ONEOK, Inc. (OKE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Welcome, everyone. This is the fireside chat for ONEOK. We've got Pierce Norton, CEO; Walter Hulse, CFO; and Sheridan Swords, EVP Commercial with us. Highly encouraged Q&A. So don't be bashful. Feel free to ask questions, interrupt. Raise your hand. There's no -- the more the merrier. So first of all, thank you all for being here.

Appreciate it.

Yes. So I think I'll just kick it off and then we'll see where this goes. Maybe just start with your last earnings call, you kind of -- I felt like very intentionally called out the potential for 2024 EBITDA to exceed $6 billion. So I wonder if you could just expand a little bit on that? And what could drive that? What could drive that above $6 billion for the year?

Well, we're not going to give guidance until we release our earnings in February. But I think I can say, and we said on the call and we feel this way as strong or stronger today, that we are seeing excellent volumes coming out of all of our basins. Real strength and commitment to not only '23 but into '24. So we're pleased with how the business is operating. The synergies, cost synergies are starting to fall to the bottom line. We're obviously seeing commercial opportunities that are coming in. So just -- the base business is really strong and all of the things that we had expected from the acquisition are either at our expectations or better.

So maybe to push further on that. In terms of the Magellan merger, can you talk about how the integration is going? Kind of what are your key areas that you're focused on? And maybe start with that.

Okay. So I'll take that one. Kevin is not with us here today, but I'll give a shout out to him. We -- the first thing that we did, and this was intentional because this is not the first acquisition that this team has had to go through. So you can learn some things from the past acquisitions. No matter what company that you're working with. So the first thing we did was we established an executive and EVP of what we call enterprise services to specifically focus on integration. And that's kind of in the short term and then also go into that person, which is Kevin Burdick. He also has responsibility for the innovation and the optimization across the entire enterprise. And he's the perfect person for that because of his IT background, being a CIO, he's gone through the company both commercially and operationally. So he really understands the company as good or better than anybody in the entire organization. So he's heading that up. He has a great team working with him. We've also kind of contracted an outside group to also help us with that. They really have helped a lot with a collection of these different opportunities. We literally now have over 200 different itemize things that we're focused on. The thing that I'm probably most proud of is what I see in the employee base. So I've been able to kind of go throughout the corporate office and as well as the field offices and just seeing the people working together. Even without prompting, we've got folks from the refined product side and crude oil side, visiting our NGL assets and vice versa, already getting ideas and getting those captured. So I think the biggest challenge that we have is actually figuring out from a priority standpoint, how do you prioritize all these different opportunities. So you don't get too many things going at the same time. But I'm -- from where I sit, I'm really pleased with what I see. It's providing more opportunity than really what we thought. So again, it goes back to how do you prioritize those.

So maybe along those lines of more opportunities than we thought. So you've laid out some -- at least at the -- if you hit everything in the potential synergy side, it's a big number, almost $1 billion. Not to say that, that's guidance at all, and I don't think anyone is assuming that. But maybe can you just -- now as a little bit more time has passed. Can you talk about these synergy opportunities that you've outlined? Which ones -- which ones -- how are you making progress? Which ones seem more near term versus longer term? And how long do you think it will take you to kind of capture a lot of these synergies?

I'll let both Sheridan and Walt weigh in on this. But you hit the, I think, the right tone there, Michael, which is they do come at different times. I mean, on day one we disclosed this in our last analyst call, you have some immediate synergies. You don't have two boards. You don't have two C-suites. And you've got -- usually get renewables every year of your insurance policies, those kind of things. So we're already seeing immediate impacts on those. And all that will be kind of quantified and baked into our 2024 guidance. But then some of the other things do take a little bit longer. We may have to have some commitment to certain things to really capture the full impact of these two sets of assets together. Some of those could take 6 months, a year, some will almost be immediately. And I'll let Sheridan kind of talk to you a little bit about some of those examples.

