Good morning, and welcome to the Green Plains Inc., and Green Plains Partners Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Following the company's prepared remarks, instructions will be provided for Q&A. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Executive Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Boggs, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Green Plains Inc., and Green Plains Partners fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. Participants on today's call are Todd Becker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jim Stark, Chief Financial Officer; and Leslie Van Der Meulen, EVP of Product Marketing and Innovation. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find it on the Investor page under the Events and Presentations link on both corporate websites. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today's press releases and the comments made during this conference call and in the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Todd Becker.

Thanks Phil, and good morning, everyone. We have a lot to talk about, so let's get started. The fourth quarter margins were improved off the lows we experienced during the prior quarter, but we are still faced with some challenging headwinds due to weakness in ethanol margins in the quarter, which happened very quickly over a few days. This industry has such great potential and we continue to have a small imbalance in production versus demand that weighs heavily on margins. In addition, the pricing structure, in our opinion, remains broken where very little margin there -- excuse me -- very little volume in the market each day on the close prices a million barrels a day of production. This pricing mechanism needs to be addressed in the future. In the Western Corn Belt, the basis remains stubbornly high for this time of year, about $0.45 per bushel higher than the prior five-year average and $0.30 higher than the prior year. A severe cold snap in December caused outages across our platform, and when combined with rail embargoes, which hit Green Plains unusually hard, we had inventory backed up at some of our locations leading to plant slowdowns and some plants going offline for a period of time. We estimate the storm cost our platform around $0.02 per gallon for the quarter alone, just over those few weeks. In addition, we made an economic decision to temporarily idle 10% of our production capacity based on current market conditions and continue to evaluate the right time to bring capacity back online. Despite these challenges, we ran at 93% utilization rate across our platform as we benefited from pulling our seasonal maintenance into the third quarter and continue to see increasing production rates at locations we invested technology into over the last…

Thank you, Todd and good morning everyone. Green Plains consolidated revenues for the fourth quarter were $914 million, $112 million higher than the same period a year ago, driven by higher run rates. Our plant utilization rate improved year-over-year to a 93.4% run rate during the fourth quarter, comparing favorably to the 83% run rate reported in the same period last year. As Todd mentioned, we are monitoring the economic environment closely for when to restart the 10% of viable capacity we have, which is having a minor impact on our utilization rate in the near term. For the quarter, we reported net loss attributable to Green Plains of $38.6 million or $0.66 per diluted share compared to loss of $9.6 million or $0.18 per diluted share for the same period in 2021. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $5.8 million compared to $32 million for the same period last year. Higher corn bases in the Western Corn Belt and weak ethanol demand contributed to the lower margin for Q4, 2022 compared to last year. We realized the $0.03 per gallon consolidated crush for Q4, 2022, which is $0.17 a gallon lower than last year due to the factors described above. On a sequential quarter-to-quarter basis, we saw the consolidated crush margin per gallon improved $0.12 when compared to the third quarter of 2022. Our Ag and Energy segment turned in a better performance versus 2021, recording a $9.6 million increase in EBITDA to $11.8 million for the fourth quarter. This increase was driven by market volatility in our merchant trading and distribution businesses in our fuel racks and natural gas storage. For the fourth quarter, our SG&A costs for all segments was $28.9 million compared to $18.2 million for Q4 2021. This increase was driven by higher personnel costs…

