CVR Energy, Inc. (NYSE:CVI) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And a lot of those are export refineries. So, it’s — even though our demand is strong, I think the world is seeing a bit of a slow.

Neil Mehta: Helpful perspective. The follow-up is, just on the dividend, Dave, it’s been a couple of quarters now where it’s been $0.50 a share, and the implied dividend yield on the stock is now close to 8%. You haven’t been afraid to move that up and down. But just from where you sit, do you feel like the $0.50 dividend a quarter is something that you can sustain in the current market environment?

Dave Lamp: Well, I think — I don’t think that will change unless we restructure corporation a little bit. If we do the spin-off, I think we’ll have to look at the dividend again because that’s just the effect of doing the spin-off. But we’re a cash machine. That’s what we’re here for. And we give out either be a regular or special. We don’t do many stock buybacks because we just don’t think that’s really necessarily in the best interest of our shareholders. And we’re going to give it back as dividends or specials.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of John Royall with JPMorgan.

John Royall: So, maybe just a follow-up on that last discussion on dividends. Maybe you could just give us some updated thoughts on the potential for specials. I think Dave referred to the specials from last year as kind of one-offs on the prior conference call, and correct me if I’m mischaracterizing that. But you did have over $200 million of free cash in 1Q, including the UAN tax payment, and you’ve locked in some hedges in the future. And so any updated thoughts on the propensity to pay out some of that with the special going forward?

Dave Lamp: Well, I think the specials, as I mentioned before, was really around a unique set of market conditions. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve never seen cracks where they were for a pretty sustained period of time in 2022. And that’s why we did specials. We didn’t think about raising the regular up to that because we didn’t think it was sustainable. And I think the same situation is here. As you know, we’re going to take it quarter by quarter and the Board looks at it very closely. We’re managing cash to levels we think we need to avoid using our revolver unless we absolutely have to. And that’s just the point of view we have. So, specials will come and go there — if the market is remarkable, and we have the cash on the balance sheet to dividend out, we will.

John Royall: Great. That’s helpful. And then on the monetization of the tax credits at UAN, how do those work in general? And how do you — how do they impact future cash flows at UAN in terms of what you’re giving up? And then, following the $19 million payment in 1Q, how should we think about the potential for future payments and timing there?

Dane Neumann: Yes. I’ll take this one. So really, what we had in place previously was an existing CO2 sales contract with a counterparty. And we ended up contributing that sales contract to a JV with the same counterparty. And as a result, it allows the tax equity investor to claim those credits that we’re receiving for the sequestration activity. So what occurred is the contract was deemed a value of $46 million. We put that as deferred revenue on our balance sheet and recognized an equity method investment of $46 million. The cash receipt of $19 million, it was $18 million net of fees, was really just the first payment in the string of payments we expect to receive associated with the JV. And that payment drew down some of the equity method investment.