Stuart Rose: Again, that would be the most we can generate. We don’t want people putting that in their numbers, but that’s what we’re working so hard to get to and if we even get to half of that, that’s all increase in earnings per share. So that’s — we have a big bogey out there, and we’re going to work hard to get us as much of it as we can.
Zafar Rizvi: That’s the reason we are allocating $165 million to it, it’s a major investment and it certainly is the risk, but we believe the return is much better and much higher.
Operator: Our next question comes from Chris Sakai with Singular Research.
Chris Sakai: Just a question on where are you seeing the most demand for ethanol?
Zafar Rizvi: Where we see the most demand in ethanol, you mean the export side?
Chris Sakai : Right.
Zafar Rizvi: I think mostly right now, we have seen the Canada, and we have recently seen the United Kingdom, Netherlands, South Korea, Colombia. So those are the top 5. We have seen some in India also. So certainly, it’s a lot of these countries are importing. So Canada is always on number 1.
Chris Sakai : Okay. Great. How are you guys seeing the price of corn and dried distiller grain and modified distillers grain heading into the next quarter?
Zafar Rizvi: I think the corn is, generally speaking, as you can see, that’s trading about $4. Yesterday, it was $4.49 and today is some increase. So I think that, as I mentioned previously in the South Dakota area, certainly, we have seen some minus bases. And we have seen some bases in overall in Illinois has gone up a little bit. We have seen this in Indianapolis and some other part where it was not as good production as it compared to last year is plus basis. But otherwise, most of the area is the minus basis.
Chris Sakai : And what about the price of natural gas as we head into the winter?
Zafar Rizvi: The natural gas price has considerably dropped as I mentioned that we have seen that is less than $5 for January, February. And we have seen that about for March as low as $2.56 or $2.67. So that will be a major impact, as I mentioned that in my previous prepared remarks that we have seen the drop in natural gas pricing.
Operator: Our next question comes from David Locke with Old Mammoth Investments.
David Locke: First off, I’d really like to thank you guys for taking questions. There are some — some teams out there that seem sort of afraid to take questions from their investors in a public forum. So thanks for your time and your candor in doing this.
Stuart Rose: Thank you. Thank you for asking questions.
David Locke: So my first question is like the industry overall has been beset by a ton of operational problems. the last few months, explosions, fires, et cetera. To what extent has that contributed to the good financial margin environment for the last half year or so and how have you guys managed to sidestep all of that? And relatedly, how old are your plants relative to industry average?
Stuart Rose: We have some of the newest plants in the industry. They’re under , I believe, under 10 years old, some of these older plants just should be shut down, to be honest with you. The fires and all that stuff maybe helped us a little bit. I don’t know if they had commitments where they had to buy. I’m not sure if the situation where they had to buy product on the open market on the spot market. that certainly, if they did, that would help. But I think you have not — and we have a number of plants, some we only own a small part of, but we have many plants, and these are all newer plants. We made — in the beginning, we made a decision to go with the best builder in the best plants. And I don’t know of any I’m not — I don’t know of any operational problems in these plants.
They’re just better built. We service and we — semi-annually we do an extensive service on these things. and they’re just state-of-the-art better plants. That’s all I can say, the Vegan ICM plants. When you see a 100 million-gallon Vegan ICM plant, very seldom do you see anything materially go wrong with those plants. There can always be a tornado or something, but the plants themselves are built terrifically. And we take — in our case, we take extremely good care of those plans.
