Natural Resource Partners LP

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Natural Resource Partners LP fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the call over to Tiffany Sammis, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the Natural Resource Partners fourth quarter 2025 conference call. Today's call is being webcast and a replay will be available on our website. Joining me today are Craig Nunez, President and Chief Operating Officer, Chris Zolas, Chief Financial Officer, and Kevin Craig, Executive Vice President. Some of our comments today may include forward-looking statements reflecting NRP's views about future events. These matters involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to materially differ from our forward-looking statements. These risks are discussed in NRP's Form 10-K and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason. Our comments today also include non-GAAP financial measures, additional details and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, are included in our fourth quarter press release, which can be found on our website. I would like to remind everyone that we do not intend to discuss the operations or outlook for any particular Coal SE or detailed market fundamentals. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Craig Nunez, our President and Chief Operating Officer.

Thank you, Tiffany, and good morning, everyone. NRP generated $46 million of free cash flow in the fourth quarter. and $169 million of free cash flow in the full year 2025. All three of our key commodities, metallurgical coal, thermal coal, and soda ash, continue to struggle with sales prices that are near or below our estimates of operators' marginal costs of production. Metallurgical and thermal sales prices are at cyclically low levels, and soda ash prices are at generational lows. We do not yet see any catalysts on the horizon that are likely to change this outlook in the foreseeable future. In 2025, softening global economic activity and subdued demand for steel weighed on metallurgical coal pricing, while low natural gas prices and mild weather pressured thermal coal. While sentiment toward thermal coal is benefiting from the projected rise in electricity demand from data centers, we have yet to see any material market improvement. Until we see clear evidence of a structural market shift, we remain disciplined in managing the partnership under the assumption that demand for North American thermal coal remains in long-term secular decline. As we said over the course of last year, 2025 was a very challenging time for the global soda ash industry. We believe 2026 will be worse. While we were early to warn about the potential for excess capacity hitting the market, The extent and potential duration of the downturn is exceeding even our expectations. International prices are currently below the cost of production for most producers. We believe supply rationalization is not a question of if, but when. However, we also believe rebalancing global supply and demand will take time, and we expect it could be several years before a healthy bid returns to the market and prices return to historical levels. We anticipate further pressure on Shisha Jam Wyoming's financial performance. We have not received distributions from the joint venture for the last two quarters, and we do not expect distributions to resume for the foreseeable future. Our managing partner is retaining cash to support investments in safety, operational integrity, and to shore up the capital structure. Additionally, earlier this month, We agreed with our partner to invest capital in the venture to reduce outstanding amounts under its bank credit facility and better position it to compete in the current environment. NRP's share of this investment is $39 million, and we evaluated it as we would any other capital allocation decision with the goal of maximizing NRP's intrinsic value per unit. Regarding carbon neutral initiatives, leasing interest for underground carbon sequestration remains lackluster. as political, regulatory, and market uncertainties pose significant hurdles for developers contemplating large capital investments for these types of projects. We continue to work on multiple geothermal, solar, and lithium opportunities, and we are making small-scale progress on several initiatives, but have nothing material to report. In conclusion, coal prices remain at cyclical lows, and global soda ash prices are at generational lows. Our co-lessees are operating at or near their costs of production, and our soda ash investment, one of the world's lowest cost producers, is managing through what may be the worst bear market in its 60-plus year history. Despite this, NRP continues to generate robust free cash flow and make progress toward our goal of retiring all outstanding debt. We retired $109 million of debt in 2025, and finished the year with $33 million of debt and no other financial obligations outstanding. Our timeline has been to retire all debt and significantly increase unit holder distributions in August of this year. Although we've cautioned that extended bear markets for all three of our key commodities would increase the likelihood that some event would occur that could push that timing back. The $39 million investment in Shishajam, Wyoming is one such event and will push the distribution increase we had expected to occur in August back to a subsequent quarter. I'll turn it over now to Chris for more details.