Theresa Chen: Got it. And looking at the Dakota Access Re-contracting outlook and all the way through Bayou Bridge, just taking into account TMX now being online, shipping not just WCS West, but also fin crude, which seemingly has indirectly compressed Bakken just given the connection to mainline, what is your outlook for Dakota re-contracting coming up in a couple of years and balanced with the incremental barrels that you’re getting from Crestwood?
Tom Long : Yes, we love Bakken, we love what we’ve done out of there, proud of the role we’ve played to get barrels out of such a great basin, the refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast, so it’s been a great asset for us. It’s funny, through the years there’s times when we have re-contracting concerns on different assets, and that’s just not one of them. We think long term there’s slips from time to time, we think long term it is the premier optimum outlet for producers. The best way to get your production to, as I mentioned, Dakota and into many of the mid-contract refineries, as well as through refineries around Port Arthur and Houston, and then of course into Bayou Bridge all the way over into Lake Charles and the St. James Refineries, and then you add on our VLCC project.
So it’s just, it’s an asset that we’re not really concerned if there’s companies that aren’t willing to roll it over for a long period of time or a period of time that makes sense to us. We may go year at a time. We just, we don’t have a lot of concern. We think that basin is going to be very stable for the next 5 to 10 years. We don’t see massive growth, but as long as oil prices remain fairly strong, we do see, like I mentioned, stable, kind of consistent flows out of there. We do believe we’re the best option for producers, and so we’ll engage with anybody that wants to roll over. Of course, we’re already talking to some of them, but it’s certainly not something we would sleep on.
Operator: Our next question comes from John Mackay with Goldman Sachs.
John Mackay: Hey, thanks for the time this afternoon. Maybe just to take one more at the power plant side, I guess curious, are you guys operating any small plants now or have you in the past? And then if I think about this potential capacity you’re adding, it’s, I guess, relatively small versus what ET probably consumes overall. So do you think there’s room for you guys to expand this number over time? And should we think of this as maybe kind of a first look on a kind of set of projects from here?
Tom Long : Yes, John, in fact, I thought I said it earlier, I probably didn’t make it clear enough. Yes, these were first steps. There’re grid problems all over the country and Texas is no exception. A lot of people are moving in Texas, a lot of data centers, a lot of AI data centers, crypto miners are still coming in, industrial growth. I mean, it’s just, we’re so optimistic on, for natural gas fire generation. So it’s something that we will continue to look at and we will, it’ll be highly unlikely if we don’t announce more of these than each quarter goes on. But we are, we will be the operator of these. As I mentioned earlier, these aren’t peaking units. They are units that are very good heat rates. So they’re very efficient and very — provide very well-priced megawatt cost when we run them.
And so this is just kind of the first step. And we’re excited about where this may take us, especially in some areas, for example, maybe at Mont Belvieu, where we think there’s a real opportunity there in this mother of our bigger cryo complexes route around the state. So it’s an area that we will continue to grow.
John Mackay: I appreciate that detail. Maybe just zooming out or moving over a little bit, can you spend a minute maybe just talking about the blue ammonia hub, maybe kind of what your role in that could look like, what kind of pieces of that value chain you’d want to own versus maybe having a partner come in and kind of run it with you?
Mackie McCrea : Yes, we keep talking about how excited we are for all of our fossil fuel business, especially natural gas, and it’s incremental on so many things and certainly with ammonia production. So right now, probably a little bit higher priority, a little bit more focus is in the Lake Charles area. We’ve got a lot of momentum with some very significant players that really know what they’re doing. We’re approaching this very similar to our LNG project and our potential pet-chem and that we don’t want to be big owners of ammonia. Do we want to operate? Yes. Well, we retain an ownership of some level, very likely or possible, but what really drives us is, I’ll give an example. One of these ammonia plants will deliver approximately 120,000 to 130,000 Mcf a day.
At Lake Charles, we’re looking at anywhere from maybe five to seven over a certain period of time. So it’s not insignificant natural gas transportation revenue. In addition to that, we’ll have storage revenue. We’ll have terminal revenue. We’ll be able to load it there. At Lake Charles, we see enormous growth for ammonia. Everybody probably knows that fertilizer is to feed the people of the world. It’s going to be nothing but growth, depending on the experts, 2% to 4% over the next 10 or 15 years. And now you’ve got this power side of it and fuel side of it where ships are being built to burn ammonia as their fuel. You’ve got bunkering for ammonia. And then you’ve got South Korea and Japan and other places where ammonia is going to be blended with coal for fuel.
So there’s a big, it’s another big plus for NuStar and the ammonia hub they bought. We see a big future in ammonia. And it’s interesting, ET standpoint, as I just said, it really helps facilitate our natural gas transportation business as well. So we’re very excited about where that’s headed. And we’ll do the same thing we hope as well on [inaudible].
Operator: Our next question comes from Elvira Scotto with RBC Capital Markets.
