Tetra Technologies, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Tetra Technologies' third quarter 2021 results conference call. The speakers for today's call are Brady Murphy, Chief Executive Officer, and Elijio Serrano, Chief Financial Officer. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Mrs. Serrano. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Betsy. Good morning, and thank you for joining Tetra's third quarter 2021 results call. I would like to remind you that this conference call may contain statements that are or may be deemed forward-looking. These statements are based on certain assumptions and analysis made by Tetra and are based on a number of factors. These statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of the company. You are cautioned that such statements are not guarantees of future performance and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. In addition, in the course of the call, we may refer to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA gross margins, adjusted free cash flow, net debt, liquidity, and other non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to yesterday's press release or to our public website for reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the nearest GAAP measure. These reconciliations are not a substitute for financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP and should be considered within the context of our complete financial results for the period. In addition to our press release announcement that went out yesterday, we also encourage you to refer to our 10Q that was filed yesterday. I'll now turn it over to Brady.

Thanks, Elegio, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Tetra's third quarter 2021 earnings call. I'll summarize some highlights for the third quarter, provide some perspective on the fourth quarter, and then provide an update on our low-carbon energy initiatives before turning it back to Elegio to discuss cash flow, the balance sheet, and liquidity. To start, I'd like to give special recognition to our Louisiana Gulf of Mexico employees that dealt with the devastating Hurricane Ida. Fortunately, we suffered no serious employee injuries, and our employees' property repairs are well underway. But special thanks to our employees and their incredible dedication to get our Fushan, Louisiana base, which supports our Gulf of Mexico operations, functionally back to being 100% in order to service our customers' needs. Again, special recognition and thanks to all of these employees and their families. For the quarter, despite some unique challenges for the industry, including massive Hurricane Ida impacting Gulf of Mexico operations, growing shipping port choke points contributing to delayed deliveries across the globe, and the type of inflationary pressure that we've not seen for many years, the overall macro environment for our industry continues to improve. as we believe we're still in the early days of a multi-year oil field services market recovery and a period of accelerating growth for our low carbon energy markets. Tetra's third quarter results reflect each of these macro factors, but more importantly, demonstrates the success we're having executing on our strategies. Year on year, we grew revenue by 30% and would have been over 40% if not for the impact of Hurricane Ida and the global shipping delays. impacting the quarter's completion fluid deliveries. The third quarter $15 million adjusted EBITDA grew 16% sequentially and 104% year-over-year and is the highest level since the first quarter of 2020 and prior to the market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA does include $6.2 million of mark-to-market gains from our equity ownership in Standard Lithium and CSI Compresco. as more investors realized the significant value in the very lithium-rich brines in the Tetra Arkansas leases and the announced progress towards monetizing these resources. The $6.2 million gain was largely offset in the quarter by reductions in adjusted EBITDA from revenue delays of approximately $11 million in completion fluid products and services from Gulf of Mexico jobs that pushed into the fourth quarter due to Hurricane Ida, and delayed deliveries due to the global shipping backlogs, and to a lesser extent, some inflationary costs on certain raw materials for our chemicals production. We generated $1 million of free cash flow and again reduced our term loan, this time by $8 million, while keeping liquidity around $90 million. Turning to the segments, as discussed on our second quarter earnings call, we expected our water and flow back services margins to improve from 5.3 percent in the second quarter to high single digits in the third quarter, a target that was exceeded to an actual 10.9 percent in the third quarter. This is an increase of 560 basis points, or 156 percent, over the second quarter, despite ongoing cost inflationary pressures in many operational areas. Third quarter revenues increased 24 percent sequentially, despite the number of active frac crews in the U.S. onshore being relatively flat compared to the second quarter. and increased 117% year-over-year. We continue to gain market share in the U.S. shale plays because of our technology, quality of our services, and a very compelling integrated water management business model supported by a well-developed automation platform that delivers on cost efficiency, service quality, and improved safety. Various factors contributed to this margin improvement. First, we completed the mobilization and we're fully operational in the third quarter for the Sandstorm Project Awards in Argentina. Building further on our business in Argentina, during the third quarter, we also secured an early production facility project that also includes additional sandstorms, which we will build and operate on a multi-year contract starting in early 2022. Secondly, we are achieving success with price improvements for many of our U.S. customers. as the utilization rates of our recycling units, water transfer equipment, including tetrasteel, flowback equipment, including sandstorms, continue to operate at maximum utilization. Newly secured customers are coming in with pricing better than some existing customers, and we are now turning down some projects where pricing is not at the levels we believe appropriate to generate an acceptable return on capital. And thirdly, profitable market penetration through our integrated and digitized water management projects also contributed to improved profitability. During the third quarter, we achieved a record high 55 integrated water management projects with 27 different customers, out of which four were new customers. We continue to make market share inroads with private oil and gas operators that see the value in our differentiated offerings and rely less on centrally managed procurement groups. In the third quarter, we successfully launched our 15K high pressure rated sandstorms which has immediately helped us gain higher market share traction in the Hainesville. Overall, we're pleased with the improvement in our water and flow back services business in third quarter. And although not yet back to the mid-20s adjusted EBITDA margin levels we achieved at the height of the US shale market in mid-2018, when there were over 300 active frac crews, we are very pleased with the progression of our revenue and profitability, and we continue to build the foundational blocks in our business to continue this improvement. Shifting to completion fluids products and services, for a number of reasons, there was an unusual number of moving