$5.60
$44.00
bear $5.60
base $27.00
bull $44.00
margin of safety $12.00
market price* $61.42
CVR Energy owns two mid-continent oil refineries, one at Coffeyville, Kansas and one at Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Together they process crude into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for customers across the Plains and Midwest. It also holds a majority stake in CVR Partners, which makes nitrogen fertilizer (ammonia and UAN) at plants in Coffeyville and East Dubuque, Illinois. Carl Icahn's Icahn Enterprises owns roughly 70% of the shares. In December 2025 the company reversed its Wynnewood renewable diesel conversion and returned that unit to normal oil refining, so renewables are no longer a growth story here. Our valuation starts from what the business has earned for owners after real costs. We take operating cash flow, remove year-to-year working-capital swings, subtract stock compensation, and subtract capital spending. We also subtract cash paid out to the outside owners of the fertilizer partnership, since that cash never reaches CVR shareholders. Refinery turnarounds are expensed as incurred, so they are already inside cash flow. On this basis, per-share owner earnings were about $(1.04) in 2020, $(0.83) in 2021, $6.04 in 2022, $8.32 in 2023, $0.80 in 2024 and $2.45 in 2025. Refining is cyclical, so we anchor on the median of 2021 to 2025, which is $2.45 per share. That window spans a recovery, a boom and two weak years. We left 2020 out because the pandemic distorted it. We did not use recent quarters to set the level. First-half 2026 operating cash flow was $371 million against roughly breakeven a year earlier, an improvement we treat as information about the growth path only. Growth and the near-term path. Owner earnings rose from $0.80 to $2.45 per share in 2025. The base case assumes no growth from that level in year 1, so it does not assume the improvement continues. We credited no growth in any case. There is no signed contract, backlog or steady expansion program behind growth, and refining margins, fertilizer prices and the pending 2025 renewable-fuel-credit waiver request all depend on events that have not yet happened. The company suspended its dividend in October 2024 and deferred growth projects. Base case, about $27 per share. Owner earnings hold at $2.45 for ten years, because the refineries are long-lived, have unit redundancy and are funded by roughly $130 million a year of maintenance spending. Earnings then fade to zero over the following twenty years, because we cannot name anything that sustains them beyond a refinery's demonstrated life and the long-term decline in fuel demand. Bear case, about $5.6 per share. Owner earnings run at only $0.60 per share, below even the weak 2024 result, for ten years and then fade to zero over ten more. Evidence for this includes the negative 2020 and 2021 results and the 2024 refinery fire at Wynnewood. Also relevant are about $1.7 billion of debt, which was refinanced in February 2026 into 7.5% notes due 2031 and 7.875% notes due 2034, and a fertilizer business that has been hurt by oversupply. No equity is assumed to be lost to debt in this case, but leverage narrows the margin for error. Bull case, about $44 per share. Owner earnings return to about $4.00 per share, close to the 2022 to 2025 median of $4.24. That would be the result if the refineries keep converting crude into high-margin products as they have done in recent years, and if the EPA grants the 2025 renewable-fuel-credit waiver that its August 2025 decisions for 2020 to 2024 suggest is possible. The company estimates that obligation at about 120 million credits. That level holds for ten years, then fades over twenty. What could make this wrong. Refining profit is very volatile: the range across recent years is from a loss to $8 per share. Our anchor could prove too high if the 2022 and 2023 boom years turn out to be closer to normal than the recent weak years, and too low if margins recover to the last four years' median. Working capital has been a net cash drain of about $414 million over 2020 to 2025, so removing it flatters recent years somewhat. We could not fully reconcile the 2021 cash flow to net income plus depreciation from the filing data alone, since a gap of about $180 million appears to reflect non-cash items and deferred taxes we did not itemize. Because we anchor on operating cash flow, this does not change our figure. Earnings before 2020 sit on a different ownership basis, the public CVR Refining structure that was bought out in 2019, so we started the stored history at 2020.