Calumet Specialty Products Partners, L.P. (NASDAQ:CLMT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Vincent Donargo: Hey, Amit, its Vince. Thanks for the question. We are — the Montana Renewables is financed, so we’re not financing Montana Renewables with this. We’re going to repay a couple of things that the parent company had put in place in the past. But broadly speaking, that money is going to stay inside the box. This will jumpstart spending that is already underway on our MAX SAF expansion case. Todd mentioned the reactor. You guys have heard us speak about that before, but we bought it in order to essentially accelerate timeline and we’ve started the engineering work already. We’re paying those bills now. So it’s a good seed money for that expansion. We’ll know in maybe 6 months or so as the engineering progresses a better estimate for the installed cost. So stay tuned for those updates.

Amit Dayal: Okay. Thank you for that. And just one more for me. Could you give us a sense of how many barrels of RD and SAF you may be at by the end of 2023 per day?

Vincent Donargo: Sure. I’ll tell you what we’re at right now. We have contracted 2,000 barrels a day at SAF and we’ve contracted 9,000 barrels a day of renewable diesel. That’s the current plan. That’s approximately 80% of our permitted capacity. So we expect to exceed that. That’s one reason why Todd mentioned a range of SAF production. 2,000 ranging up to 4,000. We’re pretty economically incented to pursue that SAF, and so I expect we will do better than our conservative promise.

Amit Dayal: Understood. That’s all I had, Vince. Thank you so much.

Operator: The next question comes from Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Neil Mehta: Thanks, team. Appreciate the time. I wanted to go to Slide 13 and the year ahead. You provided that ’23 CapEx guidance of 125 to 145 XMRL. Can you help us understand the buckets associated with that CapEx and how should we think about what maintenance or sustaining CapEx is on the business?

Todd Borgmann: Yes, I think — This is Todd, Neil, and thanks for the question. I think there’s largely two buckets. Turnaround bucket be about $50 million to $60 million in 2023 and then the other bucket we’re calling modernization, reliability and integration focus. So this group is largely maintenance, but there’s also some returns and some positives that come with a lot of that spend as well as we saw last year. So a lot of these projects are very similar to the type of things we did last year. I’ll give you a couple examples. So we’re upgrading our control system in City. We’re in the middle of a large multi-year control system, refresh in Shreveport . We have some tank work across the system. We did some of the tank work last year and we’re really able to kind of improve the integration between our plants and network from that.

We have a Cotton Valley turnaround, which will come with some reactor improvements and yield upgrades. We have more work to do across our utility systems and utility systems are important. In fact, most of, I mentioned a $100 million a little earlier and as I look back to the largest improvements that came out of last year, it really was an improvement in the reliability of our utility systems. So we’re going to go ahead and continue to push that. Like I kind of said in the scripted remarks, it was really a 3-year plan on both tanks, utilities and controls and so far so good on that whole program. The — another example of a maintenance type of thing that generates returns, although it’s hard to maybe associate a specific number to it would be an upgraded water system in Shreveport.