Calumet, Inc. /DE Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good morning, and welcome to the Calumet Inc. Third Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to John Kompa, Investor Relations for Calumet. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Chloe. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. With me on today's call are Todd Borgmann, CEO; David Lunin, EVP and Chief Financial Officer; Bruce Fleming, EVP, Montana Renewables and Corporate Development; and Scott Obermeier, EVP of Specialties. You may now download the slides that accompany the remarks made on today's conference call, which can be accessed in the IR section of our website at calumet.com. Also, a webcast replay of this call will be available on our site within a few hours. Turning to the presentation. On Slide 2, you can find our cautionary statements. I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, we may provide various forward-looking statements. Please refer to our press release that was issued this morning as well as our latest filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a list of factors that may affect our results and cause them to differ from our expectations. As we turn to Slide 3, I'll now pass the call to Todd.

Thanks, John, and welcome to Calumet's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. This past quarter was strong both financially and strategically. Calumet generated $92.5 million of adjusted EBITDA with tax attributes, and we're hitting key milestones outlined earlier this year. At Montana Renewables, we remain on track for our MaxSAF expansion in the first half of 2026, and our SAF marketing plan is progressing well ahead of schedule, with approximately 100 million gallons of post-expansion volumes secured through contracts. Across Calumet, our cost and reliability initiatives are exceeding expectations, and our commercial organization continues to sell increasing production into stable high-margin accounts. Let me delve into these themes, beginning with costs before David discusses the financials. In the third quarter, Calumet reduced operating costs by another $24 million compared to the same quarter last year. Operations improved rapidly throughout 2024, and while we anticipated some tapering in the second half, the rate of savings actually accelerated this past quarter. Year-to-date, operating costs are $60 million lower than last year, and we have a roadmap for further operational excellence opportunities in the coming years. Reliability has also seen improvements, with year-to-date production increasing nearly 600,000 barrels compared to last year, largely in our specialties business. Cost and reliability initiatives combined have lowered operating costs by $3.37 a barrel across the system. In our Specialty Products & Solutions segment, the third quarter marked a record production quarter. Despite challenges in the broader specialty chemicals industry, our commercial team sold over 20,000 barrels a day at margins exceeding $60 per barrel while rebuilding inventory after the Freeport turnaround. Additionally, we experienced strong fuel performance in both margin and volume, highlighting Calumet's integrated model—where specialties provide stable earnings, and fuels offer variable upside. Currently, our excess cash flow is being directed towards reducing debt and will later support further growth in specialties. I'd also like to point out the ongoing growth in our Performance Brands segment. Year-to-date EBITDA is up compared to last year, despite the divestiture of the Royal Purple Industrial business earlier in 2025. Our commercial excellence program is yielding excellent results, and TRUFUEL is poised for another record EBITDA year, even without significant Gulf Coast weather events, thanks to its increased presence in approximately 4,000 new Walmart stores. Moving to Montana Renewables, we’ve observed critical regulatory signals pointing to an industry recovery. We continue to enhance our competitive edge in all margin environments with advantageous logistics costs and product mix. However, the industry still faces challenges with weak renewable diesel margins. In the third quarter, realized margins were lower than anticipated due to a widening feedstock physical basis. Fortunately, this has reverted to more normal conditions in October. Despite low industry utilization, we are seeing shutdowns in production. We anticipate that an increase in biomass-based diesel demand will lead to a stronger RVO, urging idle facilities to restart. However, biodiesel producers need assurance they can cover fixed costs, or else the RIN will need to rise or feedstock prices to fall. This is a change from the previous two years, where many producers barely covered variable costs while hoping for a better future. This quarter, we executed our first $25 million PTC sale, validating this monetization strategy, and subsequently sold another $15 million in October as we trend towards a more typical tax credit environment following the 45Z credit extension. As we near the launch of our MaxSAF expansion next year, we completed a successful test run confirming our ability to generate 120 million to 150 million annual gallons of SAF. Although this involved a temporary cost in volume, the test provided vital data for our engineering optimization. We have about 75% of our MaxSAF expansion either contracted or in the final DOE review stage, positioning us well for the next update. Our offtake model is diversifying, featuring a mix of customers, including airlines and various scale buyers. The SAF business resembles our Specialty Products sector, characterized by flexible logistics and tailored sales approaches. Recently, we opened our physical truck rack for SAF sales in Montana, facilitating the sale of physical barrels to familiar regional outlets. We aim to optimize our sales across markets, ensuring a diversified and stable customer base while maintaining SAF premiums in the $1 to $2 per gallon range. Looking ahead, we expect global supply and demand for SAF to balance in 2025, moving toward a deficit in 2026 due to increasing mandates. Our conservative approach to voluntary demand modeling has proven optimistic in light of recent cancellations and delays of major projects, coupled with growing voluntary demand. We've positioned ourselves well in the market, establishing ourselves on all major Scope 1 and Scope 3 registries, giving us a distinct early mover advantage as we prepare for the launch of our MaxSAF 150 project. Lastly, European demand has also shown encouraging signs, with mandates increasing and SAF prices rising significantly, while feedstock prices remain stable. The potential penalties for non-compliance could strengthen the SAF premiums we’re securing. We aim to leverage our customer-focused strategy and first-mover advantage in sustainable aviation fuel. Now, I'll turn the call over to David for a deeper dive into the quarter’s financials.