Thanks Jim. From a commercial standpoint, we've been pointing to 2023 for a while now, as we now have significant quantities of volume from our expanded MSC platform. Our team has been working with numerous customers for some time now and the impact is showing up in our sales efforts. For the year, we have contracted and sold nearly half of our anticipated production and when combined with what we believe will be repeat customers since we are in the ration and they expect us to keep volume available, we have approximately 250,000 tons or 75% of our capacity spoken for all intents and purposes. The engagement from our customers across species have been impressive and we appreciate each one as we know putting a new ingredient in, in mass is something that has never really happened in the span of my 35-year career. A new plant-based high protein product in volume besides the traditional corn gluten meal, or high pro soybean meal or fish meal, has never really been available. In addition, when we embarked on this journey, we initially focused on the crude protein differences between our legacy distillers’ grains and these protein centric products. This helped to underpin both the nature of our transformation and the view that we needed to become part of feeding the world. We always knew that once we solidified ourselves with our new customer base by providing unmatched production volumes and redundancy to focus would shift to nutritional value and the impact on our customer's bottom line. As we are successfully completing sales cycles initiated early to mid-2021, we are starting to see the customer's acknowledgement of the nutritional benefits that our fermented ingredients have to offer over certain other plant-based and solvent extracted ingredients. This embraced by our customers is also…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Craig Irwin from Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. So, Todd, talking to some of the other players out there, the private guys, it sounds like there's something really funky going on again with asset values that they're particularly strong. We haven't seen something like this in almost 10 years. Can you maybe share with us what you're seeing point to data points that we can see publicly? And I kind of have an intuition and this might be related to operators confidence in SAF and the demand for those plants to serve the opportunity for the IRA and what President Biden's laid out. Can you maybe just unpack that for us and talk about whether or not this could put us into a capacity deficit for fuel ethanol in the future?

Yeah. Thanks. Great question. What we're seeing out there, at least at the scale plants, the big plants that we -- that are have been built over a 100 million gallons is strong interest that we've seen on processes that are happening in the market today. We're hearing that some people aren't even making the second rounds of some of these asset sales because they're bidding what were traditional values that we were able to buy in the past, and they're not making it to the second round. So, we're hearing very strong values almost towards original replacement values. Even though today, it would cost a lot more to rebuild a platform like ours. So that's very enthusiastic for us. When we look at our asset values today, obviously you're going to have to watch whether you're subscale or not, but when we look at that today, our view is that the people that are showing up in some of these data rooms from what we understand are really taking the view of sustainable aviation fuel and decarbonization and looking at the IRA and thinking to themselves the optionality that's available in this industry has never been stronger based on all of the different aspects that this industry is heading down. Whether what we are doing on protein, oils and sugars, whether what others are doing around other technologies that they're deploying, whether we're going to do combined heat and power systems on co-generation to reduce our -- not only our carbon, but our energy costs all the way through this sustainable aviation fuel initiative, the optionality in getting a hold of these systems seems to be something that many new players and many other entrants are looking at the U.S. ethanol industry that traditionally they may have looked past it. So yeah, we certainly have headwinds in our traditional fuel economics and we've had them. How are we make a little more than we need every single day, but I think that's going to -- as we see every year, we sat last year at this time, literally on this call, not knowing what Q2 was going to look like and thinking to ourselves, it's going to just going to continue. And all of a sudden we saw a very, very strong change in the margin structure. Hard to predict that will happen or not this year, but we do know that the ethanol margin moves very quickly.

Excellent. Thank you. My second question is about protein pricing. So, it seems like every few months, there's some controversy that whips around people speculating about your pricing for the MSC product. You were pretty clear in your commentary, but I was hoping you might be able to kind of put some boundaries around pricing. In the past you pointed to soy meal versus soy concentrate things to consider. Are we looking at potential pricing closer to that of soy concentrate, particularly as we look at the 58% product that you'll be selling into aquaculture. How should we really think about pricing today? And how this rolls out this year?

Yeah. We hear a lot of rumors around our pricing, which is always very interesting. But obviously there's lots of things that go into consideration of whether it's geographics, freight spreads, where we're relative -- where we're at relative to production. What we wanted to make sure is the -- our investor shareholders understood first and foremost, what we laid out originally with that what we believed was a initial $200 value over our traditional products we are achieving and actually exceeding on average over the whole platform. Yes, certainly there's times when Nebraska distillers' grains rally very, very hard against protein, but maybe Indiana isn't. So, depending on where you have locations, some of your plants, you have higher and lower margin structures depending on the time of the year. But overall, what we -- and what -- and we wouldn't say it unless it was true by the way. So -- but overall, we've achieved greater than the $200 a ton on average across since inception, by the way. And we can go all the way back, but since inception. On top of that, what we've seen is the contribution from corn oil, which we put into our margin structure on this part of the house that has been strong because of values have gone up significantly since the start of the project as well. So, look, overall, we are bringing systems up still. We had two -- we had -- or we had record days of production this week again, across our platform, and we're still not at full rate. And so, we're very excited about it, but it does tell us that the production that we've outlined across these five facilities are on track. Our sales program is on track. We are having great conversations with…

