Mark Lashier
President and Chief Operating Officer at Phillips 66
Sure. Yeah. As we look at the opportunities in what we call our Emerging Energy business, we focused on four key pillars. The first and kind of the cornerstone is renewables, so renewable fuel, renewable diesel. You also see activity around sustainable aviation fuel, that's getting a lot of momentum. We can pretty modestly modify our Rodeo assets once they're up and running, to produce more sustainable aviation fuel. We're looking at other opportunities. We've signed an MoU with Southwest Airlines to explore that, to look at opportunities to kind of drop in sustainable aviation fuel right now, most of them have to be blended up to 50%. And so we've got our Energy Research & Innovation group looking at that. We are in contact with jet manufacturers, talking to them about optimizing sustainable aviation fuels for their engines. So we're really going at it from a technical perspective and an economic perspective. So at the end of the day have a solution that we can get returns on from sustainable aviation fuel like what we're seeing in renewable diesel. The piece that's missing is what is the regulatory environment around sustainable aviation fuel, what incentives are going to be there. They're going to have to be there. We've had engine manufacturers tell us, look, we don't think that hydrogen is the solution for aviation. We certainly don't think batteries are solution for the aviation. We need your help. And we're big in aviation fuel today. We know that business and we're going to apply our technology and our know-how to get there. We are also around the -- a very important dimension of the renewables is the feedstock access.
One of the attractive things about our Rodeo facilities is sitting on the water on the West Coast, and we can access feedstocks from around the planet. The front-end of that facility is going to have great flexibility and that's where a lot of investment is frankly having the flexibility to bring in a variety of feedstocks. So we can go out and trade around that asset, get commercial group, that's doing that today, taking renewable feedstocks into our Humber Refinery in the UK, producing renewable diesel there. And so they know those markets. We can trade around those markets and there is going to be plenty between the carbon intensity of a feedstock and the cost of that feedstock. So we will be able to put in front of that asset the best possible mix of feedstocks to drive that and to capture the low carbon fuel standard benefits, the blender's tax credits and the RIN values that we need to make those things pay-off and we should see a similar regime around sustainable aviation fuel. So that's that first pillar. And when we have success there, we can scale that across other assets. We're looking at other assets that can do the same thing, that have the same kinds of strategic advantages.
And I think you mentioned the capital advantage of a brownfield investment like that. We're going to invest about $1 -- equivalent about $1 per barrel, lot of other -- I'm sorry, gallon -- $1 per gallon and other investments are more like $3 per gallon capital. So it's going to be very capital efficient, it's going to be very competitive from a feedstock access perspective. And we're going to be able to take that diesel all the way to the customer at the pump where we're reconfiguring. Marketing assets in California to be able to handle renewable diesel, we've already done 600 stations that they can take that. So, we can control that value chain all the way to the customer. And we like that model and we will look at where we can replicate that model elsewhere in our system.
Then, you start moving across those pillars. We're also looking at things like carbon capture and storage. We've got opportunities around Rodeo, again to demonstrate the viability of that to lower the carbon intensity even further of the renewable diesel production there. It takes a lot of hydrogen to hydro-treat these materials to make renewable diesel. And hydrogen from steam methane reforming produces a lot of carbon-dioxide, will have, again, an asset on the ground, a pipeline that's delivering crude oil to that asset today. It's not going to be delivering crude oil and while at some point in time, so we can repurpose that to take carbon-dioxide back to the simple valley oil fields and we're in discussions with partners that can sequester that CO2. And if we like how that works and as economic, we could create a trunk line, where we can take and sequester carbon dioxide for other carbon dioxide producers in that region.
So really lower the whole carbon footprint of the entire complex, whether it's a power producer or other refineries in the neighborhood. And we've got third-parties that are investing in solar installation to provide electricity. Solar power throughout the [Phonetic] facility, that lowers the carbon intensity of what we're doing. And we can do that across our fleet without investing our capital in wind or solar, but we would certainly like to use solar-based electrons and wind-based electrons to lower the carbon footprint is what we do. And so, that's the carbon capture pillar and the hydrogen pillar, where we've got initiatives in the UK to look at green hydrogen to take wind power off of North Sea and through our Gigastack consortium and produce green hydrogen for consumption at our Humber Refinery.
In Switzerland, we've got fuel stations that provide hydrogen -- green hydrogen as a transportation fuel for truck fleets. And so, we have electrolysis systems that generate the hydrogen from water and provide that in Switzerland. So we're exploring those pillars in a way that we're not going to jump in with both feet. And so, we see line of sight on good solid returns and good solid investments. And then there's batteries, today we produce needle coke. Needle coke is -- the needle coke that we produce is the preferred feedstock to produce synthetic graphite for the creation of anodes and lithium-ion batteries. And we want to explore that value chain and see if we can integrate forward in that value chain and capture more of that value.
You've seen us make an investment in a company called NOVONIX. We screen a number of companies and we have criteria to make sure that those companies are solid, they have good technology, they have good sound green technologies for the production of anodes. And NOVONIX goes to the top of our first and we are able to make a 16% investment in NOVONIX. So we can collaborate with them on optimizing the conversion of our needle coke into the best possible anodes. Anodes that perhaps charge faster, have longer life, have better life cycles. And so that's what that investment is about. There is a growth of a whole ecosystem around lithium-ion batteries, both in North America and Europe to get away from the near total dependence on China for the lithium-ion battery supply chain.
And so, we've got needle coke capacity in the U.S., and we've got a needle coke capacity in the UK. And so, we're looking at those as two centers that we can join that value chain. So those are the kinds of investments that we're going to make. Many of them will be small on this front-end like our small investments that we made in Shell Rock Soy Processing in Iowa to understand the dynamics around getting soybean oil in front of our renewable diesels. Or this investment we made in NOVONIX, or the kinds of investments that we're making around hydrogen production in the UK and Europe. We're going to walk before we run, because we believe that the energy transition future is all of the above, kind of a portfolio around energies and we want to be able to position ourselves in those technologies and those energies that are going to create value over the long term. There is going to be winners and there is going to be losers and there is going to be dead ends. We want to make sure we don't take the dead end, and we don't take the loser, so we're going to be cautious. We don't have to be out on the leading edge, the leading edge of these technologies, what we believe that we've got the technical know-how and the financial wherewithal to advance projects that look like they will return -- a solid return for our shareholders for our investments.