Green Plains Partners LP (NASDAQ:GPP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Green Plains Partners LP (NASDAQ:GPP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 6, 2023

Operator: Good morning and welcome to the Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Following the company’s prepared remarks, instructions will be provided for Q&A. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Boggs, please go ahead.

Phil Boggs: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners third quarter 2023 earnings call. Participants on today’s call are Todd Becker, President and Chief Executive Officer and Jim Stark, Chief Financial Officer. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find it on the Investor page under the Events and Presentations link on both corporate websites. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today’s press releases, in the comments made during this conference call, and in the risk factors section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement. Now, I’d like to turn the call over to Todd Becker.

Todd Becker: Thanks Phil, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. This morning we reported $52 million in EBITDA for the third quarter and an ethanol operating rate of 93.9% and very strong Ultra-High Protein production and sales. These results begin to demonstrate our platform’s capabilities and we believe we can and we will build on these record rates moving forward and start to see the real benefits in Q4 and beyond. The team was focused on bringing our platform back to consistent operations after our first half headwinds, some of which continued into July of this quarter. But we really started to gain positive momentum as the quarter progressed and has continued into Q4. We executed on the market opportunities that were and continued to be available.

As I just said, we have continued the same focus in the fourth quarter and have positioned ourselves, based on current market dynamics, to perform better across every product we produce. We remain largely open to the expanded margins in the fourth quarter, although we were able to lock in our veg oil pricings higher than the current market and now own our winter gas at or below market. In addition, corn basis, which has been a significant headwind for the past two years, has moderated significantly on the forward look. And while we still have some needs to buy in for the quarter, we are generally covered at or below market as well as on a physical corn basis. In Q3, for reference, the corn basis in our areas was $0.44 higher than the five year average.

During Q3, as we finished up bringing in the last of the old crop. In addition, as ethanol remains inverted slightly on the curb, and as we always try to reduce our inventories, this always is a slight negative when the market is and was set up like that against the end of the quarter. During the quarter, we restarted our Wood River MSC Protein System late in July and operated at consistent rates across the entire platform. We achieved new record production levels for Ultra-High Protein in the third quarter and are on pace to set new highs in the fourth quarter. Not only did our entire platform operate more consistently, but we continue to see higher average yields per bushel. We continue to refine our process and apply learnings across our five locations.

For example, last month in Shenandoah, we averaged over four pounds per bushel, and you will recall that our original investment thesis was based on three to three and a half pounds per bushel, so we could achieve our 2025 targeted volumes with fewer locations, but with investments – and lower than we originally anticipated. Although, we are continuing to roll this out through our platform, our JV with Tharaldson, which will be the largest MSC facility ever built, is slated to come online in Q1 of 2024. And later in the call, I will dive more deeply into protein economics production, 60 Pro, current dynamics, and some other exciting ingredient opportunities that are coming our way. I will also update you on our decarbonization clean sugar launch and veg oil marketing.

Our liquidity improved in the third quarter, with our platform turning to free cash flow generation and also benefiting from the sale of our Atkinson plant above that. With strong margins on paper today, we expect even better free cash flow in the fourth quarter and to end the year stronger yet. Last month, we executed a definitive merger agreement with Green Plains Partners. We are continuing to work through the process and anticipate completion before the end of the year. We expect that the proposed transaction will simplify our corporate structure and governments – and governance, generate near-term earnings and cash flow accretion, reduce SG&A expense related to the partnership, improve the credit quality of the combined enterprise, and align the strategic interests between Green Plains shareholders and the partnership unitholders.

There will be some one-time deal expenses that will hit Q4 and Q1, but we will call those out for you after the close. And now I’ll hand the call over to Jim to provide an update on the overall financial results.

Jim Stark: Thank you, Todd. Good morning, everyone. Green Plains consolidated revenues for the third quarter were $892.8 million, which was $62.2 million or approximately 6.5% lower than the same period a year ago. The lower revenue is attributable to lower prices for ethanol and dry distillers grains in Q3 of 2023 as compared to the third quarter of 2022. As Todd stated earlier, our plant utilization rate was 93.9% during the third quarter, compared to the 90.9% run rate reported in the same period last year, but significantly improved from the 81.5% in the second quarter of this year. We anticipate our plants to continue to perform targeting utilization rates in the mid 90% range of our stated capacity. For the quarter, we reported net income attributable to Green Plains of $22.3 million, or $0.35 per diluted share.

