Good morning. We're going to start our next session and then break for lunch. Welcome, everyone, again to the 27th Annual Needham Growth Conference. The next presentation will be a fireside with Clean Harbors. We're pleased to have with us today the company's Co-CEO, Mike Battles, and CFO, Eric Dugas. Also with us today, Senior VP, Investor Relations, Jim Buckley in the front row. My name is Jim Ricchiuti, Senior Analyst in the Equity Research Department at Needham, covering industrial tech companies. I think most people are very familiar with Clean Harbors. Thank you both for joining us today.
Thanks.
Thanks for the venue and thanks to the Needham, Mike, for the help.
So.
Let's start off.
I think just the discussion with the extremely unfortunate events that are taking place in Southern California have a couple of questions. Have any of your operations been impacted? I know the situation is very fluid, but any broader implications for your operations as you think about this over the near term?
Yeah. So, you know, kind of our first concern is the people of Clean Harbors, and there are a handful of people who have lost their homes, which is tragic, and we're working with them to provide housing and other opportunities for them. None of our structures in Southern California have been affected. Certainly, routes have been disrupted. Air quality problems that are existing in Southern California are slowing things down. You know, and so we've established a command center. We've got our event team out there. We have the sales force kind of circling the wagons, if you will, to make sure that we can respond. You know, some parts we can't even get into yet, so it's not even an opportunity to go kind of additionally to sell.
But certainly, there's going to be some push on that to clean it up, and then we should be in a good spot. Now, the thing with fires and hazardous waste, they do the work for us, which is kind of a problem. Doesn't make the air any better, but it certainly doesn't help the waste that's not on the ground, it's in the air. So that's a bit of a challenge, unbalanced. We think there's opportunity here, probably tough to say, sitting here in mid-January about what the effect would be, probably net neutral if I had to guess today, because some things are slowed down, some sites are closed, some people are not at work because they're dealing with personal situations. So it is more to come on that one, but, you know, we'll see. It's a tragedy. It's awful.
Yeah. Let's turn to the environmental services business, where you guys have shown really solid organic growth, 6% or so each quarter through the first nine months, well above GDP. You know, remind us, was that always the case pre-pandemic?
Yeah. So I'll take this in, Eric. Please feel free to chime in. You know, when we think about going back for people who followed us for 10 years, 15 years, you know, we always said it's a GDP plus type of growth. And the pluses would be, you know, increased regulation, regulation enforcement, events, large-scale events. East Palestine would be a good example of that. You know, pricing, pricing, and, you know, also captives closing. And so there's 40 captives out there. They incinerate waste on site, and they can close because of increased regulation, increased compliance. So those four have been the driver of that. So, and again, going back five years, 10 years, I've been with the company for 12 years, you'd say that, you know, if GDP's three, well, that's like four or five. And as you said, Jim, it's growing at a much faster rate than that.
Why is that? A, because we think there's been the chemical renaissance, more investment in the U.S., more investment in production and manufacturing. You know, I also think that there's been an ability for good competitive environments been allowing us to price faster than inflation. And so all these things have been driving that. I don't think that changes with the turn of the calendar. I think those things kind of continue to grow. When you think about our business, and you said this is 6% for the first nine months of the year, organic growth probably closer to 7%. And so I think that I don't think that changes. And even with that 7%, the Industrial Services business, which we'll talk about in a minute, you know, that's been flat to down. So the other parts of the business are going at closer to 10%.
I don't see that changing in 2025. I think that we've been able to price faster than inflation, and I think we'll be able to drive margin improvement over the next four or five years.
Yeah. And you've been talking about pricing, and it has been clearly a tailwind for this part of the business. When do discussions begin with respect to pricing actions? Do they start the year? You know, these conversations that kind of roll through the year, you know, depending on different factors. Help us with that.
Eric?
Sure. I'll take that one, Jim. And I would say, you know, just a real quick answer is they're ongoing throughout the year, depending on the customers. So, you know, I think over the last four or five years, the team has done a great job. We have a team dedicated to pricing strategies. So we have a lot more empirical information around pricing. We look at our customers holistically. So we look at what is their pricing today, what type of margins do we drive from the customer, how many LOBs do they take from us. And we kind of look at that, as I said, holistically and quartile the customers and develop good pricing strategies. You know, we aim today to look at the pricing associated with all the customers we can.