parts for the quarter, including the $14 million seasonal drop from the second quarter peak in our European chemicals business, the aforementioned revenue reduction of $11 million due to Hurricane Ida and global shipping delays, the mark-to-market gains of $6.4 million adjusted EBITDA from our investments in Standard Lithium, and some cost inflationary pressures from some of our chemical production raw materials. Adjusting for the second quarter revenue seasonality of $14 million and the $11 million delayed revenue due to Hurricane Ida and global shipping issues, both quarter-end quarter and year-on-year revenue comparisons would have increased by double digits to mid-teen percentages, which we believe is more reflective of our current business performance. Using a similar analysis for adjusted EBITDA margin, accounting for the 6.4 mark-to-market gain, on standard lithium and the loss of EBITDA due to Hurricane Ida and delayed shipments, we believe the third quarter adjusted EBITDA would have been in the mid-20s, which includes the inflationary cost, which we see as likely to carry forward into the fourth quarter and potentially beyond. Going forward, we are increasing our prices to reflect these inflationary costs, as we're seeing the global supply chain for our core products tighten as well, especially for bromine and calcium chloride products. During the third quarter, we continue to see the core strength of our completion fluids business improve, which we feel supported by a number of data points. First, a well-known industry research expert reported on the completion fluid segment of the global oil field services, the results of which showed Tetra for the Gulf of Mexico with an average 67% customer loyalty compared to the industry average of 33%, and with superior supply performance compared to our competitors. We continue to be awarded large multiyear contracts in deepwater markets, with a new deepwater project awarded in Brazil during the third quarter for a large integrated service company. This is in addition to the previously announced large multiyear awards in the Gulf of Mexico for a supermajor operator, as well as a deepwater award for a major integrated service company in Brazil. Looking forward, we expect to see materially higher revenue for this segment in the fourth quarter, as the Gulf of Mexico activity returns and many of the delayed shipments will be delivered during the quarter. We expect our fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA margins to return to the mid-20s range, not including any benefit from standard lithium shares, which through October are up another 40%. Our industrial chemicals business continues to stay strong, which is complemented by improved demand for calcium chloride in the recovering oil and gas market. The previously mentioned plant investment in Europe for a 25% increase in production capacity is on track for completion in the second quarter of 2022. And finally, we continue to refine the engineering and testing for what we believe will be an industry-unique manufacturing process for CO2-free calcium chloride, designed for our own future production and to support the anticipated demand from our partnership with Carbon Free. In regards to our low-carbon initiatives, we continue to be excited with our progress. As mentioned in our previous press release, we're ahead of our internal timelines to generate revenue from our low-carbon energy initiatives. In the third quarter, we secured and shipped the second commercial order and sale of PureFlow, our high-purity zinc bromide solution, to a publicly traded energy storage technology company. We are making progress in building and furthering a long-term strategic supplier with this customer and expect to have an agreement in place before year-end. Assuming this agreement materializes as expected, we anticipate a material increase in demand of PureFlow orders for deliveries in 2022 to support their manufacturing and production needs. We're also in discussions with other energy storage companies, which use zinc bromide as an electrolyte for energy storage. Considering the forecasted high compound annual growth rates in the energy storage market, we will work collaboratively with these companies to meet their longer-term demands for our pure flow solution, as well as their full electrolyte needs. Moving on to lithium and bromine reserves, Standard Lithium completed their preliminary engineering assessment, or PEA. To extract lithium from brine from our acreage in the Smackover Formation in Arkansas, the standard lithium PEA indicates very attractive economics for the acreage, with 1.32 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent at the inferred resource category, which is 49% higher than what was previously estimated. Based on the standard lithium press release, the economics on the tetra-acreage are attractive to advance work on this acreage in parallel to their current work on Lanxess facilities. The timeline of Standard Lithium work on Tetra's Arkansas acreage is of interest to Tetra for several reasons. One, we would begin generating royalties from lithium production on Standard Lithium versus our current option fee agreement. And two, the bromine-rich tail brine from Standard Lithium's extraction process will be available to Tetra, as Tetra still maintains all the mineral rights to the bromine, which we have previously indicated expiration targets of 2.54 million to 8.58 million tons of bromine. In addition to the standard lithium option agreement acreage, Tetra previously communicated that we estimate between 85,000 and 286,000 exploration target tons of lithium on acreage outside the standard lithium agreement, which is 100% Tetra. We're planning to drill an exploratory well in the fourth quarter on our dedicated acreage to obtain lithium and bromine samples, allowing us to move from exploration target to an inferred resources target phase. We then intend to move towards a PEA study in early 2022. There's significant value in our mineral rights in the Smackover Formation in Arkansas from a combination of our option agreement with Standard Lithium, our bromine resources to meet the growing demands for completion fluids and energy storage, in addition to our 100% tetra-owned lithium resources. We will continue to evolve these resources to create shareholder value. Finally, in the area of carbon capture, Carbon Free continues to make progress on raising capital to launch their CO2 sky cycle capture technology while we evolve the engineering on our unique CO2-free calcium chloride manufacturing process. We will continue to work with Carbon Free to source and supply the required volumes of calcium chloride as they get ready to announce their first project. Overall, despite the number of unusual circumstances with Hurricane Ida, global shipping and logistics issues, and overcoming inflationary pressures, we had a good quarter. Heading into 2022, we see continued improvement in the industry macro fundamentals and the need for E&P companies to invest to meet a growing energy shortfall. Although we do expect a modest pause in U.S. onshore activity around the holidays, early feedback from our customers points to a robust increase in activity early next year. At the same time, we will continue to make progress on our multiple low-carbon energy opportunities, potentially putting us in a position in the near future to communicate to the market the potential revenue, EBITDA, and cash flow targets from these initiatives. Now I'll turn it over to Aligio to provide some additional details, and we'll open it up for questions.