CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Josh Spector : Okay. And just quick on CapEx. I mean this year makes sense. I guess, I mean assuming you guys go forward with FID on the facility, assuming your share of that’s roughly $1 billion spent over four years. I mean, should we be thinking about if that plays out, your CapEx is in the range, $700 million, $800 million the next four years, barring you don’t do any additional further projects?

Tony Will : Yes. Josh, it’s not really ratable that way even though we can talk about allocating it that way, typically, there’s a little bit of money spent upfront for the engineering work and also for the initial down payments on procurement of long lead time vessels and other equipment. But the vast, vast majority of the expenditure happened in the last two years to the last 18 months, which is when you’re doing all of the major construction activity. So it’s really back-end loaded.

Josh Spector : Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Richard Garchitorena. Please, Richard go ahead.

Richard Garchitorena : Great. Thanks having me in. Just one high-level question. You’ve made a lot of announcements on the clean energy initiatives in the past year. And considering you have strong free cash flow, it doesn’t seem like that’s a constraint. When do you think your plate will be full in terms of like how many projects do you think you could have going on at the same time between now and 2027 or so where you feel comfortable you can manage that? And then I guess, just also in terms of what your priorities would be in terms of managing those? Thanks.

Tony Will : Yes. So I think a lot of it has to do with the capacity of the engineering execution within the existing facilities. The Blue Point complex in Louisiana is a bit of a different one because that obviously it’s a greenfield kind of project, and we are staffing up that organization for assumed go forward, but the decision about go forward has not been made yet, given that we don’t have the cost estimate on what that would be. So I feel like we can execute a lot of these things simultaneously. We’ve got a lot of capacity around the network. And the projects that we’re talking about other than the Blue Point Complex are not so large and so involved that it would overwhelm our engineering resources and a lot of this stuff would get phased in.

So on the CCS stuff, we’re making good progress in a number of the facilities concurrently. I do think as we talk about N20 abatement and/or flue gas recovery, that would be phased in over a little bit longer time horizon and making sure that we don’t kind of overwhelm resources, but we also align those initiatives with turnaround planned, turnaround activities and so forth. So those would also get phased up.

Chris Bohn: Yes. And the only thing I would add is the projects that we’re doing really play into the core competencies. And that’s why this strategy makes so much sense for our organization. It’s not as if we have to go out and build a whole bunch of new infrastructure. A lot of that exists and we’re making add-ons to that. So I think that also alleviates the size of these projects and then additionally, partnering in areas that we don’t have those core competence — allow us to maybe take on a few more projects than we would if we were doing them all by ourselves.

Richard Garchitorena: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this is all the time we have for questions for today. I would like to turn the call back to Martin Jarosick for closing remarks.

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