Sometimes there's contract limitations, but those are few and far between at this point, but try to look at them at least on an annual basis. During the periods of higher inflation, sometimes these discussions would take place multiple times a year. We're kind of in a one-year rotation right now, or one-year cadence, I should say. We get that together. We meet strategically. We meet with our sales and ops folks, and then we approach the customer and position ourselves and talk about the value we bring. Where there is pushback, we can leverage the different lines of business with one another to really bring the most value to our customer. I mean, let's be clear. The number one thing is that we deliver good, safe, consistent services to our customers that they value. That is what is driving our pricing.
And the ability that there's limited opportunity for alternatives. And so I think that's been able to, you know, we've battled with our sales organization to drive pricing, and the win rate has been flat. And so we've been able to drive this type of price increase without losing customers. In my mind, we got more to do there. And I think that when we hit that wall, customers will tell us with their feet, and they haven't done that yet.
Yeah.
And Mike, you were starting, you referenced one piece of the ES business. It might be helpful to remind investors because it has changed a little bit.
That's right.
Some of the largest components of that business. And then I'll follow up to that.
Sure. So when you think about, you know, so the guidance has us around $6 billion in revenue. That's what consensus estimates, a little under $6 billion for the year. About $5 billion of that is in environmental services, and that's broken down into four major pieces. The way I'll simply say it, you have the Technical Services business. Think about that as large-scale hazardous waste disposal going out to a Dow plant or a DuPont. Once a week, getting a tanker car full of hazardous waste, delivering that directly to an incinerator through a direct burn stream. That's large-scale waste. We have the SK Branch business, similar type of business, only small scale, going to Jim's auto body shop, going to Jim's paint shop and picking up, you know, five drums, three drums on a route-based work. Small quantity generator, still very profitable.
Those drums are very profitable work, and that's been a good growth engine for us. That's kind of small quantity generator, same type of profiling and hazardous waste needed for the large scale. Then in the more Industrial Services, think about that as going out and going to a refinery or a large chemical company. They shut down for two weeks a year, three weeks a year, and we go into a complete turnaround. We shut the plant, they shut the plant down, we go in and clean out pipes, take the hazardous waste off-site and manage that through an industrial turnaround. And then we're on-site every day through an insight program, managing their hazardous day-to-day waste needs. And the last piece, the piece we made an investment in with the HEPACO acquisition back in 2014, 2024, is in Field Service.
That grew for the first nine months of the year at 48%, but about 12% of that is organic. What drives that is utilities with emergency response or, you know, emergency response at a customer site. There's three drums, and it's spilled over and it's bubbling. We got to get out there within the next couple of hours. Those are the four major components of the business. I'd say, you know, Industrial Services, $1.4 billion, Field Services are close to $1 billion now with the addition of HEPACO and the growth they've experienced. Tech Services and SK Branch, about $1 billion each. That kind of adds up to get to your $5 billion. Three of those businesses have grown double digits this year organically. Industrial Services actually went backwards.
Why that happened is because oil prices went down all year. That put pressure on our refinery customers, which is a big part of our business. That put pressure on us. They need to generate their numbers. They don't want to do a big turnaround. They want to postpone those turnarounds until next year or the year after. They can't postpone them forever, and so that's creating, I think, going to create an opportunity for us in 2025 as oil prices have recovered a little bit, we hope, here to stay, and that's going to drive more investment in Industrial Services, so my point being is we're going to grow. For the first nine months of the year, we grew organically 7%. And that's with a big part of the business going - 1% or -2%.
Thank you for that. Field Services, I want to touch on HEPACO acquisition. It's coming up on a one-year anniversary in March.
March.
Yeah. So it sounds like the business has performed well. I don't know whether you characterize it as better than expected. How have you realized some of the synergies that you expected? Maybe just talk a little bit about that.
Sure. So I've been pretty close to that acquisition, so I'll take that one, Jim. But, you know, when you look back, when we look back at HEPACO about a year ago, I think so far, so good, very pleased with the acquisition. We felt like it would be a great fit because it fit right in with our legacy Field Services business nicely. But when you think about the value we brought to this acquisition, some of the synergies we had targeted, I'd say we've probably done a little bit better, particularly on one front where, you know, HEPACO had a nationwide kind of 1-800 hotline where they had developed established relationships with customers, but they could call in when a spill occurred, and they would essentially send out crews to respond. But a lot of times those crews were made up of subcontracted parties.
