CVR Partners

Greetings and welcome to the CVR Partners second quarter 2025 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press door zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Richard Roberts, Vice President in Financial Planning and Analysis and Investor Relations. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you, Christine. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate your participation in today's call. With me today are Mark Pytosh, our Chief Executive Officer, Dane Newman, our Chief Financial Officer, and other members of management. Prior to discussing our 2025 second quarter results, let me remind you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, as that term is defined under Federal securities law. For this purpose, any statements made during this call that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be false. This call also includes various non-GAAP financial measures. The disclosures related to such non-GAAP measures, including reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, are included in our 2025 second quarter earnings release that we filed with the SEC for the period. Let me also remind you that we are a variable distribution MLP. We will review our previously established reserves, current cash usage, evaluate future anticipated cash needs, and may reserve amounts for other future cash needs, as determined by our general partners forward. As a result, our distributions, if any, will vary from quarter to quarter due to several factors, including but not limited to operating performance, fluctuations in the prices received for finished products, capital expenditures, and cash reserves deemed necessary or appropriate by the board of directors of our general partner. With that said, I'll turn the call over to Mark Pytosh, our Chief Executive Officer. Mark?

Thank you, Richard. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. The summarized financial highlights for the second quarter of 2025 include net sales of $169 million, net income of $39 million, EBITDA of $67 million, and the board of directors declared a second quarter distribution of $3.89 per common unit, which will be paid on August 18 to unit holders of record at the close of the market on August 11. For the second quarter of 2025, our consolidated ammonia plant utilization was 91%, which was impacted by some planned and unplanned downtime at both facilities during the quarter. Combined ammonia production for the second quarter of 2025 was 197,000 gross tons, of which 54,000 net tons were available for sale, and UAN production was 321,000 tons. During the quarter, we sold approximately 345,000 tons of UAN at an average price of $317 per ton, and approximately 57,000 tons of ammonia at an average price of $593 per ton. Relative to the second quarter of 2024, sales volumes were higher despite lower production volumes, driven by a combination of strong demand in 2025 and a larger shift of product deliveries from two Q into one Q last year as a result of favorable weather allowing farmers to plant earlier in the year. UAN and ammonia prices increased 18% and 14% respectively from the prior year period, driven by robust demand on increased corn plantings and tight inventories across the system. Overall, we had another good quarter, and we believe the setup is favorable heading into the second half of the year. Domestic and global inventories and nitrogen fertilizer remain tight, and that has been supportive of pricing in the summer, which I will discuss further in my closing remarks. I will now turn the call over to Dane to discuss our financial results. Thank you, Mark.

For the second quarter of 2025, we reported net sales of 169 million and operating income of 46 million. Net income for the quarter was 39 million, or $3.67 per common unit, and EBITDA was 67 million. Relative to the second quarter of 2024, the increase in EBITDA was primarily due to a combination of higher UAN and ammonia sales pricing and volumes, along with lower PEDCO feedstock costs. Direct operating expenses for the second quarter of 2025 were 60 million. Excluding inventory impacts, direct operating expenses increased by approximately 6 million relative to the second quarter of 2024, primarily due to higher natural gas and electricity costs. During the second quarter of 2025, we spent 11 million on capital projects, which was primarily maintenance capital. We estimate total capital spending for 2025 to be approximately $55 to $65 million, of which $40 to $45 million is expected to be maintenance capital. We anticipate a significant portion of the profit and growth capital spending planned for 2025 will be funded through cash reserves taken over the past few years. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $162 million, which consisted of $114 million in cash and availability under the ADL facility of $47 million. Within our cash balance of $114 million, we had less than $1 million related to cash prepayments for the future delivery of products. In assessing our cash available for distribution, we generated EBITDA of $67 million and had net cash needs of $26 million for interest costs, maintenance capex, and other reserves. As a result, there was $41 million of cash available for distribution and the board of directors of our general partner declared a distribution of $3.89 for common use. Looking ahead to the third quarter of 2025, we estimate our ammonia utilization rate to be between 93 and 98 percent, with some downtime planned at Eastview for control system upgrades. We expect direct operating expenses, including inventory impacts, to be between $60 and $65 million, and total capital spending to be between $20 and $25 million. With that, I will turn the call back over to Mark.

