Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P. (NASDAQ:CLMT) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Louis Borgmann: Yes. Amit, this is Todd. I think we’re certainly going to generate positive cash flow in the second half of the year with Montana Renewables now running fully construction over, so on and so forth. So absolutely, there will be — we would expect cash flow to be available. That being said, I think the major big bang deleveraging event it’s still going to be tied to monetization. There would certainly be the option to delever over time with operating cash flow, with MRL on and our Specialties business operating as well as it has over the past couple of years, we’d expect that to be an option. But I think we’ve been pretty clear that we want to complete the deleveraging of Calumet as quickly as possible. We’ve been talking about it for a while here. We want to get back to growing the business, and the most logical path is minority monetization of Montana Renewables.

Operator: And our next question will come from Manav Gupta with UBS.

Manav Gupta: My question to you here is, can you help us understand your SAF strategy? How much are you producing right now? Once you do expand, if you do, then how much SAF could you produce? And then just a quick follow-up is, how much more do you actually expect to make on an EBITDA per gallon basis in SAF versus RD? So if you think you can make 140 million gallons in RD, can you actually make 250 million gallons in SAF? And I’ll turn it over after that.

Bruce Fleming: Hi, Manav, it’s Bruce. The — if I take those in reverse order, we’ve got an undisclosed commercial premium above renewable diesel. That is very sufficient to incent staff recovery. The volume part is we’ve contracted 30 million gallons per year. That’s a percentage of our yield, kind of 12% to 15%. The expansion case, the licensors tell us we can go to full conversion, 100% SAF. We think there will be an optimization short of that, so we are tentatively advertising 230 million gallons of SAF capacity post installation of our yield flexibility project.

Operator: Next question here will come from Jason Gabelman with TD Cowen.

Jason Gabelman: I wanted to ask about the monetization strategy and efforts going on? And specifically, Todd mentioned a couple of things at the end that you’re receiving indications that the value of MRL is higher than the value of the current enterprise value of the company, so I was wondering if you just could elaborate on that a bit? How do you translate that into actual value for shareholders? And what does that process look like over the next few months? And then tied to that, considerations for converting to a C corp, do you see that as unnecessary step in unlocking the value?

Louis Borgmann: Let’s have Bruce start with kind of MRL valuation, and then I’ll pile on, if that’s all right, with kind of the last question.

Bruce Fleming: Sure. Jason, it’s Bruce. The MRL valuation is reasonably clear. The energy transition companies, the public peer companies are trading in an enterprise value of EBITDA multiple that’s visible. We expect to lay in with that at a minimum, if not get a premium for the competitive advantages that we’ve got due to location, due to the advanced pre-treater technology and due to the fact that we’re now North America’s largest SAF producer. So when you put all that together, that’s the public valuation signal that we would expect to target. I’ll tell you that the bulge-bracket banks we’re talking to have no concern about some kind of an overhang from the parent, which I think is part of what you were getting at. And so we’re simply going to stand it up, and it looks like it’s going to be a pretty straightforward process.

How long that takes and the condition of the capital markets will obviously give us a shot at positioning our timing. But from here in early August, we’re presumably targeting first part of next year for closing and funds realization.