I'll give you a couple of examples of things we can see immediately. One is we have condensate coming off OFS in Oklahoma that we've typically been selling that at a deep discount to WTI because it goes into the crude side of the business. Now that we have the Magellan, we're able to greatly reduce that discount and basically put it into our own system. So right away, we can get that. That can happen immediately and has happened immediately. Do you see opportunities like that, you see opportunities just trying to get people together in the wintertime, the NGL purity system and the upper going from Conway to the Upper Midwest gets full at that period of time. We've already find opportunities. So we can move some of that product over on to the refined product system to get around bottlenecks because at this time of the year, the [indiscernible] system is not as full. So those are some ideas that have hit right away. I think it'd be fair to say that we haven't found anything that is going to take longer than we thought. Everything is going to kind of come in the time frame that we knew was going to be. We knew bundling was going to be the most further out one because we need to wait for contracts to come off and to be able those opportunities to come up. But when you talk about batching and blending, we've had some quick hits, things were coming on today. And then we knew we were going to have to spend a modest amount of capital at a low multiple to get some of that done and that's being put in progress.

Maybe just a follow-up on all these different commercial synergies. Is there a way you can just like bracket the size or the average size of it? Because you've turn out $200 million, $400 million up to $900 million, but like the average kind of like opportunity that you're capturing. Is there like -- is this a $10 million? Is it $20 million? Is it $50 million? Like trying to get a sense of how...

Just thinking off the top of my head. As Pierce said, we've -- our list of synergies has grown as we've got people together. And they're all over the board. We've had some quick hits that are a couple of million dollars a year, and we have some other ones that are tens of millions of dollars a year. And obviously, the tens of million aren't as many. But what I would say is when we look at our synergies, there's not one, two or three synergies that we're counting on, specific synergies that we're counting on to get here. So I think they're more in probably the $10 million to $25 million a year range is maybe be where it fits in there. I haven't calculated it, but I know there's a lot of them, and we don't have any ones that we have to have to make it work.

I'm just going to pause there and see if there are any questions...

Just back to an initial comment you made, Walt, in terms of seeing excellent volumes in all basins. It feels like others are saying -- I don't want to say something different, but like E&Ps are clearly being very disciplined out there. And if you can just kind of talk a little bit about any changes you may be seeing as we enter into 2024 in terms of customer activity. There's -- we've seen weakness in prices out there and just a lot of mantra in terms of capital discipline from a lot of producers. So just little bit more color on that front.

Yes. And I think it's fair to say we haven't seen this influx of new rigs, and that isn't how it's based is. Execution of the plans that were in place, maybe a few more completion crews that have driven volume in the Bakken. In the Mid-Continent, there's been some -- there has been some new activity that wasn't kind of out there in the past, primarily in the Western part of the state. And then the Permian is obviously seen nice growth. But our producers, I think they are staying disciplined, but they're surely not taking their foot off the pedal. And I think that there is a 6- to 9-month lag from when people drill to when those volumes show up. So we're seeing the activity that was taking place in the first half of the year. Really kind of finished strong and give us a nice tailwind into '24.

Maybe if we just -- maybe on the Bakken, specifically, there's I'd say like recently, you've seen the GORs dip a little bit or at least kind of bounce around. And where is that GOR for a long time was just up into the right. It seems like that diverged a little bit. So I'm curious if you could just give us your perspective on what's going on there in terms of GORs and just generally your outlook on production growth and activity in the Bakken?

So let's start with the second one first. Overall, our production growth in the Bakken, we still see the crude oil production growing. We still see it growing modestly. There's enough rigs out there to have a modest growth. Now with that as we get more out into the future years will that change, we'll just have to see. The rigs are becoming more efficient. They're drilling longer laterals. And so we can't just say if they maintain this rigs that we won't continue to grow as we get bigger. On the GOR side, if you just take a step back, every well in the Bakken is going to have a GOR that comes out day one. And that GOR is going to grow. And so the only dip you're seeing right now is we're seeing a little bit more drilling down in Dunn County, that it's GOR that it starts with from day one is lower than we've seen in some other counties like McKinzie County. But that GOR is going to grow as well. So you've seen an overall little dip, just a little bit of change and where they're drilling to make that grow. But the fundamentals of what we've always said about GOR are still there that as well comes on, the crude oil is going to decline much faster than the gas because the GOR is going to grow and that volume is going to stay through there. And then as they -- as the crude oil kind of stables out after a couple of years, the GOR will continue to grow through that period of time. All the wells are the same way. We're just seeing a little bit of lower initial GOR out of the Dunn County wells.

