Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Dan Eggers.
Dan Eggers - Credit Suisse
Ted, can you shed a little more light on the progress you are seeing on the environmental remediation options on the Midwest Gen fleet and kind of beyond the SMCR savings what else -- what other room you see for reducing that big bucket of money even further?
Theodore F. Craver
Dan, did you address that to me?
Dan Eggers - Credit Suisse
Yes. Anybody can answer it, I suppose.
Theodore F. Craver
Okay. All right, frankly you are breaking up a little bit so I wasn’t sure I really caught all the pieces. I’ll just take a first swipe at it and then turn it over to Ron and Jim. Fundamentally what we have been trying to do with all the work on these alternative compliance approaches is to see if there is a way to meet the more stringent NOX and SO2 requirements but in a less capital intensive way and I think we have mentioned before some of these different approaches -- of course, first you have to make sure they work technically and then secondly, you have to make sure you understand what the trade-offs are, and in some cases, the trade-off is between capital expenditures, lower capital expenditure but higher operating expense. So that’s where a lot of the work is going on right now, particularly on the SO2 and then finally, we want to make sure that any alternative compliance program that we come up with is going to really work from a regulatory standpoint. So the point really being we want to make sure they are durable and that we don’t head down a path of a different technology or a different approach only to find out it’s got difficulties on the regulatory or legal side, so those are the conditions that we are working through. I think as I said in the remarks, pretty clear where we are on the use of the SMCRs as the alternative for meeting the NOX requirements and those are the first installations that would have to go in. We still have more work to do on the SO2 side.
Dan Eggers - Credit Suisse
What should we assume the timing is going to be for the SMCR spending and should we assume that the $350 million or $400 million of savings, those are pretty short-dated relative to your previous expectations?
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
