Green Plains Inc.

Please go ahead, Will.

Thank you and good morning. I would like to welcome everyone to the Green Plains Inc. second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call are Chris Osowski, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ann Reis, Chief Financial Officer, Imre Havasi, Senior Vice President of Trading and Commercial Operations, along with the rest of our senior leadership team. There's a slide presentation available on the investor page under the events and presentations link on our website. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, and other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results can materially differ because of risk factors discussed in today's press release, comments made during this call, and in the risk factors section of our Form 10-K, 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. I'll now hand the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Will, and good morning, everyone. The second quarter marked another period of strong execution for Green Plains. The team delivered adjusted EBITDA of $93.3 million despite downtime for spring maintenance, up from $71.5 million in the first quarter and a significant improvement from $16.4 million in the second quarter of last year. Successfully executing our maintenance program while achieving our strongest quarterly performance in years highlights the strength of our operations and our team. Green Plains today is a fundamentally different company than it was a year ago. We are focused on operational excellence across our platform. We have a growing carbon business that is delivering significant value, and we are benefiting from favorable demand fundamentals across ethanol, corn oil, and protein markets. Together, Those advantages are creating a business with a higher floor, stronger free cash flow, and significantly more flexibility than we've had before. Before I discuss our outlook, I want to start with safety. Safety is the foundation for everything we do. A safe plant is a reliable plant and a reliable plant is what allows us to consistently deliver for our customers, our shareholders, and our employees. During the quarter, Our employees worked safely and we continued to improve the risk profile of the fleet. Recently, our Superior Iowa facility achieved highly protected status from FM, becoming our second facility to earn that recognition after Central City Nebraska in Q1. Superior also recently surpassed three years without a recordable accident, which is a fantastic achievement. In June, we held our annual Safety Week across the organization with senior leadership team spending time in our plants alongside our teams at FluidQuip Technologies and FluidQuip Mechanical. That kind of visible hands-on engagement reinforces that safety is owned by all of us every day. Operationally, the quarter played out largely as planned. We produced nearly 161 million gallons of ethanol and ground over 54 million bushels of corn while completing our normal spring maintenance. Capacity utilization averaged nearly 90%, reflecting those planned outages plus a molecular sieve B change-out at Madison, Illinois. It's a normal course maintenance item, but one that typically occurs once in every 8 to 10 years. We remain on track for roughly 95% capacity utilization for the full year. These results give us confidence in our sustainability of our operating rates as we move through the back half of the year. That consistency matters because it's the foundation for everything we do. Lowering CI scores, improving capture rates, raising yields, taking out costs, and finding opportunities through our benchmarking efforts. Operational excellence isn't a side project here. It's the engine behind our earnings growth and long-term value creation. and nowhere is that more evident than in our carbon platform. Capture performance is at or near our expected long-term rates and the earnings keep building. Our carbon platform contributed nearly $59 million of EBITDA in Q2, up from $55.2 million in the first quarter, bringing first half carbon EBITDA to approximately $114 million. We are earning 45Z credits as we produce qualifying low-carbon ethanol, and the value we generate begins with operational execution. As we continue to execute, we increase the value of the credits we earn. We have not monetized any portion of our 2026 credits to date. Staying patient is allowing us to negotiate a deal that generates stable, predictable cash flows, and while we haven't announced a partner for these credits, We're pleased with the progress we've made and believe our approach is positioning us well. Our focus remains straightforward. Maximize value while ensuring we maintain the necessary compliance and documentation to fully monetize the credits. Ann will provide more detail on the accounting and cash flow considerations in her remarks. But before I hand it over to her, I want to spend a moment on the broader demand outlook for ethanol. We're seeing several demand drivers line up at once. Domestic demand remains healthy, exports are performing well, and policy backdrop for the higher blends remains encouraging. Permanent year-round E15 remains an important opportunity, but it's only one part of a larger demand story. On the policy front, the Senate Agricultural Committee is set to formally schedule the Farm Bill markup later today. We also see growing interest in ethanol's role in maritime fuel applications continued discussion around sustainable aviation fuel, expanding international blending mandates, and a broader recognition of ethanol's role in energy security. Geopolitical uncertainty, evolving trade dynamics, and changing global fuel requirements continue to create opportunities for low-carbon liquid fuels. Weather, crop size, and global grain flows will continue to influence feedstock markets Thanks, Chris. The second quarter reflected strong execution across the business and continued growth from our carbon platforms.