Perfect. Thank you for joining us for the last fireside chat of our conference. Today, we have with us Green Plains. We have Todd Becker, who's been with the company for almost 15 years. I believe most of them as a CEO. We also have Jim Stark, who joined one year ago, I believe, or a bit over one year ago, or rejoined actually.
Yes
... as a CFO from Darling Ingredients. They both are very knowledgeable on this space. I think we're gonna jump right into Q&A.
Great.
I'll start with the transformation story, which obviously is the big story here. I want to take the opportunity to Firstly, let's take a step back and revisit where do you stand on some of your major projects? What was completed late in 2022, and what is the, you know, where is your $200 million of CapEx for 2023 going?
We have now fully converted 560 million gal of our 950 million gal or so of capacity. We have more coming on and in process for construction starting this year, as well as our joint venture under construction as well. We are now beginning to fully run close to full capacity. We're starting to hit 800-900 tons a day. That gets us into that 300,000-350,000 tons a year capacity. We're still not even fully debottlenecked on Obion, which came on late last year, early this year. Basically right now we're producing all of the product, we're selling all the product. We don't have any real product nearby to sell.
If we kind of take a look at where we're at today, everything's producing in spec, 50% protein or higher. The customers have accepted this in many, many different categories, from aqua to pet to poultry to swine. As well as, looking at the future of the rest of the year. Kinda once we're in the ration, we have to actually put aside some of the forward production as well to stay in the ration. We expect that when we kinda look at where we're at today, we'll have all the plants running. We think kinda March 15th-ish is when we'll start hitting full capacity every single day for the rest of the year and then bring on another plant hopefully later this year with our joint venture.
When we look at it, we walked into the quarter 140,000-150,000 tons sold for the year, really holding back about 90,000 tons for continued inclusion in the rations that we're in already. We'll have a little bit of capacity then yet to sell in the last half of the year. We're gonna start to scale more towards our higher protein concentrations as well. With $560 million converted, we'll hopefully break ground on Madison as soon as we can. That's another 120 million gal equivalent. The Tharaldson plant's $170 million, of which we own half of, and we're still trying to get our permit for Fairmont. That's really the first part of our CapEx plan for 2023.
Okay, perfect. Before we actually dig deeper into the high-protein business, wanted to check what are you seeing on the CapEx front and inflation. I don't know if that's a better question for Jim, but you started these plants a few years ago. Clearly, price have gone up. Have the same debottlenecking and conversion projects gone up in terms of CapEx, and to what extent?
Yeah. With what we're building today is more expensive than what we built three years ago in Shenandoah, and then Wood River after that, and Central City. It's leveled out. It's leveled out, and it probably is gonna start to come down a little bit on some of our future projects as well. We're starting to see at least the price of steel come down. Labor has leveled off. Overall, I think our most expensive project would have been Mount Vernon. We hit it right at the top of the inflationary supply chain. Since then, everything has started to get a little bit cheaper. The project we'll start this year will be more somewhere in the range of where we started to the high point. We look at Madison, and a lot of that we bought early on.
A lot of that equipment is sitting there. We're just waiting for the permit. Once that permit gets issued, we're gonna quickly build that. We think tsevenat'll be our quickest build. We know how to do these very well right now. I think it's probably seven months start to finish 'cause everything is there waiting. From the inflationary standpoint, I think everything has come back at least under control. There's definitely some areas that have remained expensive. The bottleneck for anybody building anything like these type of plants in the United States or any other type of agricultural processing capacity is gonna be electrical gear. That is still a long lead time item, and has not come down at all. I mean, we're basically putting in 12-18 months to order new gear.
If you're gonna start up any new project, you should expect that, and it's basically driven by a lot of. There's just not enough capacity to build gear in the United States. You have to go to. In some of our smaller projects, like sugar, we could do specialty gear, which is faster, but the bigger projects that you need Siemens and others, that's really the bottleneck to build anything today.
