Pembina Pipeline Corporation (NYSE:PBA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Your next question comes from Patrick Kenny from National Bank Financial.

Patrick Kenny: Just on the Dow Chemical opportunity with their FID potentially around the corner, could you just update us on what the potential scope of investment could look like in and around your Fort Saskatchewan footprint or surrounding AEGS and Vantage? And just how we can think about the timing of capital spend as well as potential in service dates?

Jaret Sprott: Jaret here. So I won’t give a specific dollar amount, but I can talk about the opportunities. So obviously, we’re a very large mover of the ethane molecule, either through the C2+ that goes into Fort Saskatchewan, it gets fracked at various fracs including RFS and then also Vantage and AEGS that supplies the petchem industry here in Alberta. So obviously, with an incremental, they’re talking 100,000 to 120,000 barrels publicly of ethane demand. We will need to — well, depending on where their demand is coming from, we will need to obviously evaluate AEGS expansion potentially for Pembina. RFS III, we built that with the ability to put a DIF Tower on the back end to basically make it look like RFS II and RFS I opportunities in Empress, on straddles, et cetera.

So Pembina obviously has a lot of deep cuts. I think we probably have the majority of field-based deep cuts that are doing residue gas extraction kind of in Western Canada. So that’s core to our business. We know how to do it. We have alignment with the right contractors to be able to do those things. Pipeline expansions are right in our wheelhouse. So with all that said, there is going to be a lot of opportunity for Pembina to participate. We hope that there is a positive FID, not only for Pembina, but the rest of our industry and our province, and our country, which — it’s going to be extremely positive. And then further to that, I think they’re talking — we’d probably have to start deploying capital in that ’26 time frame to start getting ready for that, assuming like an 18-month build for a deep cut gas plant and stuff.

I think the real wild card right now, Pat, is a lot of the equipment is — we’re seeing electrical equipment transformers that are being consumed in data centers and stuff like that. The long lead for these types of things are extremely long, but it’s well within the time period to build a world-scale net zero cracker.

Patrick Kenny: And then maybe just sticking with the petchem theme here, so just with Heartland now up and running, I know there’s a lot of moving parts, and you touched on the propane inventory picture into next year. But any change to your marketing strategy going forward into next year around propane? And then maybe just playing the hypothetical here, but if an opportunity does come up to own a portion or all of the facility, how might this stack up as a strategic fit versus, say, the TMX opportunity or other egress type assets that might shake loose from your larger pipeline peers?

Chris Scherman: It’s Chris. I can talk about the propane strategy. With Heartland up and running, there’s no real change to our strategy. We continue to be big fans of Access and the West Coast and the global markets as well. We think Heartland helps the market generally as well. So no changes for us now that it’s up and running. As far as the marketing plan, who’s taking the question on?

Scott Burrows: Yes, Pat, I’ll take the second one. I mean, I think, to be honest, we’re happy to see, as Chris said, that asset up and running and contributing to incremental propane demand for the province. Quite frankly, we haven’t spent a lot of time on thinking about that lately because we’ve been waiting for it to get up and running. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I just mean that it’s — these projects are complex and they take a while to get up and running. In terms of where it stacks strategically, we get asked obviously about M&A all the time. And we continue to say that we’re in reactive mode, not proactive mode right now. We are very happy with our organic backlog and are focused on executing that, hopefully getting Cedar across the line and executing. So we will react if something comes to the market and evaluate it just like we would any other opportunity, but we are not proactively out trying to shake the trees right now.