Great. Well, congratulations on the progress with MSC. And we look forward to more news from SAF. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Jordan Levy from Truist Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Morning Todd, Jim.

Morning.

Maybe we could just start off on CST. I wanted to get a sense for how you are all approaching the commercial process there as you get ready later this year to bring that first facility online. Is there learnings to be had from the work you've done building up the protein sales side of things, and how should we think about that, whether it's a co-location or sort of an off take arrangement?

Yeah. I think first and foremost, our learnings from protein will absolutely apply into our CST business. How we ramped up our sales process, our quality control process, the things that we did, how we brought plants online. We -- traditionally, it was pretty simple. You build an ethanol planet, it runs, now you have adding component technologies that you've seen in your visits as well. These are not part of the plant. These are actually separate and distinct functional assets. And so, we just -- we got great education on how to do this correctly as we think about our CST. Most of this first plant will ship to customers around the United States. We won't have a co-location set up there for several years, but we are working with partners on that as well. But we're basically looking for -- we've had a lot of discussions. We've had product in customer's hands. We are making product in York, we're first focusing on 95 DE which is a familiar term in wet milling. We're focused on refined and unrefined, which is unique. We are also in the process of increasing our capabilities to 43 DE, dextrose equivalent and making sure that our color matches what comes out of a traditional wet mill, which is why we're attracting wet millers to our company right now who would've never worked in the ethanol industry before, by the way. They all -- they looked at this and they -- it was child's play to make ethanol for these guys. When you look at what happens at a wet mill, it's much more complicated. So, when we look at not only the talent we're attracting, but the customers that are calling, we've had customers call across the United States that have basically been rationed and they're short supply and they need more dextrose. And you saw an announcement out of the one of the big four that they're going to expand some of their dextrose capacity. But in general, we believe that we're going to be the next big player and it's just a matter of time now. Yeah, we got to get the first ones started. We got to get make sure we debottleneck it. But we are anticipating, and we are thinking about really this is the game changing technology for Green Plains that could truly revolutionize our long-term margin structure above all else, above protein, above oil, even above carbon long-term. We believe that this product is -- the margin structure is just so robust and it has been for many, many years in this -- in the wet million industry. So, we're on track., We like what the position we're in. If I could go faster and wave my magic wand, I would. But today we just have to be a bit patient on this. But absolutely what we learned in protein is critical to starting up our CST systems and executing even better in the future.

No, that's great color. Maybe just on a follow up. I don't know how much you can say here. But maybe from a more general level, I'm just curious how you're thinking about how the industry might go about pricing or structuring ethanol in an ethanol to jet situation, given it's -- it'll be kind of a low carbon feed stock situation. I'm just curious if you have any thoughts there.

