Good morning, and welcome to the Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners First Quarter 2023 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 would now like to turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Vice President, Investor Relations. Mr. Boggs. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Green Plains Inc. and Green Plains Partners First Quarter 2023 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 statement. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Todd Becker.

Thanks, Phil, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. Concurrently, with our earnings announcement this morning, we announced an offer to acquire all of the publicly held common units of Green Plains Partners. We believe the proposed transaction will simplify our corporate structure and governance, generate near-term earnings and cash flow accretion, reduced SG&A expense related to the partnership, improve the credit quality of the combined enterprise and align strategic interest between Green Plains Inc. shareholders and the partnership unitholders by regaining full ownership and control of Green Plains total platform, including our terminals. All of this will allow us to be more flexible with our long-term asset and company strategy. This is as much commentary as we can provide on this potential transaction at this time. So let's get the first quarter results out of the way. As indicated, ethanol margins were very weak in the first quarter and began to recover too late for us to take advantage if we look backwards. But since we are looking forward, things have changed significantly from the lows we saw in January as market fundamentals look very interesting for the remainder of the year for all of our products, and we'll get to that later. This was further validated with yesterday's EIA data. Our overall consolidated crush margin was negative $0.07 for the quarter, leading to a negative EBITDA of $27.7 million. Corn basis has continued to be high, particularly in the West. We experienced a basis that was approximately $0.25 a bushel over the prior year and $0.40 over the prior 5-year average. Ultimately, margins needed to adjust to this, and they have started to in the Western Corn Belt for the rest of the year based on the current forward curves and markets. Veg oil…

Thanks, Todd, and good morning to everybody. Green Plains consolidated revenues for the first quarter were $832.9 million. That was $51.5 million higher than the same period a year ago driven by higher run rates, which enabled us to produce more ethanol, high-protein ingredients and renewable corn oil. Our plant utilization rate improved year-over-year to 87.5% during the first quarter as compared favorably to the 83.1% run rate reported in the same period last year. As Todd mentioned, we are working to restart our Wood River plant, which will have a minor impact on the second quarter utilization rate as that plant represents nearly 13% of our stated capacity. For the quarter, we reported a net loss attributable to Green Plains of $70.3 million or a loss of $1.20 per diluted share. That compares to a loss of $61.5 million or a loss of $1.16 per diluted share for the same period in 2022. When we look at the bigger cost variances between the 2 periods, higher corn and natural gas prices, combined with higher railcar lease expense were the main drivers. Higher railcar expense as a result of moving to a compliant DOT-117 fleet of rail tankers, which was common across the industry. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was a negative $27.7 million, which was in line with the prior year. We did experience a $4.5 million increase in depreciation and amortization expense versus a year ago. Our current expectation is that D&A will remain in the range of $23 million to $25 million per quarter for 2023. The increase is mainly due to the addition of MIC technology bills at 5 of our locations. We realized a negative $0.07 per gallon consolidated crush for Q1 of 23%, which was in line with the prior year. On a sequential…

Thanks, Jim. We are making great progress in customer acceptance moving into new species, new parts of the ration and targeting new product replacements. Over the past 6 months or so, we've experienced a 25% increase in annual commitments from our pet space customers and have sold out approximately 75% of our 2023 anticipated production through a combination of contracted and repeatable committed customer sales. And we have included some customers, as we have had some customers start small before becoming much more strategic to us. As we continue to earn repeat business for our ingredients, we are beginning to see improvements in overall pricing, which we always believed would be the case. We believe there's a huge opportunity to move into and substitute corn gluten meal and soy protein concentrate in parts of the ration and anticipate having a portion of our portfolio dedicated to that late in the year as we move into 2024 with a 60% protein project -- product, which will start to show the real earnings power of this technology upgrade and product suite. Our MSC operations continue to work towards expanding our average daily production close to 1,000 tons per day from our first 5 installs as I indicated earlier, which should put us on track to hitting our original MSC volume goals for the entire platform without converting all of our locations, increasing the capital efficiency of our investments. From a financial point of view, as we indicated, our premium achieved was approximately $200 per ton since inception, and that basically held in Q1. In Q2, we have widened that premium out to $217 a ton based on the current book, and we are seeing $230 a ton in Q4 as corn has gone down, while meal and equivalent pricing has remained steady.…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Adam Samuelson from Goldman.

