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spk10: We've seen costs easing, and our margins continue to catch up. Steel costs have rescinded, and feedstock costs have plateaued. That being said, we're cognizant that the current geopolitical environment poses a risk of a new round of cost escalation. On availability of supply, Lubrizol recently notified us that our force majeure is being extended through June of 2022. Now that we have introduced replacements, we expect availability to continually improve but it looks like margins will be somewhat squeezed through the first half of the year. Last, and excitingly, we expect volumes to meaningfully grow, as we believe we can now keep up with demand. On slide 12, you'll see that in Montana, we delivered $9.1 million of adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter versus $24.4 million in the third quarter and $6.4 million in 4Q of 2020. We experienced normal seasonality in Great Falls, as gasoline and asphalt demand in the Rocky Mountains is typically low in the winter. Further, we previously reported a hydrogen unit outage during the month of November that led to unplanned downtime for the plant. We brought both the hydrogen unit and the facility back to full operations in December and have been running well ever since. Before I turn the call back over to you, Steve, I just wanted to say that it's been a pleasure being your CFO. I know we are both grateful to so many. our analysts, investors, vendors, customers, and ultimately the great Calumet employees who have made the past couple years at Calumet a true success. And Steve, while I know you're not going anywhere, I think I can speak for everyone when I say thank you for your leadership and commitment to Calumet as our CEO. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to you to talk 2022 out with.
spk08: Thank you, Todd, and thank you for the very kind words. I'll briefly touch on the transition announcement we issued yesterday. one that has been well received by major unit holders and key partners, and then I'll conclude with our outlook. The most consequential transition event is Fred's decision to retire from our board as chairman. Fred has been a wonderful leader, mentor, and friend to many of us here at Calumet. He co-founded the company, so naturally we'll miss his perspective, his experience, and his expertise. Heritage has been very supportive of management and of Calumet through the years, So firstly, I wish Fred all the best and thank him from our entire Calumet team. Thoughtful and planned transitions are important to Fred, and we've approached this one in exactly that manner. Secondly, I just want to reiterate that this is the same management team, although roles are changing. I look forward to continuing in an executive capacity as well as chair of the board. We have a great group of directors and a great management team running our business. And third, Todd's going to do just great. It's going to be an easy and smooth transition. He knows as much about Calumet as anybody in the company. He's been here a long time, has deep experience across basically every one of our businesses. He's sharp, he's humble, and he loves this company. He's going to be an excellent CEO, and I have every confidence in him to lead us into the future. I would add that our transition is not just about Todd. It's about a confidence and belief in our whole team. The last two years have been pretty challenging for Calumet. And it takes a strong and close team to circle the wagons, pitching together, and emerge from all the challenges of the pandemic with a transformational vision, one that's created a tremendous amount of unit holder value and should be able to continue to create substantially more. We've got about 1,500 people here at Calumet, and I'm proud to have had the chance to work with each and every one, every one committed to staying the course and rising to the challenge, no matter how daunting it might appear. Okay. In conclusion, on slide 13, I wanted to touch on our outlook for this year and how Calumet is thinking about positioning ourselves for continued growth and success. First, let's touch on our core specialties businesses. As you know, that's comprised of specialty products and solutions and performance brands. In SPS, and you've heard me say it before, through most of the business cycle, we believe we're competitively advantaged by producing our own feedstocks as opposed to purchasing them. And that is definitely very true in this current market. So while Todd mentioned that record specialty margins have eased, product inventories are shockingly low, demand is solid, and we definitely appear to be setting the stage for solid fuels margins contributions that will at least balance, if not outweigh, the easing in specialty margins. In performance brands, demand continues to be strong, and we believe that as supply chains recover, we will generate even more value in this business. I'm not going to say we are out of the woods on supply chain issues yet, but we have had quite a lot of promising signs. I told you about where we are today with MRL. It's a truly superior RD project. We believe the most value to be unlocked for Calumet unit holders is the path for MRL into the public markets, and we will continue to position that business accordingly. We can then use some of that unlocked value to deliver the Calumet parent, giving our special needs business a competitive cost of capital, and the appropriate leverage to return to growth and reinvestment mode for what is an excellent business. And despite geopolitical uncertainty, we think 2022 has the potential to be a good year for Calumet, one that should generate enough earnings and cash flow to give us the option to begin to selectively invest in growth again. We've budgeted about $25 million or so for improvements to modernize, upgrade, optimize, and further integrate our plans. It's a basket of small capital projects that are easy to execute and have high returns. So with that, I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to open up the line for Q&A. Operator?
