It just uses a much higher magnitude of sulfuric acid. So we expect that will continue to drive demand for sulfuric acid going forward.
Patrick Cunningham: Great. Thanks. And then just on the higher CapEx number, which parts of the catalyst business is that being directed? And would I be correct in assuming that you might have a bias towards the catalyst business in terms of potential bolt-ons? Thanks.
Kurt Bitting: Yes. That’s another good question. I’ll take the first part there. Our growth capital is geared towards the catalyst business. There are some good opportunities in the polyethylene catalyst market as well as in our Zeolyst joint venture that we’re continuing to look at. There is something that we’re continuing to believe that there’s strong growth where we will continue to invest organically in the Catalyst business. Yes. I think it looks in terms of inorganic growth, we look at Ecovyst, we like all the segments that we serve, right? I mean we deliver unique and customized products and services, really the blue chip refining, petchem, mining and catalysts and major industrial consumers, and we really like these segments.
So any opportunity to expand our offerings in these areas or adjacent to the areas is going to be interesting to us. So we’re really confident that we can drive value in an acquisition either by leveraging our operational expertise, technical know-how or customer relationships in either of the businesses, not just Catalyst Technologies.
Patrick Cunningham: Great. Thank you.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.
David Begleiter: Thank you. Kurt, you touched on capital allocation this year. But thinking about the use of the free cash for debt pay down, what — can you talk about how much we should expect? Or what are the priorities besides that reduction this year?
Kurt Bitting: Yes. So thank you for the question. So we’ll go step back really — 2022, we’ve repurchased about $137 million worth of stock, increasing the value to the shareholders. So we’re really — we’re proud of that fact, we are able to execute that and maintain our net leverage ratio at that 2.8x. It really reduce it to the — and then maintain it at that 2.8x. So as I just said, we really strongly believe in the secular growth trends in our businesses. So moving forward with our cash generation, we’re going to continue to invest in our businesses and grow them both organically and inorganically as we think there’s great opportunities there. And then secondly, we also have that board share repurchase authorization that I just mentioned that we continue — that we can continue to use to deliver value to shareholders.
David Begleiter: Understood. And just on sulfuric acid, apologies if I missed this. Is there potential to add capacity organically or even potentially buy some more capacity given the robust end market growth you’ve talked about?
Kurt Bitting: Yes. We’re always — we have multiple projects at any given time looking to debottleneck our existing assets, right? So we’ve talked about before we debottleneck logistics assets. We have the ability to debottleneck and remove restrictions on our existing plants and push more, I guess, more sulfur capacity through the plants to generate more sulfuric acid. And we love the sulfuric acid industry. We’ve been in it for 120 years. So we’re always looking to grow our production capacity where we can.
David Begleiter: Thank you.
Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Hamed Khorsand with BWS.
Hamed Khorsand: Hi, good morning. Could you just elaborate on given the reduced production in Q1, are you looking to ramp up production beyond nameplate capacity to catch up with sales? And how are you going about landing new customers when you have this kind of headwind in Q1 as far as production is concerned?