I'm trying to catch -- to get my notes down from the litany of things that you just led through Todd. But I guess, maybe if I was to pick out a few of the newer items there. I think this was the first time we heard you allude to maybe thinking about expanding corn grind capacity. And I was hoping you could just clarify that just in terms of thinking about the size of what that would entail and the incremental just how much that's actually of that starch is actually ethanol versus thinking about clean sugar just new ethanol capacity on its own has not been something that we've needed much in the United States in the last decade really. So I just want to make sure I'm understanding kind of where the capital is going there.

No, I understand. So we have probably 3 plants where we have MSC installed today, where we'd like to get more grind. But if you take a plant like Shenandoah, where we're going to have some of that grind diverted to clean sugar as well as the -- but when we do that, the protein and the oil and the feed stays the same. So you're really just diverting some of that starch from ethanol into sugar, it does free up some of the back half of the plant, which will go unused. And really, the key at that point is while you might make a little more ethanol of you and grind expansions are not very high in CapEx. So while you expand the grind, the most important thing to expanding grind is, as I said, you make a little more ethanol, but you make a lot more protein and oil. And that's really what pays for it. While you're also then increasing potentially down the road, moving that back and forth between making more dextrose as well. With dextrose margins so high, obviously, the more grind we can convert to dextrose, the better at Shenandoah and other plants, but it does free up other capacity to increase as well. So we kind of mentioned that on the last call and have been talking about it for probably 6 months or so. So it shouldn't be anything new. We just haven't -- we're starting to look at really plants like Shenandoah, plants like Gobain and plants like Central City, which are easily expandable, have the corn that they need. And then looking at our other parts of the platform where we have maybe some smaller suboptimal plants that either can look at monetizing those or using those for other ingredients as well. So we're just starting to look at it. But when you look at the paybacks just from protein and oil alone to expand a little grind, it will certainly take care of the rest.

And then in the prepared remarks as well, there was some discussion around the realized premiums that you were getting on your Hy-Pro sales, both in the first quarter and those expanding to -- I believe you said $230 a ton in the fourth quarter. As we think about that level of premium on your fourth quarter volumes, I mean, how should we think about the protein concentration of that sales book? Just trying to think about how much further there is to go as you push towards a corn gluten meal or soy protein concentrate replacement at 16% protein?

That's still based solely on the 50 Pro premium. So when we look at what's happened in the market, with our inputs going down on forward corn. And really, we've seen soybean meal equivalent go down as well, but not quite as much as the input side. So that's widened out the margin on paper, and that doesn't include any uplift from any other products. When we look at -- we made some early small sales of 60 Pro, and we've seen those premiums at another $300 to $400 a ton over what we're selling the products today just for the 50 Pro product. So that's really the juice of the opportunity is that if we can start to make an impact into those products. And we're pricing them right now. We're in valuations with several very large customers right now for 2024 to use our products as a replacement to gluten meal and to soy protein concentrate in their rations. And that will just widen out those margins as we get later in the year. We do have initiatives for this year to sell some 60 Pro, and we're in those discussions as we speak. But none of that is included in that forward guidance.

And if I could just squeeze one more in as you -- maybe just on Summit, as we think about their permitting and getting the rights of way necessary to move forward, how are you currently thinking about the timing of when you could start actually shipping on that and thinking about the contributions from the low car from CI and 45 that might come with that?

I mean they're making great progress. Their numbers are in the high 60s now across their platform from what I understand. They've gone into South Dakota to go and start to increase those numbers as well through certain programs and they have their for space. And I think that's the key and is a project that doesn't have their port space lined up today probably doesn't have much of a chance to get operating in 2025. So it's really going to be a function of can they continue on with their right of ways, get the permitting that any they need later, hopefully, later this year, get in front of the agencies in these states and then from there, start construction and start to move very fast. But I would say, if I had to estimate, hopefully it sometime in 2025, when we start to achieve some of these values. Remember, the 45 is 2025 through 2027. So you want to make sure you get some of that. And our view is the 45 does get extended, it's going to be a battle, but I don't -- I think there's a lot of interested parties, not just the ethanol industry. It's the -- it's everybody from airlines to refiners to everybody in between. So strange bedfellows where we all want the 45 expanded. But we're hoping and we're optimistic that sometime in 2025, some of these projects will be online. And we're working on other projects as well. And when we do our teach-in, we hopefully have some interesting discussions around other carbon intensity reduction projects and partners that we're working with to do that as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Kristen Owen with Oppenheimer.

So can you just give us a sense of the moving parts that you've identified for 2Q between the ethanol crush, Train Wood River being down, some of the maintenance. Just help us understand what the buildup for crush margin can look like in 2Q? And then how we should think about any changes in baseline EBITDA bridge exiting 2023? And if we could start there, that would be great.

