TC Energy Corporation (NYSE:TRP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

John Mackay: Okay. Fair. Maybe a follow-up on Keystone, can you spend a second just talking about what you’re kind of assuming for ’23 in terms of being able to get back to prior run rates or not? And then the $650 million of potential costs, or I guess, the liability you took, how much of that do you think can come back through insurance? And is any of that assumed in guidance right now?

Francois Poirier: Thanks, John, it’s Francois, I’ll start off and then pass it on to Richard. All I want to do is, again, say thank you to our workers. We still have 800 people plus in the field. They’ve done great work. They’ve done it safely. And I also want to thank the community in which we’re working — who has been terrific in receiving and welcoming our workers and has been very supportive of our efforts. So with that, I’ll pass it over to Richard.

Richard Prior: Yes. Thanks, Francois. I just — a couple of other things I’d mention on that respect too. I’d also pass our thanks on to a couple of agencies that have participated in the response to our incident command structure, that being the EPA and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, they’ve both been very helpful and instrumental in terms of us progressing the work that we’ve been able to on the ground and on our cleanup and reclamation. I’d say our near-term focus right now is safely operating the system and completing the cleanup and remediation efforts on site. We’ve — as Francois mentioned, we’ve recovered 90% of the oil and we continue to make very good progress there. We did release last week as part of our overall root cause investigation, the results of the metallurgical lab analysis.

And what that did conclude is that the failure was a result of a weld flaw and bending stress that were both — had to be present in the area in order for the failure to occur. Importantly, though, it also did confirm that there were no issues with the pipe and fitting strength or material properties and the system was operating well within its design and permit requirements at the time of the incident. So we are thinking and that the evidence is suggesting here that this is a localized issue, but we’re still taking a system approach to accessing a risk, and our engineers are actively evaluating across the Keystone system where a similar circumstance could potentially occur. As part of our root cause assessment, we’re also working through our remedial actions and what next steps that we’re going to have to take in order to confirm both to ourselves, to our regulators and our customers that we can continue to operate the pipeline safety — safely.

So in the meantime, we are operational to all delivery points, but we are operating the pipeline under some additional operation — operating mitigation measures, which includes a pressure derate, which is also required from FINSA in the corrective action order. Commercially, we’re able to deliver all of our contracted volume requirements, but we’re limited in our ability at this time to move uncommitted or spot volumes. And just to give you some perspective on that, Keystone is 94% contracted. We’re required to leave 6% of our space for uncommitted or spot capacity by the regulator, and it’s — that’s 6% of the volume at this time, we’re not able to move. So we’re working through these remedial actions. It is going to take some time for the root cause investigation to play out and for us to determine not just what caused the failure, but why those circumstances were in place at the time.