Thanks, Todd. Before I get into the quarter results, let me address an error in our reported Q1 and Q2 2025 cash flow statements, which we discussed in an 8-K filing this morning. In accounting for a series of transactions during the first quarter, we misclassified debt extinguishment costs and inventory financing flows as cash flow from operating activities rather than cash flow from financing activity. The correction of the error will result in an approximate $80 million increase to cash flows from operations for the first quarter. Total free cash flow, the income statement, balance sheet and adjusted EBITDA all remain unchanged, and we will restate Q1 and Q2 financials alongside our Q3 filing. With that, let's get into the quarter. We reported $92.5 million of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter, which was the strongest quarter in a number of years. We were able to reduce our restricted group debt by over $40 million despite the third quarter being our largest cash interest period of the year. Deleveraging continues to be a strategic priority, which we expect to continue in Q4 given the strong business performance. Further, during the quarter and after the ruling on the small refinery exemptions, we reduced our outstanding balance sheet RIN obligation by over $320 million. As Todd mentioned, we also sold our first $25 million of PTCs at MRL, demonstrating the ability to turn those into cash as the market has opened up and started to normalize following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. We look forward to more ratable monetization of our tax credits over the coming periods. Turning to Slide 5. Our Specialty Products & Solutions segment generated $80.2 million of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter. The third quarter of 2025 reflected the strong commercial momentum in our Specialty Products portfolio as well as the benefits of our overall improved reliability and cost discipline. This was the fourth consecutive quarter that our Specialty Products posted sales volume exceeding 20,000 barrels per day, and coupled with strong margins, we continue to demonstrate the resiliency of our specialty business. Despite broad industry chatter over the year that specialty markets have been a little soft, our sales team has demonstrated the continued ability to take advantage of our integrated asset base and diversified markets to continue to place our products at over $60 a barrel. Further, we posted third quarter production volume gains of 8% compared to the prior year. Our production has grown reliably over the past few years as we've improved our operating discipline. We look forward to continuing that trend through the remainder of the year and into next year. Our steady production environment also enabled the capture of stronger crack environment as fuel margins increased significantly year-over-year, which we view as upside in our integrated model as we continually optimize our crude slate and product yields to capture market opportunities. To begin this year, we gained access to a new crude oil supply chain, including the ability to target specific segregated or blended crudes in Cushing and further north in the DJ Basin, at the same time, reducing our pipeline tariff. Year-to-date, this improvement has driven a $15.3 million decrease in transportation costs and provides even further ability to dial in our assets and feed to a specific use. We remain focused on driving additional operational improvements in the segment and look to further reduce our cost per barrel in the segment. As we said during our second quarter earnings call, strong operations to not only increase volume and reduce costs, but also supports increased margin as well as it allows our commercial team to place more volume to secure contracted homes rather than relying on spot market sales. Moving to Slide 6 and