TETRA Technologies, Inc. (TTI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the Second Annual Winter Wonderland Best Ideas Conference. The next presenting company is TETRA Technologies, Inc. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the over to today's host, Elijio Serrano, Chief Financial Officer of TETRA Technologies, Inc. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Matthew. TETRA appreciates the opportunity to again present this year at the Winter Wonderland Best Ideas investor Conference. A copy of our presentation is available on our website. Please be sure and download a copy there. As a reminder, our forward-looking statements and industry and market data material is also available on our website. For today's presentation, it will be myself, Elijio Serrano, Chief Financial Officer; and also Brady Murphy, President and Chief Executive Officer of TETRA. We're going to go through our materials and then allow time for some Q&A at the end. Brady?

Thank you, Elijio. We'll start with some investment highlights for TETRA. TETRA is a well-established global innovation leader for high-value completion fluids, water management for the unconventional oil and gas markets and a very synergistic industrial chemicals business. We're uniquely positioned for a multiyear oil and gas market recovery and a long-term accelerating low-carbon energy market. Some highlights from the business side. We have a diverse revenue stream, consisting of international, U.S. land, oil and gas and, as mentioned, the Industrial Chemicals segment. We're a leading water management and water recycling company and the largest U.S. market in the Permian Basin, recycling over 1 billion barrels of produced water in 2021. And we have a key mineral resource base and critical chemistry expertise for the energy transition, which we'll discuss in some detail. I think the chart on the lower right shows that the company has performed very well throughout the industry's most difficult downturns during the past 5 years, including the COVID-19 impact in 2020 and in 2021. Well, today, we're a much leaner and, I think, stronger company than we were pre-pandemic and we're confident our future results will demonstrate that. The agenda we will step through today is cover some recent highlights, talk about our ESG story, including the low-carbon energy business strategies that we have in place. We will give a summary of our Completion Fluids & Products business segment, our Water & Flowback segment. And Elijio will take us through a financial overview and summary. So for recent highlights, we will be covering our fourth quarter financial results and highlights at our earnings call on March 1. But within the past few months, we have achieved some very strategic milestones as it relates to our low carbon energy initiatives. So we'll summarize them here. I won't get into a lot of detail on each of these because we will be talking about these in more detail as we go through our presentation. But I do want to highlight them to kick off the presentation. The first one is we received the final technical report for our bromine and lithium-brine property in the Smackover Formation in Arkansas. That summary concluded an exploration target estimate to contain between 2.54 million and 8.58 million tons of elemental bromine and an exploration target estimated to contain between 85,000 and 286,000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent. On that particular segment, those are the leases that TETRA has 100% exclusive rights to both the bromine and the lithium. We'll also talk about the Standard Lithium acreage with their option agreement in place. We do have a new well planned for completion in mid-March. We're getting ready to spud that well. That will allow us to obtain the brine samples and the fluid analysis to complete what we believe will be an inferred resource report elevating from the current exploration target that we've completed thus far. As it relates to the Standard Lithium agreement and relationship, they completed their preliminary economic assessment, PEA, on the TETRA lithium option property. A very favorable report, increasing the inferred resources on the property to 1.2 million metric tons with a pretax internal rate of return of 40.5%. If you look at the PEA report, that will show the royalty payments due to TETRA, assuming they were to develop those properties over 20 years with lithium current -- lithium prices in the PEA at $14,500 per metric ton. Of course, we've seen a pretty strong run-up in lithium prices as the graph on the right shows today. That's over $55,000 per metric ton. And since our royalty agreement is revenue-based, there'll be a direct correlation between pricing and our royalty stream at the time of that development. Some additional recent highlights involve some very strategic partnerships that we are very pleased with, very confident with as one of them was with Eos Energy. We signed a strategic term sheet regarding a long-term agreement with Eos to supply our ultra-pure zinc bromide as part of their electrolyte within their long duration energy storage technology. We'll talk a little bit more detail later in the presentation. And as we've mentioned last year, when we signed an MOU with CarbonFree in May of 2021, we've recently agreed on a joint intellectual property agreement with CarbonFree for our proprietary calcium chloride produced CO2 free, which we think is a key enabling step for their SkyCycle technology. Moving on to our sustainability story within TETRA. We've had a long tradition of strong environmental and sustainable story within the organization. We mentioned the recycling and reusing of produced water, one of the leaders in the industry, a continuous innovation as it relates to cleaner and a more environmentally friendly completion fluids, eliminating zinc in deepwater high density fluids offshore. So we're building on that legacy with our low-carbon energy initiatives that we'll get into more detail on. On the governance side, we announced yesterday with a press release, very pleased that Sharon McGee will be joining our Board of Directors. Sharon brings a great background and expertise in both lithium production and the bromides market. And so we're very pleased to add her as our second, really, kind of chemicals background-focused director to help us round out our Board for that portion of our strategy going forward. And of course, we have a strong tradition in our HSE culture of