So the only thing I'd add to that, Michael, is when you look at our footprint up in the Bakken, we probably are the people that have the best insight to what that total GOR is. So you may have another midstreamer that maybe give some information about the GUR in their specific area. It does change from area to area. But the breadth of our operations up there gives us the best insight to that. And we literally have data on these wells back into the '50s and '60s and not many people can say that. So -- and we tend to say what we're going to do and do what we say. So when you hear our story about the GOR, it's probably going to be the most accurate you're going to get out of the basin.

Could I ask about this Matador projects guests? Is this real this thing? Can it happen in the next 2, 3 years?

You're talking about the Saguaro pipeline?

No, Sorry, That's Saguaro.

The Saguaro pipeline, the facility -- the LNG facility just announced yesterday that they've actually started to contract train 3. There was a public announcement. So 1 and 2 are completely contracted. We're in the same position we've been that we're continuing to wait on the U.S. government to issue the presidential permit. Once that is done, then the pieces are in place for the LNG facility to go out and get their financing locked up. And once that's done, there would be an FID on the facility and we would FID on the pipe.

[indiscernible].

Yes. I think that our pipeline is 100% in the U.S. It goes from the Permian to the border. They also have announced that they've actually let contracts and identify the construction companies that we'll be taking that on as well as had the governors in the two states that are being crossed come out in strong support of the project. Is there -- is it done yet? Absolutely not. We typically wouldn't even have been talking about this. We don't typically talk about our transactions or tell -- or things that we're building and tell their FID. This one, we didn't have a choice because we had to file that presidential permit. So we're kind of out there talking about something that's still in process and may not get there. But the commercial side of this just continues to get stronger and stronger. So there's a good tailwind there.

And I would say that the planning is out of this is not something that they just started. There has been a lot of meticulous analysis of exactly what is that route, which areas do you need to avoid, which do you need to try to pick and tread through. So I mean, from where I sit, I think they're doing as much as they can. I think they realize that there may be some difficult areas, and they're trying to navigate their way either through that or around those.

Yes. The one thing I would want to leave you with, though, is that we are cognizant of a risk that, that pipe could get delayed on the interim in the Mexico or maybe it never gets built. We are entering into this project from a structure standpoint to make sure that we don't have a pipe to nowhere. And we will not go forward if we are in a situation where we had a pipe to nowhere. So we're very cognizant of that.

Do you folks have any opportunities on the natural gas storage side?

Yes. We still have opportunities after Winterstorm Bury, we've really seen a resurgence in the need and the desire for natural gas storage. And we've been able to recontract that storage at very favorable rates that has come off. But since the rates have gotten bigger or larger rate, now we've gone back and looked at previous projects that did not have the economics behind it to be able to expand some of our storage and we're going back in and redoing those and doing some of those as well. So we think we'll still grow our storage position and be able to contract it for long-term contracts, very favorably.

Is it meaningful?

Pretty meaningful to that segment. But what I'm trying to get to is now you're about -- you're close to $6 billion. You have to decide what is meaningful to it. But it's going to be a very nice add-on to our natural gas pipe segment.

Extremely strong return on investment.

Maybe just go back to the Bakken for a second. So as I'm sure you're well aware by now, some of your competitors have made comments about competition or creating competition in the Bakken. I wonder if you can just talk about your positioning there and how you think about competition and to the extent that what -- what is the tenure of your contracts? And what -- yes, we will stop there.

