Hallador Energy Company - Q4 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Hello and welcome to the Hallador Energy Company announced Fourth Quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Harry and I'll be your coordinator today. If you'd like to ask a question during Q&A, you may do so by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. And I would now like to turn the call over to Becky Palumbo, Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Rebecca Palumbo (Head of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Harry. Good morning and thanks for joining Hallador Energy's call for the fourth quarter and full year 2023. Today are Brent Bilsland, our President and CEO, and Larry Martin, our CFO. Yesterday afternoon, Hallador released its fourth quarter and full year 2023 financials in a press release. Today we will discuss those results as well as our perspective on current market conditions and outlook for 2024. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call to answer your questions. Before beginning, a reminder that some of our remarks today may include forward-looking statements subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions contained in our filings from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission and are also reflected in yesterday's press release.

While these forward-looking statements are based on information currently available to us, if one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if our underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary from those we projected or expected. To be clear, Hallador has no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future results, or otherwise, unless required. Lastly, Hallador will file its Form 10-K sometime this week. With that said, I will turn the call over to Larry.

Larry Martin (CFO)

Thanks, Becky. Good afternoon, everyone. Before we get started, I would like to make a definition of Adjusted EBITDA as operating cash flows less the effects of certain subsidiary and equity method investment activity, plus bank interest less the effects of working capital period changes, plus cash paid on asset retirement obligation reclamations, plus other amortizations. For the fourth quarter, Hallador incurred net loss of $10.2 million, $0.31 basic earnings per share and $0.27 for diluted earnings per share. For the year ended December 31st, 2023, we had $44.8 million of net income, or $1.35 per basic earnings per share and $1.25 for diluted earnings per share. We had Adjusted EBITDA of $1.7 million for the quarter and $107.3 million for the year. We increased our bank by $29.8 million for the quarter and $6.3 million for the year.

Our funded bank debt as of the end of December 31st was $91.5 million. Our letters of credit were $18.6 million. Our net funded bank debt was $88.7 million. Our leverage ratio for debt to Adjusted EBITDA was 1.3x at the end of the year. I will now turn the call over to Brent Bilsland, our CEO.

Thank you, Larry. First, I'd like to thank the Hallador team for their hard work and dedication on finishing a solid year for our company. While the fourth quarter highlighted some operational challenges and the episodic nature of our power revenues, I don't want those challenges to overshadow the positive year that we had as a company. In addition to near-record margins on our coal division for the full year, the continued integration of Hallador Power into our portfolio was a springboard to record net income, our highest revenues ever, and a future sales book that is approaching $1.5 billion and continues to grow as demand for energy and capacity increase. We are seeing success in selling contracted, contingent energy at excellent prices, and in light of that, we are also focusing on capital expenditures to prepare the plant to support those contracts in future years.

We are also very excited about a recently signed agreement and structure with Hoosier Energy and their distribution member, WIN Energy REMC, that should allow us to attract industrial users of power such as data centers, AI providers, and power-dense manufacturers to the Merom property. We believe leveraging our plant to help supply these large users of energy should allow us to operate the plant more efficiently in a volatile power environment and generate increased margins at or above what we can achieve in the traditional wholesale market. We are already seeing increased interest and excitement around the prospect of this type of offering. If we succeed in attracting high-powered, demand customers through this structure, it moves Hallador up the electricity value chain, providing additional margin and stability to our earnings for years to come.

Combined with our increased volume of forward power sales, we believe these types of opportunities will continue to improve the long-term outlook for the company and provide a stable platform to leverage both our power and coal assets in a responsible, sustainable, and profitable manner. We have been very deliberate in structuring these bilateral sales contracts to limit our exposure to unplanned and, for that matter, planned outages and other unexpected challenges in what we expect to be an increasingly volatile power market. Negotiating deals in this way protects us from downside risk, but is also an extremely bespoke process, which takes significantly more time than simply agreeing to firm power contracts and accepting that additional risk.

The offshoot of this is that while we methodically build our sales book, we are subject to the whims of the spot power market, and more specifically to the weather and other factors impacting short-term electrical demand. As we saw throughout the last several months, when you have 60- and 70-degree days in winter, the typical energy prices we would expect to see get thrown out the window, and you end up in a situation where the plant simply does not dispatch. The continued depression of natural gas prices exacerbated this issue, and our fourth quarter results were impacted by all of these factors. Just as an example, while the average spot price for energy at Merom was around $69 in 2022, the mild winter and low gas pricing drove the average price down to about $31 in 2023.

The spot market pricing really highlights the importance of the longer-term contracts that we continue to put in place, especially as we continue to spend CapEx to ready the plant to support those sales. Since January of 2023, we have contracted nearly $500 million in future energy and capacity deals. Many of these deals extend through 2028, with the higher contracted prices occurring in 2026, 2027, and 2028. In addition to the fourth quarter challenges at Merom, we also continue to fight against geology, inflationary pressure, and operational challenges in our coal division alongside the continued retreat of the coal markets from the largely elevated pricing of the last couple of years. In response to these changing events, we took steps to support liquidity and to increase the efficiency of our operations.