Thanks, Dane. In summary, despite some planned and unplanned downtime, we had a good quarter of operations with ammonia utilization of 91 percent. Demand for nitrogen fertilizer remained solid through the end of the planting season, and we are seeing the strength and demand continue for the second half of the year with favorable pricing. The spring planting season went well, and demand for nitrogen was strong. The USDA estimates that 95.2 million acres of corn and 83.4 million acres of soybeans were planted in spring 2025, a 4 percent increase for corn, and a 3 percent decrease for soybeans compared to 2024. Yield estimates are 181 bushels per acre for corn and 52.5 bushels per acre for soybeans. Based on these planting and corn yield estimates, the USDA is projecting inventory carryout levels for 2026, so approximately 10 percent for corn and 7 percent for soybeans, which are below the 10-year averages. Grain prices have softened, some recently driven primarily by expectations of large crop production in Brazil and North America in 2025 and potential trade disputes where the purchase of grains may be used as a negotiating tool when reaching trade agreements. December corn prices are approximately $4.15 per bushel, and November soybeans are approximately $10 per bushel. Geopolitical conflicts are continuing to impact the nitrogen fertilizer industry. In the second quarter, Israel attacked Iran and caused a natural gas disruption and the flaring of ammonia inventories in Iran, along with a disruption in natural gas flow to Egypt for an extended period of time. Fertilizer producers in both countries shut in capacity during that time and have only recently begun to ramp up production again. Additionally, Ukraine damaged two nitrogen fertilizer plants in Russia, which reduced the production of the product available for export. It is currently unclear when these two plants will resume full production. In total, nearly 20 percent of global urea export capacity was offline for a period of time in the quarter, while India has been seeking to import urea for its planting season. All of these factors contributed to a tighter global supply-demand balance for nitrogen fertilizers at the end of the planting season and the normal seasonal price declines for the summer fill and fall prepay UAN and ammonia have been much narrower over this year. In addition to the supply tightness across the fertilizer market, the potential for tariffs on Russian fertilizer exports represents another wild card that could have significant impacts on pricing in the near term. Natural gas prices in Europe have declined slightly since our last earnings call, but remain around $11 per MMBTU currently, while U.S. gas prices continue to range between $3 and $4 per MMBTU. Europe has refilled its natural gas inventories at a slower rate than expected, and there are concerns about the ability to replenish the inventory to targeted levels before winter of 2025. The cost to produce ammonia in Europe has remained durably at the high end of the global cost curve, and production remains below historical levels, which has created opportunities for U.S. Gulf Coast producers to export ammonia to Europe for upgrade. We continue to believe Europe faces structural natural gas supply challenges that will likely remain in effect for 2026. At our Coffeeville facility, we're working on a detailed design and construction plan to utilize natural gas and additional hydrogen from the adjacent Coffeeville refinery as alternative feedstocks to third-party pet coke in addition to expanding nameplate ammonia capacity by approximately 8%. We expect to begin implementing the project this fall. To remind everyone, this project would give us the ability to choose the optimal feedstock mix between natural gas and pet coke, and this would make Coffeeville the only nitrogen fertilizer plant in the U.S. with that feedstock flexibility. We also continue to execute certain de-bottlenecking projects at both plants that are expected to improve reliability and production rates, including the expansion of our DEF production and loadout capacity. The goal of these projects is to support our target of operating our plant at utilization rates above 95% of nameplate capacity, excluding the impact of turnaround. We have water quality upgrade projects at both plants underway, and the electricity reliability upgrade project at Coffeeville is also progressing in partnership with the city. During the upcoming fall turnaround at Coffeeville, we plan to install a nitrous oxide abatement unit, after which we will have nitrous oxide abatement units on all four of our nitric acid plants. This would further our strategy of reducing the carbon footprint of our operations, and we are continuing our efforts to have Coffeeville certified as the low-carbon nitrogen fertilizer production facility. The funds needed for the 2025 projects are coming from the reserves taken over the last two years, and the board elected to continue reserving capital in the second quarter. While the board looks at reserves every quarter, I would expect them to continue to elect to reserve some capital, and we anticipate holding higher levels of cash related to these projects in the near term as we ramp up execution and spending, which we expect will take place over the next two to three years. We have a planned 30-day turnaround at our Coffeeville facility, starting in early October. In addition to the normal open, clean, and inspect of many of our units, we will be replacing the ammonia converter internals and installing the nitrous oxide abatement unit. The expense for the turnaround is expected to be approximately $15 million, and we have the cash to fund the turnaround expenses and reserves. The second quarter continued to demonstrate the benefits of focusing on safety, reliability, and performance. In the quarter, we executed on all the critical elements of our business plan, which include safely and reliably operating our plants, with a keen focus on the health and safety of our employees, contractors, and communities, brutally managing costs, being judicious with capital, maximizing our marketing and logistics capabilities, and targeting opportunities to reduce our carbon footprint. Yesterday, our parent company, CBR Energy, announced that its CEO, David Lampp, would be retiring at year end. As part of the transition, I have agreed to take on his role starting on January 1, 2026, in addition to my role as CEO of CBR Partners. I will continue to focus on having our great team execute CBR Partners' mission to deliver safe, reliable operations and generate attractive unit holder returns. We aren't going to lose focus. In closing, I'd like to thank our employees for their safe execution during a few brief outages, achieving 91% ammonia utilization, and the solid delivery on our marketing and logistics plans, resulting in a distribution of $3.89 per common unit for the second quarter. With that, we are ready to answer any questions. Christine?