our Performance Brands segment. We are pleased to post another strong quarter driven by our commercial excellence program and growing recognition of our brands. You'll remember that we sold the Royal Purple Industrial business earlier this year, and despite that EBITDA being fully reflected in the prior year financials and not this quarter, the segment was essentially flat year-over-year. We also continue to benefit from our integration strategy as we gear up to target markets that best unlock the intrinsic value that exists in our ability to vertically integrate where and when it makes sense to do so. Last, as Todd mentioned earlier, the third quarter results reflected strong volumes and margins in our TRUFUEL brand. Not only is TRUFUEL growing on the shelves and with brand awareness, it's also benefiting from favorable procurement initiatives as the team has successfully leveraged its growing volume over the past couple of years. Moving to Slide 7. Our Montana/Renewables segment generated adjusted EBITDA with tax attributes of $17.1 million in the third quarter compared to $14.6 million in the prior year period. Montana Renewables specifically posted slightly negative EBITDA with tax attributes of $3.5 million for our 87% share. As I mentioned earlier, we successfully monetized $25 million of PTCs during the third quarter and continue to monetize PTCs at improving price levels as we continue to expect to trend towards roughly 95% capture on those sales. Earlier, you heard about the SAF test run that was important to derisking our project, and this run meant the units slowed down temporarily during the quarter, resulting in a couple of million dollars of lost margin alongside some wider-than-normal feedstock basis, which increased feed costs temporarily more than RIN offsets, and this has reset to more normal levels here recently. While we've gained a lot of regulatory clarity this year, the industry is now just waiting for the rules to be finalized. With that in hand, we believe the business is set up for a strong recovery in 2026 based on the preliminary RVO targets that were announced by the Trump EPA. Fortunately, the core building blocks of our renewables business, marquee customers, cost-advantaged assets, unmatched feedstock and end market proximity and an improving yield slate remain intact. Combined with our relentless focus on cost reduction, we remain well positioned for the rebound that we expect to inevitably occur once we see the EPA land the proverbial plane on the RVO. In fact, our operating costs, excluding SG&A, reached $0.40 per gallon and was our eighth straight quarter of improvement excluding a turnaround in the fourth quarter of 2024. In the interim, we continue to increase our outlets for SAF as demonstrated by our recent announcement of on-site blending and shipping capabilities. Initial distribution is through AEG's fuels network, and they are already proving to be a strong partner. On-site blending capabilities enables MaxSAF sales from the truck rack to local and regional service, further broadens the SAF market outside of major airports. This investment also allows us to strip credits and monetize SAF outside of direct offtakers. On the Montana asphalt side, the third quarter is typically a good one. This quarter, in particular, we saw one of the strongest quarters in recent memory and a $14 million year-over-year gain. Our polymer modified asphalt business continues to be an advantage as well as the niche fuels distribution and with costs dramatically improved, we are pleased to see the impact on the bottom line this quarter. Thank you for your time today. We remain focused on driving meaningful free cash flow generation as we conclude 2025 while steadily marching towards major value-creating opportunities that rest ahead for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator for any questions.