I guess I've said many times that our tenure of our contracts are very long, very long term up in there. We have a very nice position up there. If you get back, when we think about competition, we think about what we need to be able to do is satisfy our customers' needs in a very favorable way to them. And we continue to be able to do that. And one way we're able to do that is just with the breadth of our system. We think we can give the best net back up there because of the contracts for residue, what we have for the NGL side, we can give the best residue back to the producer on our G&P side. We also have -- and thinking about the G&P side, we have multiple plants, a super system that we can move barrels around where we have a lot of redundancy. We can make sure the volume flows. And as we've always said, People are not up there drilling for gas, they're drilling for oil. They just want to make sure the gas goes away and doesn't slow down their oil. So we have a lot of that we can offer, make sure their gas is flowing. And then you get into the NGL side, multiple pipes coming out of the basin. So we think we have a very good -- what we have up there, our assets up there fit the producers very well. We have economies of scale. And then you go beyond that, we have long-term contracts already in place.

Maybe just stay on the Bakken, but I'm more thinking about the gas side. There's obviously been talk about gas expansion projects, pipeline expansion projects for quite some time. You had that northern border potential expansion out there. But now you have this Bison Express project, which seems like it's FID is going forward. So how do we think about how that impacts you? And does this mean that you don't need Northern Border to expand now. So is that expansion off the table?

So I'll take that one, Michael. The -- first of all, the Bison, I think you're talking about Bison Express, okay? So that is what we would call A Northern Border expansion. It's not The Northern Border expansion. So I think some people don't quite make the connection of that. That actually is part of Northern Border. And so anytime you do expansions, the ones that typically done are the ones that make the most sense first. So the Bison Express made sense to do first. It connects up to several assets that ONEOK actually has positions in down in the Powder River Basin to get you all the way down to Cheyenne. So that's the way those things have been pathed. It didn't preclude Northern Border from actually doing another expansion on The Northern Border pipeline. But I think that gets done over time as the need presents itself. But right now, there are some small expansions that have been done with WBI. There's more gas being consumed up in the Wyoming and North Dakota areas because of conversions of coal-fired power plants to gas fired. So with that going on, the stuff that's going on with WBI, the Bison Express, all those, we feel like is going to fill the needs for some period of time out there. But then if the gas keeps growing, then you introduce the Northern Border expansion.

So I mean you guys took capacity and is an anchor shipper on the Bison Express. I guess from your perspective, what led you to that decision where you felt like you had to take capacity there? Does that tie into your bundling strategy for producers of being able to offer NGL and residue gas takeaway, I guess, what are the benefits for you for getting that capacity?

So it's -- I'll let you weigh in too, Sheridan, but it's all about competitive advantage. So when we need to move someone's natural gas or their natural gas liquids, you got to have those outputs for that. And so when we say -- Sheridan just talked about the previous question about how we provide the best netback that translates into the best value for the customers. And so when you actually have that capacity, you're making sure that those volumes are going to move, which ties back to the crude always moving. And so -- we see that as a competitive advantage of ours is to hold that space so that we can continuously move those volumes. And so that's the way I would probably answer that. It's just about -- it's a one-stop shop as opposed to, okay, well, we can move your liquids, but we can't move your gas or we can't do this when we can do it if you get it to this point. But we also we gather, we process, in some cases, we treat and then we move the gas and the NGLs. I mean it's a business model that's working really well for us right now, and I think it will continue to work well.

Just another quick one. Are you out of the M&A game now that you have Magellan? Or does that preclude you from doing other stuff?

That's a loaded question. No, it's not a loaded question. It's just a good way to introduce capital allocation, I guess. So I'm going to let Walt kind of answer that.

