Greg Mills: Yes. We don’t hold. In fact, we try to keep our inventory as lean as possible, and we effectively sell everything that we buy each month. And to the extent that we go a little long or a little short just based on normal market imbalances or barge timing, that type of thing. There’s some of that, but that does — sometimes that does show up in a say, a carryover of inventory into the next month just based on barge schedules. So there’s some volatility there. But in general, we’re not trying to play the market at all. We buy and sell and clear barrels as efficiently as we can.
Kevin Roycraft: Yes. We’re not projecting or — we’re not going out and buying as much oil as possible and then hoping we have a sale for it. Generally, the refiners are committing to us how many barrels they need. And then we go out and purchase — attempt to purchase as many barrels as we can supply them to meet those needs. So it turns quickly. And like Greg say, when we see swings in inventory, it’s generally because a barge has pushed either for weather or refinery going down or an issue like that rather than us intentionally speculating on and holding oil.
Wade Harrison: Yes. And then sometimes, if those barges get pushed because of weather stuff, they’re scheduled to pick it up on the 29th of the month, and they don’t pick up until the first or second in most instances, Greg, you can confirm this, the refiner will go ahead and price it in the month that was scheduled for delivery. So there’s no price risk carrying from 1 month to the next month.
Greg Mills: That’s correct. And we’re just not reporting the revenue until it’s list next month, but we’re recording the — saving the value of that deal in our inventory.
Kevin Roycraft: Yes, because technically, from an accounting standpoint, the sale has not occurred until the following month even though we know what the price is going to be.
Unidentified Analyst: And just on the VEX pipeline. Obviously, I know I think everyone is waiting on kind of the third-party benefits to develop over time. But can you maybe just talk a little bit about sort of the first-party benefits, I guess, you would call them in terms of what that acquisition has done for your internal operations in terms of, I guess, maybe like a stacked margin kind of cost benefit, I guess a little similar to what you’re saying on Firebird being a hauler for GulfMark. Can you maybe talk a little bit about what VEX has done in a similar way for the operation?
Kevin Roycraft: Yes. It’s been a huge benefit. And prior to our acquisition of the VEX, GulfMark was already the largest shipper on that system. So we’re able to manage very efficiently and without the risk of third parties changing our expenses related to shipping on the pipeline. So managing our schedules. It’s seamless from the truck picking up at the lease all the way to the barge loading. So it’s been, I’d say, a nice benefit there. Related to intracompany dollars changing hands to the extent that we need to, we can look at, like I would refer to it as corporate economics. And since we’re not paying a third party, there’s more flexibility for the marketers to look at covering costs on a variable basis for the truck and the pipeline. We don’t really have to do that very much, but that is a tool that we could use.
Greg Mills: And I’ll touch on the benefits of if we’re unable to ship on that line or if someone had purchased it that was going to use it for their exclusive purpose or wouldn’t allow us to ship on it. Depending on the volume we’re doing, it’s about 50 to 70 trucks a day not having to turn a 100-mile round trip. So there’s a massive amount of savings and the efficiency that we can use those trucks in other areas, and they’ll have to purchase more equipment or hire more drivers because the pipeline is moving that oil from Clara, Texas down to Victoria for us. So there’s some big benefits as far as that goes as well. So we’re glad to have the line. We’re expecting and hopeful we get some third-party benefit of that. We’ve had a little bit on the terminalling side, but I think anything we can add to it is really — there’s not a lot of incremental cost.
So we just need to keep everything we can to get some third-party barrels on that. But while we wait for it, the line is still really, really important and valuable to the company.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Kevin Roycraft for any closing remarks.
Kevin Roycraft: Thank you for your continued interest in the company. We will be participating in the Three Part Advisors IDEAS Conference in Dallas on November 16, and we look forward to providing you an update on our progress when we report the Fourth Quarter Earnings. Thank you for joining us.
