ONEOK, Inc. (NYSE:OKE) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: Thank you. And our next question today comes from Neel Mitra with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Neel Mitra: Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. It seems like everything is going well, you are going to be below 4x leverage easily for 2024 and the $6 billion in guidance seems pretty conservative. How are you looking at shareholder returns right now? Is a repurchase program in 2024 on the table, just as we look for how to return cash to shareholders after this merger and when we can think about how we are going to do that?

Walt Hulse: Well, I would say, clearly, our financial flexibility is increasing. And all of the capital allocation tools that are available are available to us and will be considered going forward, so plenty of flexibility and stay tuned.

Neel Mitra: Okay. Great. And then second question on building an LPG terminal on the Gulf Coast. Some of your peers have talked about how they initially priced at greenfield and now they will price everything at brownfield to try to combat new entrants. Does this make LPG exports or a new terminal kind of lower on the priority list than the batching, bundling, etcetera, when you consider the barriers to entry just with pricing for existing players that are in the space right now?

Sheridan Swords: Neel, this is Sheridan. We still have aspirational to have LPG export terminal. We are not going to do a project that’s uneconomical. But we do have one of – or the only person that has the amount of volume at our disposal to be able to support a new dock, and we do have customers that are interested in seeing a new dock being built. So, we think there is an opportunity there as well. As it relates to how we prioritize that with our other opportunities, we are going to – as Kevin said, we are going to look at things on capital. How quick that we can get it to market and how much money we are going to make on that to determine which projects we have our resources work on. But I don’t think that the LPG export dock has moved down in the list from where it is before. We still are continuing to look at and still have conversations. But it is a much longer term project than some of the other ones that we have in the synergy category.

Neel Mitra: Got it. I appreciate the commentary. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And our final question today comes from Craig Shere with Tuohy Brothers. Please go ahead.

Craig Shere: Congratulations on the closing and quarter, and thanks for taking the question. Just one for me, and you kind of talked around this a little bit or kind of responded to some Q&A on it. But Pierce, you mentioned prioritizing incremental commercial opportunities identified post close at the start of this call. And I am a little unclear, given all the commentary, if this is mostly about chopping wood and management bandwidth or despite better than expected deleveraging, are you starting to see more accretive capital deployment opportunities than you are prepared to pursue all at once?

Pierce Norton: Well what we are seeing is as we have put these two – just as a reminder, prior to September 25th, you are limited in how much discussion and how far you can go with some of these discussions both on – with people, contracts, commercial opportunities. So, what we are seeing is as we have gotten access to all the information, all the contracts and the people and our people are working together, we are just seeing more and more opportunities. And so we are going to prioritize that. It’s hard to tell right now if we have overrun some of those kind of things, but that’s something that we are – we definitely have enough that we can prioritize the things that are going to make the highest impact in the shortest amount of time.

So, those are the ones that we are focusing on, and we are managing through the rest of it. But we are not going to lose an opportunity because we feel like we are – we don’t have resources, we will get resources to deal with those.

Craig Shere: Fair enough. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Andrew Ziola for closing remarks.

Andrew Ziola: Alright. Thank you everybody. Our quiet period for the fourth quarter starts when we close our books in January and extends until we release earnings in late February. We will provide details for that conference call at a later date. Thank you for joining us and have a good day.

Operator: Thank you, sir. This concludes today’s conference call. We thank you all for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.

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