Alan S. McKim
Analyst · Wedbush Securities
Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. In Q2, we generated excellent results in our Environmental and Industrial businesses, while our Energy business was impacted by the winter break up in Western Canada, the unfavorable weather conditions in Canada and the repositioning of our solids control assets and surface rental equipment in the U.S., and I'll discuss more in a moment. We view much of the slowdown in energy as seasonality, as well as timing related. Therefore, we are reiterating our full year 2012 guidance. We're confident that we can achieve the full year financial targets we set for ourselves based on expected growth across our business lines and the current conditions we see in the marketplace. Q2 is the weakest operating period for our Oil & Gas Field Services segment. Because it depends on the timing of the spring breakup, the sensitivity to wet weather is heightened due to the mud season that ensues. As we highlighted on our Q1 call, the spring breakup came early this year, about a month earlier than in 2011, due to the warm conclusion to the winter in Western Canada. The breakup, which includes road bans, weight restrictions on the movement of heavy equipment, was also lengthier than normal this year. The remote regions of Western Canada, where we operate, had a tremendous amount of rain and snow melt, which greatly extended the wet season and stalled operations for us and our customers. While travel restrictions are no longer in effect today and the fields around the drill sites out in the prairie regions has since dried out, it heavily curtailed our activity in Q2. The other factor behind the results in our Oil and Gas Field Service segment this quarter is the ongoing shift in the U.S. by major energy companies from dry gas wells to liquid-rich and oil plays. This trend, which we touched on during our Q1 call, continued during the quarter. What that shift means to Clean Harbors is that in addition to winning the business, we have to relocate our equipment from the dry gas sites that we're servicing to these new liquid-rich plays. Unfortunately, that process takes time and money. The solids control assets and surface rental packages that we are repositioning to new drilling locations includes a variety of equipment, such as centrifuges, frac tanks, fluid control, pumps, generators, light towers [ph], well site trailers, et cetera. So much of this is made up of the Peak assets that we acquired in mid-2011. We're aggressively moving ahead with redeploying these packages. And while I don't want to view specific numbers for competitive reasons, about 1/3 of our surface rental packages are in the process of being repositioned. We are fully confident that all of them will be in position to be fully utilized again in the fourth quarter. Let me now turn to our other segments, which generally had strong results, especially our Environmental business, which extended the momentum we saw in 2011. Within our Technical Services segment, utilization at our incinerators surpassed 90% for the quarter, and at these high levels, where we achieved, we are able to maximize our profitability. Our U.S. locations generated 88% utilization. In Canada, our Sarnia incinerator was essentially 100% utilized this quarter. While our overall rate of 90% is down from 92% we reported in Q2 of last year, this is a result of a 17% increase in down days at our incinerators this year compared with 2011. Otherwise, we would have had even greater incineration performance, particularly in the U.S. Our landfills had an equally strong story in Q2. Volumes were up 60% from prior year, as we benefited from activities in the Bakken oil field in the U.S. and Projects. In fact, this quarter was the second-highest quarterly volume in Clean Harbors' history. Our landfill team continues to do an excellent job at capturing significant waste streams from a variety of projects. Our Field Services segment had another solid quarter in Q2, achieving 9% growth, despite having no major emergency response events. This segment continues to grow organically, due to a steady pipeline of routine maintenance and project-related work. Our Industrial Services segment grew roughly 27% from Q2 a year ago. We saw a nice mix of business in this segment. Activity in the Oil Sands region was certainly a significant contributor to the segment's performance. In addition, our broad array of in-plant services remained in high demand this quarter. The other strong driver for our Industrial segment was lodging, particularly our fixed lodging business. We're extremely pleased with the demand we're experiencing for our accommodations. And the investments we've made in lodging, combined with the acquisitions we completed, have positioned us well in the marketplace, as well as helping us to manage the needs of our own workforce. And we continue to see strong bookings for this business going forward. I should point out that this is also the first quarter for our Industrial segment without our International Catalyst business, which we divested at the conclusion of Q1. It was a small business for us, roughly $10 million in annual revenue. Here's a quick snapshot of our key vertical markets in Q2. Chemicals was our largest vertical in the quarter, accounting for 15% of total revenues, as it benefited from a strong bulk in Specialty Services performance as a result of our cross-selling. In addition, the low price of natural gas was favorable to overall production for our customers in the chemical vertical. Oil and gas production was our second largest vertical at 14% of revenue, and grew nearly 40% from a year ago. This was driven by our legacy Transport Downhole and Exploration services, combined with the assets that we acquired from Peak. Refineries and upgraders were our third largest vertical at 13%, and were flat with a year ago, which is quite an accomplishment, given that we had nonreoccurring event revenue of $16 million in Q2 of last year, and again, we sold our International Catalyst business. Oil and gas exploration accounted for 11% of revenue, and was more than 4x larger than a year ago, which reflects the addition of Destiny, along with healthy growth on our legacy Exploration and Directional Drilling business. Other significant contributors in Q2 included General Manufacturing, which had a nice quarter at 8% of revenue, Utilities at 5%, Government at 4% and several others, including Pharmaceutical at 3%. The majority of our verticals performed well in the quarter, with one outlier being our broker business, which declined approximately 11% from a year ago. But we attribute that to the shutdown of our Mercier incinerator, which had a heavy broker customer base. Turning to our outlook. As I mentioned, we're confirming our full year guidance because we are seeing a strong second half of the year. There are positive indicators and underlying trends that support our outlook in each of our 4 segments. Within Environmental, we are entering our strongest operating quarter of the year. We've got a great pipeline of business. We see opportunities for growth and expansion in both Tech and Field Services segments. We're experiencing steady demand within our Industrial segment, including the solid bookings for our Lodging business I mentioned, as well as an array of cross-selling opportunities. Within our Oil and Gas Field Service segment, we're seeing a considerable pickup in activity, and projects that were delayed due to weather have been restarted. Our growth strategy for the past several years has consisted of 6 key elements. First, expanding our service offerings and our geographic coverage; second, cross-selling across our 4 segments; third, pursuing selective acquisitions; fourth, cost pricing and productivity improvement initiatives; fifth is expansion of our throughput capacity through investments in capital and permitting; and lastly, building a healthy backlog of projects. Today, we are well capitalized to continue this approach. We recently raised $800 million in a highly successful bond offering, which also retired some of our existing debt. With more than $500 million now in available cash, we intend to continue to invest internally and pursue acquisitions. We remain on track to hit our full year CapEx target of $180 million, over $100 million of which is allocated for growth investments. In terms of acquisitions, we are currently evaluating potential candidates of various sizes within all 4 of our operating segments. Overall, we expect acquisitions to play an important role in helping us to extend our growth momentum in 2012 and beyond. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jim for the financial review and guidance. Jim?