spk02: Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star then 1. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Our first question comes from the line of Manav Gupta from Credit Suisse. Your question, please.
spk00: Hey guys, well, a quick question here. You seem to have compressed the timeline of startup of Montana Renewables. As I understand, this is an economic decision. The margins are extremely good and you want to capitalize on those margins. So I'm just trying to understand if you can help us quantify a little bit, what would have been the opportunity cost had you taken the decision to start the facility versus now that the margins are really good, you are choosing to continue to operate it as a refinery and then compress the timeline of startup so you start everything together once the pretreatment unit is also online.
spk09: Bruce, I'll take a run at that. That might have been about six questions, so come back to me if I don't cover it all. The compression is, I think you correctly captured. It's very interesting because we think we're de-risking both of the businesses there. By staying online for the summer asphalt season and capturing that, we're actually supporting the site's economics overall. And then on Montana Renovables, What we had initially envisioned was bringing on the hydrocracker early. That makes more sense if we bring it on coincident with our pretreater. And we're continuing to raise our aspirations for the benefit of the feedstock gathering strategy and the low CI feeds that seem to be coming our way. So while we haven't disclosed it, we suspect that we're going to do better than what we've advertised.
spk00: Thank you for taking my questions. I'll turn it over.
spk02: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Carly Davenport from Goldman Sachs. Your question, please.
spk03: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions today. Just wanted to start on the 2022 capital spending guidance that you provided. Are you able to provide a bit more granularity in terms of the allocation of that capital across the segment and maybe including some of the projects you're considering for the discretionary CapEx? And does the overall budget include all the remaining spend to get renewable diesel up and running?
spk10: Hey, Carly, this is Todd. Thanks for the question. A couple in there. So I think when you think about CapEx, You know, we think about kind of three buckets. And, you know, we have the 115 to 135 kind of range for the year. You think about a steady state bucket of kind of $65 million of maintenance environmental. There's obviously some volatility around that number based on turnaround. So this year has kind of higher than normal turnaround spend as far as segment breakout. We don't break it out. all the way down to the segment level. But I can tell you the biggest chunk is in the Montana full plant turnaround. If you remember, that's been kind of on the agenda for years now. And, you know, that's the turnaround where the full plant comes down, and then we do the conversion of the hydrocracker to renewable diesel. So that's a big one. We also have some kind of smaller turnarounds throughout the specialty system that have some cost implications but aren't really expected to have a meaningful impact on sales If that's helpful. And then we have the, so that kind of is a, I think about that as a $20 to $30 million bucket. And then we have the $20 to $30 million of kind of discretionary spend. So these are kind of high return modernizations that Steve mentioned in the script. And, you know, some examples, you know, Shreveport in Cotton Valley, we're doing some spend around some optimization kind of reliability, utility improvements, doing some electrical work, some integration work, that type of stuff. We're investing in our naphthenic crude oil supply chain to be able to bring in kind of a wider and kind of a wider slate of feeds. We're doing some investment at our Shreveport crude tanks so we can better control and blend specialty crudes. We're doing some automations that, you know, will increase white oil volumes out of Carn City. We restarted that hill plant to keep up with growing demand in white oil last year. So, you know, those are some that just come off the top of my head, but give you a feel for, in general, these aren't major risky type of spend. These are, you know, kind of a group of smaller buckets that, you know, we think have an extremely high rate of return, kind of two-year payback type range. in minor controllable spend. Strong optimization focus.
spk03: Great, thanks. That's helpful. And then, sorry, just to clarify on that. So, you mentioned the Montana full plant turnaround is included, but the renewable diesel, like, spend on pretreatment would not be included in the 150.
spk10: That's not included. No, that's not included in the range, no.
spk03: Okay, great. Thanks for that. And then the follow-up was just kind of a housekeeping item around G&A costs during the quarter came in a bit higher than where we had anticipated. Is there anything that you'd call out as kind of one time in nature, or is that kind of the type of run rate we should be thinking about going forward?
spk10: No, I think, you know, in general, we've talked about an $80 million type run rate for that corporate segment. And, you know, I think that's that's probably still the right guidance going forward.
spk03: Great, appreciate the color.
spk02: Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Amit Dial from HC Wainwright. Your question, please.
spk05: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. Just with respect to the MRL going public decision, is this concrete? And if it is, can you give us potential timing for this?
