Green Plains Inc. (NASDAQ:GPRE) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call August 6, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Phil Boggs - EVP of Investor Relations and Finance
Todd Becker - President and CEO
Jim Stark – CFO
Devin Mogler - SVP, Corporate & IR

Conference Call Participants

Adam Samuelson - Goldman Sachs
Heather Jones - Heather Jones Research
Salvator Tiano - Bank of America
Andrew Strelzik - BMO Capital Markets
Laurence Alexander - Jefferies
Matthew Blair - TPH
Eric Stine - Craig-Hallum
Jordan Levy - Truist Securities
Kristen Owen – Oppenheimer

Operator

Good morning and welcome to Green Plains Inc. Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Following the company's prepared remarks, instructions will be provided for Q&A. [Operator Instructions]. I will now turn the call over to your host, Phil Boggs, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations and Finance. Mr. Boggs, please go ahead.

Phil Boggs

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Green Plains, Inc. second quarter 2024 earnings call. Participants on today's call are Todd Becker, President and Chief Executive Officer; Jim Stark, Chief Financial Officer, and several other members of Green Plains senior leadership team.

There is a slide presentation available and you can find it on the Investor page under the Events and Presentations link on our website. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could materially differ because of factors discussed in today's press release, in the comments made during this conference call, and the Risk Factors section of our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statement.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Todd Becker.

Todd Becker

Thanks, Phil. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining our call today. Margins began to turn higher later in the second quarter driven by a change in the fundamentals and U.S. Ethanol is once again the lowest price molecule on the planet.

We ended the quarter on track for potentially record exports for 2024 and the world has returned to the U.S. to buy low carbon fuels led by expanded use in Canada and many other countries. EBITDA sitting at over 23 million barrels of stocks for most of the quarter, we saw a nice margin expansion as we entered into the third quarter. Favorable natural gas and corn prices also helped as fuel prices remained elevated and continued to stay that way with strong driving demand as everybody knows air travel is mostly a challenge.