Tim Go: And Paul, one last thing. You asked for what our target throughput is we — in our mid-cycle roll-up that we put out there, we put 640,000 barrels a day as our basis. Of course, we think as we continue to implement these strategies that Valerie just talked about, that we hopefully will get to an above mid-cycle kind of condition. But I’d say at this point, we use 640,000 barrels a day is our first target.
Paul Cheng: Tim, you said crude or the total throughput that you are mentioning?
Tim Go: That’s crude.
Paul Cheng: That’s crude. And then under that, what type of unit costs we will be talking?
Tim Go: What kind of unit costs are we talking about? So we’ll — I’ll let Val, say, something on that.
Paul Cheng: Not same on the natural gas price is somewhere in the 300 to 350. So if you can give us some idea that on the two regions, what is the — say, what is your core unit cost once that you complete this with liability improvement?
Valerie Pompa : Yes. Yes. As we improve reliability, our costs will continue to come down a large component of any operating organization as large as ours is tied to how well you execute and how reliable your facilities are. So as we directionally improve there, our cost will continue to decrease. Our estimation is directionally, it will be down, and we’re thinking somewhere between 600 and 650 over time.
Tim Go : You’re starting to — yes, Paul, you’re starting to see some of the benefits of some of the integration work and some of the reliability work already that we’re doing operating costs this quarter are down which is encouragement, but obviously, we have more work to do.
Paul Cheng: All right. Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Ryan Todd at Piper Sandler.
Ryan Todd : Great. I was wondering if you could provide a little more color in terms of where you are in normalizing R&D operations. I mean, sequentially improved, but can you walk us through kind of the pathway where you think you are in terms of throughput utilization and kind of normalizing that up to a full run rate?
Atanas Atanasov: Yes. Good morning. This is Atanas. With respect to utilization and where we are, our goal has not changed. What we have indicated is that we’re looking to achieve what we’d call normalized run rates, which is between 75% and 80% by the end of this year. As you can recall, we had the turnarounds of two of our colocated facilities, which impacted utilization rates. But on the flip side, it also gave us an opportunity to look under the hood, so to speak, and make improvements to our equipment, one of the — some of the positive things that you’re already seeing is the decreasing OpEx per gallon, which declined 29% quarter-over-quarter. Another thing is the improvements that we’ve made to Catalyst. So our focus has been process optimization as well as yield improvement and Cheyenne has been a great example of that. So at the end of the day, again, our goal has not changed. And we’ve been committed.
Tim Go: Yes, maybe I’ll just add on to that. I think we are excited about what we’re seeing in the underlying capability of this business. As Atanas mentioned, we did show both yield improvement and reduced costs. We also ran well at Cheyenne with 99% yield and 89% utilization, which we believe is a good sign in our ability to drive productive levels and choose to run the economic barrels that we see fit. So excited about where we are and look for normalized towards the end of the year.
Ryan Todd : Great. Perfect. And then maybe any update just in terms of what you’re seeing in the lubes business and the backdrop there, both from a — as we head in as we’re far way through the third quarter here in terms of what you’re seeing on kind of the rack back and rack forward dynamics there, as well as maybe your continued thought process on in terms of the kind of the long-term suitability of that business within the portfolio?
Atanas Atanasov: Sure. This is Atanas. Just at the high level with respect to the performance of the business, what we’re seeing is continuously strong performance. We have — volumes have softened up a little bit primarily on recessionary fears around our specialties market, but on the flip side, one of the positives is our ability to hold up margins and continue to improve product mix, hence, the strong performance of the business — and on an ex FIFO basis, where we are year-to-date compared to last year, we’re actually $12 million better on an apples-to-apples basis. And so our goal is to continue to shift more of those base volumes — base oils volumes into finished and specialty. And I want to remind you again that at the end of the day, we don’t look at our businesses right back and right forward. We look at it on a holistic basis and I’ll turn it over to Matt Joyce to provide some more color.