spk10: Sure, I'll take it. This is Todd. You know, I wouldn't say anything's concrete. We're still evaluating kind of a number of options right now. You know, we do think that ultimately, at the end of the day, this business is best served in the public market. You know, you've probably noticed that you see some some things out there alluding to SPAC markets and, you know, a lot's changed in that market that's pretty meaningful, I think. You know, one thing that's changed is, you know, that market's kind of bifurcated between real businesses and spreadsheet businesses, and that's advantageous for us. You know, I'd say the other thing that's changed is It's really not a dependable source of capital as redemptions trend up, which, you know, for us is okay. MRL doesn't need much capital. And last, I'd say it's gotten a lot cheaper to do a SPAC. So you think, you know, relative to kind of doing a traditional IPO path. So, you know, we think you really have to plan on receiving very little capital from a SPAC trust. You analyze the cost difference between a traditional IPO and a SPAC. And you really compare that cost to the value that you'd place on accessing the public markets more quickly. So, you know, speed has value to Calumet. We think the public markets have value to Calumet. You know, not unlimited value, but obviously expediting the deleveraging of our specialty business and standing up an independent public MRL are both fundamental to our vision. So, yeah, you know, I think that path is one we take seriously. I think we do want to end up in the public markets. It's a matter of time, you know, traditional IPO path, expedited SPAC path, some combination of private equity investment followed by, you know, a future public path, you know, a little bit further down the timeline. So I don't know if that helps, but try to frame up the options a little bit.
spk08: Yeah, I mean, this is Steve. I mean, sorry, I mean, just to reframe it maybe. So The way I would look at it is this. A base case is that this is probably a highly IPO-able business roughly 18 months from now when it's stood up and running, right? So that's an easy move into public 18 months from now. In the meantime, it's possible to accelerate it. So as Todd says, you know, SPAC is an interesting option that has evolved in how it works. So if we have the capital, by and large, we need. So if we take a SPAC route, it's simply because at this point in time, the cost of doing a SPAC has dropped dramatically, and we wouldn't be doing it for capital raise. So redemptions would be a secondary issue. We'd be doing it as a much accelerated way into the market. So it's possible that we would do that. And, you know, if you look at the Oak Tree transaction, it's clearly designed to facilitate that. And then there's a third strand to weave into that, which, as Todd said, you know, there may be private placement at some point in the process. You know, it doesn't have to be private equity. It could be strategic. So we've got the IPO out there in the future, and then we've got these other strands to weave in if we think it makes sense to accelerate the process.
spk05: Understood. Thank you for that. That helps us think about you know, the optionality around this asset. Then just staying on MRL, with respect to feedstock, I mean, I'm reading between the lines. I guess there is some feedstock flexibility over here. You know, what is the go-to feedstock you're targeting near term? And then, you know, what are the other options that you have, you know, with respect to this?
spk09: Hi, Matt. It's Bruce again. The feedstock slate is optimized for our local gathering. And we've got a completely different opportunity set than, for example, the Gulf Coast industry. We believe that some of the historical cheap, attractive feedstocks are going to come up. They're going to arb in to some sort of CI parity in the large markets. And that's going to have an impact on trade flows. So we've got a pretty good global balance, then a North American balance, then a micro balance around us. And based on all of that, we're going to run a lot of things. It's kind of like a large crude oil refinery that's got access to 400 different crudes. If you think about it that way, it's going to be a very dynamic price environment. There are going to be opportunities for feedstock sellers that are much, much better coming to us than what they're doing today. And all of that plays off of our feedstock pretreatment unit. It's a next-generation technology, and it can run any triglyceride feedstock from anywhere in the world.
spk05: Okay, understood. Thank you for that. Just one last one for me. With respect to the performance brands, you know, the $34 million in backlog for this segment Can you give us some color on, you know, when this is expected to be delivered by? Is it like, you know, the next one or two quarters or is it slowly throughout the year?
spk06: Hi, Amit. It's Mark Lorne. Thanks for the question. So sort of bringing together some of the things that Todd and Steve referenced during the call. We now believe that, based on line of sight, that we've got the raw materials coming in to help us to start eating into that backlog. So we would expect that to be going down from here. The costs are still slightly high because we're having to go and source material that we hadn't planned for originally, as mentioned. So we're still somewhat in recovery mode on that. And then the unknown quantity within all of this, and I know both Steve and Todd mentioned this as well, is the geopolitical environment that we operate in. All things being equal, we would expect that to be coming down to a normalized level by the end of the first half, but there is still that element of uncertainty. That's what we're planning towards, and we'll continue to put the best endeavors behind it.
