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

Elijio Serrano: And Tim, our shareholder base is not — does not have a mining background or a large construction background. So I think it’s important to keep reiterating the process and the steps of what we’ve achieved to get there. We want to make a decision with as much data to manage the risk of such projects. And again, just to make sure that everybody is on board, a quick recap is last year, we published a preliminary economic assessment on the bromine project and that was after drilling one test well, and we laid out in our investor presentation the expected economics on bromine by itself. This year, we’ve just now completed the second test well. And from there, we’re going to be able to move from inferred resources, which is the least defined category.

And shortly, we’ll publish measured and indicated volumes of bromine and lithium. And then from there, we can evolve it to move toward the economic assessment on the lithium side once we complete the engineering study. So there’s a series of methodical steps and gates we’re going through to get to a final investment decision, and we’re going to stick to that discipline to make sure that we manage the risk and fully outline everything that’s required to get this done. Now as part of that, we expect that between last year and this year, we will have spent $19 million of cash to do that, some of which we’ve shared with our joint venture partner. But the cash flow number that I talked about earlier are after spending $19 million over the last couple of years, which tells you how strong the base business is performing, setting us up to invest in Arkansas.

Tim Moore: Great. Well, Brady and Elijio, that was very helpful color and the details and the timing of everything. I just had one more question since my desalination question already got asked. One question that I had was just maybe jumping ahead on bromine-related products, that seems like if things go well, that production will probably come on a little bit before lithium. How far in advance would you start having discussions with potential customers to maybe offtake supply tied to those prime leases in bromine? Would that start next summer? Or do you have to wait more until you have things in place?

Brady Murphy: Yes. Tim, I think we’re well ahead of you on your projected timelines for some of this stuff because clearly, Eos, we see as a key offtake provider, and we’re having great discussions with them in terms of meeting their new Z3 ramp-up battery demand. So that’s one for sure. We have another PureFlow customer that we’re in discussions with, that we’ve not announced publicly. So that’s part of this demand requirement for bromine. But on the oil and gas side, we are also having some kind of longer-term offtake discussions as well because we’ve never had our own bromine supply. These are new discussions for us but now that we’ll be completely integrated from the bromine supply all the way to the end products, these are discussions that are pretty meaningful for us with — on the oilfield services side as well.

Tim Moore: That’s terrific. I always like it when companies exceed my own expected timeline [indiscernible]. That’s great to hear. And that’s my questions.

Brady Murphy: Thanks, Tim.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from Stephen Gengaro with Stifel. Please go ahead.

Stephen Gengaro: Thanks. Two follow-ups for me. In the last couple of quarters, and I know there were some circumstances you guided and I was wondering if you had a view of the current consensus, which is around $27 million in EBITDA for the fourth quarter?

Elijio Serrano: Yes. So Brady mentioned earlier that on the water flowback side, we believe that we can stay approximately at the levels that we’re at, assuming that there’s no material pullback at the end of the year that we’ve seen historically, even though the last couple of years, we’re not there. The fourth quarter is really going to depend on timing of some of the big projects that we have anticipated, whether they straddle Q4 and Q1 is to be seen. And it’s hard to predict with some of the big projects that we have out there.