We were able to internalize a lot of that work. This was a synergy area that we were really excited about, and we were able, and we always had plans to internalize that work to our legacy Field Services folks because we have them across the country. HEPACO was more established kind of mid-Atlantic, midwest area. So when they had responses out west, we were able to respond this year at probably a higher frequency than we had anticipated. So that's been really, really good. I think the other thing too is, you know, HEPACO really had some really good relationships with railroad companies and some trucking companies, and we've seen some significant and large opportunities this year relative to emergency response in those areas. We talked about it on our Q2 call earlier this year where we saw the volume of large responses kind of increase.
But overall, we're really excited, really happy with the acquisition. I guess the last thing I would make and kind of speaks to how we look at the future, especially in our ES space, and particularly as FS, you know, we're seeing probably more emergency response calls coming in. And what is driving that? And we sit down and think about it. And I really do think companies today, when bad things happen to the environment, they're handling them in a more appropriate way. They've always wanted to do the right thing, but I think there's more pressure on companies to bring in the experts, handle this environmental action the appropriate way, do the right thing, and avoid litigation. And we can help them do all that. So I really do think there's continued growth through that acquisition.
Now that platform is a billion-dollar platform under Clean Harbors, kind of that ER Field Services work. It's gone well.
When we think about Field Service prospectively, we say we call out kind of large-scale events. East Palestine is a perfect example of that in 2024. We did about $30 million, and we called that out in Q2 and Q3. That's probably a headwind going into 2024. We're not going to, as we give out guidance for 2025, probably speak to any large-scale events, but there's more of them happening. That's a fact. Whether they're, you know, there's about 20,000, 21,000 calls a year. That's 21,000 lottery tickets, as one of my colleagues has said recently. That could turn out to be a big deal. The fact that we have this footprint and we're growing this business gives us opportunity for us.
Again, we don't really model it, but certainly it's part of the value proposition of the company.
You guys had another important milestone for the ES business this year. Ribbon cutting in October marked the opening of the Kimball, Nebraska Incinerator. How do we think about the scale-up of Kimball in 2025? I think you've suggested EBITDA contribution in the neighborhood of $8 million-$12 million.
Yep. That's right. So continue, well, first off, we were successful in starting up the plant. Later on in Q4, we did the official ribbon cutting in October and then opened up the plant a little bit later. So far, so good from what we hear from the team. I know Mike was actually out there a few weeks back and saw it in person. And he's reiterated, you know, the opinion of just really proud of the team, really proud of this brand new asset that we brought on, about a $200 million investment. And couldn't be happier with his visit there. But, you know, as we look out into 2025, Jim, there's lots of tailwinds that we view in the business. We see tailwinds from reshoring. We see tailwinds from infrastructure. We see tailwinds from captive operators sending more waste streams to us.
Certainly PFAS, I'm sure we can talk about a little bit. But all those waste streams, along with the demand that we're seeing today, we believe will fill up the capacity, you know, fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things. In 2025, as you said, $8 million-$12 million, we're going to be measured in terms of how we ramp up that facility. We want to make sure we ramp it up appropriately with the right types of materials so that we break it in correctly. Past experiences, we had a little more ups and downs when we opened up El Do seven years ago than we would have liked, and trying to take those learnings and utilize them here and really have a successful first year and then move towards kind of the $40 million EBITDA contribution that we're looking from this facility long term.
And that ties into the next question I had is with El Dorado. Is there something that can help inform us about that? But it sounds like that was also a bit of a learning experience, and you'll apply those lessons.
Absolutely. But I think the last thing I would make with the comparison to El Do, you know, El Do, when we brought that plant online, the capabilities of that plant at the time were to be able to handle the high hazardous waste streams that are coming into the network. Kimball, again, taking some learnings. Kimball, we did the exact same thing with some added capabilities and bells and whistles. So, you know, we've seen our drum count coming into the network being up roughly 15% from last year in 2024. So, you know, kind of towards the end of construction earlier this year, late last year, we decided to do some incremental capabilities to be able to take in more drums, things like that to upscale the facility. So again, a great asset, particularly with all these tailwinds behind us, Jim.
Just really excited that we got this thing going and looking forward to ramping it up.
It looks like a timely investment just given.
