Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Polaris Renewable Energy Inc. first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are placed in a listen-only mode, but we will open the floor for your questions after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Polaris CFO, Anton Jelic. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thanks, Todd. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 2022 first quarter earnings call for Polaris. In addition to the press release issued earlier today, you can find our financial statements, MD&A, and quarterly information form on both SEDAR and our corporate website at polarisrei.com. Unless noted otherwise, all amounts referred to today are denominated in US dollars. I'd like to remind you the comments made during this call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation regarding the future performance of Polaris and its subsidiaries. These statements are current expectations, and as such, are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. These risks and uncertainties include the factors discussed in the company's quarterly information form for the quarter ended 31 March 2022.
I'm joined this morning, as always, by Marc Murnaghan, CEO of Polaris. At this time, I'll walk through our financial highlights. Power generation. Consolidated power generation for 3 months ending 31 March 2022 and 2021, respectively, were 177,176 megawatt-hours and 180,984 megawatt-hours. These production figures are net of all plant downtime, both planned and unplanned. With respect to Nicaragua, we saw total megawatt-hours of 113,915 in the first quarter versus 119,854 in the same period last year. In Peru, total megawatt-hours in the first quarter of this year was 68,850 versus 61,130 in the same three-month period in 2021. Revenue.
Revenue was $16.1 million during the 3 months ended March 31, compared to $15.7 million in the same period last year. The increase was the net result of carbon credits sold in the quarter, coupled with higher revenue from Generación Andina, partly offset by lower production from San Jacinto. Net earnings. Earnings attributable to owners was $2.5 million for the 3 months ended March 31, compared to a loss of $0.9 million for the same period last year. Net earnings mainly increased due to the recognition of deferred income tax benefit from our Peruvian operations, given the revaluation of the Peruvian sol since 31 December 2021.
Contributing to earnings in the first quarter of this year were higher revenue, lower depreciation, and amortization expense, and higher other gains in the current period, partly offset by the increase in finance costs and other direct costs. Adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA was $1 million for the 3 months ending March 31, compared to $11.9 million for the same period in 2021, principally as a result of higher revenue from the sale of carbon credits. Cash generation. Net cash from operating activities for the 3 months ended March 31 of $7.6 million was lower than the $17.3 million for the same period last year, mainly because in the 2021 period, San Jacinto collected approximately $8 million overdue receivables balance after the sign-off of the new PPA agreement.
Net cash used in investing activities for the 3 months ended 31 March 2022, was $8.2 million, compared to $0.6 million in the same period last year, largely due to purchases related to construction in progress of the binary project in San Jacinto. The net cash used in financing activities for the three months ending March thirty-first, 2022, of $14 million, compared to $31.4 million net cash from financing activities reported in the same period last year. The decrease was driven by the net proceeds relating to the common share issued during the first quarter of 2021, coupled with higher dividends paid in the first quarter of this year, and the net impact of the repayment of debt and refinancing completed compared to last year. Finally, dividends.
I would like to highlight once again that we do intend on paying our 25th consecutive quarterly dividend on May 27 of $0.15 per share to shareholders of record on May 16. This continues, of course, the board and management's commitment to regular positive distributions to shareholders, coupled with an ongoing emphasis on attractively valued accretive acquisitions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Marc, who'll elaborate on current business matters as well as on our quarter end results. Thank you.
Thanks, Anton. A few comments that I will add here. First, on San Jacinto, I will go from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022. We were up net production from 51.4 to 52.7. We're at about 52 this quarter or Q2 to date. We're up net a little bit from what we believe is the injection system change that we made in December. We had made one earlier last year in the fall, didn't really work. We've gone back to what I would call more of a an outfield injection strategy, and we'll look to continue to optimize.
We are working with actually a new technical consultant that very recently, and they've reinforced that the idea that the outfield is, in their view, they agree with us, a much better strategy, but they think we can do even more things to continue to do even more outfield and more to promote call it this higher steam fraction. We actually are looking at several options with them. We don't have any guidance on that yet. I think call it when we report Q2 or Q3 and around that time we'll be able to give a little bit more caller
The general concept is increase some of just this is all with existing wells and not what I would call big CapEx, big drilling CapEx. This is things like acidizing jobs to improve some of the injection capacity of the outfield wells, which we think would reduce or eliminate, call it the declines that we're going forward. They have some ideas on some of the production wells that are in service that are some of the smaller ones that they think have been limited in terms of production based on actually events that happen during drilling.