TETRA and continue to get customer recognition for our performance there. I think this slide summarizes maybe what we see as leveraging our current resources and capabilities for the energy transition. Starting with the Smackover leases. TETRA acquired this acreage years ago because of the richness of bromine in the brines to support our Completion Fluids business. We have a 20-year supply contractual agreement today for our bromine needs. And so thus far, we've not developed this acreage for production. But with the recovering oil and gas market in a new and rapidly growing market using zinc bromide for energy storage, we will require significantly larger volumes of bromine in the future. Fortunately, our brine leases are very rich in bromine with an exploration target up to 8.6 million tons. For comparison, the USGS, the U.S. Geological Survey, in 2021 estimated the total proven reserves in the U.S. of 11 million tons. Over the years, we developed a high-purity zinc bromide completion fluid solution that is well suited for the energy storage technology as a key component of the electrolyte. The zinc bromide battery technology provides longer charge-and-discharge cycles to lithium batteries and are a safe, well-suited option for maximizing the efficiency of solar and wind farms. We'll cover our strategic relationship with one such technology company in an upcoming slide. In recent years, we discovered that not only were our leases rich in bromine but also in lithium. In 2017, we signed an option agreement with Standard Lithium for an annual fee and shares that they have the right to apply their direct lithium extraction technology to extract lithium while we retain all the rights of the bromine in that acreage. In addition, TETRA maintains 5,000 gross acres beyond the Standard Lithium agreement, where we have 100% of both the lithium and the bromine rights. As mentioned shortly, we'll be drilling a well in this section that will allow us to move from an exploration target to an inferred resource for both bromine and lithium. Based on those results, we will decide on a development strategy and quickly move into a preliminary engineering assessment. The third area for TETRA to participate is in the carbon capture area. Last year, we signed an MOU with CarbonFree, which uses a patented process to react CO2 flue gas with calcium chloride to produce a globally marketed product called precipitated calcium carbonate. As a global leader in the production of various grades of calcium chloride, we are uniquely positioned to partner with CarbonFree and, in fact, have made a $5 million investment in that company. A little bit more detail on our relationship with Eos in the energy storage side. Again, we mentioned zinc bromide as a key part of the electrolyte. We are in the final stages of negotiating a definitive agreement, moving from our term sheet that we signed several weeks ago. Eos has, as of their third quarter earnings, $151 million of booked orders, of which we are supplying PureFlow for their '22 manufacturing production schedule and a very impressive $3.7 billion of project pipeline. Now just taking that project pipeline, $3.7 billion represents about 22 gigawatt hours of project pipeline. When you convert the 22 gigawatt-hours into the amount of bromine that's required, it represents nearly 20% of the current global production of bromine. So this is a meaningful opportunity, a meaningful growth area for the company. And of course, we're well positioned to leverage the resource base that we have in Arkansas to take advantage of this opportunity. We also have a patented process for producing the high purity zinc bromide. The picture you see here is our West Memphis plant in Arkansas in fairly close proximity to the bromine leases that we have. A little bit more granular view of our lease position in Arkansas. You can see the TETRA acreage shown in blue, next to Albemarle to the right of us, somewhat close proximity to the LANXESS property, all in the southern portion of the state of Arkansas. If you blow up the TETRA portion, you can see the lighter yellow shade, where we have the agreement with Standard Lithium, where again, they have the option to develop the lithium but we retain 100% of the rights of bromine in that acreage. And then the pink section is the 5,000 acres where we continue to have all of the bromine rights but also all of the lithium rights within that acreage. That is the acreage where we will be drilling the well and hope to be able to have an inferred resources report sometime in the second quarter. I think it's important as we talk about lithium to talk about environment options and impacts with lithium production today. Most of the lithium production that is produced in the world today is either through hard rock mining or solar evaporation, each of which has some challenges as it relates to the carbon footprint and the environmental impact. Direct lithium extraction is still evolving technology. Standard Lithium's technologies, we believe, is one of the leading technologies in this area, thus our partnership. But it has a much lower environmental input or impact. This produced from brines deep down hole, in this case, Smackover of 9,000 to 10,000 feet deep. The brine is produced, the lithium is extracted. And then the rest of the brine fluid is reinjected back down hole, which helps to maintain pressures and reservoir continuity from extracting the lithium, a much better environmental footprint than other options today. We talked about the CarbonFree relationship. That partnership continues to evolve. As mentioned, we've reached the agreement on some IP as it relates to a very unique and proprietary method for producing calcium chloride, which is CO2 free. Most production methods producing calcium chloride, they have their own carbon footprint, which defeats the purpose a bit of carbon freezing objective. So we're about that opportunity and the agreement that we have in place. If you just look at the volume of calcium chloride that will be required as CarbonFree rolls out their plants, 15 CarbonFree plants would be essentially equal to the global current production of calcium chloride today. So this is a strategic initiative for TETRA, a great growth opportunity for TETRA. And as we discover more means to produce calcium chloride, especially CO2, it's very, very important for the future of the company. Taking a look at our current business segments. Completion Fluids, again, a strong market share