And when you think about the $40 million, Eric's made a good point about kind of do the math on the $40 million, take 70,000 drums, 70,000 tons, you can do the math pretty quickly. But that doesn't include the trans, that doesn't include the pickup and the movement of all that waste. So that's and the cost savings of having another incinerator, you know, kind of in the middle of the country. I think that's kind of, we talk about $40 million, but it's actually probably much better than that, depending on kind of how you think about, you know, kind of the cost, the pricing we're going to do on the pickup and the trans. So I think that's something to keep in mind as you're putting out your long-scale models.
It's going to take a couple of years, as Eric said earlier, it's going to take a couple of years to kind of get to that kind of run rate. But I do believe that that's going to be kind of just like we're seeing it today. We're seeing margin expansion today from the investment we made in El Dorado back in 2017. And that's including the incinerator plus all the trucks and all the work to pick it up. So we're seeing that benefit. We're going to see, we'll be here in seven years talking about that in the same way.
Yeah. But what I was going to say, the timing of this also seems well-timed because what we're hearing, you know, first of all, we all know there's increasingly complex waste streams that you guys are being called in for. But there are also expectations there's going to be a stronger industrial economy. And then you touched on it, increased capacity in petrochemicals and whatnot. And what I wanted to get to on this also, and this ties into the idea of captive, going after some of the captive. What is this going to enable? And we'll talk a little bit more about 3M and what happened there. But just in general, trying to frame what Kimball does for you other than that nice EBITDA contribution.
Sure. You know, so I'd say that so we've gotten some questions over the since we did the deal and closed on the incinerator around, you know, increased capacity in our network, both between us and our competitor opening up, you know, whatever number you pick as far as incremental capacity. And is that going to put pressure on pricing? Is that going to put pressure on our network as far as, and I'm here to tell you that, you know, I don't, I couldn't, I think the opposite. I think we should be thinking about opening up another incinerator, like starting that planning process sooner than later. Because I'm of the view that we've been growing this, you know, drum capacity, as Eric said, we had 15% drum capacity increase year-over-year. It's going to continue.
And so we're going to fill up, you know, whenever Veolia opens up. They said mid-year, okay, great. Let's, I think there's going to be so much need in the marketplace. You know, industrial production over the past few years has been, you know, meh, down, flat. Let's talk about it actually growing. And if that were to happen, then what happens? I just, I'm of the view that it really is going to be a need. I don't see it as pricing. First of all, the stuff never goes on sale. Incinerator capacity never goes on sale. We own 60%, 70% of the marketplace. Pick a number. We're not going to slit our own wrists. We're never going to drop that price. And it's one incinerator in Veolia. They're not, they spent a lot of money for that. Don't know how much. Don't really care.
It's going to be. They're going to need to get a return on that as well, so I'm of the view that not only is pricing going to continue to grow, we're going to need to start thinking about another incinerator, and when is that going to happen? Because it does take five years from the time we decide to actually get it kind of on waste, if you will, at least that. That's something that I'm of the view that the pricing is going to continue and there's going to be no discounts happening here, and so I want to just be clear about that. We get a lot of questions on a lot of network capacity coming online.
I just want to take this opportunity to kind of, at least my view as a CEO of the company, that we're not going backwards on this. That's for sure.
Yeah. Okay. No, thank you.
And when you think about captives, so captives have been, you know, we talk to our captives all the time. There's 40 captives out there. Captive incinerators, for people who don't know, they're incinerators that sit on a customer site. The waste gets generated on site, never leaves the site and gets incinerated right there. Now, the challenge with those things is that there's more regulations, more standards, and frankly, we couldn't take it. Like we have all these incinerators, we have nine incinerators, now we have 10 with Kimball. We just had a backup, we had a backlog, we couldn't even take it.
And so the fact that we're hopefully getting after our backlog and getting that to more reasonable levels should give our customers and our captives more reason to say, hey, look it, okay, I'll close my captive, I'll give you that waste because I have, we have the capacity to handle it where I'd say a year ago we did not. Where I sat up on the stage and said we had our backlog, our deferred revenue is going up, that's not necessarily a good thing. It's a good thing from a short-term investment standpoint, but we don't want to double handle that waste. We don't want to keep our waste on that site. We want to move it. We want to get it out of the network. It's expensive to hold on to that waste.
I think a more reasonable level of deferred and backlog, I think, is a healthier thing to our customers and allowing our customers, our captive customers to make that big decision to close their incinerator and give us that waste.
Mike, do they, you know, necessarily have to close or because isn't it also a case where there's some waste streams that they should not be handling and maybe others that they can handle? I don't know.