The first question comes from Alexa Petrick with Goldman Sachs.

My first question is just on as we think about the MaxSAF expansion, and I think you've also talked about being on track to do 120 million to 150 million gallons of annualized SAF production in 2Q. What are the gating items? Just as we think about operations on the ground, what are some of the checklist items?

Alexa, this is Bruce. Very little, frankly. The unit as we stood it up back in 2022 was known to have some latent capacity. We've got a couple of tactical constraint removal things that we'll do during the scheduled turnaround, a few tens of millions of dollars. We're pretty excited about the leverage that implies on our cost of goods sold, including the capital charge. The reason we've ranged the output is we'll see about catalyst performance in the new configuration. Probably, we're being a little conservative there, but give us some room to grow into that maybe.

Then can you talk a little bit about some of these offtake agreements? I think there's also some commentary that you've been in some final conversations as well. Where do those stand?

Bruce again, thank you. The way that we've set this up is the same thing we did in 2022 pre-commissioning of the whole business. Last April, I asked our marketing team to go ahead and presell the increase in SAF that will be coming in spring. We're halfway through that 12-month program to get it placed, and we're well above halfway through signing people up. There's a mixture of executed and in-service contracts. There are a couple of material contracts that are effectively complete but require the DOE to approve them, and so they're with the DOE. Then we've got a pipeline of additional origination that we're pretty excited about. As I said a second ago, as we probably grow into maybe more capability than we've advertised, we've got the customer standing by to pick that up. The market shows every characteristic of being supply short. Again, I can't overemphasize how exciting this is.

The next question comes from Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright.

Congrats on the pretty solid results. For Montana Renewables, I know you touched on it, Todd, a little bit, but the gross margin issue, is it primarily just stemming from the current market conditions? Or is there anything in the sort of production ramp that you are playing with that may be causing near-term pressure?

Amit, it's Todd. No, I think nothing outside of what I talked about in the prepared remarks earlier. I'd say there were a couple of things abnormal to the quarter, one to us and one to the industry as a whole. The one to us was we talked about something the volume a little bit to run the test that Bruce was talking about, which should give us a lot of confidence around our ability going forward on MaxSAF. That cost a couple of million gallons. Obviously, that's back to full capacity. Then the other one that was more, I'd say, just broader industry is typically, all feed just trade off of an index to CBO. There's always a little bit of lag, and there can be volatility from time to time that over time just balances out. What we saw during the quarter was a lot of the physical basis. Feedstock was, we said in the call earlier, about $0.20 a gallon more expensive than our normal index margin thinking would imply. Basically, $0.20 outside of CI parity. Now that's fixed. There'll be times when it's a little bit better than that, right? There's a little bit of volatility, of course, between the grains, and that's something that gives us an advantage to switch, quite frankly, over time. The industry did see that in the quarter. Again, you kind of add that to the downtime in volume, and that really speaks to probably the difference between this quarter and last quarter.

Just a follow-up sort of on that. What's the primary feedstock you're using for the MRL right now?

This is Bruce. To be honest, there's not a primary feedstock. One of our key competitive advantages is short supply chains that can access any of the principal classes of feed. We are very, very dynamic as we reoptimize each month. We think that we're gaining competitive advantage versus some of our peers with longer supply chains and we shift gears very, very quickly. With that said, if you wanted to think broadly, you can think 1/3 vegetable oil, 1/3 corn oil and 1/3 tallow and protein oils.

Just last one for me. When you sort of look at 2026, it looks like the operating side of the story is running pretty well. Are most of the risks and opportunities based on how the macro plays out for you guys?

Yes, as we approach 2026, we're very optimistic for several reasons. First, we've made significant operational improvements and we expect to maintain and build on these advancements. Additionally, the regulatory challenges that have impacted Montana Renewables and the biofuels sector in general are beginning to subside. The Renewable Volume Obligations that have affected us in 2024 and 2025 will soon be finalized, which we believe will enhance industry margins. This is crucial since we have only just managed to stay above breakeven this year in a challenging market. As the overall industry improves with a better macroeconomic backdrop, we will be well-positioned to capitalize on that. Furthermore, aside from the index margins, our ability to add Sustainable Aviation Fuel presents a significant opportunity. This not only provides substantial upside but also mitigates risk since it will be less affected by general index margin fluctuations due to the SAF premium.

The next question comes from Jason Gabelman with TD Cowen.

I don't believe there was much talk about small refinery exemptions in your prepared remarks. Just wondering how that impacts, one, your financials directly? Two, your view on the RIN balances moving forward?

Jason, Bruce, I think that's probably a two-parter, but redirect me if I'm off target. Our two small refineries, you could call them micro refineries by industry scale, have always qualified on the merits. We're confident we will continue to do so. Look, when you come to carry forward, we're all waiting for the EPA to process the public comments, which I'm sure they've received 17 terabytes of, but that's a policy question, and we'll all find out together. Am I responsive to your interest?

Yes. I guess I'm just wondering more directly, if there's any impact from the exemptions that were granted, if there was any financial impact to you, positive or negative?