Okay, perfect. You mentioned the volumes that we're gonna have on high-protein meal, and already you have the slide deck, what's kind of this margin uplift depending on the program. Firstly, can you tell us a little bit, give us more color on the pricing structure? Because one thing we've seen is obviously meal prices, let's say soybean meal being the benchmark, have gone up dramatically in the past year and even since November, December. Are you pricing your contractual relationship to a benchmark as a, let's say, soybean meal plus basis, or is it a fixed price? What happens when, you know, some of the most marketable products like soybean meal go up in price? What does this mean to you?
Yeah. That's helped our overall margin structure. What we've seen is that. Now listen, where soybean meal has gone up in the last 30 days to $470 or $500 a ton, we'll get some of that as well, but a lot of our product has been sold locked in at that spread, what we indicated around $200 premium to DDGS. On top of that, we get our corn oil uplift over and above what we initially thought as well. You know, what but in our spot sales that we get to make, we do get some of the benefit of some of these higher prices. Remember, it's all in relationship to the distillers grains pricing as well. Distillers grains has gone up as well.
Yes.
The spread between high protein and distillers grains hasn't changed that much. I mean, you saw Nebraska in the mid to high 270s or 250s. If you have meal of $450-$500, the spread is still in that $200 a ton range. Earlier last year, we saw it really narrow in when the meal oil spread got a little bit out of whack, and it got close to a $150 spread. Now it's closer to a spot $220 spread. The meal market's highly inverted. As the energy guys like to say, it's highly inverted.
Once you get back out there, it's more traditional, $425 meal, $225 distillers grains. We like it. Everything we did and everything we invested was based on about a $200 spread to meal.
Okay.
$200 dollar-
To DDGS.
premium to DDGs. Yeah.
Okay. You're rolling out essentially some new products from your facilities. As you did the trials with your customers on various types of feed, aqua feed, pet feed, can you tell us what are some of the comments you got in terms of what was positive, what they liked, but also any feedback they gave on what they would like you to do going forward?
Yeah. What we do know is that our product is gaining wider and wider acceptance. There was a lot of skepticism on whether we could actually sell our product. Well, okay, check the box. It's sold out.
Okay.
We still like to achieve higher returns against this product, and we think it's worth more than even than we're selling it for today, but we'll talk a little bit of how we're gonna get all that 'cause that's gonna really focus on the higher protein concentrations. What we do know is that whether it's in pet food, whether it's in aquaculture, whether it's in poultry, the product's now being pulled through. I'll give you an example. We had one customer who said, "Put me in for 10,000 tons next year." That was in 2022 for 2023. He's up to 90,000 tons and wanted to buy 50,000 tons more. They're discovering something, and I will tell you what they're really discovering in our product, which differentiates it from other protein products.
It's 75% protein and 25% yeast. It just tastes better. If you're a chicken or if you're a dog or if you're a fish, they just eat more of it because the yeast increases palatability. That's a unique difference in our product, and that's really what we're starting to see when we're getting second and third comebacks for more and more volumes. That's really what we're starting to see. I'd say the only issue there is that where we're going with our product is gonna be really interesting because we really want to, While we've gone after high protein soybean meal equivalent type markets, we really wanna go after. The next step for us is to go after corn gluten meal equivalent type markets. The step after that is to go after soy protein concentrate equivalent markets.
We know once we get penetration into this 50 Pro base load, that's when we start to really focus on getting into that high fifties against corn gluten meal. We have an advantage against them. That advantage, it's 25% yeast. It just tastes better. They just eat more of it.
I wish we could do a taste test, but I'm not sure.
Yeah, you could... It actually smells like bread. It's because of the yeast.
Oh.
It's very yeasty, right? Traditionally, what a feeder would do is buy protein and buy brewer's yeast, and they put it all together, and that's how they got the animal to eat the product. With our product, it's a one single product solution, which then they free up a bin to do other things. Now they don't have to buy those two products. They get to buy one single product, and it takes care of it, and they can go use that bin for other reasons.
