Mark Harding
Analyst · Wm Smith & Co. Please proceed with your question
Thanks very much. Good Morning or good afternoon, depending on what part of the country you are in. I would like to welcome you all to our midyear earnings call. We have got a slide deck for this call which you going to find on our website. So if you go to purecyclewater.com and you go over to the Investor page, then there will be an icon that will allow you to click open the presentation and follow along with us on the presentation. I will try and note the transition of the slides as we work through the presentation. So with that, I would like to get started. We will have some prepared remarks and then we will open it up to some Q&A towards the end of the call. So first slide is always to get the lawyers out of the room. So it's our Safe Harbor statement that says that statements that are not historical facts contained in this corporation are forward-looking statements in the context of the meaning with Private Security Reform Act of 1995. You all, I am sure, are very familiar with that. So we will move on to kind of an overview of the company and I am going to blow by this pretty quickly because most of you will be familiar with the company and where, what operations that we play with. But we are a water utility company. We have a portfolio of water that we own or control. So water outlets is one where you can own that asset as a real property asset. We generate revenues on that from selling water to customers, both residential customers, commercial customers, as well as industrial customers. A large segment of that is to the oil and gas industry and then we also own some oil and gas royalties where we receive some mineral royalties from oil and gas interests in these properties have. Moving on to the fourth slide. So we are sort of cradle-to-grave on the water utility. We own the water, the wells that divert that, they are treated, distributed to our customers. They use it. They turn it into a liability. We collect that. We reprocess that water and then we reuse that water for irrigation and industrial uses. Our portfolio can serve about 60,000 connections and the metrics on that, we generate revenue from that tap fees, which are onetime capital fee and then we also generate revenue from monthly water and sewer bills. So we typically get about $30,000 per connection on the water and the wastewater side on the tap fees and about $1,500 per connection annually in water and wastewater revenues. Transitioning you to the next slide, really what we want to talk about more specifically is the development side. We have about thousand acres, 930 acres of land located in a very good location in the Denver Metropolitan area right along the interstate. We are about four miles south of Denver International and about 16 miles just to East of Downtown Denver. Nice piece of property. We have got a diamond interchange at the property, which give us good transportation access. The property is zoned for about 4,400 residential homes and that's a mix of detached single-family homes, attached paired product and multifamily homes as well as about 1.3 million square feet of commercial area. Moving on to the next slide, kind of gives you an overview of where we position ourselves in the Metropolitan area. Very good job project for us. We have got a lot of employment centers in and around our area. So, our target for this is going to be kind of entry-level housing and some of the logistics that are important to those buyers are going to be access to transportation and access to employment centers. So you have the Denver Airport, which is the largest employer in the state, that's about 35,000 jobs. We have an Amazon Distribution Center. It's about thousand jobs. We have some convention center hotels that are opening up in the fall that are very big employers, well, as many as 3,000 jobs. So really, mostly concentration of activity in the Denver area is concentrated in this I-70 corridor. So we are very excited about bringing this project online. Transitioning you to the next slide, really I want to detail out a little bit about what's going on. We did open construction on that. We are very excited about being underway, doing our over excavation and our overlot grading of these lots. The over excavation and grading component of this will probably last about three months. So we are actually grading the entire 150 acres as the mass balance works on how you deliver these lots and the efficiency of delivering these lots, because you cut and fill and moving the dirt so that it's very difficult to move that for one specific neighborhood. So the plan on that is to do the over-ex and the grading for, well not the over-ex, some of that over over-ex will be in phases. But the overlot grading will be for the entire 155 acres or the entire 500 lots. We are concentrating the over excavation, which is really a soil mitigation issues. So, Colorado has some expansive soils. This particular site is really what we would call marginal on its expansive soils, but most of the builders are responsible for their own evaluation, an independent evaluation of whether or not each of their individual lots requires this type of soil mitigation procedure and they handle that costs themselves. They use the same contractor that we use for our overlot grading under separate agreement with them, but we are concentrating our activity to this brown area which really will deliver about 220 lots. So we are looking at not only the dirt work on that, on the over-ex, but we will have the utilities, wet utilities, which will be water sewer storm, dry utilities, which will be communication and electric, all kind of configured for that first 220 lots. If we have that over-ex probably by a sort of mid-to-late June, we will be done by that timeframe. We will be letting contracts probably later this week for some of the wet utilities to get the water sewer and storm drain facilities and some of the channel way work done, a lot of the electrical probably following shortly thereafter, really to just build to getting some sites that are available. So working with our three builders, we want to try and deliver some model home lots. So we have the ability for them to start construction on those sometime later this year and then really work on production of those starting for the next building season starting in January. But we will have sort of delivery of lots later this year, where they will be buying, some of them will be buying. Just in two of the three builder cases we have lot development agreements, which means we get progress payments. One payment when we deliver platted lots, one payment when we get the completion of the wet utilities and then a third payment upon completion of the finished lot and then with one builder finished lot deliveries directly. So look to see some of activity in follow-on quarters later this year and then really rolling into first quarter of next year. The overlot grading is going very well. Sometimes when you get started on that in the winter, particularly for seasonal issues out here in Colorado, you can be influenced by bad weather and while the East Coast, all of our friends in the industry in the East Coast have had a terrific year in dealing with weather issues, ours has been very mild. So you guys have been getting all of our snowpack this year. So most of our contractors are probably even a little ahead of schedule on some of those deliveries. So we are excited about maintaining that delivery schedule. Moving on to the next slide, talk a little bit about where do we go from here. We are really working on the first 500 lots. And I think we have got a very good execution on how we are delivering those first 500 lots. But we are also looking at, this is a bigger project. We have got about another 800 acres to deliver on this and how do we phase some of that activity. So this will be little bit of work that we have been doing on that phase. So we are looking at the second phase, which will be starting with some of the commercial, up by