Well, obviously, we are in the process of digesting what we've done. We've continued to look over time at all opportunities. But we've been very intentional and disciplined. We had a list of criteria that we evaluate everything against. Magellan was at the top of the list for achieving goals that we had established. Now that that's done, we've achieved some of those goals. So maybe they shift a little bit. We can look at other new goals. From a balance sheet standpoint, we are well on our way to getting back towards our 3.5x debt-to-EBITDA target. Deleveraging has gone faster than we expected. The free cash flow generated by this combined entity is meaningful. So that's going to give us flexibility. I think that we'll continue to have a strong dividend when it grows. But I think that we also are going to make sure that we maintain flexibility over time and look at all the options from a capital allocation standpoint to give us the flexibility if the right opportunity from an M&A perspective were to be there or a capital project that we're in a position to do that. And I would come back to the point to say that when we first threw out that 3.5x target, we were about a $2.5 billion debt-to-EBITDA company. So we were talking about $1.5 billion was a half a turn. Well, today, as you're up and around that $6 billion mark, half a turn is $3 billion. And that gives you a whole lot of flexibility if you're thinking about the opportunity set that's out there. So we think we're in a great position from a capital allocation, lots of flexible...

Well, your answer surprised me, to be honest. I was thinking more operationally that you want to realize all these commercial synergies. So that begs the question, operationally, if you were to make an acquisition, would that be a gating item?

Well, the answer is there's different ways. It's about connectivity. So how do you connect NGLs to the refined products business? In some areas, we're already connected. In some areas, we not need to put a tank in and I want Sheridan to kind of talk a little bit about kind of the way we can now use these systems together that you couldn't do in the past but you may need to do an acquisition to connect those, but the alternative is, is you build to connect them. So that's really what you do is you look and see what are those opportunities to buy something for connectivity versus what is it that you do to build for connectivity but neither one of those are going to be really large capital numbers. Nothing like what you've seen in the past where it's $2 billion or $3 billion or $4 billion. So -- and talk a little bit about the opportunities that we're seeing, Sheridan, as far as on the refined products and NGL side and how you work those together?

And so the same thing is if you think about the refined products, they're using a tremendous amount NGLs. Mainly normal butane and natural gasoline, which in the past, they always have to access that from the market and be able to store it in the summertime to be able to have it on hand when the blending season comes in the wintertime. Well, now the first thing is you got these two systems together, they don't have to worry about the stores and the acquisition of that. And actually, it opens that to us. So we can be very opportunistic on choosing the spread between normal and natural gas and unleaded when we lock it in. We can look throughout the year. We're not as dependent on when you can get a hold of the normal butane and being able to store it and have the right capability. That's the first thing that we're going to be able to open up and be able to capture more of the spread that we have it in the past. The second thing is we can move normal butane on a refined products pipeline. When we talk about batching, we're talking about a refined products pipeline, when it batches, it's going to put a batch or 10,000 barrels of diesel in the line, then they're going to put 10,000 barrels of unleaded right behind it. And that mix in between there is minimize that as much as they can, but you'll have a little mix that you have to blend back in. The pipelines and the system is able, after that unleaded batch goes in, we can slip a normal butane batch right in behind it, send it right to the location of where they're going to blend at the terminal to get the last little bit of the blending done, eliminating trucks and everything else that they're using today. They're having to truck that from a long ways away to get up there. Their average logistics cost for normal butane is $0.20 a gallon. That -- they are moving some by pipe today that are coming in for other locations, but they're trucking a lot. And what they're trucking is much greater than $0.20 a gallon. By being able to use the pipelines that are already going to those terminals, we're going to be able to make sure they get the butane there at a much cheaper cost. And then once you have the butane there, you know that you have it on hand, ready from the opportunity to blend comes. Remember, at these terminals, you've got trucks coming in all the time. They're pulling the demand goes up and down throughout the day. So you got to make sure you have butane there when the opportunity is there instead of having a truck having to bring it in, sit and wait. You can build up a storage and bring batches in. So those are some ideas where you put the two systems together, they were good. I talked earlier about matching around sometimes in the winter time, the purity, natural gas liquids system that goes from Conway to the upper Midwest. That's when it's moving most of its liquids. The refined product system that sits basically in the same area, that's its slow time. So we can use that pipeline to get more capacity in the times when we have the greatest need. And then the opposite is going to happen in the summer. When you move more refined products in the summer. We're going to use that NGL system to move more refined products to get it to the demand when is needed. So those are some examples when you start putting these two things together, how they work.