In December, we implemented an at-the-market offering program under our existing shelf registration statement as a tool to fund any short-term financing needs. Under the ATM, we sold approximately 800,000 shares of Hallador stock in December of 2023 and raised approximately $7.3 million of equity. We sold an additional 700,000 shares or so of Hallador stock in January of 2024 and raised an additional $6.6 million. In addition, in February, several members of our board further bolstered our liquidity through unsecured one-year notes totaling $5 million. We are also starting to see capacity revenue come in, which, in combination with the items I just discussed, will add to the liquidity position and give us additional optionality as strategic opportunities like hedging, acquisitions, or other ways to improve our balance sheet present themselves.

Our near-term actions to improve liquidity will be done in a prudent and strategic manner to respond to changing events or to take advantage of market opportunities in furtherance of our long-term outlook. In February, we also restructured our coal operations in an initiative designed to add efficiency to our operations and create higher margins in our coal segment. As part of this initiative, we idled production at our higher-cost Prosperity Mine and substantially idled production at the Freelandville Mine, where we expect to finish reclamation late in the second quarter of 2024. These moves should reduce our capital reinvestment for coal production in 2024 by approximately $10 million, thus reducing CapEx for our coal division from $35 million to approximately $25 million. We are also focusing our seven units of underground equipment on four units of our lowest-cost production at Oaktown.

As part of this initiative, we reduced our workforce by approximately 110 employees, which we expect to start creating OpEx savings once the warrant period expires in the second quarter. While this was a difficult decision on a personal level, it was the right thing to do for the company, and we believe that it will improve our operational efficiency relatively quickly. By focusing on our most efficient mining and highest-margin coal, we expect to produce about 4.5 million tons annually of higher-margin coal as compared to 6 million historical tons of production at the Oaktown Mining Complex. Additionally, in 2024, we have secured supplemental coal from third-party suppliers at favorable prices. This allows us to diversify self-production supply risk and provides us with additional flexibility in our sales portfolio.

The optionality to obtain low-cost tons either internally or from third parties while capturing upward swings in commodity markets for coal and electricity should further maximize margins while optimizing fuel costs at Merom. As we enter the traditionally mild spring, seasonal electricity prices could remain weak. However, we remain excited about the transformation of Hallador from a commodity-focused producer of coal to a vertically integrated independent power producer. We believe that this transition provides significant opportunity to capture the increased margins of the energy markets, to take advantage of the soaring demand for electricity, and to step up the value chain in a more sustainable and future-proofed industry than that of which we have traditionally operated in. As evidenced by the ongoing build of our long-term sales book, this deliberate movement into the electricity sector should materially strengthen our company and the products that we sell.

As I said at the start of my comments, despite a challenging quarter, I'm very pleased with our annual results and the continued evolution of Hallador as a company. That concludes our prepared remarks. I'll now open the line up for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind and would like to withdraw from the queue, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted locally. Our first question today is from the line of Lucas Pipes of B. Riley. Lucas, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

Thank you very much, operator. Good afternoon, everyone.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Good afternoon, Lucas.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

Brent, I first wanted to touch on the liquidity and how you think about it. So you used the ATM a little bit late last year. Earlier this year, there were the unsecured notes. Do you manage to a minimum cash balance or minimum liquidity balance? Would appreciate your thoughts on that. Thank you.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Well, I think, look, we are until we finish filling out our sales book, which we think we have enormous opportunities in front of us to add to that position this year. There's a lot of RFPs out, a lot of interest. But in the meantime, we're very subject to spot prices of power, which is very much influenced by the weather or lack thereof. So when we think about liquidity, you can never have too much, right? But that being said, I mean, our board of directors owns roughly 31% of the shares. And so our interests are very much in line with the shareholders because we are substantial shareholders, including myself. And so it's a balance.

We have to look at what do we think power prices will be for the year, and how much liquidity do we need to fulfill our obligations of improving the plant, keeping the coal mines up in tip-top shape. We probably had about as much that could go wrong in a fourth quarter as went wrong, right? We had half the plant offline. Part of that was planned. Part of that was unplanned. We had moved a lot of equipment around at the coal mines trying to get all seven units in better production. And finally, in February, decided we were going to focus on our four best units of production, and we were going to buy some coal from third parties. And so there's just a lot that goes into that question. I don't think we have an exact target number.

