Charah Solutions, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Shara Solutions Inc's second 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 like to now hand the conference over to Steve Brim, Vice President of Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary for Shara Solutions. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your participation in our second quarter 2021 earnings call, and we look forward to sharing our prepared remarks and answering your questions. We hope you had a chance to review the press release we issued yesterday after the market closed. If not, you can find the press release as well as the 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 a customary question and answer session. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our remarks regarding SHARA solutions include 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 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, including our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and our annual reports on Form 10-K. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements except as required by law. During this conference call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. We provide reconciliations to the nearest applicable gap measure in our earnings press release and supplemental presentation. Again, thank you for joining us today. Now, I would like to turn over the call to Scott Sewell, our president and CEO.

Scott? Thanks, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our earnings call today. During the second quarter, we continued to capitalize on opportunities for significant new businesses. We also posted strong financial results for the quarter and expect this to continue in the second half. This morning, I'll briefly review our progress this quarter in winning awards and advancing our projects. I'll also update you on our bid pipeline, our ESG initiatives, and recent additions to our board of directors. Roger will then review our financial performance during the quarter. He will also review our plans for refinancing our bank debt, which we see as a path to significantly improve financial flexibility to grow our business. We've had a highly successful year so far in terms of new awards, which total $685 million through early August. This puts us on pace to significantly exceed the $715 million of new awards we received in 2020, which was a record year for us. 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. The total this year to date includes $158 million of new awards received since our first quarter earnings call in mid-May. These recent awards are across all our business lines. Remediation compliance, fossil services, by-product sales, and environmental risk transfer or ERT services. Our ERT services businesses continue to be a compelling one-stop solution for our customers looking to address the environmental and economic challenges associated with retiring older or less economically viable fossil generating assets. We are excited about the potential to grow this business. In May, we reached a binding agreement to acquire the Avon Lake plant in Ohio from Gen-On when the plant ceases operation in April of next year. Avon Lake is a 627 megawatt coal plant along the Erie. We will assume responsibility for demolition of the plant and environmental remediation and sustainable redevelopment of the site as we are doing at our Gibbons Creek ERT project in Texas. Speaking of Gibbons Creek, during the quarter, we continued to ramp up activity at the site. Demolition of the plant is underway and is expected to be largely completed this year. Remediation of the ash ponds is ongoing and on schedule. We are nearing finalization of the redevelopment plan for the site. We also continue to ramp up activity at the large remediation projects in the southeast on which we started work earlier this year. These include a coal ash reclamation project for Dominion Energy and two long-term ash pond closure by removal projects for a major southeast utility. These and other remediation projects are on track. The new business awards we have received, which total $1.4 billion in 2020 and 2021 to date, position us for strong growth in revenue, earnings, and cash flow this year and next. A significant portion of these awards are large projects that will take several years to complete. As a result, our weighted average remaining contract life has increased to approximately six years currently from approximately three years in 2018. This extended contract life provides greater visibility and durability of revenue, earnings, and cash flow than we have had in the past. Notwithstanding the significant awards we have received already, we still have approximately $4 billion of pending proposals on which we expect to hear over the balance of this year and in 2022. As I noted, we expect additional award announcements in the second half that should result in another record year for us. We also have identified close to $7 billion of opportunities across our businesses. We are optimistic about the prospects for converting some of these opportunities into additional new business that will further add to the predictability of our revenue stream and layer on growth well into the future. The regulatory environment continues to be very favorable for our business. As we have discussed on previous calls, states are continuing to become more prescriptive regarding the means and methods of ash pond remediation. At the federal level, we believe the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration will accelerate its efforts on regulatory requirements, beneficiation guidelines, and ash impoundment closure deadlines. As the 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 utilities and power generation companies deliver on their impoundment closure requirements and needs. In addition, the Biden administration has proposed a trillion dollar investment in infrastructure over a multi-year period. The bill has bipartisan support. It's enacted. we would expect our byproduct sales business to benefit over time from increasing demand for concrete, as FLYA serves as an attractive economic and environmental alternative to Portland cement in the production of ready-mix concrete and concrete products. Next, I'd like to touch on our ESG initiatives. As we noted in our inaugural ESG report earlier this year, sustainability is at the heart of our business. We practice resource conservation and recovery through the beneficial recycling of coal ash ash impoundment closure services, and the remediation and redevelopment of land for community and commercial use. These activities reduce greenhouse gas emissions, decrease landfill disposal, conserve natural resources, and protect our waterways. In the report, we laid out 2021 objectives in the key areas of environmental, data acquisition and reporting capabilities, diversity and inclusion, and safety we are on track or ahead of plan with respect to these goals to cite just a few examples on safety we undertook steps to improve the quality of site inspections and observations to focus on the quality of our near-miss reporting and unsafe observations also we have maintained our excellent safety record with zero lost time injuries this year to date and a total recordable incident rate of 0.32 which is below our goal of 0.46 or lower. In terms of environmental, we have implemented cross-training sessions at the site level to increase both the amount and quality of site audits and inspections. Year-to-date, we have not received any notices of violation or notices of deficiency. On data acquisition and reporting, we are developing and implementing methods to track our consumption of water, electrical energy and fuel, and our production of disposal of waste. We are also looking for ways to reduce our water consumption or use recycled water. In another important area, I'm pleased to announce that since our first core earnings call, we have added three highly qualified individuals to our board of directors. Dennis Whalen joined our board of directors effective at our annual meeting in June. He's a retired senior partner of KPMG and brings more than 35 years of global experience in driving innovative growth, aligning risk with strategy, and developing dynamic talent. Dennis serves as a trusted advisor to senior leaders and board members across the energy, construction, industrial manufacturing, and life sciences industries in both developed and emerging markets. He also has expertise in shaping governance strategy to create long-term value and to unlock the power of diversity. Timothy Allen Simon joined the board in July. Timothy is an attorney with more than 40 years of experience, primarily in the public sector. He has a deep understanding of the energy and utility industries, having served on the California Public Utilities Commission from 2007 to 2012. More recently, he has been a consultant on utility infrastructure, financial services, and broadband projects, and has been a frequent public speaker on energy, infrastructure, diversity, and inclusion. We expect that Timothy's background and experience will be tremendously helpful to our board and management team as we continue to provide innovative solutions to our customers while accelerating business and financial performance. Kenneth M. Young joined the board effective with our equity issuance to B. Reilly, which closed last week. Kenny is president of b riley financial and ceo of b riley principal investments he has more than 30 years of operational executive and director experience primarily within the energy communications and finance industries on a global basis we look forward to his contributions to our board before turning the call over to roger i'd like to thank our dedicated charles solutions employees who are working every day to help our customers ensure service reliability and to 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 Shannon, our CFO.