There's ways that they think we can attack that on a quote-unquote small dollar basis, but could, you know, get I would say megawatt gains, not huge, but 1, 2, 3 megawatt kind of gains per well. That's quite interesting. We're looking at that, as well as some actual options to potentially reduce the variability in 9-3, which is the well that cycles for us. I think we're moving into a period where we're gonna have some interesting options to that aren't sort of a zero drilling or a big drilling campaign, but rather more maintenance type CapEx and optimization. Again, given the price we have there, I think it'll pay to do that. I don't think it's not something we need to do.
It's not something we would do right away, that we could probably do it sort of a little bit every year. That's quite interesting. The one other comment I'll make is just so that everybody is aware, the major maintenance at San Jacinto is actually gonna be July of this year and not. It won't land in Q2 like it did last year, and that's just because it's very hard for us to be able to nail down every year the same month, the Fuji technicians as to when they come over. That's actually going to be July. Comments about Peru. I would say hydrology net was similar, but net downtime was lower. We did have a little bit of downtime at El Carmen, which was resolved.
That might have cost us only about 1,000-1,500 megawatt-hours. Other than that, I would say given it was the rainy season, the plants were all running at reasonably high levels, as expected. That's good. I think the big point about Peru is that we haven't received a communication about what the prices will be as of May 1 of this year. There will be a reasonable increase in the prices for Ocho de Agosto and El Carmen, what we think is in the 8% to 9% range, given that they have a link to US CPI in the contract. They didn't get one last year.
The sum of effectively the last 2 years of inflation will get applied going forward, starting this month, actually. That's very good. Comment on the cash position. The total cash, including some LC's, et cetera, that we put on the binary unit, is about $87 million. That is down, but we've now invested approximately $14 million in the binary unit to March 31, and had advanced at that time about $1 million for the solar project in Panama. With that, we're looking at call it another $11 million on the binary unit to spend from here. On that binary unit, we remain on time, on budget with the Q4 in-service date, targeting first revenues end of Q4, beginning of Q1. Everything is looking very good there.
Then now we do have another project, which is the Panama Solar, or the Panama Solar project. We have started, call it the earth prep. We have nailed down the inverters, the panels, transportation. That's all in good shape and within budget. At this point in time, it does not look like we've been impacted on the transport and the supply side for the panels, which is good. We are looking at a similar in-service date for that, which will be Q4, again, late Q4 in service. First revenues, call it starting first thing Q1 next year, for the solar project in Panama. That's the first acquisition we announced, which is closed.
Then the other two, which I'll mention, are Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. Both of those binding SPA's have been signed, but we haven't closed yet. Both of those transactions have the same two main conditions, which is lender approval and Ministry of Energy approval for the share transfer, which we don't expect issues on either one of those. The only thing is the question is how long will it take? We're in the process, the solicitations have already been made. We're working with the ministries to get them comfortable. Again, we don't expect any issues on that. I think our best guess in terms of timing would be call it June, July to receive the approval and then close immediately thereafter.
Also mentioned a little bit on the carbon sales. We did a small amount. These were some 2015, 2016 vintages at San Jacinto. We had actually entered into that agreement last May, June, with the thinking let's just sort of dip our toes in the water and sell a little bit of the vintages. The price was agreed upon back then. We couldn't close it, sorry, until this quarter. Not a huge dollar amount, but I still think it's important to note we will likely have a little bit more coming in in this quarter. Prices are in the current market higher than what we agreed to sell those at back, call it in May of last year.
We don't have a firm plan yet in terms of what to do on, call it the 2018, 2019, 2020 credits at San Jacinto and the go forward, but we're gonna be formulating that. Definitely the market has strengthened into the $3 to $5 range per ton versus the $1.50 that we sold those at. We will continue to look at potentially bringing in some revenue on a quarterly basis for the carbon credits going forward. We are in the final throes of having Ocho de Agosto finally approved. That's taken a bit of time, but we're hoping to have that done in the next few months.
Also we would look to, once sort of acquisitions are closed, the plants in operation already are not something we can do anything on. Any of the even small expansions or brownfield expansions or phase 2, we have already sort of started the process of the paperwork, call it, to get those. Continuing to have more projects in the portfolio that have or that they're generating carbon credits. Continuing to be very focused on that. Then we don't have. It's a bit early given that we haven't closed on the Ecuador and the Dominican yet, but what I would say is once, I would suggest on, like, the second quarter call, we will be able to give much more guidance in terms of the quote-unquote "pipeline" there.
What would the status be of the phase 2 at Canoa? We should be able to give people caller on where we sit there. There is a small brownfield expansion in Ecuador. We'll be able to give caller there as well as more caller on the bid process that we anticipate entering into. As people know, we have been working on at least one hydro project, but there's actually more in Panama.
