Charah Solutions, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Charter Solutions Inc's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session, and instructions will be given at that time if you would like to ask a question. I would now like to hand the conference over to Steve Grimm, Vice President of Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary for Charter Solutions. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your participation in our first quarter 2021 earnings call and look forward to sharing our prepared remarks and answering your questions. We hope that you have had a chance to review the press release we issued yesterday after market closed. If not, you can find the press release as well as our supplemental investor presentation you may follow during our prepared remarks on the investor section of our website at www.shara.com or ir.shara.com. Joining me today on our call are Scott Sewell, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Roger Shannon, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Following their prepared remarks, we will conduct the customary question and answer session. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our remarks regarding Shara Solutions includes statements that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those being disclosed in our earnings press releases and conference calls. Those risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our earnings press release as well as in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. we disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. During this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. We provide reconciliations to the nearest applicable GAAP measures in our earnings press release and supplemental presentation. Again, thank you for joining us today. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Scott Sewell, our president and CEO. Scott?

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. It's great to have you join us for our earnings call today. I'm happy to be speaking with you again and providing an update on our first quarter performance. This morning, I'll briefly review our accomplishments year to date, provide an update on current business developments, and update you on our pipeline of opportunities. I'll then transition the call to Roger to review our financial performance during the quarter. We are very pleased with the start of our 2021 fiscal year. When we spoke to you seven weeks ago on our year-end 2020 earnings call, we announced that we had won approximately $500 million in new awards in 2021 to date. These included two long-term ash pond closure bioremoval projects at a major southeastern utility and the acquisition of the Gibbons Creek, Texas facility as part of our Environmental Risk Transfer, or ERP, suite of services. Since then, we have won another $26 million of new awards, including an Ash Marketing contract with a new customer in Nevada and Sales and Operations contract extensions with two Lumina facilities. The $527 million in total of new awards so far this year is a continuation of the strong momentum we have coming off our record $715 million of new awards in 2020. As we stated on our last call, these new business awards, coupled with our existing backlog and opportunities for additional business wins with new and existing customers, position Shara's solutions for strong growth in revenue, earnings, and cash flow in 2021 and beyond. We remain confident that the increasing emphasis at the federal and state levels on environmental remediation and the growing demand for fly ash and concrete will continue to create opportunities for Shara Solutions' one-stop platform for remediation and compliance services, byproduct sales, fossil services, and environmental risk transfer services for years to come. During the first quarter of 2021, We mobilized operations at Dominion Energy's Chesterfield Ash Pond for the beneficial use of 8.1 million tons of reclaimed ponded coal ash and at the major southeastern utility that I mentioned earlier. We also completed the acquisition of the Texas Municipal Power Agency's Gibbons Creek Steam Electric Station and Reservoir in Grimes County, Texas. and we have begun decommissioning, remediation, and redevelopment activities at the site. We are very excited about the Givens Creek project. We are also very excited about the opportunity to expand our innovative ERP solutions further to help our utility partners retire and decommission older or less economically viable generating assets while minimizing costs, maximizing the value of the assets, and improving the environment, we continue to see and evaluate new opportunities to provide creative solutions to utilities, environmental remediation, and compliance challenges through our ERT services. And we expect to have further ERT win announcements soon. Finally, I want to touch on the strong momentum for our new opportunities that we continue to see as well as our excitement about the outlook for the company. The future remains bright for our business, and we expect to continue announcing more new awards in 2021. Following our 2020 and year-to-date 2021 wins, we still have over $3 billion of pending proposals. We are in contract negotiations on several projects, and we expect to make additional official award announcements soon. Conversion of opportunities into more new wins will further add to our predictable revenue stream. and earnings growth. We also have visibility into an additional $7 billion of opportunities on which we intend to submit proposals between now and the end of 2022. Our ability to continue to add new customers and new awards with our power generation partners speaks to the essential nature of our services and the reputation, experience, and resiliency of our industry-leading team. As we have discussed on previous calls, states are becoming more prescriptive regarding the means and methods of ash pond remediation. In addition, we believe that the Environmental Protection Agency under the new administration will accelerate its efforts on its regulatory requirements, beneficiation guidelines, and ash impoundment closure deadlines. We continue to see these movements as positive for SARA Solutions. As a partner of choice for solving our customers' most complex environmental challenges, and as an industry leader in quality, safety, and compliance, we are ideally situated to help power producers deliver on their impoundment closure requirements and needs. I am very proud of the way we have partnered with our customers to maintain service continuity safely. And I want to thank again our dedicated Charo Solutions employees who are working every day to help our customers address their environmental and recycling needs. We remain committed to keeping our people safe, supporting our customers, and growing the business. With that, I'll turn it over to Roger, our CFO.