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. The confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question comes from a line of Rob McGuire with Granite Research. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning, Mark, Dana, and Richard.

Good

morning, Rob. Hey, so a couple of questions on UAN. Can you just comment on the timing of your UAN summer fill program, what your thoughts are in terms of getting out there, and are you seeing enough strength to hold pricing without needing to offer discounts?

So, Rob, we have not yet completed the summer UAN fill. We have completed the summer fill and fall prepay for ammonia, but the season was extended into July. There was a lot of demand for UAN at the end of the season, so that went into July, and inventories are very low. So the fill season got pushed back. We do expect it in the next couple of weeks. And the prices typically, and you've been through this before, Rob, but typically would see a pretty good, maybe a 25 or 30% decline in price from the end season price to the summer fill, and that percentage decline is going to be a lot less this year because of the tightness and the supply demand. So it's not going to be at season prices, but it won't be at the big discount that it typically is.

Okay, I appreciate you getting me on track there. And then is it safe to assume that the third quarter UAN pricing, I mean, it's going to drop, it sounds like, at some point, given the seasonality you just discussed, but I guess do you have an outlook on ammonia pricing through the fall application, and then would you be open to sharing that?

What I would tell you is that the fall pricing was, I'd say, relatively similar to the spring pricing. It depends on the geography, but we expect the fall to look a lot like the spring. And again, typically we would expect that to be a pretty good discount from the spring, but the ammonia will be priced around where the spring price was for fall.

Okay, I appreciate that. And then just switching gears here, direct operating costs increased to $60.5 million in the second quarter, up from $54.5 million in the first quarter, but the gross ammonia production was down modestly. Was there higher than usual maintenance and repair costs in the second quarter number, and just sort of related to the new control systems installed at East Butte? Is there any background? Well, let me know along those lines.

Yeah, a couple of factors there. We did have a bunch of repairs go through in the quarter with the outages that we had, and we did draw on the inventory. So that would draw out more DOE because we sort of effectively made it in the first quarter and shifted it in the second quarter. So that would tend to lift the DOE there.

Got it. And then you guided the third quarter direct operating costs to $60 to $60.5 million. Can you give me an idea of what the breakdown there is? I think Jamie might have talked about that, but just with regards to maintenance versus growth capex?

Oh, that's for the year. For the year. I'll let Dane answer. You're saying capex or DOE?

Yeah, I think we can trust both there. Which one are we looking at?

The direct operating costs for guidance was $60 to $65 million, I thought.

Yeah, so as it relates to the DOE, we're looking at $60 to $65 million. We're expecting to continue to see the elevated natural gas and electricity costs that we saw in the second quarter. In addition, we have the work on the Clark Controls. There'll be some expense associated with that as well. Outside of that, nothing really abnormal that we would expect in our OPEX for the third quarter. Yeah,

one of the things that we've seen this year, Rob, in the summer in particular, is elevated electricity pricing. And we haven't had any brownouts or blackouts, but the pricing that we're seeing come through at peak demand periods has been higher this year than last year. So that's lifted up our DOE a bit. And gas is higher year over year. That'll start to normalize in the second half, but it was higher in the first half. So all of those are kind of, they're all little pieces that add up to the total.

Thanks. I appreciate that. And then with regards to the unplanned downtime, is that, is everything okay now? Or is that part of your expectation of utilization running a little lower? I know you're going to turn around as well.