The store is open for any and all. We can run the incinerator, we can buy the incinerator, we can close the incinerator. I mean, all these, I'm open, we have all those. It's a math exercise. We got to prove the math that we can do it cheaper than they can do it themselves, and including, with the challenge, of course, is when, as you know, Jim, when you do close a captive and you lose that permit, there is no going back. You've lost that permit forever and getting a new permit is very, very difficult, and also you have to clean up the site, and so that's expensive, and so those, you got to prove that math, and what we did at 3M, as Eric said earlier today, was that we're helping them clean up the site as well.
And so because we can do that with our remediation team. So that really is the value proposition. And I do think it's very real. And I do think that we don't need captives to close to kind of get to ramp up Kimball. I think that's, we didn't make that assumption, but I do think the captives closing and where they come to us or come to our competitors, it's going to help the marketplace.
But I think we do see a confluence of different considerations that captive owners need to consider, those being increased costs to operate, those meaning the specialty and knowledge to operate, those being changing regulations and compliance matters that aren't getting any easier in order to control emissions, and now another consideration of seeing some incremental capacity opening up, so if I'm a captive owner, now I'm really, I have all these confluence of factors and considerations. Logic would say, hey, they seriously got to consider this. They want to focus on their core operations, not running an incinerator. Now's maybe the time to think about going to a partner that I already know, that already handles some of my waste streams in a more, in a greater way.
Industry-leading safety record. Industry-leading compliance record.
This has been going on for decades now, and we would expect that it will continue.
Yeah, you touched on industrial production. New administration, now what, next week? You've got the same party controlling Congress. Any observations as to how you're thinking about this and how it might impact the business?
I mean, I think, Jim, you know, we get the question a lot and we ask it of ourselves. And I think we come to the conclusion that for the last 40 some odd years, you know, we've managed the business fairly successful through Democrats, Republicans, split houses, whatever the case may be. And if you think about what we do, it's really about health, human health, environmental health, and doing things that are great for Earth and people. And so I don't think that changes under a new administration. So I think we'll continue to perform well. We performed well four years ago through this administration. You know, we're hopeful maybe one area where we see a little bit more action is kind of on the acquisition front and getting things through kind of government approval. And maybe that's helpful to us from that perspective.
But otherwise, I would, you know, we don't see any huge impediments to the new administration.
Eric, it's maybe a good segue too to PFAS. You know, as you're thinking about the opportunity as it relates to PFAS change at all. It's complicated because that's also a state, a local issue, and in addition to being, you know, an EPA issue.
Yeah, I guess I would say around PFAS is that, you know, we talk about, so a couple of things. First of all, we're doing another emission test at one of our incinerators with the Department of Defense and the EPA on site. We did that at the end of 2024, a couple of months ago, and we're going to come out with that report when it's finalized, you know, end of Q1, early Q2. We're hopeful it's very positive and gives, and just proves again that we are, we can handle large-scale PFAS incineration in our network. You know, when I think about it for a minute, and I read the same newspapers you read, you can't go two or three days without reading another PFAS article in the paper around these forever chemicals and what do we do about those forever chemicals?
They're really bad and they're in everywhere. They're on, now they're in farmland, they're on the soil. So it's biosolids and all that great stuff. I mean, I want to try to tell, you know, tell the New York Times or whatever. It's like, you're missing the other half of the story. We have the solution today at scale that can solve this problem. We need to do a better job. I need to do a better job of marketing that and telling that story to get people to understand that there is a solution out there. Because I feel like whether, you know, whether, how fast the government works, we've been talking about this for a very long time. Who knows with the new administration how fast and how slow these regulations come. We talk about new [audio distortion] coming this summer.
That's what our environmental team tells us, our compliance team tells us. I don't know about that, but let's say that's true or not true. It doesn't matter because PFAS is dangerous. It's in the news every day, whether it's municipal or in the state level, there's going to be a lot of effort around cleaning that stuff up. We are the solution today. We can take the soil. We can do all things. We can do testing for water. We can do water remediation. We can do soil remediation. We can incinerate it or put it in our landfills. We know it's safe and it's coming. And so it's a small business today. It's a $80 million, $100 million business. It's going to grow 20%. I think there could be some step changes that do that today that things like our new incinerator would be just perfect for.
Okay. We've got 13 minutes left and I still haven't asked a question.
So proud of you.
All right, but we have to. SKSS. Tough year.
Yeah, no doubt.