Moving to something else, I guess, that tastes good. Clean sugar.
Yes.
Dextrose. You're converting one plant, I believe, this year. York is,
No, York is our SemiWorks.
Sorry
... innovation lab.
Okay.
We're building our first clean sugar dextrose facility in Shenandoah.
Sure. Okay.
Yes.
One thing is clearly that jumps out of your slide deck is that you assume that the premium on an ethanol gal equivalent base will be $0.67. You've talked also that right now, based on current market price, it would be perhaps $1.
Yeah.
Firstly, can you talk a little bit about this market and why are prices so tight, but also give us some background about what is the market size? What are your key competitors?
What we always said is the holy grail really for a dry grind facilities is, can you make dextrose or not? The reason we bought Fluid Quip Technologies, while the market thought we bought it for protein and got the dextrose technology, we actually bought it for the dextrose technology and got the protein technology. We always knew where we were going with this technology portfolio, that we own and control this out of a dry grind facility. Traditional dextrose was made out of a wet mill is what they call it, where they fractionate it on the front end and go after all these different products, and they make a lot more money than a dry grind facility, which has made three products traditionally, ethanol, distillers grains, and some corn oil.
What we have as a technology now is now we can go and grab and make dextrose out of a dry grind facility. That's what we're building in Shenandoah. Today, in the U.S. alone, it's about a 16 billion pound market and growing. We think in the next 10 years it'll double in size at least or at least 50%- 100% higher in the next 10 years. We've said that, and we're seeing it play out. We're seeing dextrose pricing well above traditional prices, because there is not enough capacity today in the United States to take care of all of the growing demand. It's everything from renewable chemicals all the way to gummy bears and everything in between.
What the market doesn't know yet is what we can make is what we've told them is we can make 95 dextrose equivalent, we can make 63 dextrose equivalent, and we're gonna make 43 dextrose equivalent, and that's kind of a water white flowing dextrose. That will go into things, everything from jams, jellies, all the way through candy and confectionery and everything in between. 95 dextrose equivalent, that goes into more alcohol products. White Claw, if you drink White Claw on the weekends, that's a lot of 95 DE is in that product as well. Today, in our SemiWorks facility, we can make 95 DE, we can make 63 DE, and we've had a breakthrough to making a 43 DE as well. That's really the Holy Grail, is can you make 43 DE?
Any of those, it doesn't really matter. The market is high. The supply is not enough to take care of the growing demand. You're hearing it from the wet millers in the sweetener market. You're hearing it already. They've passed on price already to the end user. They're getting the higher prices. The great thing about what we do is we make it cheaper and it's a lower carbon intensity, significantly lower carbon intensity than what's out of a wet mill. What you said, what we based everything was on traditional spreads. A traditional mid-teens type sugar market against a, you know, where we would be able to make that product. That gives us about $0.67 a gal uplift on converted capacity versus traditional ethanol margins. Today is mid, you know, high teens to mid-20s where you're getting...
There's some products even trading higher than that's more close to a $1 a gal uplift. In Shenandoah, for example, we're converting 25 to 30 million gal equivalent grind to go into our new dextrose facility. This isn't a inline. This is a brand-new on a standalone technology that basically we'll just pump the product into there and it'll make the dextrose. It'll do all the way through filtration and the color side. You know, really what we're doing is today we're converting about 25- 30 million gal of capacity in grind. It should make somewhere between two and 300 million lbs of starting dextrose. We've designed it to scale it quickly to 500 million lbs with not a lot more CapEx.
If you take a look at that's 25 million-50 million gal equivalent. At today's market, it'd be a $1 a gal uplift from the margin opportunity versus ethanol. That's significant. The great thing is we own and control that technology, and it is not easily copied or duplicated because it's very, very technical, and it's not something you're just gonna start up and make sugar. We're hiring and attracting talent from all of the major wet millers. They're all coming to work for Green Plains today because they absolutely believe that this is where they wanna make dextrose. It's very exciting what we're doing. We have a high, high confidence of success. What we learned when we stood up the protein business will absolutely apply now when we stand up our dextrose business as well.
