All right. Thanks, everybody. We're going to continue now. We touched on it a little bit in the last meeting. We're going to talk a little bit more about biofuel and parts of that market. We've got Randy Stuewe here, who's the Chairman and CEO of Darling Ingredients. So, Rand, thanks for being here today. I know the flights were not easy on your way in yesterday. We appreciate you making the effort. So I wanted to start high level on the renewable diesel market, similar to what we just talked about a little bit with PSX, but a lot of moving pieces. You've been in this business for a long time. You guys are the longest running, biggest producers of renewable diesel in North America. There's a lot of uncertainty out there, a lot of moving pieces, obviously with the BTC, IRA, PTC, LCFS. As we think about the next 12 months, can you walk through how you see the moving pieces adjusting to find a new equilibrium in the market? Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks, Ryan, for having us. And always the little background on the company is we entered the RD business in July of 2013 with serial number 01 of a technology to convert animal fats and used cooking oil into a hydrocarbon. We've continuously been running successfully and profitably for that entire time frame. As a public company, we got to publish our margins, and ultimately, we attracted competition into the space. And as activism went into the boardroom of Big Oil, they chose to try to operate in the green world. And so last year was the inflection point. If you think from 2013 to 2018, we averaged $1.26 a gallon. From 2018 to 2022, about $2.26 a gallon, and then down to investment case last year. And so the industry today is absorbing, as Mark said, the transition from the producer blender's tax credit to the producer's tax credit. It's absorbing a slow rulemaking on the LCFS out there, and it found itself in a bit of oversupply, and that would be globally. We ran about 4.5 million tons last year. Neste ran 3.8. We're the largest in the world globally today. Basically, the plants can run when they're turned up full near 100,000 bbl a day. The marketplace is going to right-size itself, and it's absolutely happening in front of your eyes. Clearly, the one key driver of this whole discussion isn't what feedstock you should use. It's ultimately who owns the carbon intensity feedstock, which is us, and then ultimately, where is the RVO going in D.C.? And I think where we failed as an industry, and when I say industry, I'm going to call it food, ag, and energy, was we failed to convince the regulators in D.C. about two years ago that there was adequate feedstock. They were worried about food inflation and then that there was adequate capacity or additional capacity coming online. So the situation we're in isn't really surprising. What's going to happen, and like I said, it's happening in front of your eyes right now, is the generation one biodiesel capacity is rationalizing. Ran at 40% or 45% in January. We'll see here. I think Friday we'll get another D4 RIN number, so we'll see what happens there, but I suspect it'll even be lower. And so ultimately, you're going to right-size the industry to the most efficient producer. What I'm most proud of is looking back now after 12 years here. In July is when you locate on the Gulf Coast with the access to our vertical feedstock, imported feedstocks, hydrogen, natural gas, electricity, and labor, and then the outbound logistics. We are absolutely positioned to win the game. Thanks. I mean, I guess a couple of things to unpack there. I mean, do you think we can get there just on the supply side, right? Like imports under the new regime, imports get backed out, marginal biodiesel capacity getting rationalized, as you said. Can supply do all the work, or do we need a step up in demand? And any thoughts on potential from an RVO point of view to see something positive on the demand side? Yeah. I think there's a couple of answers to that. One is, yeah, supply is happening right in front of your eyes just like we talk in business school when you get below the variable cost to produce. Let's talk about that real quick so people understand. Between carbon intensity and the producer's tax credit and the LCFS, if you're running on soybean oil, which a lot of these guys were trying, their margin is zero today, and at zero, we're at $0.80. So it's happening. We're not at $0.80 today. We're lower than that. So they're running in the red. You'll see first quarter numbers here in another, I don't know, 35 days from everybody. You'll see the industry in the midst of rationalization. Now, remember, the RVO didn't go away. It grew 500 million gal this year. Remember, imports don't qualify for the producer's tax credit. A billion gallons went away, so we have never seen a situation in a global industry right now like we've entered right now. The big oil guys, the obligated parties, the retail guys, they're all sitting on the sidelines right now trying to figure out what's going on with the chaos in Washington, and