Jim Stark: Yes, I mean, what we said is, number one by bringing the partnership back in, obviously we don’t send some of our money out the door in terms of fees. We get that back in, but we’re paying for that, some savings in SG&A and so overall interest savings as well, potentially as we will look to do, see what we do with that piece of that. But we’re still negotiating with the conflict committee and we should have more on that during the quarter.
Dan Rizzo: All right. Thank you very much.
Operator: Next question comes from Jordan Levy, Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Jordan Levy: Hey all, I appreciate all the commentary and the improved outlook you talked to in the back half of the year. Maybe if we could just unpack that a little bit more and help frame up how we should be thinking about what run rate EBITDA might look like given the levels you’re running at on protein right now and what you’re seeing in crush and DCO?
Todd Becker: Yes, I mean, I think when you kind of look at it, it’s on paper similar or better to the margins we locked in during Q2 overall. And depending on where we see ethanol perform, we’ve got to watch the corn market closely. I mean, bombing a Black Sea Port from the Ukraine to Russia, doesn’t help our crush. But overall, the crush expanded, the numbers came back in line, run rates were over overly stated in our opinion last week at 10, 90. It’s probably not possible, just doesn’t stay there very long. And I think we’ll get some better EIA data going forward. I think we’re below last year’s stocks levels, blending continues to increase. RIN values have not broken since the updated RVOs at all. So, if you look at kind of retailers, they’re making plenty of money blending ethanol, we’re seeing more and more E15 type 88 octane sales happen to the consumer.
We’ve even seen uptick in E85 sales, which we didn’t know how much traction that will continue to maintain over the years. But when you look at corn oil alone, relative to the first half just take prices where they’re at today, I mean, that alone is in that $75 million to $80 million range, just contribution where the first half was more of a – because of prices and the volatility is more on that $50 million to $60 million range in the first half. So that alone gets us back. We got the question once. How did you come up with $0.70, $0.60 or $0.70 a pound in your long-term view of oil? And I think it’s taking shape nicely. And so protein on as well, we’ve got to deliver on some of these 60 Pro sales, but overall we should start to really see a nice protein uplift.
I mean, we are looking forward to today, which is going to come soon where we’re able to really break out last half protein numbers for you. But I can tell you that it’s on pace with what we had previously indicated. On top of that, Fluid Quip will start to gain some traction on some of the sales that they start to make. Remember when we make a sale in Fluid Quip, it actually increases EBITDA at Green Plains. There is a margin on technology and they’re working on incredible technology opportunities well outside of protein and what they do. And so they have a much bigger engineering and construction and technology business as well. So we’re looking forward to their contributions and we’ll just have to wait and see where ethanol comes in. And even the last half on Ag and Energy is usually stronger than the first half than we – because third and fourth quarters is really we start to kick in on in that as well.
So overall when you kind of look at it, on paper it’s greater than what we were logging in the second quarter and we’ll have to see where it goes from there. And fundamentals are good in everything we’re doing.
Jordan Levy: That’s promising. Thanks Todd. Maybe just shifting gears over to the regulatory front. Looks like the administration’s working through how to think about ethanol as a feedstock for SAF. Just curious what your thoughts are there and how they might look to approach that and what implications that might have?
Todd Becker: So I have Devin here with us, who you guys met on our IRA Teach-in except to say, and I’ll just lead it and I’ll let Devin give you a little more color. And we’re very focused on making sure that the regulations are in place that give ethanol as good of a shot as anything else. And alcohol, the first step is to decarbonize, which is why we’re very happy with the choices we’ve made around our decarbonization strategy and being upper, what we believe will be earlier than a large part of the industry because of the choices we made. But overall it looks like we’re getting good bipartisan support for making sure that the modeling is thought of correctly. And I’ll let Devin comment on that a little bit.
Devin Mogler: So, like we said on the IRA Teach-in, we want to see the Department of Energy’s Argonne GREET model used that allows for decarbonized ethanol to serve as primary feedstock for alcohol-to-jet SAF. We saw some encouraging comments from the president just last week in Maine where he said that farmers have a vital role to play in producing SAF. So that was encouraging. We expect to see regulations put out by treasury as early as next month, September on the current 40B SAF tax credit, and then shortly thereafter for 45Z. And there’s a lot of discussion. But as Todd mentioned, tremendous amount of bipartisan support from both the House and the Senate to continue to encourage the administration to allow for decarbonized ethanol to serve as a feedstock and help to meet the SAF Grand Challenge goal of 3 billion gallons by 2030, which we don’t believe is possible unless you use these agriculture row based feedstocks.