I think it's more we're looking at our sales book and what the opportunities are and where we can get comfortable with margins locked in contractually and managing liquidity until we reach that point in the road.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

Got it. Really appreciate that. And turning a bit to kind of the Q1 outlook, you already mentioned the weather hasn't been supportive. What insights would you be able to provide here at this point as it relates to Q1? How much of those issues kind of continued into the quarter? It sounds like they did, at least on the coal side. And for the full year, what sort of volumes should we anticipate at this point? And then on the power side, is that part of the discussion around kind of filling out the sales book, or was that really more in regards to coal? Thank you very much.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

All right. So I'm not sure I got all your questions, Lucas. On the sales book, where we see opportunities is, look, the market is short capacity, right? We've seen these power generation supply has been relatively flat for about 20 years. And then we've been in this transition period of maybe a decade of closing baseload and replacing it with non-dispatchable resources. And that has shrunk the accredited capacity. And I mean, MISO says they've got some reports out that say in the next couple of years, if people retire assets as announced, the reserve margins go negative. So that won't happen. But it just kind of shows how tight the situation has become from a generation point of view, particularly in MISO. And now you add in this explosion of AI, right? I mean, the growth in that industry is just kind of unprecedented, right?

There's all sorts of reports. So I don't really know which numbers to believe. But essentially, these companies that are trying to race to develop AI, they can't find places to plug in. And so they're short capacity. We happen to be long capacity. And this is kind of happening everywhere, right? We've talked to a lot of different utilities about, would they have interest in selling their other plants to us. And there's always some interest out there. But what's also been surprising is how many have said, "Yeah, we know we show a retirement date, and we're going to push that out because we're seeing all of this new demand suddenly show up from manufacturing, from Europe, from AI, from EVs." So the long-term trend from us, we're extremely bullish. The short term, we're depending on weather in the spot market until we fill this book out.

But there are major RFPs out right now for power and capacity, and we feel we have a high probability of success in obtaining some of that. We are extremely excited about this new structure. We were able to get Hoosier and WIN REMC to work with us on to try to attract high-demand users of power to our site because we feel that, look, either that's going to offer us better terms than we can get in the wholesale market, or we're not going to do it. But we feel just from the early indications and please keep in mind, we just signed this agreement like a week ago. So we're early in this process, but we will be running an RFP to see who's interested in locating our site, and can we get terms that are better than what we see in the long-term wholesale market.

Certainly, you're going to see us add to both positions, and I hope this year in a very meaningful way. On the coal side of the business, Merom is a significant customer of our Sunrise Coal division. And if you look, you'll see in the 10-K when we release that, we went ahead and contracted that business to ourselves just to try to add more clarity and set that price out for the next handful of years. And when we do that, it really kind of shows that materially, for the next four years, we're extremely well hedged or sold, contracted on the coal side of the business. So I think that answered two of your questions. I can't remember what the third was.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

This was very helpful. The third one was on the outlook for Q1 and the full year. I do have another question on the MOU. So maybe since you mentioned it, I'll raise this one first. Is this an MOU for behind-the-meter power, essentially? And then how quickly do you think you could see something materialize? And I'd assume you'd have some construction that would need to take place, the build-out of a data center, what have you. So kind of best case, when could you supply power to a customer? Thank you.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Yeah. So we will go out for RFP this spring, hopefully next month. We're trying to get that in order to see what the demands of the markets are. We have, I think, a fair amount of flexibility on what we can offer customers. And quite frankly, I don't know what the build times will be. We've had some customers without an RFP knock on our door and say they'd like to begin construction in three months. I think that's probably too aggressive. Could we see something as early as next year? Possibly. But we're not really far enough along in those conversations to give any guidance around what the timing is. I think what we're excited about is just what we've seen other companies do, both in Indiana and throughout the Midwest. We've seen some really large developments, and those prices don't get published, but they do get whispered.

And if that holds true, we're excited about what that could potentially be. Again, till we see an RFP result, it's really hard to say. We're just excited about the opportunity. And then as far as our first quarter, we saw one week of really cold, extreme weather. So the power plant performed well through that period, and that was a profitable time. And the rest of winter so far has been extremely mild. I mean, we've had some 60- and 70-degree days in both February and March in Indiana. So we don't know what that means. We're heading into the shoulder season here next month. That traditionally is low power demand, but winter is traditionally high power demand, and that hasn't proved to be the case. So we'll see if this turns out to be a hot summer. We're encouraged by we've got extremely cheap gas today.

Then when you start to get out to October, November, we have reasonable gas prices again up in the $3s and $3.50 range every month thereafter. So the power curve is seeing that, and it has remained robust so far. But short-term prices have been cheap. And so we'll just manage through that. And that's why we will keep a very close eye on liquidity to make sure that we are successful. And there could be some opportunities again here with the MOU that we just signed.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

Yeah. Directionally, would you expect Q1 to be worse than Q4?

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Well, I'm not prepared to give guidance on Q1 at a 10-K earnings call. So we'll wait and see what those results are. Quarter's not over.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

Helpful. Thank you. I'll do one last one. Why was it necessary for Hoosier to be part of the MOU?