Well, David covered that as you're aware, the balance sheet has had an inventory accounting style accrual while all of our cases were pending now that they've been resolved generally favorably. We've extinguished 80-plus percent of that and figure, I believe David was $329 million.

Then on the comments around kind of feedstocks impacting 3Q MRL results. It sounds like that's been alleviated in the near term here. I'm wondering what do you think caused that feedstock tightness? If we get a ramp-up in renewable diesel capacity as a result of a more bullish 2026 RVO, is there a potential that feedstock prices can tighten again and impact your margins? Or do you see the 3Q impacts as very transitory in nature?

Jason, it's Todd. I'll start off and see if Bruce wants to jump in. We think it's transitory, but it happens, right? There's a general lag on the physical side that happens from time to time. We see the same thing in the crude oil markets when you get an overbuild or shortness just due to kind of a physical near-term shortage in like Cushing, for example. I don't think that it's anything that we should think about changing any sort of long-term view. In fact, if you go back over time, there's never been a lasting difference to CBO outside of CI parity, and we wouldn't expect that to change. This is kind of just normal volatility. We've seen times where it's helpful this quarter, it was negative for the industry, but I don't see anything that would impact that going forward. In fact, we have so much more capacity and availability of feedstocks than even the currently forecasted RVO would suggest that it's hard to imagine a feedstock shortage. Even if there was, you should see that play out through kind of the base COP margin and not some sort of physical basis differential.

The next question comes from Greg Brody with Bank of America.

I don't normally do this, but congrats. A lot of great developments this quarter. In particular, probably removing the Gregg Brody slide is one of the big ones. Just operationally, you guys really demonstrated a lot of improvement, so congrats to everybody. Maybe you mentioned the deleveraging is still the priority. You're starting to generate cash. Can you talk a little bit about what you think is next to sort of help address the maturities? Just to give us a sense of how you're thinking about it today?

Yes, I'll take this and see if David wants to add anything. I mentioned last quarter that we expect strong cash flow from the business, especially in the second half. This, along with the sale of RPI earlier this year, should be enough to cover the '26 notes. We are looking beyond that. As we consider the management of the '27 maturity and our ability to reduce debt, it involves cash flows from our organic operations and potential strategic activities, as long as they enhance both our debt and equity positions without detracting from our integrated story. That remains an option. Ultimately, it's a partial monetization of Montana Renewables. Not much has changed in that regard. We are following our plan as we prepare to take the next step with MRL. As discussed during the call, our next milestone is to prove the success of the MaxSAF expansion and solidify the RVO. With a couple of strong quarters following those events, we will be ready to take that final step.

You're refinancing some of the 2027s. Is that part of the equation potentially?

Yes. Look, I think refinancings are always and just managing the timing are always part of just the general menu. As we sit right here today, we don't have anything active or anything specifically in the plan. Bigger picture, we're looking to execute the longer-term deleveraging strategy, which is a reduction of an additional $600 million to $800 million of debt. We have plenty of opportunities to do that. If there was some sort of opportunity or reason to have refinancing as part of that, then we'd certainly be happy to do that in a step of optimization, but most importantly, we're focused on kind of the organic cash flows, potential strategic activity and monetization of Montana Renewables to permanently reduce that debt.

One last question for you. You mentioned that you've begun to monetize the PTCs. What are the realizations on those regarding the discount to the actual PTC EBITDA that you are seeing?

Yes. You have to go back. The PTCs were kind of new at the beginning of this year and kind of weren't fully clarified until kind of the Big Beautiful Bill. Even today, some of the ultimate kind of final rules are even completed. I think we expect over time to kind of monetize closer to 95%. I think the initial monetizations were probably closer to 90% and then we continue to close the gap as we monetize more and have more term sheets as we look further out. We've seen the market get a lot deeper and a lot more interest as they normalize earlier in the year was still new for people to digest.

No. I think we expect to kind of monetize them more ratably. Todd mentioned in his remarks that we also monetized a portion in October. We're just kind of working through them.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to John Kompa, Investor Relations for Calumet for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Chloe. On behalf of Todd and the entire management team, I'd like to thank our shareholders for joining our call today and our continued support. Have a great rest of the day. Thanks.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.