Green Plains Partners LP

We will now turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Executive Vice President, Investor Relations and Finance. Mr. Boggs, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Green Plains Inc. Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. Participants on today's call are Todd Becker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jim Stark, Chief Financial Officer, and several other members of Green Plains Senior Leadership Team. There is a slide presentation available, and you can find it on our 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, 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 release, in the comments made during this conference call, and in the risk factors section of our Form 10-K form 10Q, 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.

Yeah, thanks, Phil. Good morning, and thanks for joining our call today. We reported $83.3 million in EBITDA for the third quarter, inclusive of a $30.7 million gain on the sale of the Birmingham unit train terminal. Our EBITDA from normal operations was $53 million, and our standalone consolidated crush margin was $58 million. Before I get too deep into the numbers, I'm sure you saw the announcement this morning regarding Jim Stark retiring from Green Plains and the promotion of Phil Boggs as Chief Financial Officer. These two guys are really well known to all of you, which should make for a seamless transition. When Jim returned to Green Plains and subsequently named CFO, I always knew this day would come as his goal was to get back to Nebraska and spend more time with his grandkids. One of the things that was part of this succession planning was to set Phil up for success, and Jim lived up to his end of the bargain and more. Jim and I spent many years together at Green Plains, and he is one of the many who will have made a longstanding impact on the company, and I'm proud to have worked with him. I'll let Jim tell you a bit more, but he will be exiting the public company world to focus on the next stage of his career with smaller private companies and spend more time with his family. Thanks again, Jim, for your dedication and loyalty. So let's get back to the quarter. Our ethanol operating rate reached nearly 97%, and we also delivered a record quarter of ultra-high protein production. as well as maintaining a strong corn oil yield in line with our record rates achieved in the second quarter. Our operating results are demonstrating the success of years of planning and execution to deliver improved operational performance across our platform, and we believe we have room to continue improving on these operating rates. The mid to high 90s run rate should be the new normal for our platform, as we still have some more improvements underway to get there and are finishing up some of those in the fourth quarter as well. Earlier this month, we completed an extended shutdown at our Mount Vernon location, as we indicated earlier, location performing some of the needed maintenance to bring the plant back to its full run-rate capabilities. We are now beginning to scale our production and expect to reap the reward of additional capacity in the next couple of weeks. We are in the process of upgrading O'Brien in the next coming months and anticipate that plant being able to increase its efficiency in production as well over the next several quarters. The operations team has done a fantastic job safely maximizing the platform, and we continue to find new opportunities to increase throughput and improve production metrics. Margins were solid during the quarter, as we indicated on the prior call, driven by demand of continued strong exports and favorable natural gas and corn prices, even though we did see some rapid compression late into the quarter. We continue to experience tailwinds for ethanol exports, with totals through August of 1.2 billion gallons, and on pace for a record year of 1.8 to 1.9 billion gallons as other countries ramp up their blend mandates and low-carbon programs. We believe this will continue to grow, led by Canada, where they are rapidly expanding blends and represent over one-third of where all of our exports go. Overall, we significantly outperformed the prior quarter, and we're up prior year as well. We will cover protein, carbon, and corn oil on this call as well, but I would be remiss not to start with clean sugar. While it may have taken longer than we all wanted, the ongoing startup and commissioning of our CST project in Shenandoah was a key focus during the quarter. As we had indicated earlier this week, we have worked through most of the challenges, and we have begun to supply product to customers for validation. We also believe we will be executing our first bulk commercial sales and shipping low CI dextrose to customers during the fourth quarter. The production process will continue to be de-bottleneck, ramping up over the coming year, and interest remains very strong despite the delays. Having up to a 40% carbon intensity advantage, it's worth the wait for many of these customers. As we always said, this technology developed by Fluidquip is massively disruptive to an industry supply oligopoly that has existed for decades, and no one thought we could make clear, clean, low-carbon dextrose, but here we are. It was a Herculean effort across Green Plains and Fluidquip to get to this point. We still have plenty to do to scale from here, but this is one of the many steps to realizing the true value of this technology. I'll spend a little bit more time on this later in the call. During the quarter, we completed the sale of the Birmingham Unitrain Terminal and used the proceeds to retire the remaining high-priced debt related to Green Plains Partners. This was an important step enabling the additional simplification and efficiency gains anticipated when we first began the process of acquiring Green Plains Partners. The Board of Directors continues to progress the strategic review process, working with its financial advisors, BMO and MOIS, as outlined in the press release. And now I'll hand the call over to Jim to provide an update On the overall financial results, I'll come back on the call to provide an updated policy outlook and discuss our progress on all of our initiatives in more detail. Jim?