spk05: Okay. Thank you for that. That's all I have, guys. Appreciate it.
spk02: Thank you. Our next question comes in line of Jason Gableman from Cowan. Your question, please.
spk01: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I want to first ask about the specialties business. Can you just remind us, I mean, you discussed the competitive advantages in SPS relative to the rest of the market from the integration you have in your Louisiana footprint. Can you just remind us kind of where the competition gets their base oil feed from, what prices that track, and how that gives Calumet a competitive advantage in that business?
spk07: Hey, Jason. Scott Obermeyer here. So, and Todd can weigh in, but just for some background context, you know, so when we think Northwest Louisiana, we're backward integrated into boiling crude. A lot of the specialty folks are buying raw materials, you know, I'll say further down that downstream, whether it be VGO or other types of feedstocks. In our case, we've got this flexibility all the way back to crude that not only to control the quality and to move around some of our molecules, depending on market and customer demand, but due to that backward integration, we've got the competitive positioning on the front end of it.
spk10: Yeah, and this is Todd. I'll jump in just a little bit. You know, so competition, it kind of depends in what area you're talking about. So remember our Northwest Louisiana complex is, At Shreveport, Cotton Valley, and Princeton, we make naphthenic lubes, paraffinic lubes, and aliphatic solvents. So we have competitors in the solvent side, for example, that buy distillate. So they're paying diesel price to make solvents, where we're paying crude price making solvents and then sending the remainder of the material to Shreveport to make fuels. We've got competitors in the lube spaces that some buy crude oil like we do. Others buy, you know, VGO, which would obviously be at a premium to crude to further fractionate and treat. So, you know, just wanted to highlight that it kind of depends on what business you're talking about. But as a whole, you know, as a network, we have the ability to both you know, go as far upstream as we need to to optimize input cost. And then we also have the ability to optimize between plants as these facilities are all kind of interconnected and in a very short trucking distance to one another. Does that help?
spk01: Yeah, that's a very helpful color. And then I just had a couple of clarifying questions on the Montana Renewables Program. project. First, you mentioned increasing flexibility to produce renewable kerosene. Does that involve an increase in capital involved in the project? Secondly, you mentioned sourcing more locally available feedstock. I know you had mentioned a $65 million EBITDA benefit from kind of a logistics advantage. So are you expecting that to now be higher given the ability to source more local feedstock. And then thirdly, just on kind of monetization avenues, I appreciate the commentary around IPOs and potential SPAC, but have you been exploring potential to have another renewable diesel player acquire you? Is there interest you're hearing within the market for maybe operators with a one-asset footprint? to expand the assets that they operate. Thanks.
spk09: Hey, Jason. You bet. Thank you. It's Bruce. I'll take those in reverse order. So I guess last March we told our investors and you and anybody that wanted to hear it that we would go this direction. And we took 100 phone calls in 100 days that cover the waterfront of possibilities. And as we funneled that down and formed a clear point of view about our superior competitiveness, which is both location-driven, that's the $65 million variable cost logistics advantage, as well as capital-driven because we have got the asset in place. I will remind you that the capital isn't for the RD production as much as it's for the logistics separation. And the things we're spending money on are mostly pretty mundane, tanks, lines, rail racks. The one thing that is novel is the renewable hydrogen plant, and we're pretty proud of that. And I already mentioned the next-gen pretreater. So as all that comes together, it's a bolt-on. to do a bit more of each of those things. It's a bit more capex for oil moving and segregation. It's a bit more capex for a small increase in hydrogen. We're not signaling an enormous turn as much as opportunistically taking advantage of off-taker demand. Backing up to the Monetization question again. This is all interrelated, right? So a complementary operating partner could bring multi-plant synergies, and that would be the closer to us that that plant would sit, the more likely the synergies are a bigger number, and that's been proved in a lot of industries over a long time. We're not missing that opportunity. And I think I'll leave it at that.
spk02: Does that answer your questions?
spk01: Yeah, that was great. Thanks.
spk02: Thank you. Our next question comes to the line. Greg Brody from Bank of America. Your question, please.