they carried over a big number of RINs, and at the end of the day, the rubber's going to meet the road here, and I suspect it's going to happen very shortly, as soon as this Friday, when people start to realize that you've got to put profitability back in the business for the marginal guy in order to make a physical gallon to generate a RIN. Now, typically, as we all learn in business school, it takes a little longer to get there, but we have crossed that variable cost line for most of the industry. I mean, if you think back to last year, there wasn't one of our competitors that put up black numbers for the year. Not one. And now, I suspect there were a few games played in Q4 with the blender's tax credit, how inventories were done, and you thought the world had changed. That's not the case. They're running red now. We're in good shape. And I think that at the end of the day, supply is going to reduce. But remember, demand's going to increase at the same time because I already said 500 million gal. And remember, imported biofuels don't economically work in here today. So you're going to get a little bit of both. The other thing we got out of the discussions with the EPA is that at the end of the day, they're going to bring the 26 RVO here April, May. I tell you, I believe they get it. I think we know we're aligned not only with the API, we're aligned with different trade organizations that are out there. We're asking for a 2 billion gal increase. Now, it's a giant ask. Are you going to get that? Probably not. But any type of increase here, I think, is really, really positive. It's most positive for Darling and Diamond Green Diesel and Valero's assets. At the end of the day, we will be and are the low-cost producer with the most efficient vertical supply chain in the world with the most flexible feedstock technology in the world, bar none. Thanks. Let's talk about that advantage in terms of and some questions in the near term on the PTC, right? So first of all, what do you think the relative advantage? What are you able to capture, you think, in terms of your sales from a PTC point of view? And do you feel like you have enough clarity at this point on the rules to start booking credits here in the first quarter? The answer is absolutely. And Mark said it before me. It's law. It takes an act of Congress to repeal it from where it's at right now. Can they modify the GREET model a little bit? Possible, but I don't think they will because they already gave a present back to the ag industry. So for us today, if you're looking at the business and you say, "Well, on December 31, you were getting $1 a gallon in the blender's tax credit, we're getting about $0.60 today on RD." Now, it's much higher on the SAF unit that's running now. So at the end of the day, we have full clarity. Our financials will reflect not only at Diamond Green Diesel, the booking of the producer's tax credit. It will reflect the income on the parent company too. For people that want to say, "Well, how does that flow through?" Diamond Green is a tax-free entity. It will, on behalf of Darling, monetize the credit. We have buyers for today. They're quantifiable. They're certifiable. They're all the things you need, and then that cash will come back straight to Darling, and it changes the world because it used to be on December 31, we had to wait till we got a dividend, and it was a very straightforward calculation out of Diamond Green. This is non-calculable from the dividend side, so therefore, it's just paid as cash to the company, so it kind of changes the way we look at the world both from a debt and an earnings standpoint as we go forward here. Thanks. One more thing before we switch a little bit. You mentioned earlier there was a bit of a delay in implementation of the LCFS amendment change. Any visibility in terms of your expectation? Or what do you think on timeline before that gets sorted? I mean, I think CARB has been absolutely transparent in what they want to do. You can go follow it. I mean, it's taken some time here. They want credits to go back to 130 from 50 or 55 today. Ultimately, at the end of the day, OAL, or so, if you think through the process, CARB generated the rule. OAL marked it up, and it wasn't. It's back to like eighth-grade English class when you got your paper back. 22 pages got marked up on it. But it was all, at the end of the day, it was very, very minor stuff that ultimately the belief was maybe CARB because of the acceleration method might have had a little too much authority. So they've got 120 days. They've told us that they believe they can get it done sooner. We'll see. And then once they hand it back to OAL, OAL has 30 days to approve it or send it back. I think OAL will approve it. I think it'll go to Governor Newsom. I mean, this program is his program. It's been a huge success for him. So I see it happening here. I think if you said, "Give me the worst case, the best case." Worst case is we get an October 1 implementation. Best case, they retro it to January 1. And then all bets