LanzaTech Global, Inc.

Please stand by. We're about to begin. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Lanza Tech Global First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question-and-answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. You may withdraw yourself from the queue at any time by pressing star 2. Also, today's call is being recorded, and I will be standing by if anyone should need any assistance. And now at this time, I'll turn things over to Omar El-Sharkawi, Vice President of Corporate Development. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Lanzatech Global, Inc.' 's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. On the call today, I'm joined by our Board Chair and CEO, Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, and our CFO, Jeff Truckenberg. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release with our first quarter 2024 financial and operating results, as well as an investor presentation summarizing the company's performance and key operational highlights for the quarter. Please also reference our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ending March 31, 2024, filed today. Both our press release and results summary investor presentation can be found in the investor relations section of our website at www.lanzatech.com. Before we begin, I'd like to direct you to the disclaimers in the front of the company's investor presentation and remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements. Any statements describing our beliefs, goals, plans, strategies, expectations, projections, forecasts, and assumptions are forward-looking statements. Please note that the company's actual results may differ from those anticipated by such forward-looking statements for a variety of reasons, many of which are beyond our control. Please see our recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which identify the principal risks and uncertainties that could affect our business, prospects, and future results. We assume no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements. In addition, we will be discussing and providing certain non-GAAP financial measures today, including adjusted EBITDA. Please see our earnings release and filings for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measure. Today's call will begin with remarks from Jennifer providing an overview of our performance and our recent financial results. Jeff will then review in greater detail our financial results, and Jennifer will conclude with a few closing remarks. At the conclusion of these prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jennifer.

Thank you, Omar, and thanks to everybody joining us today. We appreciate your ongoing interest in and support of Land4Tech. I'd like to begin by sharing five key things from the past several months that I'd like for you to take away from this call. These are all outlined on slide five. First, we delivered financial results for the first quarter right in line with our internal forecasts and guidance provided last quarter. Revenue of approximately $10 million, gross margin of 34%, and gross profit of $3.5 million all increased year on year as we continue to scale and optimize the business while closely managing costs across the organization. Second, we announced in March that Project Secure, where our partner, Technique Energies, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive a $200 million grant. This commercial project will leverage Landsat Tech's and Technip Energy's transformational technologies to produce sustainable ethylene from captured carbon dioxide emissions, further validating the transformative nature of our carbon recycling technology and laying the groundwork for highly replicable project opportunities for Landsat Tech at the more than 370 ethylene steam crackers across the globe. Third, It was an extraordinary quarter for sustainable aviation fuel, our investment in LanzaJet, and our role in the broader SAF sector, which continues to gain significant momentum globally. In January, LanzaJet, in which we continue to hold an approximate 25% ownership interest, inaugurated the world's first ethanol-to-SAF facility in Silverton, Georgia. The achievement marks a strategic and historic milestone, not just for Land2Jet, but for the growing SAC economy at large, as this 10 million gallon per year facility brings a new production route to commercial scale, the Alcohol2Jet or ATJ pathway. Separately, Landsat Jet is in the process of completing an approximate $100 million investment round to accelerate its growth from some of the largest and most influential companies and investors in the world, with commitments already from Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund and Southwest Airlines. Fourth, We continue to advance our growing pipeline of commercial-scale projects while expanding the scale and diversity of the feedstocks and representative geographies. This includes growing the base of projects straight into the top of our development pipeline, as well as advancing projects through the various development stages. And finally, we are reiterating our 2024 financial and operating guidance introduced earlier this year. This includes expected revenue of $90 to $105 million, which at the midpoint reflects top-line growth of approximately 55% over last year's performance. From this, you can see that we continue to execute on our growth plan while maximizing operational financial flexibility across all parts of our business. As we mentioned in our previous quarterly calls, we are committed to a culture of safety and are proud to report that we completed the quarter without any safety incidents at our facilities in the field or in the laboratory. Regrettably, we did, however, have one recordable loss and injury due to an office place incident during the quarter. I would like to now review the key highlights from the first quarter of 2024, starting with Project Secure, our sustainable ethylene from carbon dioxide project in partnership with Technip Energies. As shown on slide six, Project Secure is a commercial demonstration of carbon capture and utilization. The grant funding of up to $200 million from the U.S. Department of Energy will support the design, engineering, and construction of Project Secure at a U.S. Ephraim Cracker facility. We expect work on this project to commence in the fall when we finalize the contracting details associated with this project. By combining the lens of the gas fermentation technology with Technip Energy's ethanol to ethylene technology, this transformational project is expected to produce 30,000 tons per year of sustainable ethylene from captured carbon dioxide emissions at an ethylene cracker operating at a major petrochemical facility in the U.S. In turn, this sustainable production will reduce the carbon intensity of the existing ethylene production of the facility. Ethylene has a massive global market, projected to reach $200 billion annually by 2030, and is often referred to as, quote, the world's most important chemical, given its use as a key building block in countless products we use every day, from clothing to packaging to foam to jet fuel. Ethylene production is also a major source of emissions globally, responsible for the release of over 500 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year and in need of carbon abatement solutions like Lensatex. Project Secure offers an immediate and highly replicable solution to decarbonize ethylene production using existing infrastructure. Technique Energies is the global leader in providing steam cracker technology to the chemical industry, with 40 to 50% of the global licensing market share by ethylene production. The modular design of Project Secure is intended to be easily deployable at ethylene crackers around the world, for which there are more than 