We can move quickly from access to a deficit as ATJ progresses. Obviously not today, but in the future. And so that really, I think, gives the industry back some pricing power. Now, first and foremost, you have to have decarbonized alcohol. You have to meet the standards that are set in the IRA. We're still focusing on the measurement of that carbon. When you start in your carbon scoring under GRE [ph], which is somewhere between kind of 50 and 60 from most of the industry, you drop 30 off as soon as you sequester the carbon, whether it's going to be direct and jacked on a pipeline or other areas. And then from there, another five to 10 points just on combined heat and power alone, before you even start to think about the aspects of what happens on the farm and even the seed that you plant. So, when we look at that, our low carbon alcohol relative to everything else should be higher in value than fuel. But I think it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I mean, today we're $0.50 under fuel, because we have a little bit of an excess in the market where there are times we're at fuel price as well. So, I think we move structurally from an excess to a deficit, and I believe we'll have some pricing power, but I believe the margins will be big across the whole supply chain. And I know people say, well, who's going to buy it? United Airlines is certainly committed in our joint venture. And remember, this is not just a off take agreement. Those are dime a dozen quite frankly. This is a very important structural partnership that we have with Tallgrass and infrastructure player who moves molecules every day. PNNL who brought forth this, what we believe is a efficient technology and United Airlines, which is saying, we don't just want to buy the fuel, we want to own the process and invest in the technology and have a real stake in the ground on this one. So that's the importance of this -- of this partnership. Just think about what we're hearing ethanol to jet. I mean, those are words uttered out of airlines today that weren't uttered three, four years ago, but it's the only real true volumetric path. Yes, absolutely. RD to jet is going to be very important. Veg oils to jet extremely important and it's going to happen as well. So, combined between veg oils and alcohol, we are going to make real impact, I believe, on sustainable aviation fuel in the future, but also really refine the margin structure of this industry significantly.

That's great. And definitely and really encouraging announcement. Appreciate the color.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Manav Gupta from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Congratulations on the ultra pro update or routine update you were all looking forward to it. My question is, now that this is locked and we can all see the price of what corn oil is doing, can you or Jim talk a little bit about what kind of EBITDA could we be looking in 2023? If you could just walk us through the various components of the EBITDA guidance for the current year.

Yeah. I mean, the EBITDA range we've given you on what we control is still intact. It's really just comes down to what is ethanol going to do this year. And today, obviously, there's some headwinds, so we have to watch that closely. But as we know, and as I said, it moves very, very fast. We've seen margin structure improve a little bit on the curve, but it's just going from low to less low. And so we're going to have to continue to move that margin structure forward. And I think this, we're going to -- there's going to be some discipline and rationalization across the industry. I think the industry is getting a little bit tired of giving their fuel away too cheap and not earning the return that we should be earning on our asset base. And so, it was a pretty tough quarter in Q4 for ethanol and Q1s are always tougher quarter. But like I said, we're optimistic throughout the year that, that we will have times again to potentially earn some real returns against just ethanol. On top of that, with what we're achieving today on protein and the fact that even with this recent reduction in veg oil prices, we still -- we're still going to generate a significant EBITDA from our corn oil program. But even more exciting for corn oil demand this year is look at the sheer volume of the potential -- up renewable diesel production coming online this year. We're not talking like just a small amount. This is their big year where they don't just add a little bit. They potentially double this year in what they've been producing in the past, which means the demand for veg oils into that space doubles as well. And when you put it all into play relative to even with soy crushing to coming online, the real question is we will hit again where the market will crush for oil, even though the oil meal spread has widened out a little bit and people have sold the oil and bought the meal, but we will bring that oil shear back into play, in my opinion, back in 2023, which is very beneficial to our corn oil pricing potentially. So, we're looking forward to it and we're really in that same range of the guidance that we issued earlier. We just have to watch ethanol closely.

I would add onto, Manav, is as you are seeing more and more of these renewable diesel plants want to add sustain aviation fuel technology, the low CI score of the renewable corn oil we make, we'll keep it in a preferred spot for demand as we move forward.

No. thanks. A very quick follow up. As you also hinted, everybody is looking for corn oil. You have corn oil. We have seen [indiscernible] and ADM do some deals. Wouldn't this be a good time to lock up a very good price on corn oil with some of this new facilities that are coming on, which could give you like a hedge against some of the volatility if there is any in the corn oil pricing?