Yes. So with Q2, it's a shutdown. The first thing we start with Q2 is that's typically a shutdown quarter for us. So that traditionally impacts Q2 for really the industry as well, and we've seen that in the recent EIA numbers. On paper, if we kind of look at the next 3 quarters, including base crush and everything else we're doing, you have to remember that when we started probably the last call we had, last earnings call, margins were significantly negative out on the forward curve for the whole industry. And they've really moved a lot since then. We believe they still have room to go. When we kind of take a look at, at least on paper today, and let's just call that unhedged on paper, what we're seeing in Q2 is a fully loaded margin of everything kind of in that $0.12 to $0.17 a gallon range just depending on what we -- what part of the quarter we can get some of these shutdowns finished and get Wood River back up and running. In Q3 on paper, fully loaded with the ethanol crush kind of coming back at least is for us $0.15 to $0.20 a gallon on paper today. And in Q4 on paper today, it's $0.22 to $0.25 a gallon with some volatility every day just depending on the movements of the window in Chicago. But right now, it feels like it's tighter. It's nice to have a baseline crush somewhere near positive or more than positive in the last half of the year. And as we exit 2023, we'll have to wait and see what translates. I think the interesting thing about this industry, and again, I may be wrong on this, but these plants are getting older. So while everybody gets…

And then you mentioned the potential for a new fiber product. I'm just wondering, where does that sit within your overall ingredient opportunity? How easy is that to pull off the line? And how should we think about something -- a sales process around something like fiber? How should we think about that process evolving?

I'll talk a little bit about how it evolves, and I'll Leslie kind of come in and talk a little bit about the product overall. So what we've discovered is and around our IP only, we can come up with a clean fiber fraction that we've been able to modify through fermentation and then use our precision separation and add a component to that to make a fraction that is more valuable than, say, a traditional distillers grain, but maybe less valuable than the high proteins, but a lot more volume of it. So we have -- it's part of our patented process, and we are now working with customers domestically and globally on this fraction. It can provide significant uplift in the future as we think about protein. Protein again was never just about making 50 Pro and getting a little bit of oil upgrade. It was all about these other fractions that we're going to go after that a wet mill goes after it today and even other companies go after in other things that they do around brain processing. But I'll talk Leslie will talk a little bit about the product that we have and some of the things that we're working on.

So Kristen, in terms of the development cycle, we really look at this as start as indicating as a holistic product development approach. So as we make improvements to the protein because the protein fraction comes from the original distilling fraction, we are keeping a close eye on what the potential is of the fiber. So it really goes hand in hand, and we are seeing improvements that make the products very interesting for specific markets that would actually be almost companion products to the protein. You asked a question in terms of how we fit this in on the sales force side of things, as we've built out the team and went deep into some of these markets with our Rolodexes of our sales team, this really becomes another product that they can sell to our customers. So we actually expand our opportunity and really build on to the view that we have an animal nutrition platform that really comes off of this precision separation technology.

The next question comes from the line of Manav Gupta with UBS.

I just wanted to talk a little bit more on the policy and macro side. We had all these renewable diesel plants that were supposed to start in 1Q, a number of them faltered. It looks like now they're finally starting to come on. MPC indicated there at 260 million gallons, probably going to 730. And at the same time, now we are finally starting seeing progress on the sustainable aviation fuel side, again, which you will be very integral part of. So help us understand what you're seeing out there in terms of finally picking up from the IRA benefit where you're actually seeing tangible benefits in terms of demand for both corn oil and eventually ethanol picking up as both RD and SAS start to gain momentum.

