Thomas Boyes: Maybe just to kind of come more directly, actually the bead issues, what kind of run rate is the facility capable or is the facility capable of achieving prior to even having the take down? Is it in excess of kind of that 50% run rate that you’re looking for by the end of the year? And then I appreciate the punch list on Slide 9. Does that kind of encompass all the things that need to occur to kind of get to 100% run rate? I’m just trying to kind of assess the relative risk between going from 50 to 100 over the next couple of months.
Dustin Olson: Yes. Look, Thomas. Look, we’ve actually been able to achieve pretty high rates across the plant. I mean like I mentioned on the feed extruder, we’ve touched 9,500 pounds per hour and 12,200 pounds per hour is effectively max rate. So that’s approximately 77%. If you look at the final product extruder, absent of the beads, we’ve already been able to touch 110%, okay? When you look at the volume through the system and what we’ve been able to achieve as the polymers move through the system, we feel very confident in our ability to hit very high rates across the plant above the 50% mark. So yes, will we — what does the December entail? We’re going to start at 50%, and we’re going to ramp up to 100%, maybe beyond and see where we land.
With respect to the list of items, outages like this are very challenging to plan and to organize, but our team for the last several weeks has been very focused on this, and all of the items that we show that have a, let’s say, a turnaround icon next to it are the items that we will complete during the outage, okay? So — and to varying levels of importance, I mean, obviously, the most important thing in this plant is to get the screen changer up and running, so we don’t have the headache of the beads. You can imagine, running for 2 hours a day, getting everything up and going and then having to shut down 2 hours later, it’s just not an effective way to run the plant. And when we have the screen changer, that problem goes away immediately and completely, okay?
The other items that are listed in that list are a lot of other, I would call it, nuanced headaches. The more things that you can make easy for an operator to deal with or, let’s say, benign and something you don’t have to worry about, the better the reliability will be. And a lot of those items have been things that haven’t worked perfect, but they worked okay, and we’re going to be able to knock those out and make the operation much, much smoother.
Thomas Boyes: Excellent. No, I really appreciate the color there. And then maybe just as a quick follow-up or a separate topic. Would just be some updating around the financing process for Augusta. Is the goal to still have project debt for that facility sometime exiting the year? Or do you think that’s more of an early 2024 event?
Dustin Olson: Yes. Thomas, it’s our goal. It’s no secret the market is challenging. But the most important component to any financing for Augusta is going to be consistent operations in Ironton. So when we come out of the outage, that’s going to help for us to start running consistently. And as soon as we do that, we’ll be engaged. We’ve got a process. We’ve got a data room. We’ve been in many, many discussions. So a lot of the hard work is done, but it’s dependent on Ironton consistently operating. So to answer your question, it’s more likely that it will be a 2024 event.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jeffrey Campbell of Seaport Research Partners.
Jeffrey Campbell: Can you expand on the change from third-party PreP, who’s responsible for the PreP now? And does this have any meaningful effect on anything, capital cost, system performance, operational costs?
Dustin Olson: Yes, that’s a good question. No, no. What I’m trying to say with that comment is that as you initially commissioned the equipment across the plant, we were engaged with the equipment vendors on site to help us run the equipment, learn the equipment, and tune the equipment. We’ve now taken over that process, and we do it on our own. And that’s really across extrusion, across PreP, across utilities. The process is you get help initially and then you start to do it on your own. And where we are now is doing it on our own. And quite frankly, that once you take over control of an operation, you find ways to optimize and to make it even better. And that’s what we’re seeing in PreP.
Jeffrey Campbell: With regard to — if we kind of take a very high view of everything we’ve discussed today, it sounds like the current ramp-up has resulted in a variety of adjustments to the system from the PreP operation you just mentioned to the final product. When all of this is completed and it’s doing everything that you wanted to do, do you believe these learn — what kind of effect do you believe these learnings will have on build time and the cost of the next system that you construct?
Dustin Olson: I don’t think it will have an enormous impact on build time, okay? I think the construction timeline is set generally by other factors. I do think it will have a tremendous impact on the overall final design and small improvements will make to future projects. And I know that when we start up these facilities, we will start up these facilities with our eyes wide open. And with much more clarity with how the operation will be able to run, okay. Let’s remember, this is the first time that this process has ever been run at scale. And so virtually every single unit operation is new, and it is being done for the first time. And in the future, we will have the experience from Ironton to directly lay into the operational startup and commissioning phases, which will be a significant reduction in time to get to full operation.
Jeffrey Campbell: Right. So because I really couldn’t get to cash flow faster. If I could ask a little bit?
Dustin Olson: Yes. So maybe to answer that question more directly, I think the construction phase of the project will not be impacted too much by the learnings that we received. But I certainly believe that the commissioning and startup phase will happen much faster in the future.
Jeffrey Campbell: Okay. Great. That’s a good way to put it. If I could ask one last one on Slide 12, I found it interesting that the DNV report on Antwerp was included in the analysis and particularly bearing in mind the carbon market, is there any chance that an Antwerp facility might proceed Augusta as the next facility after Ironton?
Lawrence Somma: Yes. Look, I don’t want to speak to the report too much or how they got the information. It’s obviously not something that we were disclosing publicly or putting in the market. But with respect to the carbon aspect of the market, this is more of a regulatory and legislation discussion that I’m certain will come forward over the next years, decades because everybody will be concerned about carbon reduction and different regulatory environments, different countries, they will implement solutions that they believe work best to drive carbon down. And whether it’s a credit system or some sort of incentive mechanism, we don’t know yet. But what we’re confident in is that we will continue to focus on driving efficiency in our plants to drive energy utilization down in our plant and therefore, also carbon footprint.