Yeah. Are there... I think you mentioned though that given the size of the market, there are some limitation in terms of how much capacity you can convert here. What would you say is the limitation in terms of...
I will tell you where we're going is we can't wait for Shenandoah to turn on to think about where are we gonna build more.
Okay.
We're already thinking about today plant one and two and start, almost start engineering to think about. When Shenandoah turns on, we have a high degree of confidence, much like protein turned on, and that will work. When Shenandoah turns on, we wanna be ready to know where we're gonna build two and three, and even have engineering and some site work, site locations picked out as well. That will get us to about 2 billion-3 billion lbs of dextrose or 200 million-300 million lbs of converted capacity. That's how we're thinking about our first stage. That's, that should be able to absorb into the market today.
What we're seeing, we're getting calls all the time from people that wanna buy 50 million lbs, 30 million lbs, 100 million lbs, but they also wanna see our quality when we start out. Much like protein. It's a little bit the same. "Show us the product when you can make a lot of it." When do we start? Like, today, we can make dextrose in York, Nebraska, like you mentioned. It's our semi-works facility. We've made all the way up to 43 dextrose equivalent, the highest quality that you can make. We're thinking about crystalline dextrose as well. That's even more margin. We're really, we're taking the wet... We've hired wet millers. We're putting our wet miller hat on in a dry grind facility, and we're attracting amazing talent that know how to make this product today.
Yeah, I mean, when we look at it, we already have to start thinking today around plant number two and three and getting to 2 billion-3 billion lbs of capacity or converting 200 million-300 million gal of capacity for ethanol.
Okay, perfect. Some other components of the transformation. On the CO2 sequestration, firstly, the agreement with Summit, I guess the way it's structured is while they pay for it, or most or all of the CapEx, they will get, for example, the 45Q credit, but you get the benefit of lower CI score and probably...
Yeah. That's evolved a lot since we've started the Summit Pipeline Project. Number one, we're very excited to be on their pipeline. They've raised $1 billion plus. It's about a $5 billion project. They've got 60% or 70% of the right of way already bought. The big thing for that is they have their pore space in North Dakota, and they're drilling their wells already. They have their capacity to store. There's nobody else today that has their capacity to store. The great thing is in North Dakota, they have primacy, so you don't need an EPA permit. You don't have to wait for the EPA like Illinois and other sites. They're very supportive in other states, and they're very supportive of that.
Our Summit agreement basically started out with a sharing of the 45Q and the carbon value, whatever we can get for carbon. What's evolved is IRA, and IRA has come along. There's the 45Z, which is worth more than the 45Q during the years it's in place. On top of that, there's a carbon value. On top of that, there's some other interesting aspects of that. The economics on paper have gotten better than what we had initially talked to the market about. We've left it at about $0.15 a gal, which is the old economics of splitting the 45Q. For the first three years of this project, we probably won't even go after the 45Q. We'll go after the 45Z credit. That's a much better economic outcome, and that's our first step to decarbonization.
In some of our other sites, we'll look at direct inject, we'll look at some offtake agreements on carbon, those type of things. In a majority of our plants today will be on the Summit Pipeline to start.
Okay, perfect. last one a little bit quickly here on sustainable aviation fuel. you have the agreement with Tallgrass and United. what's kind of the timeline for the pilot plan? If it goes well, when do you think that could be commercialized? What are your financing commitments in the next few years towards that JV?