Yeah. I don't think you're going to find somebody doing multi-year off take with a high price today. I think the view is they -- they'll rather remain in the spot market or at least try to lock-in volumes of the low carbon. I think it's a bit of like -- we have been in negotiations and discussions with several parties on a potential partnership. The volume's the easy side. It's really how do we structure the pricing side of this and really what's beneficial for our shareholders. What's been beneficial for our shareholders is our patients to wait and let this industry get built out. And with this industry building out, this will be the year where I start to think locking in the ability to source the low CI waste oils, that's going to be really, really valuable. And we continue to try and unlock that last half pound per bushel of corn oil in the kernel. It's still sitting there, and we believe that at $0.60 and $0.70 a pound, which is $1200 to $1400 a ton, that is very valuable that you could put some serious R&D behind, and I think others are as well, not just Green Plains. You could put some serious research and development behind trying to unlock that last half pound of oil in the kernel because it's still going to be lower carbon than anything else out there other than one other type of waste written residues. So, I think we're in a really great position. Can I control what's going to happen in veg oil pricing globally? No, but I think you see that the U.S. remains an island over global palm and global other vegetable oils. And I think we'll remain that way for the coming years because the demand is just so robust that's coming online for our products.

Thanks guys and thank you again for the update on the protein side. I think the investors really appreciate it. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Kristen Owen from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for the question. Todd, you mentioned this in some of your other responses, but I was wondering if you could just say more about the Tallgrass and United Airlines agreement. And specifically I want to ask about the progression of that partnership, what happens as you develop that catalyst? And just help us understand why this pathway is so different from the other SAF announcements that we've seen.

Yes. That's why it's really exciting actually, is that this was a competitive process with PNNL. This wasn't like Green Plains and Tallgrass showed up and all of a sudden got a technology. There were other parties that you are very aware of their names, which we won't comment on. They were trying to get this technology as well. And it's unique -- and again, I'm not a chemist or a biologist, but I can -- I'll give you the Todd Becker view and then, we can certainly do a teach-in later on, on this technology. But the traditional SAF, alcohol/jet adjust technologies is a four-step process to a five-step process. And it's breaking the carbon chain, the double bond between carbon and carbon. And that's the difference. It's ethanol, ethylene, and then ethylene through the traditional steps of alcohol that you have. What's different about this technology, it's a three-step process and it's a doubled bond between carbon and oxygen, much easier to break. And that's what the catalyst really sets us up for. So, first thing we have to do is we have to optimize the catalyst. We knew we had to do that. When we partnered first with Tallgrass to get control of the technology from with PNNL to develop it, we knew we had to optimize the catalyst. We quickly were approached by airlines and specifically United where we felt we wanted a partner. We knew we could sell the alcohol to jet. We weren't worried about that. We knew there was -- that was easy to do. But the vision of United to say we're committed, we want to help optimize the catalyst. We want to partner with you financially, we want to make sure we get the fuel in either say Denver or --…

No, that's super helpful. And I think we'd all take you up on that key trend. If I could follow up on…

I'll tell Phil that. So.

If I could follow up with a slightly less interesting question, more on the ethanol based business. Just how you're thinking about the export outlook for 2023. How much demand do you see moving to places like Canada and just your ability to serve that market? Thank you.

The Canada's robust. I mean, they continue to really drive down our drive programs around low carbon fuels, and ethanol is a key component of that. We're excited about the volumes that go there every day, but we need the other world. We need the other parts of the world to engage for sure. We're very competitive as a molecule. If you look at our discount to gasoline and [indiscernible] today, we remain at a discount, probably still right now, the cheapest molecule on the planet for octane. Our octane values still remain very, very intact. So, I think it's engagement. As I said, the world needs to continue to open up, and I know it's a broken record and I can't even believe we're still talking about it, but we still need China to open up post-COVID and bring demand back online. And I think that's going to be the real driver that probably puts a bid back into gasoline, but also puts a bid into molecules that can go into fuel tank as well. I think what's also really interesting is not just exports, but when you look at -- and I know these are easy states, Minnesota and Iowa -- blend rates are up to over 12% now and up to -- over 12% is because you can blend E15 pretty much year round in a lot of states at this point. And so, we think that will continue to increase as our value proposition remains. And ultimately this E15 just get one more percent blend on average across the whole industry or the whole gasoline supply in the United States. That pretty much cleans up our excess and really changes the view of where this ethanol industry can go. So, if you kind of look in your crystal ball and you say to yourself, yeah, Canada's really strong. We're still doing business with the rest of the world. We're still exporting some ethanol. We're still exporting some B grade. Those type of things are still happening. But if you kind of take a look at little more percentage blend in the United States, a little more export demand moving to SAF, you can move very quickly on this margin structure. And I think that's what we're all looking forward to.

