Good afternoon and thank you for attending today's Century Aluminum Company Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Shesan [ph] and I'll be the moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for question and answers at the end. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Ryan Crawford.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the conference call. I'm joined here today by Jesse Gary, Century's President and Chief Executive Officer; Jerry Bialek, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Peter Trpkovski, Senior Vice President of Finance and Treasurer. After our prepared comments, we will take your questions. As a reminder, today's presentation is available on our website at www.centuryaluminum.com. We use our website as a means of disclosing material information about the company and for complying with Regulation FD. Turning to slide one, please take a moment to review the cautionary statement shown here with respect to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures contained in today's discussion. And with that, I'll hand the call to Jesse.

Thanks Ryan. Thanks to everyone for joining. I'll start today by reviewing our second quarter financial and operational performance before discussing the current market conditions. Jerry will then take you through the financial results, and I'll wrap-up before turning it over for questions. Turning to slide three, continued strong operational performance and falling input prices in our smelters drove Q2 adjusted EBITDA of $30 million, which was an improvement of about $6 million over Q1. We made significant progress over the last several months welcoming our new Jamalco colleagues and beginning to integrate the Jamalco operations into the Century System. We are encouraged by the quality of the people at Jamalco and perhaps most especially, by their excellent safety culture. Jamalco has a long history of prioritizing the safety of its workforce and the sustainability of its operations with excellent systems in place, to ensure that people will return home safely each day. We have some nice opportunities to import some of the Jamalco Safety Systems and procedures into the rest of Century's operations. Jamalco did suffer an adverse weather event in early June when lightning strikes damage the local grid. This caused a complete disruption of power to the refinery for several days and resulted in damage to several key pieces of equipment. The outage resulting in stability and a staged restart of the plant resulted in lost production in June. The refinery returned to full and stable operations in July after gradually returning to targeted production levels over the course of June. Jerry will cover the financial impact on Q2 in a bit. As we discussed on our last call, we are in the process of implementing a series of operational improvements and investments at Jamalco to restore the refinery to its design capacity of 1.4 million over…

Thank you, Jesse. Let's turn to slide seven, and I'll walk you through the results for the second quarter. Consolidated Q2 global shipments were 174,000 tons, slightly down sequentially related to normal variation in quarter end shipment cutoffs. Realized metal prices were in line with expectations helping to deliver net sales for the quarter of $576 million, a 4% increase sequentially. Looking at Q2 operating results, adjusted net income was $16 million or $0.16 per share. This was an improvement of $27 million compared with prior quarter. The adjusting items for the second quarter were add back of $6.6 million for lower up cost or net realizable value on inventory; $3.6 million related to the final capacity charge for the Hawesville curtailment, $1.6 million for share-based compensation, and $700,000 for Jamalco acquisition costs. These partially offset by a deduction of $4.3 million in unrealized gains on forward contracts. Adjusted EBITDA attributable to Century was $30 million, an improvement of $6 million sequentially. Note this includes our 55% share of the Jamalco JV in Jamaica. Liquidity remains wrong at $231 million at the end of the quarter, consisting of $51 million in cash and $181 million available on our credit facilities. Please note that we expect our Mt. Holly's land sale transaction will close in the third quarter with an expected final sale price of approximately $25 million. Turning to slide eight to explain the $6 million second quarter sequential improvement in adjusted EBITDA. On balance, realized lagged LME prices and delivery premiums were in line with the outlook we provided during our last call. Second quarter realized LME was $2,371 per ton, up $21 versus the prior quarter, while realized US Midwest premium of $563 per ton was down $10 and realized European delivery premium of $299 per ton was…

Thanks, Jerry. Despite a complex macro environment, Century's focus on cost discipline and operational performance has put us in a good position to continue to deliver results throughout this portion of the cycle and beyond. The operational improvement programs [Indiscernible] and began implementing when we took over our global operations two years ago, are consistently delivering strong performance in our smelters. Our major capital investment program in the Grundartangi casthouse project is nearing completion and on track to deliver our first sales of low-carbon natural billet to European customers in the first quarter of next year. Paired with our ongoing US casthouse debottlenecking programs, the Grundartangi casthouse will give us the ability to sell 80% of Century's total production value-added product in the form of billet, slab, foundry alloys, or natural low-carbon aluminum. Our new Jamalco operations have derisked the supply chain for our most critical raw material and provides a meaningful opportunity for value creation as we execute our planned capital and operational proven programs to return this asset to its full potential. All-in-all, we remain focused on what is in front of us and excited about our future. Thank you. And I'll now turn the call over to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Lucas Pipes with B. Riley. Your line is now open.

Thank you very much, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. My first question is on Jamalco. I think last quarter you mentioned an expectation that at spot prices at that time, Jamalco would be accretive to the financial results starting, I think, this quarter, the third quarter. So I wondered if you could comment on that, whether that is still your expectation, and if you could maybe quantify the impact. I would appreciate that. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Lucas. It's Jesse. Thanks for joining. Thanks for the question. Yeah, so going back to the last call, I think you stated the question correctly that at spot prices at that time, we did expect that Jamalco would be accretive to the financial results in Q3. And I think had that continued to be the case, that statement would remain true. But as Jerry stated, going forward, what we'll do is we'll just include the Jamalco results in the guide. And so you have that for 90 days. It's within that 10 million to 20 million that you have in front of you. But just for context, that statement would have remained true now had spot prices remain the same.

Okay. Thanks for that. Switching topics for now you mentioned the MISO auction during -- I think that happened during the second quarter. Could you remind us kind of what the details were of that auction and the implications for your business and any read-through to a potential hospital restart? Thank you for your perspective on that.

Sure, Lucas. Thanks. Again, good question. Yeah, so the MISO capacity auction, remember we pay for power in basically three portions within our Kentucky -- both Kentucky plants. A portion of that is capacity, a portion of that is energy, and a portion of that is delivery. And so, the capacity auction takes place every April and May. And this year, the capacity auction returned to normalized levels. You may remember a year ago, we saw capacity prices within MISO have a large surprise to the upside. Capacity prices were up quite significantly. This year capacity prices returned to those normalized levels, and so the impact that you'll have -- now, this is Seabreeze specific will be about $20 million benefit for that new 12-month period from the year-ago period. So about a month of that came through in the Q2 results, and you'll see about $5 million benefit in the Q3 results. Obviously, that will impact Hawesville as well, but you would see similar benefit if you were purchasing energy at the same levels at Hawesville. But overall, with respect to a Hawesville restart, we're still in the same place we are when we spoke last quarter. We continue to monitor market conditions, both on the revenue side and the cost side, and we'll come back to you once we've made that decision.

Thank you. And a quick follow-up. The capacity price, I think it's quoted in, megawatts per day of capacity. Can you share what the prices that you locked in on that auction?

Yeah. So, they do -- I think they actually clear on a monthly basis, but we can give it to you on a megawatt-day basis. So, it's less than $10 a megawatt day for the upcoming 12-month period.

Got it. Okay. I appreciate that. I'll turn it over. Thank you very much and best of luck.

Thanks, Lucas.

There are no more questions, so I'll pass the call back over to the management team for closing remarks.

Let's re-prompt the questions one more time.

[Operator Instructions]

Okay, thank you very much everyone for joining the call, and we look forward to talking to you in Q3.