Well, let's talk about the oil first. As we indicated, we went from a weak market as the U.S. was importing some offshore used cooking oil, of which some of those are still sitting offshore because they are getting rejected because of quality, which helped us as well. But that would cause a bit of a weak tone to the fast market earlier in the year. That's changed significantly. I think our low CI oil becomes more valuable over time as more plants start up because of the value from the programs that are in place to monetize that low CI relative to soybean oil. So soybean oil will always be the most volumetrically available for this industry and the easiest to buy and probably the best logistics. So they will always have their place, and it's the right product to use for some of these processes, but we fit in very well. And as I said, we have seen now moving from soybean oil price to a little bit of a discount to now again a $0.05 to $0.10 a pound premium to soybean oil futures, which is somewhere in that 10% to 15% range above. And that's pretty much not the high that we saw earlier last year, but we're starting to get towards that. And even LCFS coming back, it's going to help us a little bit as well as we've seen those values come back as well. That's helping the value of our oil. So we have our place. More plants that come on is a good thing. Plants that run better is a good thing. I mean that's what's happening as well is that any industrial process as we've seen through MSC as well, anything that starts up just takes longer than you might think. And some of these are plants that come online, take a little bit longer than you might think but once they kind of get through that initial debottlenecking bring on the oil, and that's really good for us. Our role in SAF and ATJ at this point, is still limited because we're really not commercialized in any technology across the industry, although there are some really great technologies out there, including what we're trying to develop as well. So we'll see where that goes. But the first thing is you have to decarbonize your out call we have certainty of that. We're not going to -- what's happening in SAF around vegetable oils and half of feedstocks, that doesn't have a ton of an impact to the alcohol market for us. It does on the veg oil market only. But we're more of a last half of the decade on ATJ and SAF coming out of the ethanol industry.

Perfect. Next is a simple technical question, which sometimes our clients ask us and some would ask you straight away. Sometimes people asking GP would be able to benefit from IRA if the government doesn't change the CIC model from Corsa to the grid. So if you could help us understand that a little better?

Yes. No, we need great. I mean, without a doubt, we're pressing for that. I mean it's harder. I mean you make more money with REIT, but even without REIT, the first 35 point -- 30 points of carbon sequestration gets you to a good place. And then on top of that, another 5 to 10 points on our combined heat power systems, which is cogeneration, which are easily financeable or people would just actually put them on your sites and you get all the CI point and credits for that. So there's a lot to do there, but I think it's -- you can't just look at it, say, Grid versus California grid. It's not quite that easy, while certainly easier with grid coming from the government side, we'd like that. I think the industry would like that as well. But overall, certainly, we're going to benefit from it either way. As soon as you sequester, you're in the game. And then beyond sequestration and beyond the combined heating power, there's another 5 to 20 points to go after in multiple different areas, post-combustion fermentation, or post combustion gases that we can -- and carbon that we can sequester that's worth quite a bit. We've got on-farm programs that are worth quite a bit. I think it's a big, long program, but it's not necessarily we have to have it, but we'd like to have it.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Strelzik from BMO.

I think if I did the math right, that you mentioned on some of the 4 consolidated crush margins, it gets you to like a run rate of $100 million EBITDA in the back half of the year, if I have that right with the contracts to the low end of the medium-term range you've talked about in the past. So #1, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong there. #2, how much of that do you actually have hedged out over those quarters? And is it at those levels or at different levels? And then #3, excuse me, what are the moving pieces left, I guess, to achieving that type of margin?

Well, I think the moving piece is to start out with the last part of your question, is ethanol crush keeps moving around. Having corn and your input is lower. The last part of it, some of it is where the opportunity may exist as well as basis levels in the West towards the end of the year. We've been able to buy some corn. But we think those have an opportunity, especially late in the third quarter with the crop coming on and getting planted early. Finally having crop in the United States, that's going to be helpful. Corn oil prices recovering a little bit. Hopefully, in the last half, that's not included in those numbers, getting to a bit of a 60% protein market not included in those numbers. But we think overall, I continue to remind people, even though we've come off the lows that we saw earlier in the year of the deferred curve and the margin relative to what we should have and what we've seen in the past, it's still not high enough. And I appreciate that people are excited about this movement from the lows to where we're at today. But our belief, and we've seen it, and we saw it last year, and I think we'll see it potentially again this year because I think we have actually a better fundamental backdrop for our fuel than we had last year. I think there's more to go. And I'm sure now that I say that, it's probably going to go straight down, but I don't think it is. I think there's more fundamentally to take out of this market. And I think that's probably where you can achieve some higher values, both in oil, both on base crush. And hopefully, we start to…

And the second question kind of on offtake agreements. It sounds like from a corn oil perspective, 2024 is kind of the right time for you guys in your view, which I think is maybe a little different than you had talked about waiting for a while. So I'm curious why you think that's the right time? Is it just a function of once we get RD, et cetera, all the plants online that will have reached some steady state of value. And so that will be kind of reasonable or is it something else that's going on there?