are off after that. Perfect. Thanks. Let's switch gears a little bit to one of the other sides of your business on the feed segment. A lot of these changes, these changes shifting toward the PTC and the IRA should be a relative tailwind for that business. What are you seeing? Are you seeing incremental fat demand out there? What should we expect in terms of the feed side of your business going forward? Yeah, so it's kind of for people that are sitting out here enjoying a wonderful lunch. At the end of the day, Darling goes back to 1882 and is the largest animal byproduct processor in the world. One out of every six animals goes through one of our factories in 23 or 24 countries. Ultimately, we produce two things. We produce protein and we produce fat, and it gets segmented as edible, inedible, then edible for an animal, and then mortalities where that has to be destroyed and converted to a BTU, so what we're seeing this year is much different than last year. The challenge that we had last year was driven from what I'm going to say a series of events in 2022 and early 2023, and that was we started up Diamond Green Diesel 2 and Diamond Green Diesel 3. Those two plants on top of Diamond Green Diesel 1 have the capability of consuming two out of every three pounds of fat made in North America, waste fat. So ultimately, not everything's going to work down there logistically and from a freight standpoint. So we found in the world being the highest bid, Delivered New Orleans or Delivered Houston, if you will, Port Arthur and St. Charles, we were able to locate lots of imported fat. And so imported fat came rolling in here last year like never before. Not only we talked earlier about imported biodiesel, predominantly out of Germany and Canada, but imported UCO, imported fat from Brazil, Europe last year as it came in. It devalued our product that we were making in North America. To give people an example, we do a cash planning, stop the world exercise for one day a year so we can kind of just look at the world from how to grow and where to deploy capital, and we were using on December 10th, 2023, $0.55 a pound fat prices at FOB our factory. By January 7th, they were $0.35. And that was a result of the imports. As we said earlier in the discussion, the PTC doesn't favor imported fats, and now you've got the Chinese tariffs and you've got all kinds of stuff going on. So we've seen fat prices now move up to they're about $0.10-$0.14 a pound higher today than they were one year ago today. That's going to be very, very bullish, not only the feed segment, but every one of our segments produces fat, and it's all different. There's edible fats, there's the inedibles that end up, and then there's the mortality fats that end up, but they all end up back at Diamond Green Diesel within our system today. The arbitrage is helping our entire global system now between Europe and then also in South America as we aggregate and bring up from our Brazilian factories. Okay. Thanks. I mean, I guess as we think about are there risks? I mean, you do source a decent amount internationally. In terms of impacting your business, is there risks in terms of your ability to source feedstock or things on that side, or can you do it enough domestically with what you have? The answer, I wouldn't call it risk. There's timing here. As I said, in 2022, 2023, as we transitioned into that year and the supply chain accepted about half imports into our system, maybe less. I don't know the exact numbers. We have to transition a lot of that back to domestic. On top of when the PTC got published and it prohibits Chinese UCO today, that's a different discussion. It doesn't prohibit animal fat out of Europe or animal fat out of Brazil, where we're the two largest producers. So we're just reworking the supply chain in Q1 to reflect what we learned on January 20th when the GREET model was published. So the answer is no risk. There's just a matter of powering back up and getting it from the right locations. All right. Let's talk sustainable aviation fuel. It feels like if there's one thing that most people can agree on across both sides of the aisle and both sides of the pond, it's that sustainable aviation fuel seems like it's going to be relatively well supported for some time to come. So you started up your expansion project, your conversion project in the fourth quarter of last year. Can you just talk to us how is the asset performing? Where are you in terms of kind of contracting of supplies? Is the pricing then in line with what you expected and had talked about previously? How's that business going? So first off, I had breakfast this morning with my colleagues from Valero so we can always think of what I can tell you. The plant's at capacity. It came in under time, under budget, and sales are exceeding our expectations at this time. It probably warrants an expansion. We're working on that. When and where? Lane and I are aligned on it has to be a demand pull. Aviation fuel, it seems simple. And I kind of want to set the table here because I want