Okay. I'll talk about the, I'll talk about the JV. Jim can talk a little bit about financing commitments, but, you know, for the JV, we are not exclusive on that technology. Just let's put that out there. We're looking at other technologies as well other than the one we're scaling up. The one that ourselves and Tallgrass and United are scaling up was PNNL had a technology. It's an ethanol-to-ketone. You skip the ethylene step. Easier to break the bond between carbon and oxygen than carbon and carbon like the ethylene step. We're gonna spend the next 6-12 months optimizing a catalyst between... We have an outside firm doing that for us. That's funded. It's not gonna take a lot of funding to do that.
If successful, and if we see that's a chance to scale it, then sometime later this year, early next year, between ourselves, United, and Tallgrass, we'll make the decision to build a pilot facility. And then post that, if that pilot facility is successful, then we'll have to make the bigger decision on whether we're going to build a full-scale plant or let somebody else do it. But we're really excited about this technology. But there's some really other cool technologies out there as well. And we're looking at, you know, just four or five that are in the works today. I'd say some are really much further along than others.
I don't know that you can pick a winner or a loser, I think the IRA is basically telling everybody, "Go develop your jet fuel technology from alcohol." If you would've asked me a year ago, "Is alcohol-to-jet a reality?" I would've said no. If you asked me a year later, "Is alcohol-to-jet going to be a reality?" I would say yes, because the IRA is in place, and the airlines wanna pull ethanol to jet forward. They weren't thinking about ethanol to jet a year ago, They are today. It's a little bit of a government helped out a little bit, the airlines are also saying, "Yeah, go make that, and we wanna partner with you on it.
The partners in probably that year timeframe from where we're today, it could be about a $50 million commitment that we would have to share in with our partners in the deal. We have a go, no-go decision at that point in time. Any step along the way of the process, any of the partners have a go, no-go to go move forward with the partnership to get it to completion.
That 50 is combined?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Yeah. That's a total $50 to get the pilot.
Total, yeah.
We're basically, you know, close to being about a third, a third. There's a little bit of differences, but in general, we're almost equal on our ownership and. If it works, I'm sure that we will all find ways to fund that project.
Okay. Let's switch a little bit to ethanol because I'm sure people wanna hear what's happening.
What's that? Yes, okay.
I'm wondering firstly, versus roughly last month when we discussed about the ethanol market, where do you see margins here? You know, natural gas, for example, is down. corn, I guess, is seasonally down. are margins getting any better?
The margins are absolutely getting better. They're still. We're from a low, from the lower lows. They're still low. What we're finally seeing is somewhat of a turn starting to happen.
Okay.
It's about this time last year that, you know, we saw the same thing happen. This week we saw a draw of 800, good driving demand at nine point one in terms of gas demand this week. We're finally... maybe we start turning the corner on gas demand. Summer driving season, the weather has been somewhat mild, so I think we're seeing the consumer start to drive a little bit more. That would be great if that happens throughout the next three weeks. If we could see that happen, I think that ethanol is starting to make its climb out of the very serious doldrums we've been in for a while, really since mid fourth quarter.
You know, how we're looking at it is last year we were not very much actively hedging our book because of the fourth quarter in 2021. You know, the margins blew out. We were hedged, and we were highly criticized for that. We probably should have actively hedged more last year. I would tell you this year, if we get an opportunity, and I do absolutely believe we will have an opportunity to hedge positive base margins, not before corn. That's before corn oil. We'll have the opportunity to hedge positive, if not very positive base margins. Base is everything we see in terms of ethanol production this year. There's never really been a year you haven't been able to do that. We just weren't actively hedging our book as we were focusing on the transformation.
We're gonna really look this year to be more like Green Plains pre 2020, 2022. When there's opportunities to hedge positive margins, we'll start to hedge. Very positive margins, we'll start to hedge more aggressively. I think we just wanna lock in these base load ethanol, so we don't have to have these discussions when ethanol is -15 or -25 or whatever it's gonna be. This is a product that is still being used broadly. Take a look at what came out, I think it was yesterday, the eight states, the governors in those eight states.
Interesting.