for high-value completions. We consider ourselves the innovation leaders in the Completion Fluids space. If you look at the margins of our business that we've -- EBITDA margins that we've been able to maintain even through this downturn, on the lower right-hand side, the last few years, this represents our 10th quarter that we were over 20% EBITDA margins and, again, maintaining a strong profitability throughout the cycles. On the water side, again, a leading water management business, water management solutions with leading technologies. We continue to gain traction with this business as we recover from the low point of the cycle that we've seen over the last 2 years. Our Completion Fluids global network. As I said, we're not in every country. But we really like the footprint in the areas where we operate for the unconventionals. We have a strong presence obviously in the U.S. and also in Argentina. For deepwater, we have a strong presence in the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, the North Sea and some in West Africa; and then for conventional oil and gas, in the Middle East. So as I said, we're not in every country but we really like the geographic footprint that we have. On the industrial chemical side of the business, again, a significant portion of our business driven primarily by calcium chloride, a very strong market position in the U.S. and the #1 market position in Europe. Competitively advantaged as the only vertically integrated completion fluids provider. And the mix of businesses that we can participate, including food and beverage, de-icing, dust control, construction materials and agriculture gives us a great and stable for us to participate in. And finally, before I turn it over to Elijio, on the Water & Flowback Services segment, again, we continue to gain market share and improve our profitability coming out of the downturn from COVID. As we look to the future into 2022, I think you'll see our margins getting back to pre-COVID levels on a considerably lower frac count and rig count. And so we are very pleased, the cost and how lean we have made the organization but also our ability to get pricing for our technologies in this market. This is shown with our overall integrated water management slide, controlled by BlueLinx and the automation that brings a lot of the cost management component of this. With that, I'll turn it over to Elijio.

Thank you, Brady. Over the last several years, we've taken several steps to rationalize the organization and have sold or divested divisions that we didn't think provided the stability of the cash flow that was appropriate for our market. The business that we have today on the water management and flowback plus the completion fluids over the past 12 months has performed quite well despite all the challenges that the global economy has faced through the COVID-19 situation. Trailing 12 months' revenue $351 million and adjusted EBITDA of $48 million or slightly under 14% revenue. And on a trailing 12-month basis, we generated $18 million despite some starts and stops in the economy and then also despite the challenges that the oil and gas operators are going through with cash flow management. On the right side, you can see that we have continued to improve the balance sheet, dropping net debt from $189 million at the end of '19 to $122 million at the end of September. From a capital structure perspective, on the right side, you can see our capital structure position. Some highlights. Brady mentioned that we have an agreement with Standard Lithium. And from that agreement, we received an annual cash payment. And also, we received $400,000 of Standard Lithium shares for their right to the option for our property in Arkansas. We had accumulated 1.6 million shares of Standard Lithium and monetized by selling those in November, December, slightly over $11 per share and generated almost $18 million of cash from that. I mentioned earlier that last year, we took some action to rationalize the business. We divested our investment in CSI Compressco, our controlling interest. We still own 5.2 million shares of CSI Compressco. We were also added to the Russell 2000 January of a year ago. And our debt does not mature until 2025. The performance of our business relative to the market. The graph on the top left shows how we have performed relative to the oilfield services index, up 339% compared to December 31, 2020, while the OSX is up 151% relative to where they were at the beginning of the year. So clearly, the market has seen that the actions that we have taken and our move into the low-carbon energy opportunities is creating shareholder. Graph at the bottom left demonstrates our performance against some of our peers. And then on the right side, we have laid out some of our capital allocation priorities. And then the last slide focus on the key items that we're working towards. The graph on the right, I think, demonstrates what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to move from a valuation of our historical business, where the multiples have been anywhere from 4 to 12x, 4 to 8x on the traditional onshore oilfield services, 10 to 12x on the industrial calcium chloride business. And we believe that the high growth energy storage, carbon capture and the lithium markets will warrant valuations on EBITDA multiples in excess of 20. And that's our strong push to move into the right side of those opportunities. So with that, that concludes our presentation. See if we've got any questions that we can address here.

One question is when will the Eos partnerships start to contribute revenue. That's already started. We have been delivering our first revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021. And we have a full forecast loaded to align with the Eos backlog for 2022.

So that's the only question that we see on the queue. We appreciate everybody's interest in TETRA. Again, our materials available on our Investors section of our website. Please feel free to reach out either to Brady or myself for any questions or additional follow-up items that you might have. Matthew, that concludes our presentation.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the TETRA Technologies presentation. The next session will begin shortly. Please consult the conference agenda for the next presenting company. Remember, one-on-one meeting requests are still open. So be sure to log into the conference platform and request more meetings. You may now disconnect.