Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P. (NASDAQ:CLMT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Neil Mehta: Great color. Thank you so much guys.

Operator: The next question comes from Gregg Brody with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Gregg Brody: Good morning, guys. Excuse me. Just when we think about — you have a lot of different funding mechanisms potentially at Montana Renewable, but there — there’s also a potential capital call that you have this year, that would require you to keep cash at that entity. I’m curious, do you anticipate that this muni deal and potentially the DOE deal will allow you to basically send cash out from that entity? Or do you think there’ll be some cash that you have to trap or to reserve for capital — for CapEx?

Vincent Donargo: Yes, good question. And I assume you’re talking about the 24th, Gregg?

Gregg Brody: No, I’m just talking about I believe the preferred instrument requires you to keep there’s the way you distribute cash from Montana Renewable, you have a capital call potential for the year and you decide whether you’re going to send money out to Calumet or keep it in. I’m just curious if you’re– if you basically trying to get a sense, if you feel like you can fund everything at MRL, what’s some of the potential fundraising you’re talking about?

Bruce Fleming: Hey Gregg, this is Bruce. Maybe I’ll start helping with that and flip it back to Todd for the corporate context. So we do not have a structured capital call in the LLC agreement that we have with Warburg Pincus. There is a minimum return requirement, but we’ve got 5 years to meet it and it’s a low hurdle at an 8% IRR. That was very attractive money, which is one of the reasons we formed that partnership last year. So as we get the opportunity to prune the capital structure at Montana Renewables, we’re going to take it. I imagine if you wanted me to handicap it, that that’s going to be evolutionary, we are going to see opportunities present themselves and we’re going to consider them and we’re going to take advantage of the ones that make sense.

So right now, we made a great deal of sense to partner with the state of Montana, use some of their capacity, municipal bond capacity and to take this, what we expect will price next week at an attractive level for us. The Department of Energy is a little further out in time, but that’s going to lay in pretty well with what we think is the spin up on the MAX SAF expansion. So we’ve got this reasonably paired, but we’ve been pretty successful in adding a lot of shareholder value by staying flexible and not committing to a particular course of action. The reason for that kind of thinking on our side is this is a fast evolving new industry segment. It’s going to be very interesting to see who’s picking their way through smarter and who wins. And we think we’re pretty well set up for that because of our geographic location advantage.

So now we just need to keep the and stay ahead of the kind of the developer group, if you will.

Todd Borgmann: And I guess the only thing I’d add is, sources and uses, they’re all a bit variable. As I look at the potential sources in Montana Renewables, I think they are greater than the uses. So it’s quite possible to expect money going up to the partners, to us in Warburg, in certain scenarios. But we don’t have a capital call. There’s not a specific timeline that we’re looking at that says that we have to accomplish something. But of course as this — the pre-treater comes online, we expect to be generating a heck of a lot of cash flow. And that’s either going to go to kind of MAX SAF expansion or for raise additional capital to fund that, it’ll come to the parent and be used opportunistically.

Gregg Brody: Got it. I appreciate you maintaining the flexibility. Do you have a range of how much growth CapEx could be? I know you’re weighing other opportunities against that, but I’m curious if you sort of have line of site into how big it can be, if you chose to move forward on it?