I think we don't have a lot of quote-unquote "guidance" on the pipeline, today, but by second quarter, we should be able to give people a lot more caller on that, to see both how the acquisitions are gonna be sort of integrated, but then how our, call it, generic pipeline, is developing and building out, and both from a timing and a pricing perspective. I think we'll really be making that transition starting the Q2 call. That's it for the formal part, so we can open up for questions now.
Certainly. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. If you would like to enter the queue to ask a question at this time, you may press star one on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If listening on speaker phone this morning, we ask that you please pick up your handset while asking your question to provide optimal sound quality. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to enter the queue to ask a question at this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please hold a moment while we poll for questions. The first question is coming from David Quezada from Raymond James. David, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Morning, everyone. Marc, my first question, maybe just a broader strategic question now that you've come through, you know, a pretty active period of M&A. Is it fair to say now that the focus, as you kind of alluded to, will be primarily development going forward? Will you still consider M&A? I guess maybe a related question, do you now feel like you're pretty happy with the footprint in terms of the geographical regions where you now have operations or will have?
What I would say is, geographically speaking, I think we can, you know, we've gone from 2 to 5. I would also note just I didn't, but all of these are still in US dollars, which I think is really important to mention. We now have 5 jurisdictions in USD. I think in the short term, the plan would be to basically, with Peru and now Ecuador, Dominican, and Panama, that we can really grow within those countries. I would. I'm not gonna say never to new jurisdictions, but what we like is that in these, call it, other four jurisdictions. I think we can really grow this company, into the, call it, $80 million to $100 million EBITDA range without needing a new jurisdiction.
I would say we are for sure transitioning from a, what has been to now basically a pure acquisition. Everything has essentially been acquisitions. We can transition to more of a, call it development mindset, but it won't be 100% development. We still see opportunities to. For instance, there are other Canoas out there. There are other San José de Minas, which is the hydro projects in Ecuador. We do see more of those, and especially in the size range we're looking at, we don't see a lot of competition. What I can't do right now is give you what's gonna be the percentage, you know, breakdown.
I think the important thing is we can now go grow organically without the need to do the acquisitions, but I would suggest we will for sure be doing more because we've been working on building up a nice pipeline that started, you know, 4 years ago and so continues to grow. I would say maybe in the short term, we integrate these acquisitions, we really start to get some runs on the board in terms of the growth pipeline. You know, maybe it's more like in 6 to 12 months, you can start to see some of these other potential acquisitions layered in. It's gonna be a blend. For sure it's gonna be a blend.
I think that's really important because we really see the opportunity to get this sort of platform to a size that has a little bit of scale, and all it would take is probably one or two more acquisitions, and you can see your way to that 100 million of EBITDA in the medium term, which I think is really important.
Absolutely. That's great caller. Thanks, Mark. Maybe one on San Jacinto as you move to complete the Binary Unit, and you've talked about, you know, some changes on the injection strategy and things that you're evaluating there. I'm just curious, does the injection strategy or any other, I guess, element of the operations there change once the Binary Unit comes online? Is there any other adjustments you'll need to make?
Not really, actually, because we probably a little bit more chemical dosing. Like we do some acid dosing right now actually to prevent silica. We'll need to do a little bit more of that, not a lot. The actual configuration of the injection system and the wells, no. We are gonna try to. For instance, one of the proposals is to. We have two injection wells in the north, and one which we think should actually be able to do 300-400 tons an hour, it's only doing about 100. They want us to consider at least doing an acid job on that.
That would help the binary in that we could just send an extra 200 or 300 tons to the north part of the field, which we know from all of the chemical tracers that we've done over the years have absolutely no connection to the field. I would say that is a minor tweak, which is trying to get a little bit more into the north. We will look at doing that. I would also say we've run all the numbers and say that if you can't get that extra 200, you know, that's 200 out of a total of 1,700 tons of brine, and the rest of it literally is going in that other well in the north.
It's, you know, I don't think your risk is high on the downside, and maybe you gain a little bit on the upside if you can do it, but it's not huge.
Okay. Fair enough. That's good caller. Then maybe just one last one. You know, obviously, the focus I think has been, you know, the new jurisdictions and the M&A. But I'm just curious if you have any update on any of the development projects that you had at one time looked at in Peru, you know, around the time that you acquired the two or the hydro facilities there.
