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

Randy Fowler: Michael, I guess we did two increases in 2022. And we said we’ll come in and take another look at it at the middle of this year, really don’t want to come in and put out a marker of where expected distribution growth is going to be. We’ll come in and take a look at it mid year. Certainly, we pivoted off the slower rate that we saw there as we went from an internal funding — I mean, external funding model to an internal funding model. So you’ve seen that the growth bounced back up into the 5% area and we’ll come in and evaluate it as we do every quarter.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Reynolds with UBS.

Brian Reynolds: We continue to hear discussions on the higher GORs in the Permian along with just continued discussion on parent child interactions. Curious if you could just discuss if you’re seeing higher GORs and higher parent child interactions that perhaps changing your view to the upside on associated gas production in the Permian going forward.

Tony Chovanec: The answer is we are continuing to see higher GORs. It’s not surprising. Look, putting it simplistically, oil declines faster than natural gas and shale basins. So we modeled it and we projected in our projections. Relative to parent child, I’ll tell you how we feel about it as a midstream company and watching all the rhetoric around it. We think parent child is a good thing, not a bad thing. And producers are learning more and more every day about it. And obviously, producers are getting larger in scale. We think when we read the different rags that parent child is a bad thing, it absolutely is a good thing. It’s how you get the most out of the reservoir. So frankly, we don’t sit up at night and — the producers and we see a lot of them and have a lot of talks with them in their conference room for things that we’re doing with them. I have to tell you, I don’t think any of the major producers are losing any sleep over it either. Brent, do you agree

Brent Secrest: I think that’s dead on.

Brian Reynolds: And maybe to touch briefly on just future growth projects. Post the quarterly results, it seems like free cash flow profile is keeping pace with the recent rise in growth CapEx. Just given Slide 6 in the presentation is largely unchanged, curious if you could provide a little color into whether we’re seeing new projects, i.e., processing plants are PDH 3 perhaps in the future, or is the rise in CapEx really just a function of maybe upsizing the existing projects, i.e., ethane exports or perhaps Shin Oak?

Jim Teague: I think our ethane and ethylene export expansions are pretty key. We’re going to see a lot more demand for those products going forward. Our ethylene export is chockablock full and our ethane exports are growing. So I like those. We’re building four processing plants in the Permian, two in the Delaware, two in Midland basin and probably all have Zach Strait knocking on the door, want to do the 14th fractionator, because we’re not going to do 13. But on a lot of our projects, there’s a knock on effect that we get out of those projects. So I can’t think beyond where we are.

Zach Strait: And probably add in some cost-efficient debottlenecking and the gathering

Jim Teague: Yes, we just picked up 580 miles of pipe for how much money?

Randy Fowler: $160 million