Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeremy Tonet: It’s been touched on a few different ways already, but I just want to bring it all together with regards to just economic conditions out there, potential and pending recession. And just wondering, specifically as it relates to your petchem business, how you see that faring in this environment? I think there’s some concern in the marketplace on that. So just wondering if you could walk us through the level of cash flow stability or other offsets that you see in that business line. Also, do you have any planned downtime for any of those facilities in ’23?

Chris D’Anna: I guess our petchem business is predominantly fee based. And what we saw last year was as spreads were wider than normal, we were able to capture — because of the way we structure our contracts, we were able to capture a part of that. Looking for ’23, on our octane business, we’re about 75% hedged at a pretty good spread. And then we expect the earnings for our propylene and PDH to be pretty consistent.

Jeremy Tonet: And maybe just one last one, if I could, as it relates to capital out there. Enterprise clearly has a fortress balance sheet relative to others in the space, and it seems like you can afford to be opportunistic if the right opportunity comes. How do you view the current, I guess, market out there as far as potentially acquiring assets, private or what have you? Is there anything — any other part of the portfolio that you would look to kind of round out through M&A?

Jim Teague: We — getting a position in the Midland Basin was important to us, and it’s proved to be pretty successful. I think Randy Fowler always says price matters and price does matter. I think we’re in a position right now that if there’s anything out there, it’s got to be pretty damn strategic for us to get interested.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Michael Blum with Wells Fargo.

Michael Blum: wanted to go back to natural gas for a moment. With the exception, maybe putting the Waha aside, which I think we all understand. Can you maybe just talk through the puts and takes on how this lower natural gas price environment will impact your business this year?

Brent Secrest: You said it, Michael, there is a lot of puts and takes. Lower price obviously affects our equity gas and that’s probably around $100 million a day. But if you look at our total gas burn and you equate our power consumption and you want to call that natural gas, at different price levels, we get imbalance. And the higher price, there’s probably some knock on benefits to us, but there’s a lot of pass throughs associated with this price. I mean the ultimate would be go sell the equity gas at the highest number, just wait and catch these load numbers, but we run a fairly balanced portfolio and it’s not — as Jim said, it’s fairly balanced. The last thing I’ll say, Michael, is that when you look at throughput in US petrochemical industry and you look at load gas and high crude, I mean, there’s a lot of benefits for our pipeline system.

Michael Blum: Just had one other question really about distribution growth in 2023 and beyond really. So you obviously raised the rate of growth in 2022. So I’m just wondering is that a new run rate, is there a reasonable range to think about going forward? And then kind of related to that, are you going to be going to like a one increase per year type of model?