngineers on a historical land use analysis of our entire North Dakota corn supply area going back 20 years. The finding was that the system is relatively stable. The land has been in agricultural use throughout that period. That historical record exists publicly. Integrating it into a compliance program, making it legible to buyers, and designing real-time controls to prevent future unintended change is the practical work.
Pawan Gupta, Frontier Carbon Solutions:
The short answer is that it is hard, slow, and expensive, primarily because it is new. There was no reason to build this kind of data infrastructure 20 years ago. Our approach is to be transparent about what we know, what we are estimating, and where we have made assumptions. Where data is incomplete, we take conservative positions and document the discounts we have applied. These are 15- to 30-year projects. Monitoring technology will improve. Data systems will improve. The goal is something reasonable, defensible, and improvable over time. Publishing how we did it also means that organizations coming after us do not have to go through the same initial effort from scratch.
Editor’s note: EcoEngineers provides MRV support for Frontier’s Project Sprint and assisted with the Gevo North Dakota supply-shed land use analysis referenced above.
Part 5: Revenue, Market Readiness, and What Comes Next
David LaGreca, EcoEngineers:
From where I sit, there are roughly three million tons of creditable CO2 removals from U.S. ethanol plants that we are aware of coming online in the next two years. The voluntary CDR market alone cannot absorb all of that. So how do each of your projects think about revenue stacking, and how does that shape the investment case?
Pawan Gupta, Frontier Carbon Solutions:
Frontier’s goal is to create optionality for everyone in the supply chain. The foundational act is removing the carbon and putting it in the ground. Once that is done, you have several paths for monetization: voluntary CDR credits, compliance market pathways like LCFS in various states, or the low-carbon physical fuel product itself. None of those are accessible without first completing the sequestration. That is the starting point, and then you optimize across whichever markets are available.
The voluntary CDR market alone is probably not large enough to absorb every ton coming online in the near term. Compliance markets in the United States, including California LCFS, Oregon Clean Fuels, and British Columbia, provide a real and ongoing revenue base. That base reduces the investment risk in a way that the voluntary market, at its current scale, cannot.
Alex Clayton, Gevo:
For Gevo, the next step is sustainable aviation fuel. The alcohol-to-jet pathway, which converts ethanol to a kerosene-type fuel, has been Gevo’s core technology focus for more than a decade. ICAO recently included CCS in its LCA structure for the alcohol-to-jet pathway, which is a meaningful development. Demand for SAF is growing as gasoline markets shrink. CCS is one of the largest available levers for reducing the carbon intensity of biofuel production, potentially removing about a third of the CI from the overall process. Gevo North Dakota is a platform: a low-CI ethanol operation that can be upgraded toward SAF, with CCS running through the whole system.
The financing environment is still developing. The 45Z production tax credit provides near-term support, but buyers looking for 10- to 15-year offtake agreements need certainty that incentive structures will persist. Capital decisions at the plant level are being made with some uncertainty still in the picture. Rail infrastructure is being built. Open-source storage is being built. LCFS programs are expanding. ICAO has moved. Buyer sophistication is increasing. The components are coming together.
About Carbon Counts
Carbon Counts is EcoEngineers’ monthly webinar series covering the mechanisms, markets, and real-world projects driving decarbonization forward.