Elvira Scotto: Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing producer activity in the Haynesville. Looks like there was some decline on your system. Also, what you’re seeing relative to what’s embedded in your original expectations or your guidance, and then how you see that activity trending the rest of the year?
Mackie McCrea : Yes, this is Mackie again. Certainly lean plays throughout the US. Marcellus with Utica in the Northeast, parts of Oklahoma, Panhandle, Texas, and East Texas, and certainly Haynesville. We’ve seen a slowdown. There’s no if, and, or buts. When prices fall to about $50, $60 at Henry Hub, it puts a lot of pressure on producers. So yes, we’ve seen it fall off fairly significantly in the Northern Haynesville. For our interstate group, though, I’ve got to get a shoutout in our volumes group. And so, yes, we’ve got to be more aggressive. Our margins tightened, but we did a good job on our intra -states in North Louisiana. But yes, as far as our GMP business, we have seen it fall off. However, if you look at kind of what’s happening, we saw a peak about six months ago with LNG exports of almost 15 Bcf.
That’s now down around 12 Bcf. There’s another LNG facility coming on, I believe, in June or July. So we can see a growth. We start seeing demand like we believe we will overseas in Europe and elsewhere, and the heat picks up this summer. We can see demand jump in. We can see demand jump up by five or six Bcf overnight. And so you see these declines in Haynesville and other areas. You’re not going to be able to ramp up those that quickly. So we see pricing out the rest of this year, I think, getting as high as $3.50 or $3.60 by the end of the year. We think that possibly could be moved up, that we could see higher prices amid the latter part of summer with a hot summer, and if the LNG demand really picks up like we think it will. But yes, no doubt, that’s been a tough report on some of the lean areas and Haynesville’s one of those.
Elvira Scotto: Okay, great. That’s super helpful. And then just going back to your slide 8 and the comments that you made about the 8, 10 megawatt gas-fired electric generation facilities. You also then talked about kind of data centers. So I’m curious are you having any conversations with some of these data centers or maybe some of the utilities regarding incremental capacity or potential expansion opportunities or how do you think about that part of the equation longer term?
Mackie McCrea : Yes, we are. We are all these, we’re in conversations with anybody that wants to gas off our systems. A quick little story here. So two or three years ago we started a strategy, an agenda that anything within 10 miles of any of our intra or interstate pipelines we need to go connect. A lot of that was focused on power plants. So we’ve been doing that for a while. Our team, Beth Hickey and her team had done an excellent job of connecting to plants, of extending agreements we have to power plants. But that also rolls over into a lot of other opportunities. And so we’re looking at laying a pipeline to a large chip manufacturer in Texas. And as well as that, we’re believers like everybody else. The data centers, and especially around AI, it’s going to happen.
Whether that means over the next five or eight years, it’s going to grow by 3 Bcf demand of gas-generated electricity or 8 Bcf. We don’t know. We just know it’s going up. So in combination with population growth, as I mentioned earlier, industry growth, ammonia growth, all the AI data centers, et cetera, power plant growth, we’re talking to probably seven or eight different power plants at least on fairly significant natural gas power generation expansions in Texas, and handful in Oklahoma as well. So it’s just that common theme that Tom and I keep talking about during this call is that the demand for natural gas is going to do nothing but go up for many years to come. And we’re excited that we have the assets that we believe will benefit the most from those opportunities.
Operator: Our next question comes from Zach Van Evren with Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co.
Zach Evren: Perfect. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Maybe just circling back on that last one on the data center side, I know you guys have probably one of the larger intrastate footprints between the Permian and call it Dallas. We’ve seen a lot of development and toxic development for the data centers in that area. Just curious on what is your ability to expand some of those intrastate pipes to maybe feed more of that power demand, whether it’s in Dallas or Houston or other states?
Mackie McCrea : Well, that kind of coincides a little bit with what I just said. We really have made it our job to go to connect to every possible gas generating power plant in every state that we operate in. And we certainly have done that and have tremendous capability of doing more of that in Texas. We’re already connected to approximately 55% to 60% of the power plants in Texas, either directly or indirectly. We have various strategically located storage facilities, both in North Texas, near Dallas, and also in their [inaudible] because a lot of these AI, unlike the crypto miners, who a lot of times are making a lot of money off selling electricity and not running their computers, AI can’t do that. I think everybody knows it’s got to have reliable, so it can’t rely on renewables.
So yes, if we need to tie at additional power plants to provide that electricity to help meet all the demands at the Dallas Fort area, including the AI expansion, we’ll certainly be a part of that. Look at our assets. I mean, there’s nobody, as you just mentioned, that’s even close to being able to provide the services we can, especially for those types of markets.
Zach Evren: Perfect. That makes sense. And then maybe switching to Blue Marlin, if you guys were able to get the favorable EIS study as well as the permit, do you have a timeframe for when that would be commercially in operation?
