Darling Ingredients Inc. (NYSE:DAR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Derrick Whitfield: Perfect. That’s great color. And perhaps for Randy or Sandy with my follow-up, maybe if you could elaborate on the market opportunity in your prepared comments on SAF. I know you’ve referenced $0.75 as a breakeven in the past, which is clearly covered by the SAF BTC. However, I suspect the market will bear a greater premium, and there’s probably some optimization you could pursue at DGD 3 as well.

Randall Stuewe: Yes. And Sandy and I’ll tag team this, and she can give you — I’ll give you the view from my chair. Number one, there’s a lot of promises being made out there on SAF by a lot of people. And there’s no gallons. So these will be the, what I’m going to call, the first real gallons made to a system that’s going to have to decarbonize and move forward. It also gives us tremendous optionality. And the optionality piece is while the industry and the analyst industry wants to sit there and tell us all this capacity that’s being added out there in the RD world, we’re going to move the next step. We’ve always been the first mover there, and we’ll control that optionality. The margin, Sandy can comment on. But long term, what we’ve learned here is that we’ll have the flexibility to arbitrage between the products.

And I suspect over time, we’ll make that decision to add another SAF unit as the world moves forward. The beauty with Port Arthur is that it can make the product, it can ship the product to California under the proposed intrastate rules that are being promulgated, it can export the product. So Sandy, what else you want to add on? What gets you excited about SAF?

Sandra Dudley: I think that SAF for us, as you mentioned, it just helps us diversify our book. So not only are we able to offer new products, but we’re also able to participate in different markets than we participated in before. And as you said, that gives us optionality. I think that there’s a lot of support out there behind SAF, too, that we’re seeing that I think will eventually increase the premiums that are available within that market. I mean, we have the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed. I think that’s very positive for SAF. We just saw that California in their Scoping Plan that they are considering instituting an intrastate jet mandate. And so I think that, that’s a positive thing for us. And then what we’ve seen lately is we’ve seen a number of SAF tax credits.

So Illinois passed one. Washington is considering one. We’re seeing Norway considering increasing their SAF mandates. We’re seeing more states with LCFS-proposed programs such as New York, New Mexico, Vermont and Minnesota. And so I think that there’s just so much going on in that space that’s positive for us.

Randall Stuewe: Yes. And I think just to kind of close off the loop, obviously, until you sell something, you don’t know what the margin is. But we believe that there’s just a ton of momentum out there in that market that gets us really excited. And to be honest, we wouldn’t make the investment if we didn’t believe the margins would be equal to or superior than what we’re doing in the road fuel market today.

Operator: The next question is from Adam Samuelson from Goldman Sachs.

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