Yeah, the White House is gonna give them the E15 forever. you know, you can blend all year round forever. Once eight states go, our view is it's gonna turn into 10 states and 12 states and 15 states. Ultimately it'll for the most part roll out. We're seeing in any of the states that blend E15, that have that ability to do that, Iowa's 12.5%. Minnesota's 12.5%. If we can get seven, six more states to blend 12.5% and then start to expand it from there, I think ethanol, that's the starting point. The ending point ultimately is this ATJ. That's when we really start to see things change.
Yeah, I mean, it's been a pretty rough go for U.S. ethanol industry and natural gas was really high, now it's really low. A lot of people locked in their first quarter gas. I mean, we, you know, the market's working through some of that, but I think we're gonna start to see the benefit of these lower gas prices in the forward crush. I think overall, when we kind of look at this forward curve, we're gonna start to see some of the benefits of better driving, lower natural gas prices, spreads getting a little bit better every day, and then every day we've seen a slow climb out of the doldrums.
It's not there yet. You know, every day we're watching it and I think we're gonna make our way back to positive margins, at least on base ethanol.
Perfect. I have a few more questions, but firstly, let's see if there's anybody who would like to ask a question. Okay. one more for me.
Yes, there you go.
Firstly, a big challenge has been the corn basis, right?
Yeah.
Essentially, it seems to me the challenge has come more from agriculture rather than ethanol. I mean, ethanol over $2 a gal is still a good price compared to where it was five years ago. Margins may be worse now. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges with procurement and, you know, the whole situation with the basis for corn going to at some point $1 a bushel?
Yes
which is-
We're starting to see some relaxation of that.
Yeah.
It's calming down. I mean, you can get your corn bought now and not anywhere near historical values, but not anywhere near where we saw the highs of last summer. In general, corn basis was more volatile last year than the corn market in general once it went up to a certain level. I think that's calming down. I think we're gonna see 90 million acres plus. I think we're growing our carryout in corn. I think more is available every day on the market. If we get this farmer to plant a bunch of corn, he's gonna look to these high prices. We're starting to see really... We're really meeting resistance up towards this high $6 corn market.
Every time we kind of get up there, it's being pushed back down and the curve is now inverting even more. We'll have to watch closely, but it would be great to have good weather this summer, great planting, and grow a big corn crop, and that will take care of a lot of issues. I think we're gonna grow our carryout a little bit, and if the world recovers as well, that would be nice. I think that's not as big of a worry today as it was necessarily four or five months ago when we were paying $100 over in Southern Minnesota, $120 over in Southern Minnesota. At least we have a shot at it.
Ethanol, while certainly it's over $2 a gal, it's still $0.40-$0.50 under gasoline on most days. It's a great blend. If you look at the C-store results that are coming out, they're fantastic. Why? 'Cause they're blending as much ethanol as they can and getting a $1.50 rent on top of that, and they're making a lot of money on the blend. That's why we're starting to see more and more being pulled through. Yeah, I mean, it's not just agriculture that's affecting this. I think, we really need to start to see driving demand recover. Hopefully this week, and last week, we saw really two weeks of good numbers that we really haven't seen since pre-COVID, actually. That nine one, the last time we saw it was this time pre-COVID.
Okay, I have two last questions, and we need to address them quickly, even though unfortunately they will take a long time.
Yeah.
The first one is a little bit big picture. The transformation could be very successful in a couple of years and bring hundreds of millions in EBITDA. At the same time, you know, $0.10 negative ethanol margin, let's say core ethanol margin, would be $100 million negative and take a big chunk of it. What can you do down the road to kind of decouple from an ethanol business that could be in decline?
Yeah
...unless AF takes over?
If, if worst case scenario is it's $0.10 and we get the 60% protein on our platform, which I have a high degree of confidence we're gonna sell most of our platform forward. Not necessarily this year. We're gonna sell some of it this year. We get into 2023 and 2024 or 2024 and 2025 and 2026, I do believe most of what we will sell will be in the higher protein concentrations, going after the corn gluten meal market all the way through soy protein concentrate. That's a $0.30 a gal plus. If we say -$0.10 a gal plus. I'm not saying that's the margin, by the way. We'll, we'll call it.