It's an interesting question, David. I would say I don't have an update to give you. Maybe the best way to describe it is we have been in the process of testing those projects out a little bit. Just we don't see a call for power there for probably another 18 months, maybe it's 2 years, but it's coming. You know, the reason why we took a pause was just because of that. They contracted a lot of megawatts years ago, and then we're still in this period of working that off, so to speak. They had cheap gas, that's changing. I would say the spot prices are changing. They've been ticking up. They haven't announced the date. We think that this year they will probably announce something.
It's early days. I wouldn't say we're really focused on it, but we are starting to, you know, look at that again, and maybe that's an event for 12-18 months from now where we're actually bidding into something, getting ready for it in the next year. We for sure would do more there with that pipeline. It's just been, you know, the market there has been quiet.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks for that, Marc. I'll get back in the queue.
Thank you very much. The next question is coming from Naji Baydoun from iA Capital Markets. Najib, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you. I just want to start with Panama. Can you just walk us through some of the milestones that you need to hit this year to get those projects online, thinking specifically about the contracting structures for those projects?
On the contracting side, given the size of this project, this is a call it a $10 million CapEx project, which is very small. To get to COD, we're not gonna borrow any money. We don't have anybody telling us that we need a contract. Obviously, if we were to borrow money, a lender would say, "Okay, you need to you know, you're not getting the money until you've got X% contracted." Given that we don't have that, we're actually not in a rush to get the contract. We're more focused on the construction.
Given that it would be, you know, our estimate is about 20,000 megawatt-hours out of that facility, which would be, you know, 2% to 3% of our overall production, we're not sort of worried about having that as spot, at least to start. We know we can get contracts, but we're not in a rush on that. I do think that you're gonna, I mean, this year for sure, the impact of oil prices has put inflation into the power prices there. I think having some exposure to that is a good thing for us as a company, longer term. The milestones really was, the big one was, you know, we've already secured the inverters and the panels.
We would expect those to sort of get into Panama in August. That would be a big milestone. From there, it's really just the assembly. That would be. You know, from there to actual COD, there's not a lot of big milestones. It's really just assembling the structure.
Okay, got it. No, that seems like pretty straightforward for now. Just to finish on Panama, I know you said you'll have more in a few months, but is Chuspa or another hydro project part of the plan in Panama for the next, let's say, 12 months or so? Is that something still to be ironed out?
It's still to be ironed out. I would say we have several others we're looking at. We have that one, which is actually we think had a good, call it, permitting or environmental sort of permit, call it good news very recently. It's definitely on the front burner in terms of the thinking. To go a bit deeper to my point about Q2 will really give people more caller in the pipeline is that we now will have other, call it potentially Canoa II. We've got, as I mentioned, Ecuador, we have some of these other ones. I think we're gonna.
We're not in a position to say, "Okay, this next year, this is the one, and then 2024 it's gonna be this one." How it all layers in, is where we're gonna try to give people caller on next quarter. What I would say is that there's a lot more in the mix to choose from our perspective, which I think is a good thing.
Absolutely. Okay. We'll look forward to that update when it's time. Just wanted to quickly touch on Peru with the energy commitments, the adjustments. I think you've already filed for those. Do you expect to see the impact of that in Q2? And would it be retroactive for Q1 as well?
It for sure wouldn't be retroactive to Q1, and I'm talking calendar. In Peru, it's their quote-unquote power year is May 1 to April 30, just because of the rainy season. That's how they do it. Our expectation is that it would. We made the application back in January. They wanted a bunch of technical information about the hydrology, which we gave them. They seem to be happy with it, and all indications are that we will get it. I just can't tell you whether we're gonna actually get the document this month, next month. It is a government agency. They are notoriously slow, but our expectations are that it would be retroactive to May 1.
To May 1 of this year? Okay.
Obviously going forward. Okay. Okay. Just the last question. You know, with Ecuador and Dominican Republic, you know, getting into the portfolio soon, and then think about Panama next year, does that give you enough to start considering a portfolio refinancing sort of initiatives maybe in 2023, or would you still prefer to wait a bit and hold off on that?
Great question. I would suggest that I think we would want to have that caller, as you say, which is, okay, here's what we're gonna be constructing in 2023. Here's what we're gonna be building in 2023 and 2024. Essentially, I think we need a little bit more sort of meat on the bone than what we have as opposed to just these operating assets that we're buying in Panama. If we had, call it one or two more, then I think we absolutely can. What we are doing is, it's a bit like the carbon credit process, not as intense, but to do a green bond, which a lot of people have done, you do need to have, call it, a third party come in.
