Stabilis Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:SLNG) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Westervelt Ballard: I’d say that, from kind of nine months — if you go back even two years, that business has been anywhere from 2% to 10%, to 5%, so it’s anywhere between 2% to 10% of our business on any given year. I know that doesn’t give you an exact, but it’s currently between 2% and 10% of our total revenue. And I think that it stands to reason that we ought to have more than that moving forward as these contracts get more predictable and more sustainable.

Barry Haimes: Okay, great. Second question is a different topic. New Fortress happened to mention yesterday on their call that they were looking to divest an asset in Miami, a liquefier that produces 100,000 gallons a day. Is that something — given the amount of cruise business going in and out of Miami, that would seem like a natural asset for you. Is that something that you’re aware of and have looked at and they fit or not?

Westervelt Ballard: Absolutely. We’re very aware, obviously, of the asset. It’s a similar asset to the other two that we have. And so I’d say it’s safe to say that we’re acutely aware of what’s happening at New Fortress and some of their aspirations, but I’ll say this: We don’t want to buy an asset just for the sake of buying one. We want to make sure that it’s got a core strategic, impactful, scalable implication on behalf of our shareholders and our constituents moving forward. And so yes, we’re aware of it. Yes, we think openly about a variety of things, but they’ve got to be strategic and they’ve got to be meaningful for us to, I think, act upon.

Barry Haimes: Got it. And then my last question, if I could throw in one last one: the feed gas issue at George West. Could you talk a little bit more about what the issue was, what the fix is? And is this something that could reoccur from time to time? Or was the fix sufficient that you put the issue behind you? Thanks.

Westervelt Ballard: Yes. So good question. I’d say on macro, when you’re looking at just natural gas in general, it contains a lot of different elements, obviously, whether it’s nitrogen or heavy hydrocarbons, other pollutants, acid. There’s a variety of things that make up the composition of natural gas. And so when you build these liquefaction plants, you have pretreatment capabilities. And you try and weigh the probabilities of certain molecules that are entering the system, but at the end of the day, when you’ve got a lot of different molecules and carbon atoms entering your system, they all have different freezing points. And some of these are at parts per million that are very, very hard to pick up on some sort of monitoring system.

And so what you want to do is you — and what we did is we took a step back and said, “What is a more comprehensive technology that we can put into our facility that puts its arm around a wide array of possible pollutants and other matter that comes into that feedstock?” We think we’ve done that, as evidenced by, if you look at kind of historical utilization, which I didn’t — we don’t disclose, but we’re running at a very high utilization rate right now. Now feeds — feed gas composition changes in Texas and across the U.S. And so it doesn’t mean that this is entirely mitigated, but we think we’ve got world-class technology that we’ve spent some money on to enhance that capability, to ensure that we have done everything we can to mitigate this.