370. This provides an enormous commercial opportunity for Lanzatec and Techniv to rapidly penetrate the ethylene value chain with its joint technology offering and capture a significant portion of this market given our established licensing models. Looking now at sustainable aviation fuel on slide 7, we remain bullish on the SAS market. As I noted earlier, it was an increasingly exciting few months for LandsatJet and the SAF market more broadly, and we believe we are well-positioned to play a significant role in the proliferation of SAF production through the Alcohol2Jet pathway. LandsatX ethanol will be a critical feedstock for SAF, and when coupled with LandsatJet technology, enables production of SAF from a variety of waste inputs and residues, including municipal solid waste, and E-Fueled. The inauguration and start-up of Landsat's Freedom Pines Fuels Facility, the world's first biorefinery that transforms ethanol into sustainable radiation fuel, is a game changer. We expect that the facility will begin producing SAF by the end of the second quarter and ramp up to full production over the course of the year. This facility will focus on maximum production of SAC at 90% of the product output, with the remainder, 10%, as renewable diesel, which is a unique capability of the landscape technology and unmatched biopathways. We made good progress on the opportunities in our commercial pipeline that focus on integrated solutions to convert waste gas and residues through the shaft by pairing Lansatex gas fermentation technology with the Lansatex alcohol-to-jet process. Our project with Aguirre and Abu Dhabi to take gasified solids through the SAF and our project in New Zealand with Air New Zealand and the New Zealand government to take predominantly gasified forestry residues through the SAF both contributed to engineering services revenue during the first quarter. Our project Dragon in the UK taking industrial off-gas through the SAF is an advanced engineering with the front end engineering and design completed and planning permission granted for the SAF unit. We continue to utilize the grant funding received by the UK Department for Transport to bring that project to SIT. The recently announced UK SAF mandate is positive for the overall UK shaft market and specifically supportive of our process and Project Dragon. The mandate stipulates that shaft must account for 2% of all fuel in the aviation sector with the threshold increasing to 10% in 2030 and 22% in 2040. Importantly, the mandate provides a cap on chaff production via the hydro-processed esters and fatty acids, or HEFA, production pathway that becomes more stringent over time, which means there's a protected market for advanced chaff in the UK, such as chaff produced from waste-based ethanol. Additionally, the SAF buyout price, or the price above which airlines can pay to opt out of their obligations, has been significantly increased as a result of the mandate further supporting SAF processes in this market. In addition to a role as feedstock provider of waste-based ethanol to alcohol to jet shaft production, we are extremely proud of our strategic ownership stake in LanzaJet and welcome new world-class co-investors into LanzaJet. We continue to hold our approximate 25% ownership in LanzaJet today. The recent equity raised by LanzaJet has been done in an unpriced round and is therefore non-diluted to LanzaTech at this time. Additionally, LamsaJet's recent capital raise does not impact the mechanism by which LamsaJet is issued additional LamsaJet shares to increase their ownership percentage as the original co-investors and others build their own plants using LamsaJet shaft technology. Moving to slide 8 on our commercial project pipeline, our total operating project count stands at 8. which includes both commercial-scale and demonstration-scale plastics. Please note that for the purposes of the project funnel, we have now separated out the landscape pre-compiled fuels facility from this illustration. This landscape project was previously in the construction category and going forward will provide updates on the project separate from the launch of the biorefining project pipeline. The Landscape Freedom Pines Fuels project is currently in commissioning and startup and is on track for production of fuel in the second quarter of this year. The total installed mainframe production capacity across our licensees operating fleet of six commercial biorefining projects is approximately 310,000 tons of ethanol per year with the ability to abate more than half a million tons of carbon per year that would otherwise enter our atmosphere. The four commercial plants in China continue to perform and will continue to make progress on the ramp-up to full production capacity at Indian Oil's facility in India and ArcelorMittal's facility in Belgium. Our global services engineers are diligently working hand-in-hand with our customers to ramp up production, and we expect that successful full-scale operations will be achieved within 2024. Looking at the top of the funnel, we have nine net additions of qualified project opportunities into the first phase of the pipeline in the first quarter, and one net project addition into advanced engineering from early stage engineering. As mentioned during our last update, we continue to expect that several projects in advanced engineering will achieve final investment decision and move into the construction phase in the second half of this year. As a result, we expect revenues from the sale of equipment packages to materialize with respect to those projects along the same timeline. In addition to the significant depth of our commercial licensing pipeline, we're working with our infrastructure capital partner, Bookfield, to transfer the first project under our partnership to them this year while ramping up development of additional project opportunities. Additionally, we're working closely with our joint venture partner, Oloyan, on developing and financing a pipeline of project opportunities in Saudi Arabia and the broader Middle East. In our carbon smart business, we continue to negotiate off-state supply agreements with our partners in China and Europe to satisfy the growing carbon smart demand in 2024 and 2025. were focused on sales into the global chemicals market with a revenue in the first quarter from several of these customers. We also remain optimistic about revenue upside for carbon smart ethanol in the low-carbon fuels markets, specifically in the EU, once regulations are settled at the European Commission on how these first-of-their-kind fuels are treated. Positive technical guidance continues to be provided by the Commission, but it is not yet final, with the latest expectations suggesting that the European Commission will approve the certifying bodies this summer. Lastly, before turning it over to Jeff, I wanted to share a brief update on the reorganization initiatives assigned last quarter. We've already begun to see the operational transparency and efficiencies bear fruit with a more streamlined executive team driving greater accountability and enhanced execution throughout the company. The reorganization and work with prioritizations announced earlier this year are now fully underway with the estimated cost savings associated now beginning to materialize. We continue to expect the annualized operating expense savings of $5.3 million to be realized over the course of this year. Additionally, we continue to expect to end the year with a global headcount at or below 400 people, which is below the total headcount at year-end 2023. As a global team, we are focused on commercial growth in our core business and delivering on the financial results we've committed to the market. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff to provide details on our financial performance. Jeff, please go ahead.