You know, more challenging than you expected. Talk to us, you know, about some of the adjustments you've made in the business, you know, and also. Yeah, there's some opportunities that you also highlighted, whether it's, you know, Group III, some of the partnerships, the strategic partnerships.
Yeah, so for people who don't know, just a quick refresher on, so you think about the $6 billion of revenue, about, you know, $5 billion is the environmental services business, which we spent the first 28 minutes talking about. And so now we're on the oil business, which is about a billion, a little under $1 billion business for 2024. And what that is is we take dirty motor oil primarily from automotive for industrial customers as well. And we re-refine it through a re-refining process to make base oil out of it, which is base oil is the building blocks of motor oil. So then we can do it again. We can make our own motor oil and we can sell it and package it through our closed loop system. So that's the business.
What's happened is that, you know, in this market, you know, we're selling motor oil or base oil compared to major oil manufacturers and we're a price taker. We have very little control over the price we sell that base oil for. And so, you know, that's put pressure on us because oil prices, as you know, have gone down kind of all year. And so that's really put pressure on us because, you know, we collect the dirty motor oil. We set a price when we collect it. It takes eight to 10 weeks to process it and sell it as base oil. And then when the prices are going down, we end up taking haircuts on that. And oh, by the way, the cost of transport has gone up and inflation, the cost of running the plants has gone up because of inflation.
And so as such, it's been more and more expensive to do. We really only have one lever and that's how much we charge or pay for the dirty motor oil that we pick up at our customer site. And so we're going down a path of really being very aggressive on charging more for that used motor oil, UMO is what we call it. And so that used motor oil, we're going from a pay for oil now to a heavy more charge for oil. We did shut because that creates how much gallons are we going to lose because of the fact we went to a charge for oil process. Well, we shut down a re-refinery in an effort to kind of drive to make less demand for us to run that plant more efficiently. And if we need to do more, we'll do more.
What that does is that it allows us to be more aggressive on that. It allows us to take some costs out from a root standpoint and also allows us to try to establish a baseline. What's happened is that for people who've been following us for a number of years, we keep going backwards and we keep saying, well, this is the low mark, this is the low mark. We're at this 150 number, which is kind of the midpoint of our guide for 2024. We feel that is a low watermark because we feel like we are being very aggressive on the used motor oil collection pricing. That should help us drive this. We talk about it as because we've always been hesitant. We got to keep the plants full. We got to keep the plants.
Now we're shutting down plants, which I think is the right answer because at the end of the day, our goal is to kind of drive profitability, not to collect as many gallons as we possibly can collect. The other things you mentioned, things we're doing that are smart. We're doing Group III motor oil. We're making our own Group III, which is full synthetic. That's a route-based exercise to drive Group III. We've also established a relationship with BP Castrol, which has had some successes. They've announced one publicly. You can see it on their website. They are driving there. We're giving them the used motor. We're picking up the used motor oil from their customers and supplying them with base oil, which they mix into their own base with their own blended products. That's really been a big win for us. Those are smaller.
So that's the lever we have is under UMO. Those things are worth a few million bucks each. And that's real money, but it's not going to be the game changer. The game changer is UMO pricing. That's the lever we have. We're going to pull it hard.
Okay. So after the Q3 results, the company revised the full year guide. Talk to us about the puts and takes and the implied Q4 guide, which I guess has a roughly $20 million spread.
Sure, roughly a $20 million spread. So when you think about, you know, our guide and setting the range and kind of upside, downside from that midpoint, Jim, it's a lot of the same things that we see in a typical quarter. So when I think about upside, downside to the up, I mean, we had some really nice emergency response jobs that we talked about in Field Services. So there's, we don't know when those are going to come or how big they're going to be, but it always is a little bit of upside to our midpoint. Obviously, utilization at our plants and things like that can be upside or downside. There's been periods in the past where we have plant disruptions or whatnot.
You know, the Industrial Services business, although Q4 is not the busiest time of year for that business though, but some of the trends, we, you know, there's always mixed messages in terms of from customers to, "hey, we're going to do this, we're not going to do this," and then they end up delaying jobs, so there's plus or minuses in our guide from that. And then obviously the one that's been most kind of volatile that Mike just touched on is the performance of SKSS, so what does customer demand look like? What does import-export imbalance look like in the quarter? And how does that impact pricing in North America and things like that? So those are always kind of the puts and takes, and those are pretty much what they were kind of in Q4 when we gave that guide.
