Heath Sampson
Analyst · H.C. Wainwright
Thanks, Greg. I'd like to take a moment to discuss the refined coal environment. Let's turn to Slide 8 and discuss the refined coal backdrop. As we have discussed over the last few quarters, we continue to see tailwinds around the Tinuum's efforts to grow the additional facilities. These tailwinds are the results of IRS tax credit clarification achieved in early 2018 and increasing clarity on certain provisions within the tax bill which has helped tax equity investor to better understand the true impact of tax reform on our businesses. On the other hand, our biggest challenge to obtaining new tax equity investors remains the public and political stigma of being associated with co-fire power generation. All our current tax equity investors, and more pertinent our prospective investors are risk adverse to the stigma and intolerant to any environmental reputation risk. Tinuum works hard to educate prospective investors to this tax incentive with instrumental enabling the development of mercury control technologies and as a whole, refine for truly health reduced harmful emissions. Turning to Slide 9, you can see the number of invested facilities versus the number awaiting for tax equity investors or waiting to be installed as of December 31, 2018. Please note, that this graphic is as of December 31, 2018, and thus does not include our January closure of the 20th RC facility. So as of today, we have 20 invested facilities and 8 uninvested. To maximize this refined coal opportunity and secure additional investors for the remaining units, Tinuum has proactively installed facilities in preparation for investment, and three are currently in the installation phase. During 2018, Tinuum spent roughly $17 million related to capital expenditures, nearly all of which was engineering and the installation costs. Tinuum and it's members, including us, would certainly not be incurring these costs if we were not confident that we would translate these into future RC facilities. We have active ongoing conversations with potential tax equity investors for several facilities. Should we finalize deals on our current discussions, they have the potential to add an additional 8 million to 9 million in annual tons to Tinuum's total in 2019 bringing the full year to approximately 12 million tons. This could increase Tinuum's invested tonnage by more than 10%. Let us turn to Slide 11 for an update of our expected future RC cash flow. As of December 31, 2018 and inclusive of 19 refined coal facilities invested with third-party investors, we now expect net RC cash flows to range between $200 million and $225 million to ADES through the end of 2021. Again, this is not inclusive of our January closure and each additional facility could individually add between $5 million and $7 million of incremental annual cash flows to ADES. This has been our number one priority and are committed to leasing or selling the ideal units is unaffected by our integration of Carbon Solutions. It is critical that our investors understand that our acquisition is truly additive to our core refined coal business. Also remember the refined coal is run by an experienced management team which involves our furnace owners including us for oversight and strategic guidance. This structure will allow us to continue to execute in refined coal while devoting the researches necessary to win with Carbon Solutions. Now let's move on to Slide 12 and briefly review this acquisition. The integration of Carbon Solutions will now form our Power Generation and Industrial segment or PGI, as we may refer to this going forward. This segment was previously much smaller and was referred to as emissions control. This segment will now comprise of significant component of consumable sales including the newly acquired activated carbon business, selling to power generation and industrials, as well as our legacy technology such as [indiscernible]. The addition of Carbon Solutions makes us the market leader in North American mercury control market which is supported by long-term highly recurring contracts. To win in the North American mercury controlled markets, company's need an activated carbon plant that is also supported by both, front-end and back-end technologies. We are now the only company that has this full suite of solutions. Further, this is truly unique and strategic set of assets. We've spent $75 million to acquire a vertically integrated business with $400 million state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. The collection of assets in low cost operating status makes it a truly unique platform. This is an asymmetric opportunity that we believe has limited downside but significant upside and we feel very comfortable in our ability to win, either on price for commodity products or on superior technology and service for premium products. The highly recurring nature of these requirements based contract also provides revenue visibility and customer retention. We have already had success in the brief period of our combined company of renewing 10 existing contracts and signed 9 new contracts with valued customers, all with varying durations and volume expectations. As we have been discussing for the last few years, we believe this industry has been transitioning due to the supply and demand imbalances and has added strategic inflection point. We've been a part of this industry for many years now and we believe that we have executed this acquisition at the opportune time as price increases have stuck and significant capacity have been taken out of the market. Fourth, we view this platform as growth oriented. Last year the plant ran at modest utilization levels and as we drive utilization closer to the industry average of 85%, we expect our already pronounced cost advantage to compound even further. We'll work through an incremental share and ready just for markets, while evaluating adjacent growing channels such as municipal order and the broader commercial and consumer market, as well as geographic expansion in other adjacent industries in the future. Fifth and finally, this unique strategic fit that Carbon Solution brings, we are excited to reunite and believe that we were the natural buyer for this asset. In our first few months as the rejoined company, employee feedback has been terrific. Our new ownership rightsize the asset