That compares to a net loss of $73.5 million, or $1.27 loss per diluted share for the same period in 2022. EBITDA for the quarter was $52 million. That compares to a negative $35.6 million in the prior year period. Our depreciation and amortization expense was slightly lower by $0.7 million versus a year ago at $23.9 million. We realized $48.5 million in consolidated crush for Q3 of 2023, compared to a negative $20.5 million in the prior year. Our ag and energy segment performed well, recording $12.2 million in EBITDA, which was about $5.6 million higher than the prior year. This increase was driven by opportunities in our merchant businesses. For the third quarter, our SG&A cost for all segments was $35.5 million, compared to $29.1 million reported in Q3 of 2022.

This increase was driven by legal fees associated with the GPP buy-in and other legal activities during the quarter. Interest expense was $9.6 million for the quarter, which includes the impact of debt, amortization and capitalized interest. This was in line with the prior year’s third quarter. Our income tax benefit for the quarter was $7.8 million, compared to a tax benefit of $1.9 million for the same period in 2022. The increase in the tax benefit year-over-year is a result of a decrease in our total deferred tax assets, which allowed us to reduce our valuation allowance against those deferred tax assets. At the end of the quarter, the net loss carry forwards available to the company were $128.9 million, which may be carried forward indefinitely.

We continue to anticipate that our normalized tax rate for the year for Green Plains Inc. excluding minority interest should be around 23%. Our liquidity position at the end of the quarter remained solid, which included $366.2 million in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash, along with approximately $200 million available under our working capital revolver. Our financial strength is growing due to the strong execution of our platform and favorable industry fundamentals as we are well positioned to execute on the next steps of our transformation plan. As a reminder, we have no debt maturities until 2026, and two-thirds of our debt is locked in at a fixed rate, leading to our overall cost of borrowing during the quarter being around 7.2%.

For the third quarter, we allocated $29 million of capital across the platform, including $15 million to our Clean Sugar build in Shenandoah and other MSC Protein initiatives, about $8 million to other growth initiatives and approximately $6 million for maintenance, safety and regulatory capital. For the remainder of 2023, we anticipate CapEx will be in the range of $25 million to $45 million as we continue to work diligently on the timing of permitting for MSC technology deployment at a couple of our larger plants. For Green Plains Partners, we reported net income of $9.4 million and an adjusted EBITDA of $12.7 million for the quarter, in line with the $13 million reported for the same period a year ago. The partnership declared a quarterly distribution of $0.455 per unit with a 0.99x coverage ratio for the quarter.

The partnership had distributable cash flow of $10.7 million for the quarter, slightly lower than the $11.3 million for the same quarter of 2022. Over the last 12 months, the partnership has – produced adjusted EBITDA of $50.6 million, distributable cash flow of $42.9 million, and declared distributions of $43.2 million, resulting in 0.99x coverage ratio, excluding any adjustment for the principal payments made in the past year. Now I’d like to turn the call back over to Todd.

Todd Becker: Hey, thanks, Jim. So our path forward continues to be focused on maximizing what we can produce from a kernel of corn at each of our biorefineries, and all of our initiatives tie back to one consistent theme making low carbon ingredients that matter. We consistently pointed the need to operate our core business well to maximize the opportunity in protein and higher renewable corn oil yields, and we are starting to achieve those higher run rates once again. Our assets have aged and we needed to put a lot of care into them. And we hired a new operations executive leadership team that is fully focused on the modernization and automation, and they know how to do it correctly. We’ve been investing in technology and are making great progress towards the goal across the platform.

Today, we have five facilities operating our MSC Ultra-High Protein technology. Construction of both Madison, Illinois and Fairmont, Minnesota continues to be pending favorable outcomes from the permitting process in both states, which continues to take longer than we thought. We are in a good path in Illinois as the permit will unlock the full potential of a plant in terms of total volume of all of our products, in addition to the MSC installation. What I’m really excited about is our MSC turnkey joint venture with Tharaldson is on track to begin commissioning and startup in the first quarter of 2024. This will be the largest plant ever built with the Fluid Quip technology and will bring approximately 100,000 tons of production to our sales platform.

