Kurt Bitting: Yes, hi Aleksey. Thanks for the question. So just referring back to that year 2019 in Catalyst Technologies was really a high watermark, really, for hydrocracking catalyst. It was kind of a peak change-out year and then our niche custom catalyst as well had a very strong year. When we look at Catalyst Technologies for 2023, the growth there is really being driven by the major segments in the business. Again, polyethylene, renewables, hydrocracking and emission controls are all had really solid growth in those — in their secular trends. 2022, I would say, was impacted by a couple of things, right? We said there isn’t high refinery margins and really high utilization in those refineries delayed turnaround. So as we look at hydrocracking going forward, I mean it may not — it may be smoother than it was maybe in the past because you had the pandemic, which had low utilization rates, now you’re coming into an era where there’s very high utilization rates.
So we definitely know 2022 was impacted by those high utilization rates in hydrocracking. And then we had the spike in energy costs at midyear and then really, as Mike talked about, some one-time freight interplant logistics that will really leave you nonrecurring. So we view that most of those headwinds that we saw in 2022 are behind us, and we really feel that the segment is going to be very healthy in 2023.
Aleksey Yefremov: And maybe as a follow-up, how would you look at 2023 EBITDA in this segment? Is this somewhat below normalized level, above or at normalized kind of can you frame it relative to the cycle of margin normalization and maybe the catalyst reload cycle at your various customers?
Kurt Bitting: Yes. I mean I’ll start just really maybe on the catalyst cycle reload. I mean, I think — again, I think we see strong growth. I mean, we see low double-digit growth at least in all the major segments there. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s — we can call it a peak year in hydrocracking because again, it’s another year of high refining utilization projections and high refining margins. So as we saw some catalyst hydrocracking sales push from ’22 into ’23, that could very well happen as well in the ’23 and ’24. And so that cycle is a little bit more of unknown than it has been in the past just because of the pandemic and the high utilization rates that have happened. But we continue to see, again, very strong growth in many of the regions. I didn’t — I left out renewable fuels as well, renewable fuels production growing roughly 20% per year, which is going to translate into some nice sales growth for us as well.
Aleksey Yefremov: Great. Thanks a lot.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from P.J. Juvekar with Citi.
Patrick Cunningham: Hi, good morning. This is Patrick Cunningham on for PJ. You referenced your geographic footprint in virgin relative to the heavy mining industry. And I know lithium is a relatively small part of your business and just a small part of lithium supplies in the U.S. in general. Is there enough potential demand to justify adding new capacity or expanding existing capacity, maybe Southeastern U.S. I think I’m just trying to understand the volume potential, what might be the differences, say, relative to copper ?
Kurt Bitting: Yes. So thanks for the question, Patrick. That’s a really good one. So as you outlined, we do have — we like to say we have our plants kind of triangulate the mining sector in the U.S., right, between the Northern California, Southern California and the Gulf Coast location. So when you look at mining, obviously, mining is really kind of the backbone materials required for all the electrification and green infrastructure. As you referred to copper lithium borates. Copper use is — traditional copper leaching uses around 3 to 5 tons of sulfuric acid per ton of copper produced. A lithium is much higher in the realm of 20 tons. So as you look at the lithium production that’s projected or really needed to kind of power the electrification and green infrastructure going forward, it’s going to require immense amounts of sulfuric acid, much more than copper or borates, right?
