Compass Minerals International, Inc. (NYSE:CMP) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ryan Bartlett: Yes, I can add to that just a little bit, Joseph. So I think as Lauren has iterated before, offtake — prepaid offtake agreement type of arrangement isn’t necessarily off of the table for Compass. But we do believe that it’s important for us to prove out the DLE technology with this commercial scale unit, which we think gives us a more attractive, let’s say, cost of capital as opposed to giving that upfront when perhaps the potential investor may perceive higher risk in the project due to DLE. So as Kevin said, we’re open to any form of arrangement. But we feel it’s prudent for us to make the — hit the next milestones before we would engage in a prepaid offtake.

Operator: And we will take our next question from Vincent Anderson with Stifel.

Vincent Anderson: So if you’re able to, I just kind of wanted to reset the stage a bit as we get ready for the FEL-2. The FEL-1 had very wide confidence ranges, I think it was like plus or minus 30% across everything. But if we were to just look at your modeling on things like reagents and absorbent polymers. Are you able to maybe just speak to your relative level of confidence in those values versus other parts of the engineering and design, or just if the FEL-1 is simply mandated to have that confidence range kind of regardless of what the reality might be?

Kevin Crutchfield: I’m going to ask Chris to address that, Vincent.

Chris Yandell: So you are correct. The FEL-1 had a wide range. It was a minus 30% to a plus 40%. And if you recall kind of middle of that range was the $262 million. So if you look at that plus 40%, you get somewhere at around $367 million with regards to overall CapEx. Typically, what you see is projects do increase from an FEL-1 to an FEL-2. Part of that is just the engineering aspect and the refining of the process, and that’s kind of answers the question as well around the OpEx. So in the FEL-1, you are around 2%, 3% engineering and you are looking at utilization of reagents. As you should progress to an FEL-2, you get more defined, and you find things in that process that you have to take care of through product specifications and you have to put unit equipment in to do that.

So we expect that the cost per ton of reagent probably stays about the same, maybe a little bit more due to inflationary aspects, which we would also expect to impact the overall FEL-2. I think if you recall, the FEL-1 was done in that early 2022 timeframe. And so the full year of inflationary aspects did not hit in that cost estimate, which we expect to manifest in the FEL-2. Does that answer your question, Vincent?

Vincent Anderson: I guess maybe what I was getting at a little bit more specifically is on the utilization from a volume perspective, when it comes to unit costs. You mentioned that there is — it sounds like there is maybe a little bit of CapEx creep from FEL-1 to FEL-2. But do you see something similar on the engineering around the reagent use, or is it very much down to what they find and we’ll just have to wait for the report?

Chris Yandell: I think it’s better to wait for the report. But what I would say is, what we expect is to see probably a different utilization, but not materially different than what we announced in that field.