We remain on our path to have our total annual capacity with 580,000 tons at the base yield of 3.5 pounds per bushel. Yet we are also starting to achieve higher yields at almost all of our locations, with some consistently achieving over four pounds per bushel daily, and believe that over the long run, we could achieve improved yields across the entire platform. Our production was significantly higher than in the prior quarter and continues to grow. Our commercial team focused on protein, successfully worked with our diverse customer base to sell all of the product we produce. This confirms what we have always believed that we have a great product that is in high demand, we have a solid customer base, and we continue to have access to new business opportunities.

We increased the number of customers by 25% to 30% during this quarter alone. Our protein product is also growing demand around the world and we are now selling our protein to north and South America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Now let’s talk about the 60% protein initiative because that’s one of the most important and exciting things that we’re going to be doing over the next several years. We executed a successful full scale 60% protein production run during the third quarter at Wood River and began to deliver commercial quantities of 60% protein to end customers and are in position to begin delivering an additional 60% protein sales in the fourth quarter. We are continuing to debottleneck the production process around this, both mechanically and biologically, as we learn how to transition these MSC systems from 50% to 60% protein production at full scale.

Once we lined out the system in Wood River, we consistently produced our 60% protein product and have achieved as high as 62.3% during the quarter. The team overall at the plant as well as in our office here did a great job in a very difficult task, which is why we know we have something unique. We now have our first repeat 60 Pro business and the product is being utilized in several large scale commercial diets along with additional trials in the U.S. and around the world. We remain committed to achieving our goal of dedicating 20% to 30% of our portfolio to 60 Pro during 2024. We can see the business in front of us and customers are starting to ask for it. In addition to the high quality nutritional, digestibility and taste profiles of our protein, we are already getting value from our lower CI from our Ultra-High Protein relative to corn burr mill from wet mills, and received updated data during the quarter on the advantage we have.

Now that we’ve been running our platform for several months, we anticipate the fourth quarter Ultra-High Protein production will be higher than what we achieved in the third quarter and growing. As we look at the EBITDA opportunity in 2024 based on the five facilities we have operating, plus a partial year impact from our turnkey JV, EBITDA contributions could be $80 million to $120 million during the 2024 fiscal year. In corn oil, our renewable corn oil remains a feedstock of choice among renewable diesel producers and even in the face of new soybean crush capacity coming online, our corn oil maintains a distinct advantage due to its lower carbon intensity. I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time on this. Most of you know everything you need to know about this great product.

Pricing was strong during Q3 and we sold most of our Q4 production at higher values than the current market, so we’re happy about that. We believe our renewable corn oil platform is well positioned to take advantage of industry drivers towards advantaged feedstocks. The low carbon premium has developed and we believe renewable corn oil beginning in 2025 is even more advantaged in the IRA, so don’t ignore that positive factor as we get into next year and the year beyond. Decarbonization continues to be a crucial strategy that we are pursuing. The most significant step we can take is participation in carbon capture and sequestration opportunities. Four of our facilities, representing approximately 316 million gallons per year are committed to the Summit Carbon Solutions Project, excuse me.

We are confident this project gets completed. Although Summit is now indicating looking at a 2026 startup, they continue to make great progress on permitting and right away. And we expect that many of the stranded navigator plants will end up on this project. As noted over the past quarter, three of our facilities are now on a separate CCS project in Nebraska, Central City, Wood River and York represents about 287 million gallons. This project appears to be on track for a 2025 startup. We have expanded and diversified our partnerships for carbon capture and sequestration and believe that we will be in a significant advantage beginning in early 2025 when 45Z goes into effect. Decarbonization through carbon capture and storage provides a critical milestone to not only lower the CI, the fuel ethanol we produce, but also further drive delineation in all of our ingredient pathways.

Ultimately, having a decarbonized ethanol platform positions fuel ethanol to be a crucial low CI feedstock for the development of sustainable aviation fuel, which as you know, we are keeping a close eye on. We expect to get some more clarity from the administration on SAF before the end of the year. We are approaching completion of the world’s first commercial clean sugar technology facility in Shenandoah, Iowa as it is on-track to be mechanically completed by the end of the year and we are still only waiting for final electrical gear. We believe we should have it in time to begin commissioning in Q1 of 2024. The interest from potential customers exceeds anything we could have anticipated and we have been looking at plans to quickly expand the capacity at Shenandoah as well as completing additional installations elsewhere when we can.