you to see where this is going. First off, Jet A, pretty close to what? Standard diesel heating oil pricing at the wing tip, right? Or in wing. This is almost 2x. Now, there's incentives in different states. That's the voluntary market here. And there's a 2% growing to 6% mandate in Europe. Very different obligated parties in that sense. So the sales book is developing very, very nicely. It's developing both voluntary and mandate, meaning Europe. The European obligated parties, as you know, would be the big oil guys of BP, Shell, Eni, Total. And over here, the supply chain is, as we get a press release out there so we can kind of show you how it works, Diamond Green Diesel sells to Valero Marketing and Supply Company who buys Jet A from Valero Refining, and then we sell to World Fuel Services who then sells to JetBlue and puts it in the wing. Very complicated supply chain. Now, why would an airline go pay a couple of bucks a gallon more for fuel when it's, what, in the mid-20s percent of their operating or variable cost? The answer is because they're able to monetize a credit. And the little secret that's developing out there is decarbonization is not dead. You may not be able to use the word climate change in D.C. today, but decarbonization is not dead, and it's not dead from the consumer-facing companies. And you can only imagine, and you know the names, Microsoft, Amazon, Nike. You can just keep going down the list. JPMorgan. They're credit buyers. We're making fuel for an airline. They're monetizing a credit then into the Scope 3 emission market. While they're offsetting their Scope 1s, they're then able to monetize. The global SAF market or the global Jet A market, it's about 100 billion gal. It doesn't take a lot to really, really participate in that. And ultimately, I am extremely bullish on where this is going. I don't think we can build the capacity fast enough. But we're the only people in the world that really know how to do it today and do it efficiently with operational efficiency, good yields, and reliability. Are the margins comparable selling into Europe versus the U.S. right now? Absolutely. So I guess maybe one last question. Obviously, there's a lot of regulatory uncertainty out there right now. It's been a volatile past couple of months out of Washington. Any thoughts about conversations you're having, whether it's risks or opportunities you expect to develop as things settle down in the coming months? Yeah. I mean, clearly, there's an agenda that's confusing and a bit hard to understand in D.C., and the chaos is pretty entertaining at times. From a food and ag energy part, for me, I think it's very, very clear. And so I don't see the regulatory uncertainty that people see. We've got a bigger RVO this year. We got an administration that, what, came out and said what last week? They said, "I hope the American farmers are ready to produce more for the American people." Donald Trump was not talking about carrots and cantaloupe. He was talking about corn and soybeans. Ethanol is cheaper than unleaded, all right? So 40% of the corn crop goes to ethanol today. 50% of the soybean crop goes to biofuels today. So I see nothing on the horizon here other than upside, a little bit of timing issue. I'll give you that. The uncertainty is there. But all you have to do is go back and look at the formation of what we call he wanted world dominance on energy, energy security. Two things. Food security, grow it here, keep it here, energy security. He formed the National Energy Council. Okay. Who's heading up the National Energy Council? Doug Burgum. Where's Doug from? The Dakotas. What's Doug known for? Well, he's got some technology, but ethanol. He's not going to let that happen. All you have to do is go read the charter, and the charter says energy security and renewables and biofuels are in there in the verbiage. It's right there in front of everybody. So the consternation of, "Well, I think Donald can get out his poison pen and do that." He's not going to do that to the American farmer, and I can guarantee that. I mean, the American farmer will determine, once again, the midterms coming up here, which we will enter early 2026. So I think you're going to get an increase in RVO. The PTC extension probably will happen, but it's going to happen after the budget reconciliation program. So I think we're in a bit of kind of people trying to handicap things. And as investors, as we've been around for years, especially in public companies, this is difficult. It's hard to have somebody tell you the truth on what's really going on. But at the end of the day, we see it as very clear. And you're already seeing it in our core earnings around the world right now. Our business is strong. People are eating. The energy side, I think we're going to be just fine. I think it'll be the back half of the year here before there's probably absolute clarity for the investing community, but I think it's a heck of a time now to be in this business. Awesome. That's all the time we have. Thanks, Randy. [Thank you.]