Lots to sink our teeth into. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from Laurence Alexander Jefferies. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. This is actually Kevin [indiscernible] on for Lawrence. Thank you for taking my question. So, actually most of my questions have been asked, but just to hop back on the SAF JV that you guys announced recently. So just wondering, I don't think you've shared how much you thought maybe this could contribute once it's up and running on a run rate business -- run rate basis to your earnings, but if you could share any thoughts around that, I'd appreciate it. And maybe just an adjacent question, I guess, how you guys think about IRS for the projects and JVs you get involved in. So any color around that would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I mean, when we look at the IRSs all the stuff that we do, whether it's protein, which I think as we indicated, our long-term and short-term now projections, we still remain intact. As we spread -- as we open up more of these MSCs every day, we're achieving the projected rate of returns, will be what we believe is something that we can do because of even where we're selling the first products. On top of that, with corn oil, finally spreading real volumes across these costs -- cost of startups are high. And so, we have to always take that in consideration and it just takes time to scale up. But over the long-term, we absolutely are on track. And our corn oil systems, obviously, they return very well. Our sugar system, when we look at the cost of construction and getting these scenes up and running versus the margin opportunity, if today we are up and running, it would be pretty close to -- almost a one year payback, but we're not up and running. So, we don't really know where that's going to be when we get there. But even in our initial thoughts, the base margin available was in the $0.60 a gallon range just for producing sugar at the traditional value of production and a traditional sales price and cost, we think is less than two times that, so less than a two-year payback on traditional pricing and potentially better than that on current pricing for dextrose. So, when we go -- when we move to that, obviously rate returns are high. And then comes down to alcohol to jet. Alcohol jet is a multi-step process for us on return. First return is the fact that we de decarbonize our alcohol and get opportunities to increase our margins just from that alone, from the IRA, from putting carbon in the ground and monetizing the alcohol all the way through. Then producing the jet at a full scale facility, which at this point, we're still determining what the economic model would be for that and whether we need to really own a ATJ plant or whether our supply agreement will be adequate and we'll just sell the technology or have somebody else build it with our technology. So, there's obviously things we can look at there as well. What expertise do we have in house versus others. But I think the IRRs will be inconsistent with everything else that we've been doing.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Eric Stine from Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions.

Thank you.

Hey, so just on high pro, I know you talked about 50% spoken for you expect repeat buys here as the year progresses. Maybe, first could you just talk about the nature of the contracts, the typical length of the contracts? And then, maybe from a high level, what do you think the right number is in terms of locking that in, just when you think about moving up the J curve and also given pricing dynamics in the margin?

Yeah. That's something we face it -- we face a question daily, right? So, it's not just spoken for by the way, let's just make sure we're clear. It's sold, sold and priced. So, I think that's important for our investors and our shareholders and our stakeholders to understand. In fact, almost sold out for the first half of the year. So, we did want to keep some volume back, because we do have new customers showing up every day. We've had to say our first nos to customers as well, which is good and bad, right? Because we do know that pricing then becomes more interesting. But we've had -- we put a sales plan together before we reach 2023 and where we thought we would sell all of our production. And that's ebbs and flows again depending on who shows up and when they show up. And we're already working on 2024 partnerships to replace corn gluten meal on certain rations around the world today. So, just to let you know, we're already focused on 2024, looking past 2023 at higher protein levels. So, we have to keep some back because the last half of the year is really when our sales team is going to believe we're going to hit in aqua as well, more globally than domestically because we are already shipping volumes into global aqua players and they are in the rations today. So, we're holding some of those volumes back for the last half of the year. We also know that some of these large customers have put us in the ration and expect us to be there when they come back for the rest of the year. So, we understand how we price. And I've indicated to you on that we also understand…

Okay. Thanks Todd.