Yeah, the planned part was okay. And we had said on the last call, we're upgrading our control system for our compressors at our East Butte facility. And it requires us to take an outage on the compressor. So that reduces our rate for a period of time until the control system is installed and then tuned up and brought into operation. So that's a good thing. But the unplanned, we had a couple outages and we dealt with those issues and don't expect that to recur. But there's, there are always going to be unplanned outages, you know, in events. But we've been pretty good about either avoiding them or dealing with them and keeping them as short as possible. And so we just, we have several factors that happened, you know, at Coffville and East Dubuque in the quarter. So we lost a few days in both plans.

Okay, I appreciate that. And by the way, Mark, congratulations on being named the incoming CEO of CVR as well. And I guess you're going to do both roles. But do you envision at some point naming a new head to CVR Partners?

You know, like it's, you know, we're in the first 24 hours, so I don't want to try to speculate on the go-forward there. But, you know, CVR Partners is an important part of the family and a valuable asset for CVR Energy. And, you know, I intend to continue to manage and follow it closely and, you know, do the best that we can to maximize returns there. So not planning on giving that up in the short run. We have a great team in place, and so I can count on them. And so I'm going to, you know, at least initially I will start with both roles. So you're not getting rid of me here,

Rob. Appreciate that. We're glad you're there. And then with regards, do you have a view on industry consolidation at this point with the new administration? Do you think they're a smidge more indulgent towards consolidation?

Obviously, you know, this administration seems to be more, I'd say, look more favorably upon consolidation in the context of lowering costs and ultimately lowering costs, you know, out to consumers. I don't, you know, like I've always felt like there probably was some more consolidation to occur in the nitrogen fertilizer space. It is a global business and some of the geopolitical events, I think, are causing people to reconsider, you know, where they own assets, where they're a producer. And so it wouldn't surprise me to see more consolidation down the road. The one thing that we are watching, which is obviously emerged here in the last week, is the potential merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. We think that that may very well open up some new lanes for us that we're not currently in. And I'm not sure there'll be another merger consideration there like in the BNTSX, but, you know, that's, you know, I think that's a sign of kind of, you know, where we are. But it could very well spill into the fertilizer space in terms of more consolidation. You heard my comments, you know, we, the U.S. has become an exporter to Europe for ammonia. They're keeping their upgrade plants up and running, but they're taking more ammonia from the U.S. And so, you know, I think production capacity in the United States is more valuable because it is where we have cheap feedstock. We have good logistics and, you know, and now with a lot of the carbon capture going on, we're increasingly lower carbon intensity. So I think the U.S. could be, you know, a durable export, an exporter of fertilizer, which would make production assets more valuable in the U.S.

That's great. One last question with regards to your brownfield reliability of redundancy projects. Could you give us an idea of where your capacity is today and what those projects will add in terms of volume?

Sure. And so what I said in the remarks on coffee mill, you know, we think we can get somewhere in the ballpark of about 100 tons a day of ammonia production out of the projects that we've been talking about for the last few quarters. And at East Dubuque, we're looking at, you know, potential projects that might add 5% plus to our capacity there. So, you know, those are and those if you look at what it cost to build new capacity, we're getting a bargain price for these brownfield projects where we're adding capacity for a fraction of what it would cost to build actual new production capacity. So they're great investments for us because it's a lot cheaper to build brownfield than it is to try to build a new one.

That makes sense. And can you just for me, are all those projects maintenance or growth cap X or a mix?

Those are all in the growth, what Dane described as the growth cap X that are being reserved. So that doesn't, you know, we've been reserving against that for a period of time and that doesn't really come out of the, you know, the maintenance side of the capital budget. So if you kind of think about reliability, we're spending our ongoing maintenance dollars to maintain our reliability and address issues, plus address and what I call bigger bottleneck issues or bigger reliability, single point of failures at the two plants. And that's those are the dollars that are being reserved in the growth capital. But we get we're going to get production capacity for that. So it's not, you know, it's a combination of reliability plus which just means, you know, higher if we operate in higher nameplate capacity, we're going to have more production. Plus, we're going to increase the nameplate. So ideally, what we would do is higher percentage of a higher nameplate. That's the goal.

But that's great. Thank you so much for all your time and answering my question. Okay, thank you, Rob.

Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I'd now like to turn the floor back over to management for closing comments.

But one and again, one to thank everybody for being on the call today and we look forward to discussing our third quarter results in October, early November. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation and have a wonderful day.