This is truly disruptive and game changing for Green Plains. Our clean sugar is up to a 40% lower CI than from a wet mill and as before we have carbon capture deployed. We look forward to demonstrating to the market a true value of this technology. Our ongoing commercial sales discussions rather dextrose product reflect the value of the lower carbon intensity of which we got brand new results during the quarter, which have basically shown that we are at least a 40% lower carbon intensity score than the incumbent products. So where does that leave us with regard to our path to our 2025 EBITDA and transformation that we laid out to you a couple of years ago? For 2024, starting with the five MSC facilities plus a partial year for the Tharaldson JV to drive EBITDA contributions of $80 million to $120 million, excluding any uplift for 60% protein, our base corn oil renewable – our base renewable corn oil business excluding the corn oil uplift from our MSC to actually about 250 million pounds and depending on how veg oil pricing goes could be $130 million to $160 million annual contribution as well.

We have recently seen veg oil prices drop. So once again, we’ll see what develops in 2025 as more renewable diesel projects come online and we’ll see what the impact it has. And if the government will continue to allow Chinese used cooking oil to really receive our tax credits. Our ag and energy business consistently generates $20 million to $30 million in EBITDA annually and our corporate SG&A is approximately $65 million to $70 million. Just to be clear, we have pre-invested both in protein marketing and technology as well as our sugar marketing and technology. So that when we kick off these new products, we are fully ready to go. I’ll let you put in your own assumptions for ethanol margins, but we do believe fundamentals for the ethanol demand will remain strong for the foreseeable future, notwithstanding those normal ups and downs we see seasonally or from quarter-to-quarter.

We are also focused on consistent operations for our core products as well. As we move into 2025, which is the incremental value from additional MSC facilities but most critically will be the startup of our decarbonization strategy with our platform having a significant advantage in terms of timing to completion relative to other projects that are out there. I’m incredibly proud of our entire team for pulling together and delivering a solid quarter and positioning us for even greater success that’s possible in Q4 based, of course, as we always say on current markets. We have made our significant changes to our executive team throughout the organization over the past 12 to 24 months. We assembled a new senior management team and leadership team in operations with hires from industry leaders in wet milling and value-added production who can also maximize the capabilities of our plants.

This team has many, many decades of operational expertise. We’ve built a new commercial leadership that’s focused on building value-added marketing and distribution that was needed for our new products. Yet have expertise in traditional commodity margin management. We also have new leadership in human resources as we are focusing on taking care of our team members needs and recruiting great talent. And of course, can’t leave this out, Jim taking over as CFO. We also have a great bench of leaders and employees from sales to marketing to trade to production to nutrition to technology, in our finance organization, of course, our plant management who all help us continue to execute on our transformation and deliver results from many industry leaders we compete with on many of our new products.

We knew this would be a challenging process. And of course, I’m humbled by the dedication inspired by the passion of all of our team members across the organization in every position weekend and week out. Finally, our commitment to safety of our employees is first and foremost before anything else we do, we will never put profits before safety and I preach this continuously anytime I can. And with that, I’ll leave it there. Thanks for joining our call today. We can start the Q&A session.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Jordan Levy with Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Jordan Levy: Good morning, all. Nice quarter.

Todd Becker: Good morning.

Jordan Levy: Maybe to start on the protein side of things, it seems like we’re getting into that time of year when you start to look at allocations. I think if we just start looking back 12 months or so versus where we are now, if you could just talk to how those are shaping up, what sort of the customer mix and how that’s changed? And how the economics look now versus how they did maybe a year ago?

Todd Becker: So let’s talk first about the economics. What we’ve seen is with corn prices kind of hanging in here a little bit lower and protein prices increasing against that. The economics on paper have clearly gotten better just basically financial to financial. Now during the quarter, last quarter we saw weakness in the soybean meal basis, which affects the overall margin structure, but that has come roaring back as well as the overall price for protein has come roaring back as well. So we’re optimistic with in terms of our price competitiveness relative to incumbent products. We get a lot of calls around that. And the use of our product and we’re seeing higher inclusion rates. And in general, we’ve seen good uplift in terms of a new demand showing up for our products across all the species.