spk04: Hey, good morning, guys. Congrats on all the promotions over there. Steve, I'll miss you on the call. Todd, looking forward to adding you to my Twitter feeds. So first question for you, I think Brad said something around about a month ago about a proposed financing in the muni market potentially. I know it's early stages, but I'm curious how that fits into your capital raising program. And there was a number in the press that released that said it was, I think, 550 million. You know, that seems large. So what do you think about using that for?
spk09: Hey, Greg, I'm going to let Todd touch on some of the detail there because it's super interesting and he's leading that effort. But let's pop back up. You know, Steve opened by reminding us the group that we took 675 million of capital in, call that recapitalization 1.0 around the Montana renewables lever, but we're not done. You know, we've signaled an enterprise value for that business to the market that's in our prior public material, low twos to low fours billion. So as you think about that, the initial capitalization last fall with our partnering with Oak Tree, which has been a great outcome for us is a mini bond ladder. So we've got a three-year tenor at a $300 million phase, and we've got another 10-year tenor of $50 million from Stonebriar. So if you think about the bond ladder for a second, we'd like to fill that in a bit. You know, we'd like to drop something in between, and we've got some pretty good ideas there. And the muni drops one on the outside as a much longer tenor. So the 550 you mentioned includes, in 2024 in our business plan, a significant expansion and further pivot towards SAF yield-wise. So with all that on the table, there's a whole bunch of moving parts for Todd and I'll ask Todd to color some of that because it is super interesting and the team is doing just a ton of lifting. So it's much, much broader than Muni, but you do recall the 550 correctly.
spk10: Yeah, no, and I'll follow on a bit. Rich is right. I mean, the 550 is a bit of a placeholder. The way these work kind of with the muni tax-exempt bond is you go out and you say, hey, we file an adducent resolution, and you say we're going to figure out how much of this applies. We think we know how much of our plant qualifies for potentially tax-exempt financing. But when you file that inducement resolution, you go out a couple years and you look at the – more than a couple years. You go out a few years and you look at potential future spend as well. So I think of it as more of a placeholder than anything else. It's an option. What it does is it qualifies us to say, hey, any spend that occurs that's qualifying for tax-exempt financing from – Basically, December, over the next few years, you know, community bond financing is a potential option for that. So that was kind of the gist of the 550. You know, it's not a commitment on anybody's behalf, you know, the municipality, us, you know, or anyone else. It's a placeholder, and we'll firm up the offering as time goes.
spk04: I know there was a resolution of intent. Is there much more you need to go through to be able to tap this opportunity, or is that something that's available in short term?
spk10: Yeah, there are a couple of different steps. The inducement resolution was the first. The second is how much of our spend qualifies, and that's a combination of what percentage of your feed is solid waste feed you know, wastewater type investment, those types of things. And so that's the second. And then the third phase is, you know, understanding how much volume cap is actually available from the state. So, you know, it's not just an unlimited supply. The municipality has to, you know, allocate their volume cap every year. And, you know, there's still some work to do on understanding how much of that may be available to us. And again, that can be tapped over a multi-year period. So that's a little bit of the number. We're looking forward, like Bruce said, potential future staff investments, you name it, that this could be an option for.
spk04: Got it. And you could raise it on a project financing basis where the facility is not online. It's more just on a forecast.
spk10: Yeah, we think you could raise it as the project does not have to be online.
spk04: Okay. Just a subtlety here. So you talked about being able to source new supply for the performance brand business, I believe, which will allow you to just meet demand. You weren't sure if it would improve your margins. I'm just trying to get a sense of, but it would allow you to increase volume. So is there an incremental margin benefit that we should think about that as you grow, margins should actually improve just because you're putting more volume to the system?
spk10: Let me kind of clarify a bit and then Mark jump in with some color here. So it will improve overall margin. You know, these are incredibly high margin products. So, you know, the margin may be a little bit lower, but the fundamental point is, hey, we can keep up with volume. And I think you hit the nail on the head there, Greg. You know, the point is we want to be able to grow volume. We have the demand. Now that we have supply, we hope to be able to keep up with the demand. Now, you know, we may make 35% margin on that incremental sale instead of a 40% margin, you know, just throwing numbers out there to represent. But it's still a very high margin business. I'm just saying relative to maybe a 2020 time period, margins would be squeezed a little bit as we add kind of higher cost alternative feedstocks.
spk04: Got it. So is it fair to say about half of the supply side issues that have hurt your margins here is addressed with this sourcing agreement?