the interstate and then flowing down into more residential and cluster type development for a number of different builders. We have probably three build, well we have three builders in our first phase and we are looking at adding additional builders in there to, maybe as many as six different homebuilders as well as some commercial type builders where they are building commercial and retail installations up along the interstate. So we are working our way through our land plan on this one. Hope to show that to some of our builders later this spring, early summer to start getting engaging level of interest and finalize that plan interest and working that through the process through this year and then being in a position to where we can take a look at multiple phases going on at the same time. As we start to deliver lots for our first phase, we can start working on some of the grading activity for our second. So that will give you the high level of some of the development activity and really some of the areas of focus of what it is that we are doing on that. Let me move on a little bit and talk a little bit about another major activity for us, which is really providing water to the oil and gas industry for well stimulation and some of the activities that we are seeing this year. So we have got multiple operators in the field now. There has just been a little bit more competition for drilling out these leases. So we have got, I think as many as three different three maybe even four different operators in this area that are looking at some of the well activities. Our more well-established operator is kind of more active than the others and they are projecting out the highest number of wells, maybe as many as 20 wells. And then we probably get three to eight wells from some other operators in the field. So we will see how that activity looks. So we are protecting somewhere around 23 wells as a conservative estimate for the fiscal year. Average sales on these wells, so some of the newer entrances in here are actually using some alternate design, frac design concepts, which use a little bit more water. So on average, I think we are seeing about $150,000 per well. We historically have seen about $100,000 a well. So this added that technology and how they plan and stage these fracs are sort of evolving and I think that has something to do with both the technology as well as this field specific. So very excited about that. We had some good operating results for the first six months. We will highlight a little bit later, but it still seems to be a very active field for development. Most of this activity continues to be HBP, hold by production type drilling. We haven't seen a whole lot of field development. And really the difference between HBP and field development will be the number of wells per pad where you can see as many as a dozen wells per pad which makes it very efficient for them on drilling and fracing activity and then correspondingly a heavy water use for us on the transfer of water to those operations. The next slide really talks a little bit about the field. Multiple formations, multiple during activities and then kind of the revenue that we see on the water activity per well. Moving on to the next slide. This is really just kind of follow-up report card on our Wild Pointe acquisition. So that continues to go very well. We had, I lost my number on this. The number of tap fees on that. So forgive me while I catch up to my presentation. So we have got continuing builder activity from the project. So we have get two types of development out there, residential development, which I think there is still probably about another 60 to 70 lots available from the residential activity. That's kind of seasonally derived where you have a little bit of activity. We have only had a couple of tap sell deliveries, as you see. Those taps are about $15,000 a tap and that's because the water system is already fully developed. So we are getting, typically we see about a 50% margin in that from the water supply to the water infrastructure. So all that water infrastructure was already capitalized by the previous developer we acquired this from. Usage fees out there are fairly seasonal. So what we see is kind of the tail end of last year's irrigation season and then really a limited amount of in-house demand over the winter. So those typically spike over the summer just because of those seasonal deliveries, but still very, very happy with the acquisition. It continues to perform in line with our forecast of the model assumptions on the acquisition itself. And we still do have our nets out for other opportunities. I know that question comes as to where are the opportunities and we try and focus those in areas where our current assets are. So we are still talking with a number of opportunities in that area to add those acquisitions. Next slide is going to talk a little bit about our WISE system. We continue to highlight this because it's part of our major infrastructure and delivery here. So in addition to pipeline capacity where we have about three mgd of capacity on our transmission line that goes really along the southern portion of the Denver Metropolitan area. We also get some water out of that. So that allows us to expand our water service obligations both for our residential as well as our industrial customers. And then, as we look at the regional opportunities here, really the advantage of this system and this cooperative is that we are interconnected with 13 different area water providers and it enhances opportunities amongst all of us for our infrastructure, our supply capacities, our storage capacities. So we look to expand upon this system and these opportunities overtime as well as we look at how systems grow and how our opportunities mature overtime. So we will go to slide 13, which will be kind of the bullet on the quarter. So we summarize it out. Our income, almost up twofold over prior-year income. So about $2 million. A good portion of that, $1.6 million is going to come from frac revenue. So that shows you where that activity is. I think we will see continued strength here, maybe even a little bit of growth in this opportunity just because it's a little, they don't have quite as much activity over the winter months as they do over the summer months. So we will see, if we have sustained opportunities here, they are round out for a very good year end for us. Our municipal water, wastewater services kind of in line with last month. Some seasonality in here, but really there is no variable differences in the increase here. Tap fee revenues, again, some of those taps are attributable to Wild Pointe. Some of those taps are attributed to an existing customer, which came into the system as well, added existing capacity in the system. And then some of our oil and gas royalty revenues. So those are down a little bit and then it continue to be sort of operational issues with the wells themselves. As these wells continue to mature, the operators continue to refine how they are operating. And we still are under a gas driven well. So I think we are one of the last wells, still yet not to have a pump jack on the system. So it still produces good royalty revenue, about $25,000 a month, as they get full month worth of operation. The last two sheets are really our balance sheet and income statement. I won't go through those. You guys can look through those. We still have very good liquidity position. We have about $24.5 million in liquidity in that. So we feel we have sufficient capital to fund the development of lots out at Sky Ranch and we try and make sure that we have a good cushion and reserve in case there is any variances in timing of deliveries or otherwise. But we are very excited about being able to deploy those capital and be able to push out some of that for returns in our shareholders. So with that as a summary, let me turn it back over to our moderator and see if we can have some questions that you all might have to drill down on some of the specifics of what it is that we are doing.