Kurt Bitting: Yes, Hamed, thanks for the question. So the production we service our customers really through a network of facilities. So when we have turnarounds and we have outages that are caused by weather-related events, we continue to supply with our existing network capacity. The utilization across our network as well as the sulfuric acid market in general is very high. So contracts in that business tend to be longer term. So when we look at our customer base, we’re generally in a position in virgin asset with customers anywhere from one to seven years. So we look at those as — those customers sign up with us for a long period of time. We made commitments to them over a one to seven-year period and supply them from whatever plant that we need to — if we have a certain unit down, we can just obviously supply either from the other unit at that site or additional plants in our network.
Hamed Khorsand: And my other question was on refinery utilization rates have been elevated for quite some time. Does this structurally change your business on a long-term basis? Or you feel like this is still a short-term event?
Kurt Bitting: Well, I mean, I think if you look at the refining utilization rates that are projected by the EIA, they are projected really to continue to maintain higher rates in the medium term. So again, we do long-term agreements with our customers, refining customers and those continue. And they have — they’re very bullish on their refining. So I don’t think that our mindset in terms of utilization, I guess, is we agree with our customers and what the EIA projects, which are going to be high utilization rates. I would also like to highlight as well is that it’s not just utilization. It’s the alkylate, the value of alkylate continues to be very high, right, which is what we’re linked to. So refineries despite whatever utilization rates are, they’re always trying to push their alkylate units because it’s one of the highest margin products that the refinery produces. It’s needed in gasoline exports and to produce premium gasoline.
Hamed Khorsand: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Laurence Alexander with Jefferies.
Daniel Rizzo: This is Dan Rizzo for Laurence. I just have a follow-up on, I think, it was David’s question. You mentioned doing debottlenecking into sulfuric acid. I was just wondering if it’s possible or how much it would cost for brownfield or greenfield expansion?
Kurt Bitting: That’s a hard question to answer for expansions. We look at a brownfield expansion as we debottleneck equipment in our plants all the time. So if you look at a sulfuric acid plant, it’s made up of numerous pieces, I would say, of modular-type equipment that as those pieces of equipment age, and we replace and come to end of life and we replace — a lot of times, we’re replacing with a piece of equipment that allows that plant to produce more product and upsizes, I guess, the production capacity of those plants. So it’s hard to put a cost on a brownfield because that’s kind of what we look at is we debottleneck certain units of the sulfur plant greenfield plants are obviously very expensive and if we were going to go in a multiyear project to permit and construct.
So if we were going to go down that path, obviously, as we’ve done in the past with our other capacity expansions or other major investments, we would be tying it to specific customer or specific segment demand.
Daniel Rizzo: All right. That’s very helpful. And then just one other question. Just broadly speaking, if we were to hit a recession in the U.S. by the second half of this year into 2024, could you still hit your — the low end of your outlook, your EBITDA outlook?