Yeah
...for your, for your illustration. Plus $0.30 a gal across our platform, that's plus $0.20 a gal. If on top of that we get corn oil plus $0.15 a gal, that's on top of that. If on top of that we convert a quarter of our platform converted to sugar. 2.5 billion lbs at a $1 a gal equivalent margin. That's equivalent of another $0.25 a gal basically over the whole platform, $1 a gal over a quarter of it. On top of that, you're decoupled. We're decoupled at that point. Yeah, we have a long way to go to get there, you're decoupled. If ethanol goes to -20 or +20, you're decoupled.
It will never get to a point, in my opinion, where it will go that deep negative for that long. Now we've seen it for quite a while here, we're coming out of it. You get to ETJ, and it's game over. I think we're gonna.
Right.
What we're doing and everything we're doing is decoupling. I will say this. In our 60 million gal plants or our smaller plants, we have to really make the decision. Or in a state that won't give us a permit, if we can't put our technology around all of our plants, then we need to probably change our mix to go get plants we can put the technology around right away and maybe, you know, reformat our platform. We don't need those. If a state won't give us a permit, we probably don't need to plant in that state, quite frankly. Because we need to be able to put our technology. There's some things we can do to optimize and maybe change around our portfolio. We're gonna look to do that. The denominator just needs to get bigger.
Like a plant like Central City, Shenandoah, Obion, those plants need to be expanded because there's protein there already, there's oil there already, and there's carbon. If you all of a sudden can expand those each 40 million gal at a very low expansion cost, you can get more protein, oil, and carbon, and you start to really decouple. In the meantime, Q1, yeah, it was a pretty weak ethanol margin. Q2 is really when we see what I believe will be full production at the five plants converted. Corn oil margins are hanging in there. If we can get ethanol back to somewhere in that plus or minus either side, if not even positive in Q2, then I think people will really start to see the real earnings power of this platform.
We always thought I said to the market, or I said to our shareholders, to our stakeholders, to our employees, "I can see inflection," and it's kind of Q2 of 2023 is really when inflection hits. You'll start to see how we can begin to decouple, come first quarter of next year when we bring on Shenandoah Sugar, which will take a little time to ramp up. We can be excited about it. We'll know at that point the future of Green Plains and the ability and the earnings power. If we can go after billions of lbs of dextrose, you will see serious earnings power out of this company.
22nd answer, and probably the biggest question though, there was a recent call that, you know, the company should be taken private by an investor. Setting aside the share price and who could do that, from a company standpoint, employee standpoint, and management standpoint, given the big transformation and uncertainty, wouldn't it make your job easier to just be private and not be, you know, not have to do a quarterly call every time and talk about ethanol margins?
Quarterly calls are so much fun that I don't know that we wanna do that or not. We listen to all our shareholders. We have plenty of shareholders that wanna see us go through the transformation. They believe our share price can go a lot higher as well. It's why they're committed to us. We understand that commitment. You know, does the company belong private or not? You know, it, it's hard. That's a hard question to answer. I mean, we're public today. There's no real path to going private. If, if somebody ever wanted to take over Green Plains, we're a public company, we're for sale every day, as I, as I say to people.
you know, we have lots of long-term shareholders that also want to see us remain and continue through the transformation and get rewarded for the commitment that they've made to us and the patience that they've had with us, and I think they're gonna be rewarded. Look, there's still gonna be a little bit of volatility to get to the other side of this, but inflection is coming. late 2023 and 2024 is when we start to really see the benefit of sugar. maybe at that point we can take a look at it, but I think our share price will be a lot higher at that point. you know, we've done I think we're doing what we need to do today, and everything else will work itself out.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Todd and Jim.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you everyone for coming to our conference.