Energy Transfer LP (NYSE:ET) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mackie McCrea: Hey, Matt, this is Mackie. Tough question in that, we’ve got a lot of balls in the air, we’ve covered it pretty well with Tom’s remarks, so we’re sending a really good position. We really need to get the DOE to extend the permit. We think they will. As we said, a lot of folks involved behind the scenes trying to make that happen, including other countries, other businesses in other countries, but we’re just keeping our head down pushing. We don’t really have a lot of estimates. We’re hopeful that we’ll have something to the DOE, sometimes kind of mid first quarter we’re pushing, and others are also pushing and to maybe do that sooner, we don’t know. It’s the regulatory agency that we’re working closely with, and I hope to make that happen sooner than later.

But at the meantime, Tom Mason’s team are working hard back over there now, trying to finalize a lot of these contracts and agreements around equity as well as new LNG offtakers. So, it’s hard to kind of predict that, but everything went exceptionally well, in the second quarter could be a possibility, but we’ll see how things go in the next three or four months.

Michael Blum: Great, thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Next question will be from Brian Reynolds of UBS. Please go ahead.

Brian Reynolds: Hi, good morning, everyone. Maybe to follow up on some CapEx questions as it relates to the Permian natural gas egress seems like we could be seeing the last brownfield expansion get contracted here over the near future. But beyond that, seems like we need a larger pipe, which Warrior still exists out there. So, just as it relates to the Warrior Project at this juncture, has the scope or size the project changed or evolved since you started marketing the project a few years ago, just to perhaps meet specific customer needs and to get the project that ultimately FID? Thanks.

Mackie McCrea: Yes, Brian, this is Mackie again. Yes, we actually started really aggressively marketing this first part of this year, but we are pushing hard, and we’ve mentioned we’ve get about 25% already signed up. We’re working on several other shippers that would bring us to about 60% or 65%. But we’re going to be pretty careful on this, we’re very careful, like we always are, we’re going to be prudent, we’re not going to move forward with that on FID until we have a substantial amount of that capacity sold out. And also, it will feed into not only markets that we’re already connected to with our intrastate network, but also, we’ll have a lot of momentum if some of these other LNG projects get to FID. So, we’re kind of like a lot of these big projects working on, they’re just taking time, we see spread other than a few days or weeks where it blows out a little bit, spreads are very tight, there’s not a lot of pain.

Right now, for the most part, we think that’s going to get really difficult as we go in ’24 until the next pipelines built. So, we do think we’ll pick up more momentum and we’re going to push hard and kind of similar to a comments around LNG. We hope to maybe get the FID on Warrior, sometime maybe in the second quarter of next year.

Brian Reynolds: Great, super helpful. And maybe to just touch on the M&A for the year with Crestwood, and Lotus coming into the fold here, can you just maybe talk about how some of these acquisitions have maybe perhaps helped defer some capital. I know Crestwood has some Permian processing capacity and I think you alluded to, and the prepared remarks that some of that excess processing capacity might be able to defer a processing plant a little bit. So, how should we think about processing capacity for ’24, ’25? Do we need to see another new build coming in next year, or could we see some capital get deferred into the following year as it relates to maybe the crude side Lotus or Crestwood on the NGL on processing side? Thanks.