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

So we, as Hallador, are only allowed to sell wholesale power. And when you start attracting customers for data centers and whatnot, that is industrial power. And so that technically has to be sold through a structure that involves Hoosier and their distribution cooperative, WIN Energy REMC. And so we basically negotiated with them for a period of time to say, "Hey, there's an opportunity here for everybody. Let's work together and see if we can have success." And those guys have just been terrific partners every step of the way and continue to do so. And as such, I think we have a real opportunity to not only create value for Hallador but create value for Hoosier, WIN Energy REMC, and their customers.

Lucas Pipes (Analyst)

Got it. Really appreciate all the color, Brent, to you and the team. All the best of luck. Thank you.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Thank you, Lucas.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please dial star 1 on your telephone keypad now. Okay. It seems we have no further questions in the Q4 today. So I would like to hand back to Brent Bilsland for any concluding remarks. My apologies. We have just had a question registered. And we have a question on the line here from Roger Ziegler. Roger Ziegler, your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Roger Ziegler (Associate)

Hi. It's Roger Ziegler here, individual investor. Thanks again for your time, guys. In recapping, one question and a comment: is there anybody else in the coal industry who is making or has made this transition into vertically integrated independent coal producer or power producer as you are? That's my first question, I guess. I mean, are you someone of us?

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Well, that's a good question. I think to my knowledge, Hallador is the only company that has acquired and has interest to acquire more coal-fired power plants in a public structure. And so we're happy and excited about what we were able to do at Merom. We think there are other possible opportunities out there to replicate. And so we will but as far as other people in the industry doing this, I know of some others that are buying plants in a private structure, but I'm unaware of anyone doing it in a public structure. It's not to say it doesn't exist. It's just to say I'm unaware of it.

Roger Ziegler (Associate)

Okay. I think you've pretty much answered this, but just for how we should think about, say, the 2024 outlook, there's some tremendous opportunities it sounds like you're really building for on a three-four-year build-out. But is it as simple as if you get in Indiana and maybe the surrounding power areas finally get a hot summer following the second warm winter in a row? Is that going to just be like it's going to springboard nat gas, coal, and your power markets considerably, correct? I mean, is it that simple?

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Yeah. I mean, power markets can move so quick. I mean, we can see spot prices one day be $20 a megawatt-hour, and three days later, they're $250. I mean, but those are weather-driven events. We're trying to get to a contracted sales book, and we're having a lot of success to do that and doing so. And we have a huge amount of business out for bid as we speak. But we'll see how successful we are in securing those contracts. But I think we have multiple customers, multiple avenues, particularly with the MOU now, to add to that.

What excites us is we see Hallador and its traditional margins that it made in coal, and then we see what if you look at our sales table in the 10-K when it gets published in the next day or so, look at the pricing for power, particularly when you get out in the 2026, 2027, 2028 range, our margins are dramatically higher. We think we can continue to have success contracting for power and capacity at higher margins. We haven't gotten our sales book filled out as fast as I would have liked, but I think our team's done a terrific job. The way we're going about it, you have to find willing dance partners. They're showing up. It just takes more time because it's a very bespoke process in filling that out.

Our earnings are going to be a little episodic depending on weather here for the next handful of quarters. Whereas the market changed so dramatically from our earnings call in November. What we saw, the power curve there for December, January, February versus what it actually ended up being was completely a different number just based on the fact that we had what some people are calling the warmest winter in history, right? We don't know what that means for the spring and the summer. If it's hot, one thing about it, the windmills MISO has a very high percentage of windmills. It has very little solar panels that have been built, very little, like 0.5% of their generation. But the wind tends not to blow on hot days.

So we're actually seeing theoretically, we think we'll see a peak in the summertime versus where we used to see it in the wintertime. So that's what we're looking at. We're in contract discussions with customers to see how soon we can start pulling some of these higher prices forward. And so that's what our team will be working on this summer. And we'll just have to see how it plays out. Hopefully, we see some warm weather. That would certainly be helpful. But long-term, we're just extremely excited because we think the earnings potential of the company has dramatically improved. And we feel that our future sales book is starting to demonstrate that to the public.

What I don't know from a shareholder perspective, will investors be focused on this quarter and next, or will they be focused on what we're building that's later this year and early into next year and beyond? Stay tuned.

Roger Ziegler (Associate)

Yeah. To say you're basically spring-loaded seems to be an understatement with the things you have in place here. So good luck on that, and appreciate it.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

All right. Thank you for your question.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We have no further questions in the queue. I'd now like to hand back to Brent Bilsland for some closing remarks.

Brent Bilsland (President and CEO)

Yeah. I want to thank everyone for taking the time today to tune into our call and your interest in Hallador Energy. We greatly appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.