Thanks. Appreciate it.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Salvator Tiano from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes. Thank you, Todd and Jim. So, my first question is on the [indiscernible], the partnership for CCNs. It's going to be the -- I guess the starting -- the first project is going to be done in less than two years, and you said, 2025, you're starting to have some income here. So, can you start quantifying a little bit what we should expect, because it's very easy, obviously, to do the math of the carbon sequestration with IRA payments and some of your expenses? But this clearly a project where you're putting on capital, but also you're making only fraction of the benefits. So, can you help us size the benefits in 2025 personally? And secondly, given the IRA benefits and how staggering I guess they are for a low CCS projects for ethanol, why not take the path of doing a project by yourself, which could yield $40 million or $50 million in profit per year?

Yeah. We're going to have a wide variety across our platform of different things we could do with carbon. I -- obviously -- don't forget the IRA, the big part of the IRA, the clean fuel production credit is 2025 to 2027. So, we do need that extended. And yes, you could certainly gain a large advantage in the early years, but it still takes time to get direct inject classics wells, and approved. And that's something you have to weigh versus the time you have 2025 to 2027 on greenfield production versus having a partnership with Summit in the ground early and achieving some of those returns early. And so, Summit realizes as well that there's a lot of dollars on the table, and I think they've already -- they understand that the opportunity for the whole universe has become bigger and there's no question in my mind that our opportunity is bigger. But I think where we're really at is, is speed, which is critical. If you look at the pipeline we're on, they're two-thirds done in Iowa. They have poor space done in the -- in North Dakota. They've got storage, that's ahead of everybody else at this point announced. Now, obviously, some people may not announce, but we haven't heard much on right of ways from others. We haven't heard much on poor space for others other than permits are being pulled -- or projects got pulled in Illinois on these big storage spaces. But we like where we're at. I mean, look, in Indiana, we're focused on a direct inject project. In Illinois and in Tennessee we're focused with Tallgrass and Osaka on converting that to syngas and/or methane fuels. In Iowa and Nebraska, we're focused on sequestering our carbon. And yeah, you can look…

I guess, [technical difficulty] my comment was mostly on the IRA credits where there's no need to hurry up and there's no 2025 to 2027 need to be online. I guess that's where I think most of the return will come. Just one…

No, actually if I could just -- there is a -- you want to be in as fast as you can to -- those three years will be very robust. So, you want to go after all of that you can as fast as you can. And if you just go direct inject everywhere, you will not get all your classics wells done. So, you're going to have to kind of make your bets depending on how fast you can be online. And want to go after some of that stuff very, very early in the process, because after 2027 it reverts back to the 45Q and whatever the programs are. Now, we believe, I will tell you this from our discussions, is that the CFPC will get extended, but today the program in place is you want to be as fast as you can, sequestering carbon as early as you can into 2025 to 2027 time area.

Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

We have no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Becker for closing remarks. End of Q&A:

Thanks everybody for being on the call. Little over an hour. I know it went a little long, but it was the end of the year, and we had a lot to update. As you can see, we're making great progress on our four pillars. Protein, we gave you more of a look under the hood than we ever have before. And our confidence grows every single day that we're going to move up the curve in higher values, in higher protein levels. Oil and renewable, low carbon oils, veg oils, opportunity is still there, or the values are still strong, yet a little off from the highs, but with a lot of demand coming on this year. And even more importantly, their transformation from just renewable diesel to sustainable aviation fuels, sugar business, our enthusiasm there, we are on track. We want to be there. The margin is our robust best, best in anything we can do today. And lastly, decarbonization and our opportunities. And you can see the importance of decarbonized alcohol in all of these processes. Exciting about that. Got a deal with the headwinds. We get it. We'll get past it. We have -- we're in a great position financially at this point, and we think we're set up very well to start to achieve our 2024, 2025, 2026 guidance that we laid out with opportunities for upsides. So, thanks for supporting us and we'll talk to you next quarter. Thanks.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.