Barry Haimes: Yes. So following up, what would be the timing of the new train coming on?
Westy Ballard: Yes. The time is going to be predicated upon, kind of the earlier question that I talked about with Marty Malloy, and that’s really just the cadence of contracts. As you think about really 2 big drivers for this company, the aerospace industry as well as the marine industry, those are kind of nascent blue sky markets and sectors. And so they’re in their infant stages of growing. So understandably, those sales cycles take a little bit longer to build out within a new market. And so we’ve had several success along the marine front and space front, frankly, with the work we’ve done in Florida as well as California, and now the Gulf of Mexico. We think that pace of play in marine picks up, we think the pace of play space picks up.
Trying to put definitions around that, if that’s in the next 2 months or 6 months or 9 months, it’s hard to say. But if you just look at the — in marine, the total number of ships, that’s 500 ships now. 3 years ago, it’s 200 ships. And 5 years ago, it was 31 ships. And so we think that just the inertia in play now is going to inure to our benefit. But it’s hard to put an actual time line on that, but we’re aggressively and pedaling rapidly in 2024 with a lot of discussions around those topics.
Barry Haimes: Right. And then so once you have contract coverage and you make the decision to go forward, how long would it take to build and finish up that train, just how many months are we talking about roughly?
Westy Ballard: Yes. Once we have the contracts on and we disclose that, it’s anywhere between 12 to 8 months. It just depends on the critical components. For that first train, it would probably take us about 14, 15 months from the time you say go. If we are starting and had to order new components, it might take 18 to 24 months. But the beauty of it is, unlike the world scale, this can be a very quick shot in the arm. Also, I think another way to think about this is we’ve got a critical vendor that’s also a large shareholder of our company, and that’s Chart Industries. They’re a logical provider of a lot of our CapEx. And so I think we would like to get and think that we’ve got some favorite nation relationships there as well over anybody else. And so it could be, as I mentioned, 15, 16, 18, 24 months. It all depends on the scale and location.
Barry Haimes: Great. That’s helpful. And then just 1 or 2 others on different topics. You talked about the movement to contract from spot. Can you give us a rough feel for what that real was contract to spot ’23 versus ’22? And then if you have any sense for this year?
Westy Ballard: Sure. So I think that when you think about our assets, 2022 was predominantly, if not holistically, spot. 2023, the vast majority of that was spot or short term, think 6 months or shorter type contracts. I think as we go into 2024 and into 2025, think kind of 18-month 4-year type contracts.
Barry Haimes: And that would be for like what percent of your volumes in 2024, do you think, would be under a contract like that versus continued spot business?
Westy Ballard: Yes. So the variability is around our assets versus third party. Third party is a variable. But I’ll just speak with our own balance sheet assets and our own plants, I would say that our goal is to have 100% of our assets under some sort of term ratable contracts, whether that’s 1- to 4-year type contracts. Versus, in 2022, 100% of that rent was all spot. And the vast majority of it in 2023 was all spot. So what we’re doing is we’re pivoting from a spot inconsistent, unpredictable market and we’re pivoting to consistent better visibility, better backlog and better planning. Better planning because we got better visibility and sidelines on cash flow and also better margins.
Barry Haimes: Great. And then on volumes this year, how much production volume, how many gallons do you think you missed out on, because of the issues at George West? But theoretically, you’d get those volumes back this year.
Andy Puhala: Yes. Barry, we — publicly, we’ve discussed it in terms of EBITDA, and we think that the EBITDA impact of that was about $3.2 million, which crossed both Q2 and Q3. So that’s how we’re kind of thinking about it.
Barry Haimes: Got it. And then last question. Are there — is there anything happening on the export license that you guys got? Just a little update on whether that’s kind of sitting on the shelf or whether there’s some plans to utilize that.
Westy Ballard: There are absolutely plans to utilize that. And the good news is it’s a 28-year license. The bad news is there is some short-term deliverables that we need to be thoughtful around. I also think it’s hard to contemplate the export right now just given where natural gas prices are in Europe and Asia. But we don’t think that’s a long-term systemic, and we think that this is a very exciting tool for us to use, in quick fashion, should those markets turn quickly. And so we are constantly in discussions with offtake internationally that can flip the switch pretty quickly. But it’s a really interesting tool, and we intend to leverage and utilize that not only for demand and power generation and the like, industrially in Europe. But also, we think that there are opportunities for us to put that on vessels and utilizing U.S. gas, exploiting that to European markets and bunkering ships there as well. So it’s got a lot of utilization — utility for us.
Operator: Our next question comes from Bill Dezellem with Titan Capital.
Bill Dezellem : In your opening remarks, you referenced the Long Beach marine bunkering project. Would you please talk about the circumstances of that for us?