You effectively approve a framework, which won't be an issue for us. We are gonna start that process to have that overlay. We'll do that in, call it the next 3-6 months. To the extent what we have is interesting, that way we can at least start to look at that in 2023. We'll get ourselves ready from both the, call it a financing construct perspective, get more of the pipeline ironed out so that we're at least ready. We'll see where that's at. I would say that to the extent we can do something, that is a big, call it, I think, a big value creation exercise for the company. It is something that we're absolutely pointing towards.
I'm not at the point where I can commit to the timing of that. A lot of what we're doing is absolutely heading in that direction. One of the reasons, for instance, that I wanna stay in US dollars is to make that event, that transaction easier to do. I think it'll be easier. We say everything we do is in US dollars. That's a big reason for that.
Understood. That's very clear. It sounds like you have a lot on your plate. It's gonna be a very active couple of years ahead. Thank you.
Thanks, Robbie.
Thank you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, anybody who would like to join the queue to ask a question may press star one on their telephone keypad to enter the queue. Once again, that'll be star one on your keypad to enter the queue to ask a question. The next question today is coming from Nick Boychuk from Cormark Securities. Nick, your line is live. Please go ahead.
Hey. Morning, Marc. First question on the dividend. Can you kind of walk us through what your thinking is on when any potential increases on that might come?
I have said to people we wouldn't consider until the back half of this year, once we are comfortable that the binary unit is in good shape. Obviously, that's putting a nice bow on the project, but in Nicaragua, it would also be a big reason why we could increase the dividend. Wanna make sure that we just don't have any capital costs, you know, quote-unquote blowouts, which we don't at this point. That, for us, would be a really important event. I think that that's, you know, when are we gonna have a lot of obviously 100% confidence is when we hit COD in Q4, but can we look at it before then? I think so.
Once we have, for instance, all of the equipment is all on ships now, and we expect in the next sort of 30 to 60 days, everything will be basically within 60 days, it'll all be on-site, and it's gonna be an assembly project. I think as long as everybody's comfortable with that, you know, our balance sheet is in very good shape. We can start to look a little bit forward, I would say, once we're in the final stages of the assembly of the unit.
Yep. That's good. Thank you. Just quickly on carbon credits. Obviously appreciate you can't give the full detail mentioning the plans for 18, 19, 20 vintage credit terms fully, like, kinda finalized yet. Can you give any caller on the dynamics in the market, who's coming to you with interest? Has that changed at all since the last time we spoke? Then obviously, you know, are there any opportunities also for you to maybe future sale or to lock in credit sales?
We did last year when we did that forward sale, we did make a press release. We did agree to another small one, which we didn't press release, but we will likely close that this year. It's about a similar size and amount. Okay? For that'll give us, again, a little bit of revenue in Q2, extra cash. I would say from there, it's likely gonna be price driven. I would say, as I said, we're seeing sort of the $3-$5 range. I think if we were to be able to get closer to the higher part of that range, like $4 or $5, we would let go of some more as we move forward here. We're not in a rush.
Part of the reason we're not in a rush is to the second part of your question, which is just anecdotally, we are getting. It's pretty, you know, it's a weekly event where somebody is representing somebody and they call up looking for credits. We've had people say, "Hi, we're looking for X million credits in Latin America." They want a bucket Latin America, which is sort of interesting in and of itself. I would say just a continual, pretty consistent groups approaching us. We're at the point now of, you know, we've done a few sales.
We're gonna take a bit of a pause here, at least for the next three months, and we're more focused on making sure we're ready with these acquisitions and expansion projects, because once you get sort of the COD on any of these, it's over. We're spending more time, quite frankly, focusing on making sure we have the inventory of credits to work with because I think that really is the more sort of scarce commodity here right now. It continues to be interesting. You know, there's a gap, I would say, between, call it forestry, you know, quote-unquote, nature-based ones and renewable ones. I think the buyer universe is gonna dictate that there's a gap. If one moves up, so does the other one.
You know, maybe there's. I think right now maybe it's a $10 spread, not even, but I think there can be a spread, and it can be a spread of the nature-based go to $50, and the renewables can go higher. It just seems like the buyer universe is fine with that. The buyer universe is fine with the different sort of two or three key verification entities, and we're looking at new ones. What I do like about it is what it seems like is that the people that are approaching us may not be the end buyer, but the end buyers are companies that have made a commitment to get to carbon neutral or whatever in 10 years or 20 years, and that's going up.
Those entities are doing it solely based on any, call it government mandates and more just based on their own internal, policies. They're driving the market, which I think is really good. I think as long as you have these private entities, making these decisions, I think these markets will start to get a little bit more liquid and more deep as we move forward here, which I think is really good for us.
Perfect. Thanks.
Thank you. There are no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the floor back to the management team for any closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone, for joining today. Have a great day. Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.