Michael Dunn: Yes. Colton, thanks for that recognition. Yes, the team’s doing a great job controlling our costs even in this inflationary environment. We have found some ways to actually continue to take cost out of the business and as you’ve indicated, the MountainWest acquisition is really the cost increase that we’re seeing there on the e-comm side of the business. And so I think going through the balance of the year, we would have an expectation that we can continue that cost control. Now, there’s always a lot of variability throughout the second and third quarters with our maintenance activities and our overhauls that are recurring and that would be the only variance that we would see there typically coming up between the second and third quarter, but other than that team’s doing a great job controlling costs this year.
Colton Bean: Great. Thank you.
Operator: We’ll go next now to Neel Mitra of Bank of America.
Neel Mitra: Hi, thanks for taking my question. I wanted to clarify on Jean Ann’s question, the available capacity on Transco. So if I understood it right, are you saying that there’s available capacity on Transco from MVP if you were to back off volumes from Zone 4? So it essentially would be shifting volumes from one area to another to accommodate the existing utility demand. And then I guess the follow on to that would be to accommodate new growth and new demand from utilities, there would need to be Transco expansions. Am I thinking about that the right way?
Alan Armstrong: Yes. Neel, let me try explain it one more time. The way the most of the system rates work on there, the shippers have pay the same price, they pay us no matter where the gas is moving from. Generally the – those utilities in that corridor have the ability to pick up gas and they have a volume available that they can pull from at various receipt points. And so they basically are out trying to buy the lowest price gas on the system that they can have delivered into their meters every day. And when we talk about system capacities, we’re actually talking about kind of the delivery capacity to those locations, and it’s – this particular path that somebody buys capacity from on the system. But the big long haul system and the original base system, the shippers have the ability to choose where they want to pull their supply in from.
And so even if they’re – we have a number of expansions going on, but even if you just looked at it in a static environment, if somebody today was buying gas Station 85, that gas is likely coming in from either system gas on in the Offshore or Haynesville or gas that’s made its way in from the Permian. But Station 85 or 65 would be a place that customers would be nominating their supplies from and they’d be buying gas from maybe a Haynesville producer at Station 85. If they – if somebody from the Marcellus decides, they want to sell their gas cheaper at 165, then that customer’s going to be able to say, well, I’m going to nominate from Station 165 – at the 165 location instead of 85. Same amount of gas eventually flows to their delivery point.
But it’s just a matter of where they source their supply from. So in – so we – it’s just going to be a question of where producers decide to sell their gas set and who wants to compete the most for those supplies. As we build out the system and the demand then matches back up to that supply then the system would be back in balance. And – but that’s the way it always worked. There’s always periods where supply builds up because you have more supply locations, then you have delivery, and then eventually you build out the delivery market like we’re doing in all these projects. And then more supply is needed, which is kind of the situation at Station – sorry, at Zone 5 right now. People got caught short there in the winter because there was not enough supply coming in there.
So MVP will provide that needed supply that was missing this last winter.
Neel Mitra: Yes. I think maybe the confusion is whether if all things are static and you didn’t back anything off of Zone 4, how much could you move South on Transco down from Zone 165 with the MVP volumes that are coming in?
Alan Armstrong: Well, it doesn’t have to just move South. It can move North and South. So I think that’s maybe the missing concept there is the gas can – will move wherever the market is, but we certainly have more demand on the system in both directions from 165 than 2 Bcf a day.
Neel Mitra: Got it, got it. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Alan Armstrong: Thank you.
Operator: We’ll go next now to Tristan Richardson of Scotiabank.
Tristan Richardson: Hey, good morning, guys. Just curious your views on the transmission M&A landscape. I mean, it seems like the funnel of assets in the market is really only growing and clearly we’ve seen a lot of transactions clear the past 12 months, even if they’re passive stakes. Have you just seen more opportunities that would potentially be a strategic bid? And then do you see these multiples as attractive in transmission with some of the transactions we’ve seen clear?