spk06: Hi, Greg, Mark, Lauren. So we believe as we sit at the moment that we've managed to cover all of the requirements as we see them today. Now, if we sort of reference, just give you some data points on this, is that 21 volume was up overall in the year, but we're actually tracking a double digit up in the first half of the year. So you can get some extrapolation there around the impact of those supply chain challenges and how we would sort of expect a normal supply to sort of pan out for 2022, which is implied in your question. The key here is that we talked again, I sort of mentioned it before, around the geopolitical piece that we've got to be mindful of in the midst of it all. And our aim is, as I mentioned before, still to clear that the bulk of that backlog by the end of the first half of the year. And as Todd referenced and sort of circling back to that and hopefully filling out the answer for you is that the compression is there. We're still in cost recovery mode, as I mentioned, but we are expecting those volumes to come back and show the trajectory of growth that we were predicting previously.
spk04: Okay. And just separately, I know you get to pass through a lot of the costs of inflation here. But I'm curious, are you seeing any impact on your business that's noteworthy from inflation?
spk06: So what we're seeing on an inflationary basis at the moment, Greg, is that everything's starting to flatten out. So with that lag that we talked about before, we expect that with cost recovery to work its way through. Now, the unknown quantity in this sort of plays a little bit to one of the comments that Todd made earlier, is that the forward forecast at the moment suggests that things will be coming back down again if you look at the indices. However, there's obviously that uncertainty that's out there at the moment. But as we see it, we're working through, and that cost recovery mode will catch up.
spk08: Yeah, this is Steve. I mean, if I could add, I mean, I think simply put, Until what happened, you know, tragically in Ukraine a couple of days ago, we would have felt pretty good that things had topped out and that at least across the markets that we accessed, you know, kind of inflation forces had topped out. Now, who knows, right, as of Wednesday or whenever it was.
spk04: Got it. Have you been able to manage the COVID issues in the first quarter with, you know, just people maybe not being able to show up to work? Yeah.
spk08: It's going well. I mean, I think, you know, like everybody in the industry, I think we struggled with trucking in the first couple of weeks of January. It's like the entire trucking industry had COVID or it felt like that. But I think, you know, both teams, Scott's team and Mark's team did a good job scrambling. So it didn't really affect our volumes. And I think like the country, we've just seen cases collapse. The last report I saw earlier this week is in all of Calumet, we had one case. So we feel good about that. And actually, we're also, you know, obviously, we're really pleased generally. But we're also very pleased because as we can potentially start to ease COVID protocols during the turnaround, we're going to have a lot of people on a crowded site, right? So actually pushing back the construction work to get out of the winter, which, you know, we talked about was we thought was a good de-risk, maybe an even bigger de-risker than we thought because we may be able to operate with more lenient COVID protocols. I mean, obviously, we'll comply with CDC and local authorities and all that good stuff. But for us, COVID looks like it's in the rearview mirror right now and not going to work.
spk04: That's great to hear. And then last one, it wouldn't be a call with me on it if I didn't ask you just your thoughts on RENs and any insights you might have on developments that are worth pointing out.
spk09: Hey, Greg, thanks. It's Bruce. Thanks, I think. I'll put the course dev hat on for a second and I'll set the Montana renewables hat down. So the EPA's public comment period closed earlier this month and They're off digesting all of that. There are a whole bunch of a thicket of conflicting legal activities all over the place, and they're going to have to pick their way through that. They're under court orders to answer certain questions by certain dates. And so I think the first half of this year is going to bring more clarity at the agency level. you know, we're sympathetic for the struggle they have, you know, trying to manage all of these conflicting stakeholder groups. That sets up the thing that maybe should be more interesting to all of us, which is the congressional renewable volume statute is going to sunset. And so we are at the early stages of a lot of conversations with legislators. Senate Committee on the Environment held a hearing. I would direct your attention to the transcripts of that about two weeks ago. And we think there's going to be a lot of bipartisan support to help the agency to norm these things. So we're optimistic this year.
spk04: That's great. Thanks again for the time, guys, and enjoy your weekend.
spk02: Thanks, Greg. Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Steve Moore for any further remarks.
spk08: Well, thank you very much for joining in on the call. We really appreciate it. Really appreciate your support and involvement over the last two years. This team's created a tremendous amount of unit holder value. We clearly see the potential to stay with our vision and execution here and create a lot more using the same team in different roles. So we're excited and want to wish you a great weekend. Thank you very much.
spk02: Thank you ladies and gentlemen for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.
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