Look, how we think about offtakes, if somebody wants to own part of our corn oil cash flows and control and have access to all of it, we want to get paid for that. And we're not just going to do that because we can stay in the spot market for quite a while. We believe corn oil will trade at a premium for the higher or the most of any given year to soy oil only because what we know why because the CI value is so much more valuable to buy corn oil and uptake. Nobody is going to -- there isn't many people, if any, that are going to do a 5-year offtake at a fixed price today. That's just not how it works. Now so we get a potential fixed premium. We've had offers on that. Could we get some people that want to take a small amount of our forward curve or forward cash flows and monetize some of that. Sure, that's easy to do, but I think there's better opportunities out there. And I think those opportunities, as you say, will come and the value -- and the true value of our corn oil business, and really, quite frankly, the corn oil business of this industry comes when we get later in this year and those projects turn on, and it's not just the soybean oil play, it's going to be low carbon. And they're going to have to meet low carbon numbers if they want to go into SAF. So we feel like we're in a very valuable place right now, and I don't want to rush too much into it. We've been in a lot of discussions. But at this point, I think we are being patient has paid off. It wouldn't have mattered if corn oil went to 80 or 50, that's not what these offtakes are all about. It's a matter of the premium, it's a matter of the check upfront.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Stine with Craig-Hallum.

It's Aaron Spychalla on for Eric. Maybe first, Todd, you talked a little bit about partnering for MSC with other third parties. Can you just give a little bit more color on the opportunity there? Is there an active pipeline? And just what might capital needs look like there, given paybacks?

Okay. I didn't hear that first part of the question. Can you repeat?

Yes. Just on partnering on MSC with third parties.

Yes, we continue to look at that approach. It's not a cheap capital investment when you look at it. But as we gain more proof points and we gain more -- and the industry understands what our system can do because it's a unique system with a unique product that is very, very consistent in what we produce and has other opportunities that we're working on much different than maybe anything they've ever seen. I think our first proof point on partnerships will be when we turn on our Thereson joint venture and have 170,000 tons -- or I'm sorry, 170 million gallons of a new protein system running equivalent where we'll produce over 100,000 tons of protein. And by that point, the benefit of that joint venture is all the work that we put in to date to gain premiums for our products. And I think when, quite frankly, the market sees that there's some that will want to invest and build their own systems, but a lot of them will just want to potentially partner to access our suite of innovation. And again, as I said, if you've been to Omaha and taken the tours, you see the innovation that's happening around this product, it's just not a protein concentration product. It's well beyond that. There's so many opportunities that we're working with so many customers on enhancing different opportunities to change taste, texture, profiles, nutritional characteristics, those type of things, which we all can do, which increases the value of our products overall. So it's a step-by-step process. We're actually talking to people not just domestically, but globally as well, on partnerships in different markets where maybe they have unique opportunities around things like non-GMO or other opportunities that we can take advantage of as well. So this is the beginning stages of what we believe will be a really exciting rollout of this technology. And again, it's not just protein, it's going to be protein. It's going to be clean fiber. It's going to be taste, texture, nutritional changes, those types of things, things we can do in fermentation that nobody else, we believe, can do in the world. So we're in a very, very good place. But again, it's just a step-by-step process. First thing you do is run your systems well. We got to run Gen 1 well, which is continual -- sometimes a continual challenge on these older plants, but we'll continue to focus on that. And then from there, we just build off of all the initiatives we've talked about.

Right. And then just maybe as a follow-up on carbon capture. Can you just talk a little bit about the plans for other plants that are not on the pipeline and potential timing and just capital needs there as well?

Yes. I mean, for the most part, at this point, everything that we have in the West is on a pipeline, and we talked about that a little bit earlier. In the East, we are working on a project in Mont Vernon that hopefully in the kind of next couple of months, will come to fruition where we can determine what we're going to do with that carbon. And I think there's some pretty interesting opportunities there. Those economics, anytime you can do your own project, if you have something close where you can't sequester are always better. It may take a little longer, but it's certainly worth their way. So we have that going on. We've got -- we're looking at Bobin and what the alternatives are there. It's a little far away from some sequestration sites, but there could be rail options. There could be pipe options to the river and then shipping down barges. We liquefied carbon as well. And so we're looking at those as well as the Osaka Gas Tallgrass partnership, where maybe some of that gets piped not as far away but into some type of synthetic gas that gets then shipped through the LNG terminal in the Gulf. So more to come on most of that, but we are working very hard really in any of those plants, especially in like a Madison and Mount Burden . The first thing we want to do there, even before sequestration happens, is look at combined heat power systems, reverse turbines, Cogen. And the most interesting thing there is the fact that you can do that with a very investment-light opportunity because others want to build them for you and you get most of the benefit while they're getting a return on Cogen. And so it -- it's very capital light for Green Plains to get 85% of the benefit with almost 0 capital investments. So we're looking at that. And that reduces -- we have a very high power cost in our East that makes those plants long-term less competitive with the West. By doing Cogen, we will be able to have Western prices in Mount Burden and Madison and potentially even cheaper than being on the grid. And that's where the next big opportunity, I think, in carbon reduction. That's 5 to 10 carbon points right there, but we still have to get the sequestration to get the max benefit.