We’re happy to report, we renewed our pet food contract for 2024. We got a 100% of that business back and it’s growing from there. The company that we’re partnered with continues to grow their volumes every single year from when we started in Shenandoah by selling part of that plant out as well. So relatively speaking from 12 months ago we continue to see uplift in all the species and continue to see growing volumes across our whole customer base, even with more volumes coming into the market.

Jordan Levy: Thanks, Todd. And then maybe just moving on to the carbon side of things. I appreciate the commentary you gave there and sort of the diversification strategy you all were kind of continuing to pursue. Maybe just with some of the recent headlines around some of the plants, some of the other plants in the market, the other types in the market rather. Maybe if you could just talk to how you’re thinking about and the confidence you have over the next few years and being able to execute on the carbon strategy.

Todd Becker: Yeah. I think we start with our core pipeline strategy was to partner with Summit and what a great job they’ve done. They’ve secured 75% to 80% of the right away. Nobody else has been able to – nobody else building a new pipeline has been able to do that. While they certainly have seen some headwinds in terms of just overall permitting, we believe – strongly believe they’ll get through that and kind of get their route established. A lot of it’s about the routing and some of it’s about local community is making sure that that they get what they need and I think Summit’s fully prepared to make those concessions and they continue to negotiate. First comes the Iowa permit, we’re confident in North Dakota and we’re also really confident that they’ll get through the South Dakota process as well with some re-routing.

That’s really what it takes is that line running from Iowa to North Dakota. Strong from the standpoint of the early funding they raised, obviously they need – we’re waiting for the final permits so they can raise the final funding. We’re confident in the team and their ability to execute and it’s going to be a massive project that gives massive uplift to our industry overall. And then with obviously the other pipeline that decided to cease their operations, I think that’s advantaged Summit relative to where they are building and to pick up other plants and increase their volumes just makes everything more economic in the end. It’s absolutely the right thing to do. Now, without any pipeline that has its normal challenges, we’re confident that we made the right choice, we made an early investment.

So we’re a shareholder and we really like the position at their end. Maybe it takes a little bit longer, but overall really good execution so far. In terms of Nebraska, we had mentioned a different project there that we believe start-up will be in 2025 and the econs are very favorable to Green Plains as well. Those will be early econs, we outlined those during our earlier calls and discussions, but we really feel like we’re in a really great advantaged position especially for the early start up. And then when Summit comes online it really just drives our capability to earn from the carbon initiative significantly for our shareholders.

Jordan Levy: Thanks so much. Appreciate the color. I’ll leave it there.

Todd Becker: Thank you.

Operator: The next question is from Manav Gupta with UBS. Your line is open.

Manav Gupta: Hi. So I was wondering if you could help us a little bit understand where can we – by when can we get more guidance from the treasury as it relates to 45Z? And I’m also trying to understand, we have seen a little bit of a pullback in corn oil prices. I think it’s more of a function of D4. You have a lot of capacity coming on, which would need that corn oil. And then as LCFS prices move up, the demand for corn oil should be higher. So trying to understand some more whatever guidance you can provide on 45Z and then how do you see near to medium-term corn oil pricing?

Todd Becker: Yes. Thanks. I have Devin here with me who let our IRA call. So, I’ll let him comment on where we’re at on that.

Devin Mogler: Hey, Manav. The government has said, they’re going to come out with 40B SAF guidance by September 15, obviously that’s in the rearview mirror by 45 days. We’re still expecting that by the end of the year and that the lifecycle modeling they put out there for SAF will likely inform your thinking on 45Z, as far as the model they’re using and how farm carbon and carbon capture can play in that. Hope we’re still optimistic that we will see 45Z guidance by the end of the year, but that could slip into early next year.

Todd Becker: Yeah. So from that perspective and as we move to your second and third question on corn oil and LCFS, we have seen a drop. I think that was due a little bit to overall market dynamics of the unwind between meal and oil. We saw meal rally and oil retreat from the highs, although we got most of our corn oil sold at higher values for the fourth quarter. So we’re happy about the position we have on at this point. That was the one thing we wanted to make sure that we locked in to at least get that locked away as we saw some downtimes in renewable diesel and maybe some delays in start-ups. Overall, I think another big impact and I mentioned it in the script is Chinese used cooking oil, which to us is disgraceful that has the ability to come in the United States and earn our tax credits.