Okay. You won't be giving guidance to Q4 results out. You'll give the 2025 guidance. But I guess where I'm going with this next question is, you know, CapEx, you had some big CapEx outliers. That's coming down. There's improvements that are ongoing and working capital. Let's hope, you know, assume a stable economic environment. It seems to point to a good year for strong cash flow.
Yeah, certainly. And I would start off by saying, you know, what we're looking to do is drive our free cash flow conversion levels to 40% of EBITDA or more over a longer period of time. Now, you look at, you know, very accretive internal growth CapEx projects like Kimball, as we said, $200 million spend.
Baltimore.
Yeah, Baltimore. You know, those things, there's some more of those kind of in the pipeline that we'll consider. But, you know, when I think about cash flow for 2025, and we've touched on this, we'll have, you know, depending on where Kimball ultimately lands for the year, you know, $75 million-$80 million is what we'll spend in 2024 on Kimball. So we'll have that dropping off. Baltimore, from a CapEx perspective, we'll have some things trailing into 2025, but it'll be far less. We talked about in Q3 some working capital challenges that we saw largely from the oil business as well as the integration of HEPACO. I think the team has done a great job of getting after that in Q3 and Q4, and hopefully we see some dividends there. But some of that might roll into 2025 as well.
So, you know, when you think about 2025 and you think about this year's guide and the low 300s, you know, you can add back that CapEx spend. Now, there may be some things that come to fruition next year that we'll call out, probably not of Kimball magnitude, but maybe some more or something similar to Baltimore. And we'll call those out. But I think we're really targeting kind of that 40% and above. But we may be a little bit low if we're a little bit low going forward. It's for reasons that we think are quite accretive from an internal project perspective.
Clean Harbors has had a long and pretty successful track record of doing M&A. You know, its acquisitions are part of that target that you laid out for investors. The 2027 target might be worth reminding, you know, folks about some of the key metrics. And then, you know, how would you characterize the M&A environment? You also brought up a good point. Maybe things change and things are easier to get some of these deals done.
Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start, and Mike, please kind of fill in any gaps that I may miss. But when you think about, just to remind the audience, we introduced our Vision 2027, 2023 now, March of 2023, and in that model, we had put forth kind of an organic growth model that we presented, and then we had an acquisitive model, which essentially was, okay, based upon where we want our debt to EBITDA ratios to be, we think we could invest roughly $4 billion over a five-year period, so we made acquisitions of about $500 million this year with HEPACO and the Noble acquisition, so off to a good start, but what I would say, you know, we'll continue to be very acquisitive. What I would say about kind of the current market, very competitive, very hot space.
There's been significant large deals kind of recently, lots in the news about it, a lot more players in our space, and certainly kind of multiples have increased, which I think on balance is a good thing for Clean Harbors. Our multiple has increased as well. But what I would say is we're going to continue to be acquisitive. Just because we have a $4 billion target out there, we're not going to, we're still going to do the deals that make economic sense for us, and we're going to weigh them against other internal accretive projects as well. But we have a very strong balance sheet. I think myself and the team, Mike, Eric, we've done a great job of keeping and maintaining that strong balance sheet so that we can be active in this space.
I'd also say, you know, we're competing not only against strategics, but also other forms of capital. A lot of these targets that are in our swim lane, we can bring a lot of value like we did with HEPACO. We can extract probably more synergies and be competitive. You know, certainly when I think about capital allocation, acquisitions is one of the areas where we see the greatest return. We'll continue to do that. We're realizing the landscape is changing a little bit as well.
Yeah, there are four ways to deploy capital. You can buy back stock, pay down debt, you can do M&A, or you can do, you know, internal growth projects like Kimball, right? The debt, as Eric said, he's done a great job with the balance sheet, now under two times levered, no need to go around with that. You know, M&A, it's getting more expensive. We look at a lot of deals. I can't stress that enough. Eric and I, Eric in particular, looks at a lot of transactions. We're going to be thoughtful with your money. We're going to be thoughtful with your investments. We're not going to overspend for assets. We're going to wait. Internal capital investments, I think those have been great returns. We just spent some time talking about Kimball. That's going to be a grand slam home run. I guarantee it. It's here.
And so there's more things like that we should do and could do. And the fourth is buybacks. We think we can continue to do that. We think that's a great return on your money as well. And we have the authorization and the capital to do so. We consider ourselves a growth company. We think M&A and internal investments is the way to go. But there's other options as well.