value to the current market and brings new growth opportunities to all the associates at Carbon Solutions. The sharing of industry knowledge and pairing off are now complete emissions controlled treatment offering has been well received by our customers as well. In fact, we have begun to recognize opportunities to expand our potential product offerings with our respective customer bases which has facilitated better organic expansion of our customer base. Integration of people, employees, customers and vendors requires focused effort and discipline which many companies take for granted and underestimate the level of sustained attention needed; we haven't and it is paying off. Another unique opportunity that only we as the buyer possess is that we will be able to better transition our utility partners refined coal volumes when the Section 45 tax credit expires at the end of 2021. As these refined coal units are taken out of service, their coal-fired sponsors will need products to control mercury. There are approximately 75 refined coal installations across the country generating 170 million tons of refined coal per year. Many RC users will need a solution to comply with mercury regulations and through our ownership in Tinuum and Carbon Solutions, as well as our existing product suite, we will be well positioned to capture incremental mercury control demand as these units retire. We believe that the market opportunity related to these utilities is approximately $35 million to $45 million annually. This incremental volume will go to the bottom-line given our significant contribution margins. In other words, this market will grow when refined coal units lose their tax credit eligibility, and there is nobody better positioned to capture this incremental volume than us. Let's move to Slide 13 and quickly review our strategy. This slide shows our roadmap for the new ADES and how we plan to leverage our new assets to become a North American leader in activated carbon within multiple diversified industry, both today and tomorrow. We already try to be positioned for profitable growth due to solidification of our new leading position in the segment. The mercury controlled market in North America is competitive and has undergone significant changes over the past few years as coal burned has shifted to natural gas. As a result, many coal-fired power generators have dramatically reduced headcount and are continuously looking for cost savings. They simply do not have the bandwidth or resources anymore. They are now looking for fewer strategic vendors that can provide more for less. We are best positioned to be the supplier of choice for this changing power market. Gaining incremental share with the North American mercury control by driving performance either by pricing power or premium service or products is priority one. Next, we are also in position today to achieve further penetration into the municipal water treatment market. This market is £100 million demand environment in the U.S. and is growing, providing the [indiscernible] addressable adjacent market to grow within. It is also a highly fragmented base comprised of many producers and resellers. The initial opportunity this market will not require any incremental plant investments to expand our purpose. To better position ourselves in this space we have focused a limited number of existing employees here and believe this will lead to positive longer term results. Longer term we aim to grow our share in the industry that commands premium products and thus premium price points. We see a bigger opportunity in the broader consumer and commercial water market estimated to be £310 million per year. As everyone has seen over the years in the press, clean water is in increasingly demand both here and across the globe; this market combines higher margins by approximately 20% to 25% compared to mercury control and has higher growth rates. However, entering this market would take additional upgrades to the existing facility while feedstock and will require additional capital investments. In addition to position ourselves as the leader in North American mercury capture and activated carbon, and pursuing adjacent market opportunities such as water, we also evaluate international markets as mercury control regulations outside of U.S. mature, as well as adjacent markets like food and beverage, other consumer products and various others. The broader water market and other more specialized adjacent market opportunities have higher growth rates and higher margins; nothing less, these are initiatives of tomorrow. We have focused immediately on organic growth within the mercury removal and municipal water space. Moving on to Slide 14, let's recap our return of capital plan. Since the start of the capital allocation program in the second quarter of 2017, the company has paid $35.9 million in dividends and utilized capital of $41.7 million to repurchase shares. We paid our fourth quarter dividend on December 6 and our 2019 first quarter dividend on March 6 to shareholders of record as of February 19. These initiatives remain a key focus of ours and we believe we generate sufficient cash flows to both, on our capital return commitments and investment to business. Finally, let's introduce our 2019 priorities for Slide 15. Unchanged from prior years is our ongoing commitment to leasing additional RC facilities and supporting Tinuum efforts to secure tax equity investors. Maximizing RC cash flows will continue to be our first focus. Our second strategic goal will be the integration of our newly acquired assets, people and operations, to immediately capture share in the North American mercury control PAC space. We will simultaneously evaluate a pursue adjacent attractive opportunities in higher growth verticals like water. We see compelling opportunities to increase utilization rates within our recently acquired assets and generate high margin revenue. And finally, we will continue to return capital to our shareholders through our continued commitment to our quarterly dividend program, as well as the opportunistic repurchasing of outstanding shares. I'm incredibly excited to build on the momentum we accumulated during the second half of 2018. We continue to believe we are truly entering a new phase of our commitment to driving shareholder value. So with that, we will take some questions.