Our next question comes from the line of Jordan Levy with Truist Securities.

Maybe just to take a step back quickly and talk to Fluid Quip. I'm curious, you guys clearly have your plate full with plenty of initiatives going on. But I'm curious how you're thinking about Fluid Quip as its own business as we move through the next couple of years, and I know there's turnkey initiatives and that sort of thing, but what's the appetite there to grow that business outside of the work they're doing for you all? Yes.

We have a strategic initiative around Fluid Quip to increase revenues, increase profitability ,continue to have that as a -- it's a stand-alone P&L for us within our system. They can do everything from what we do in our Gen 1 plants through MSC clean sugar hits. That's a big win for Fluid Quip on top of that. There are several initiatives about expanding things like I talked about. If we get to 1.5% yield on oil, that's a Fluid Quip Technology upgrade. They're working on that. We don't work on that at Green Plains. Then we get to 70% protein, that's a Fluid Quip initiative that they're working on. And we'd like to do as much of that mechanically as we can to go as far as we can. We're even looking at different ways to even get closer mechanically to 60 Pro, which we think we have some opportunities to look at that. But fermentation is very interesting as well. They're working with everybody from dry mills to wet mills to other types of industries and separation to sell their technology and sell their machinery. It's very undervalued, I believe, in our valuation from a portfolio perspective, yet to be proven out for some. But when you look at the value of the IP they have, they have value of potentially what they're developing and it doesn't take a lot of money, allocation and capital allocation to get to some of these end games because a lot of the work has been done prior to acquisition. They just have a really great franchise. And we just don't have enough salespeople, quite frankly. So if you know anybody that wants to sell our -- some of our technologies, we're hiring at Fluid Quip because we have some great things. Like I said, we're talking to all different industries domestically and globally from Canada to Europe to Brazil. We help those plants, both in all types of grain processing and everything in between. So we've got a lot of stuff to do there. It's totally in my opinion, an underappreciated asset of Green Plains. But again, you got to wait and see the contribution for that, and it will be -- it's probably a little while away, but they contributed last year, they'll contribute this year. And overall, we think the future is very, very bright for that technology provider.

That's good to hear. And then just a quick follow-up. Any thoughts on the current landscape for ethanol assets? I don't know if you're seeing any ethanol M&A activity or anything there.

Yes. I mean it's hit and miss right now. I think the bigger, more efficient plants are more valuable than the smaller, I would say, substandard size. So you either got to make those bigger or just -- like we said, we assess our portfolio every day. If we can apply some type of technology to any of one of these plants that we have, it probably doesn't fit long term with our portfolio, but we're not worried that somebody else won't take good care of them either. So we evaluate our portfolio, and we think there's probably room for some optimization of that moving in and out. And we look at what's in the market today. There isn't a lot in the market today for acquisitions of large plants. I think, especially again as this curve has gotten better, attitudes are better in the industry. We still have a ways to go, again, as I said, I try to caution people that while they think that this move is really, really good, I think it could still continue to get better. So I think there's some opportunities there. But our view is that you got to have a plant that you can apply carbon, protein, oil extraction further, dextrose, fiber, nutritional products. If those plants can't do all of those things, it's probably something we'll look at in the future to say, should it be in our portfolio and how do we go get more that are in our portfolio. One way is for acquisition and one way is through partnerships.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Becker for closing remarks.

Yes. Thanks. We really appreciate you being patient for this call. We know they don't go long sometimes, but we try to give you as much information on what we're working on as we can. There's a lot, and we think it's very valuable for our shareholders and stakeholders to understand what not just the near-term opportunities are, but the future opportunities. When we look at one of the most valuable opportunities for us is getting this clean sugar system up and running. And our view is that we want to have 200 million to 300 million gallons converted to sugar by 2027, which is a significant increase than from what we are building today, and that really is where the game changing starts to happen relative to everything else that we've been doing on top of everything else we've been doing. And so we're working on all of that, and we're working on behalf of all of you, hopefully, in the next couple of months, we have some more good news around the things that are important to you around technology and demand and offtakes and having a nice steady ethanol market for a little while would be nice, too. So we'll see you next quarter, and thanks for all of your support.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.