Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Mansi Singhal of Barclays Capital. Please proceed.
Mansi Singhal - Barclays Capital
Hi, good morning.
Ron Miller
Good morning, Mansi.
Mansi Singhal - Barclays Capital
Could you help explain your conversion costs in the quarter a little bit? If I look back on my notes from the second quarter, you had said the spike was due to higher natural gas prices and lower production, and both those things kind of reversed in the third quarter, and your costs didn't come down. Can you just kind of break down some of the variances there?
Ron Miller
Well, I can let Ajay talk more about the numbers, but we had a maintenance outage at our Pekin facility that stretched out. And this often times happens. It stretched out longer than we had originally planned. We took the opportunity to take an early outage at our Pekin II facility that was originally scheduled for later in the year.
So the combined effect resulted in lower production. We have also continued to experience higher natural gas price during the quarter.
Mansi Singhal - Barclays Capital
Going forward, what kind of a number is your kind of a normal base number without maintenance that we should be modeling in?
Ajay Sabherwal
Mansi, firstly congratulations on your new position.
Mansi Singhal - Barclays Capital
Thank you.
Ajay Sabherwal
We hope to see the numbers come down, obviously. Now in the near-term, we have some natural gas contracts that are higher. Now natural gas is 40% of our energy source. Remember, we use a coal-fired boiler in Pekin, so that helps. And natural gas prices for the amounts that may not have purchased have come down quite a bit.
So we do expect to see decreases. I can't give you an exact sense of when we would get closer to the $0.60 that we feel is more normal for us, given our more complex wet mill with the higher co-product returns. But I would hope by first, second quarter, we should see that sort of a number.
Mansi Singhal - Barclays Capital
Okay. Could you talk a little bit about the utilization rate? I guess it's been in early 90s over the last four to five quarters. Do you see it kind of rising going forward? Because I mean some of the other companies have been operating at more than 100%, do you see kind of your plants reaching that level?
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