Kenny Rocker: So yes, a couple of things here. Let’s just take hold for first up. Yes. And you’ve heard us talk about this. We do have a couple of mechanisms that are in place that allow us and our customers to be competitive with natural gas prices. One of the things that we have seen out there is the fact that there has been a little slight uptick in terms of demand based on the extreme heat that we’ve seen. We’ve seen that also impact again in the near term natural gas prices out there. So we’re seeing more demand out there. We’re working closely with Eric and his team as we speak to add more sets and add more inventory into the network. And we’re looking at the 4 curves that you just see, how long that will last. So we’re always looking at that, and we’re looking at that by the week.
Switching to domestic intermodal on the pricing side. we like the fact that we have our customers that are competitive in the marketplace and that we’re competitive against truck. Some of those mechanisms will go up, I think, tightened in a Loup market like where we are now, it might move down a little bit. But the key is to make sure that we can capture the volume against truck and make sure that we’re competitive.
Operator: Our next question is from the line of Fadi Chamoun with BMO Capital.
Fadi Chamoun : Congratulations, Lance. Question on the opportunity for volume. Like if you think about a zero GDP environment over the next, say, 12 months, what can service improvement deliver in terms of growth? Where are maybe some of the verticals you think that you can make a difference in the service level and ultimately start to see more idiosyncratic opportunities to grow the business?
Kenny Rocker: Yes, Fadi, thanks for the question. Let’s just walk through — if you look at our outlook slide, and I’ll supplement that with a few more specifics on our biodiesel, the renewable diesel market, we’ve got seven different facilities on us. We’re going to land another facility here by the end of the year. We’re very encouraged by that. That’s a key part of our growth strategy. And we mentioned that a couple of years ago, during Investor Day, very proud of our commercial team for securing that. Construction, our rock business, for example, those are areas where Eric’s team is just delivering great service, and it’s showing up in terms of carloads. We’re adding a few more sets there. We’re seeing more carloads that are coming on because of that, and some of that is market-related.
There’s just more infrastructure that’s out there. If you talk about the service product, we look at auto parts coming out of Mexico. We’ve seen a pretty fast and upcoming grower — growing EV producer that we’re growing with on the auto parts side that we’re excited about. We’ve secured a new automotive OEM on our line back in the spring that has brought business to us. That same OEM will be bringing on business in the first quarter. So we’re pretty excited there. And then kind of last but not least, I’ll just say that overall, the team has been engaged on bringing new business in different ways. We have a new industrial park that’s going to be landing on us in the Buckeye, Arizona area. So that’s great. And we’ve got a customer that will be doing reusable plastics, so just you think about the ESG connection.
So we can create our own business development with the service that I mentioned with Eric, and we’re excited about it.
Lance Fritz : And it’s proven, Kenny, your BD pipeline is up, what?
Kenny Rocker: It’s up around 20% to 25%. So the team is just doing a fabulous job going out there and expanding the market better.
