Magellan Midstream Partners, L.P. (NYSE:MMP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Spiro Dounis: I want to go back to the guidance, and I’ll try and keep it broad. We kind of looked over the last five or six years or so, and it looks like you guys have beaten your initial guidance every single year other than 2020, and I think there’s a pretty good reason to give you a pass on that one. But from an outsider’s perspective, it would seem like you all take a pretty conservative approach to guidance. So I guess I’m just curious, as you think about the guidance and maybe where some potential sources of upside surprise could be, anything you can kind of highlight? Maybe another way of asking is, what’s not in the guidance?

Aaron Milford: Well, I mean, a couple of things I would highlight. Everything that we foresee or expect, we’ve tried to reflect in this guidance. For example, the basis differential we just talked about, we tried to give you really clear guidance of what we assume there. We’re assuming it’s better than it was last year, but it’s still not as great as it was historically. We think that’s going to hold. But we’ll see how the year plays out on a volatility around basis. So that’s one area. Commodity prices, what’s going to happen with crude oil prices? We’re using an $80 strip basically for the year. Could they be better or worse? That’s an area we tried to give you some sensitivities around that based on what’s left to be unhedged and our tenders in our product.

So that’s an area that, depending on what commodity prices do in either direction that could influence where we end up. The long haul shipments, we do have some expectation that we’re going to continue to get some longer haul shipments. We’ve got a heavy slate of refinery maintenance is sort of expected in the first part of the year, we generally benefit. But then there’s the whole element of unexpected, unplanned outages and refineries have been running really hard for a very long time and we’ve seen a higher level of unplanned outages, frankly. And to the extent we have unplanned outages, that’s usually a good thing for us. And it’s difficult for us to predict what those unplanned outages are going to do. But if we start seeing a lot of unplanned outages, we would expect on average to benefit from that.

So we’ve tried to take into account what we can see on outages, but the unplanned outages are just very difficult to predict. It depends on where it happens, how long it happens, the nature of the outage itself. So it’s difficult to predict that that’s something that could traditionally be good for us. So I think it’s really that simple. It’s what happens with unplanned outages, what happens with the actual commodity markets, basis differential. And outside of those, we’ve really tried to provide the guidance that reflects what we think is going to happen this year.

Spiro Dounis: Second question is on storage. I guess I’m just curious, how would you characterize directionally how that market’s been moving maybe since the last year? I know pretty subdued here, but just curious what’s going to take to see the economics improve there? Is it really just a function of the futures curve at this point or is there something structural that could occur to kind of get that moving higher?