Michael Blum: Second part was about any upstream benefits.
Chuck Kelley: Upstream.
Pierce Norton: So Michael, what I would say there is it’s going to be a little bit of a longer answer here. But you came at it from the question of what’s the capacity of an existing line, and you put more demand on it, and what does that look like. I’ll just paint a scenario, which don’t take anything from my comments that we’re far along in this. But if you were to put a data center in North Dakota, it’s a cold weather area. It’s very advantageous for data centers, and you connected it, say, to the tailgate of one of the plant. Then you’re taking load 24 hours a day, and that’s loaded it frees up on transportation of gas that goes elsewhere out of that basin. We do have space to do that, but that’s one way to kind of tamper down maybe a future expansion out of the North Dakota area on the transmission lines, whether or not that WBI, whether or not that be Northern Border, or actually some other generated facility for natural gas electric power generation.
So that’s just one example of the way I could see that it’s kind of a long way of answering your question, but that’s what I would see a benefit to the gathering and processing business.
Michael Blum: Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And then just wanted to go back on Salon for a second. I realize it’s a small acquisition in the grand scheme of things, but I wonder if you can just talk in terms of strategic rationale for that asset to why you want to own more of it? And just also from a capital allocation perspective, and why that makes sense?
Sheridan Swords: Michael, this is Sheridan. I think the first thing on why we won’t own it. We operate that pipeline. It’s coming out of an area that we see growth in crude. In fact, the last couple of months, Saddlehorn has been fully allocated. And the third is, as this was kind of instigated by plans that has a lot of connectivity up in the area, and they’re seeing a benefit as well, which gives us more confidence that this is a good asset to own more of.
Michael Blum: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Theresa Chen with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Theresa Chen: Good morning. In terms of the synergy outlook, just near-term, looking at the upcoming maintenance in Wink Webster, is there a room from a crude oil marketing activity perspective across your assets for additional synergies to capture what would likely be a temporary and volatile and middling different rentals backdrop and using the excess capacity you have on a BridgeTex or maybe Longhorn to small extent. I realize that this does not neatly fit within your four categories of synergy buckets, but given that you are a significant market of commodities in general, could this be a source of additional upside?
Sheridan Swords: Theresa, this is Sheridan. Yes, we do see – we’ve always, from the beginning, saw opportunity in marketing crude oil to bring volume to our system. Specifically, right now, as we think about what’s going on in the next 2 months, with the MEH to mid differential kind of blowing out, we’re naturally seeing more volume come to BridgeTex. That volume is up quite a bit. And it’s part of the reason we’re even more confident that’s going to continue and confidence in increasing our guidance as we go forward. And with some of the maintenance that is coming up on certain pipelines, we haven’t factored that in yet, but that gives us even more confidence that we’ll see some strong volumes, crude coming out of the Permian on our system. Marketing will add to that, but that will probably be a little bit more longer term as we get later on the year.
Theresa Chen: Got it. And going back to the AI theme, this is come up so much in recent weeks and months, but related to natural gas transmission and storage assets. And I’m just wondering if you have any early indications or thoughts on just quantitatively, what this could mean as far as the size of the EBITDA opportunity for ONEOK?
Walt Hulse: Well, first of all, I think you’ve got to look at the size that we currently are making $6.175 billion in EBITDA. And I think you got to look to see what kind of pace it’s at. I think it’s really just too early to tell.
Theresa Chen: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Sunil Sibal with Seaport Global Securities. Please go ahead.
Sunil Sibal: Hi, good morning, everybody. So I just wanted to understand a little bit on the growth prospects. When you think about beyond the projects, which are kind of get completed in the first half of 2025, so I was curious how would you put your growth opportunity beyond that in the four business buckets that you have, and then on the same line, how have your hurdle rates changed, if any, in the current environment versus the environment we had a couple of years back in terms of interest rates, etcetera.
Sheridan Swords: This is Sheridan, again. On growth projects, we are continuing to, on the synergy side, continuing to see low capital high multiple type growth projects that we are baking in as we continue to go forward. They’re coming all the time. We get more and more of them, but they’re kind of factored into our overall capital plan already. We had capital now that we would capture this. But we continue to get more excited about that growth that we see different growth projects as it relates to synergies and bringing them together.
Sunil Sibal: Okay.
Chuck Kelley: I think as you were asking, I think what you’re asking about the interest rates. We aren’t a company that relies heavily on short-term debt. all of our debt has turned out. And we have cash called the last three bonds that we had matured. And we’ve said that we expect that, that will probably be the case later this year that we would go down that path. So occasionally, we’re in and out of the CP market to cover month-to-month type of things. But our business is generating cash flow to be self-contained, and so we don’t see any real impact from higher rates going forward.
