TETRA Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:TTI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Elijio Serrano: Yes. So Stephen, we tried to highlight in our comments, as deepwater jobs become a bigger and bigger portion of our revenue, we are going to see some quarter-to-quarter fluctuation. As I mentioned, we did 15 deepwater completions in the Gulf of Mexico in our record setting Q2 and nine in Q3. That mean, the rig count hasn’t changed. The amount of activity hasn’t changed. It’s really more of a scheduling issue. And remember, these deepwater jobs are worth 5x to 10x more revenue to TETRA than a non-deepwater job. So they move the needle in terms of the number of jobs that get executed. We did have one job that was very unique that was actually canceled because of the dry hole, which is very rare as you probably know, in a development campaign.

Unfortunately, that well is not going to come back. But that’s a pretty rare example of when a job would get canceled. When we think about the fourth quarter, I would think of it in terms of — right now, I think we’re going to be closer to kind of the Q3 activity levels that we saw in terms of overall deepwater completion activity relative to the record set in Q2. But again, that’s why we feel — you really need to look at TETRA’s business over a longer horizon now because of the timing of these deepwater jobs. That is starting to include Brazil. It’s going to start to include more deepwater jobs in the Eastern Hemisphere as well.

Stephen Gengaro: Okay. Great, thanks. And when we think about the water side, I mean, it was impressive that your performance was as good as it was, given what’s going on in the U.S. land with a little bit of a, we think a short-term log activity. But when you think about that business, and it’s hard for us to sort of separate out the impact of what you’re doing now in Argentina, can you give us a sense for sort of how much of that business is U.S. land? And maybe a couple of the — do you think that the outperformance relative to U.S. land activity levels is sustainable?

Elijio Serrano: The Argentina business is in the mid-$20 million a year revenue range with three early production facilities. Q4 is clearly going to be different because we’re selling, it’s a one-off opportunity, the early production facility. And the operating fee on a monthly basis to continue to operate the facility will decline. But the vast majority of our business is U.S. shale plays, highly concentrated in the Permian Basin, where we think we’ve got a strong presence and with the SandStorm Technology and the water chemistry that we’re using on the water side. We think those have represented competitive advantages and that we have been able to gain market share without deteriorating pricing is evident from the margin improvement that we’ve seen.

Stephen Gengaro: Got it. Thanks. And if you don’t mind one more for me. When we think about the strength in your Fluids business, obviously, we talked about the deepwater side. And when you think about raw material supply demand, usage of bromine, the potential ramp in PureFlow in 2024 and then sort of the development of the bromine opportunities, how should we triangulate all that around your supply, your margins and maybe the CapEx needs you may have in ’24?

Brady Murphy: Yes, so Stephen, as you know, we have a long-term supply agreement with one of the producers in Arkansas. But our demand well exceeds that contract, we have been fortunate to get spot bromine prices that have been fairly attractive this year relative to prior year. Some of that is just driven by the kind of the global bromine market, which because of China’s economy being down, et cetera, those prices have come down and there’s more material available. But we expect that to be a fairly short-lived window for us to be able to acquire the volumes at the pricing that we need for bromine, which again is another reason why by 2026, we really want to have our own supply coming online to keep pace with our oil and gas business as well as the projections from Eos.

Stephen Gengaro: Got it, great. Thank you for the color.

Brady Murphy: Sure, thanks Stephen.

Operator: And our next question will come from Tim Moore with EF Hutton. Please go ahead.