I can't let you leave until we talk about the Permian NGL takeaway situation. It looks a lot like it's going to be overbuilt. A lot of announcements in a short period of time. So curious if you could just address your strategy there with your latest expansion. Obviously, you don't have a gathering processing footprint so you don't control liquids in the same way some of the competing pipelines do. So I'm wondering if you could just kind of talk about what your strategy is there to compete.

Well, the strategy has always been there to create a better value for the customers than our competition is. That's always been what our strategy is. Part of that has been we've been able to contract that pipeline in a way and we constructed it in a way that we can just add a couple more loops as we need more capacity as we go on. We've got to this period of time that we need to complete the loops, but we only have about 100 more miles delay to complete the loops where everybody else is more like 300, 350 miles delay. So with that, what we did is we went out and have contracts in hand that give us a nice rate of return for our expansion. So you got to think about it. Everything beyond that is really you could almost say is [ free ]. And we're not going to give it as [ free ]. We're going to be at the market, but that's one way we can compete. We can compete on price. The other thing that we compete, we think this is the more the area we'll tend to look at is through bundling. And we've talked about that with the 3Bs and the synergies with Magellan, but we've been doing bundling for a long period of time. That's where you would have -- you may have somebody to have a contract with up in the Bakken and you got -- and you're trying to get a contract, a different contract with them in the Permian. You may go in there and talk to them about as a consideration for getting the contract in the Permian, there may be some things that you've wanted in the Bakken that we could adjust that contract for to be able to incent them to bring that volume on. They get more value. You gave them something that nobody else really can. And you can take that against what's coming down. We're going to be able to compete on that side. There is a little bit of a fallacy out there that a lot of people think, if you have a G&P assets in the Permian, you control all the liquids coming off that gas plant. That's in the Permian, that is not true. You can control some, but a lot of the producers, especially since they're getting to be the bigger and bigger producers, the Chevrons, the Exxon. As they get bigger, they are going to have what they call taking kind rights, meaning that the producer is going to decide who the NGL provider is coming out of there. They're going to do the contract with them. And the reason they do that is because they also see that they have product with other companies throughout different parts of the United States, and they want to leverage their Permian to help get better rates in the area of this well. So they're going to be wanting to bundle as well. So it's a mutual beneficial thing to come in here. And we've been doing that for a period of time with our different basins. Now that we have crude oil and sometimes, we have refined products, we have some customers that touch each one of our business segments, we have more opportunities to bundle those things together to be able to compete.

And Sheridan has been a little bit humble there. When we bought the West Texas LPG line, it was doing about 100,000 barrels a day. Today, it's doing 300,000 barrels a day. So he's demonstrated the ability to compete very effectively without G&P.

All right. Bigger picture question about the merger. I think there's a view out there that looking at energy transition refined products could be the first part of the value chain to mature and eventually start seeing demand declines and that the legacy ONEOK businesses were had better runway in terms of natural gas and NGL. Do you -- is your view that, that view is wrong and you see it differently? Or is the view that, hey, this transaction was compelling for a number of other reasons that were just much more important than that?

Well, it's compelling for many reasons, but I don't think we would spend $18 billion if we had that point of view that the refined products and jet fuel and diesel is going to go away. If you look at where these assets are located, yes, are there going to be more EVs on the road? Sure. I was actually in the Dallas-Fort Worth area this past week visiting one of our locations, our truck facilities there and talking to a gentleman who have been there for 17 years, and he was talking to me about the year-over-year growth that they've seen in that area for years and years. And it's more than double what it was when he got there before. So yes, you may have -- where people, I think, miss it, is where does the population go. So if you had a stagnant population or a declining population in an area and EVs were taking off, then that might be true. But most of our areas for whatever reason, probably a big part of it is COVID, that there's been an influx of population in our areas. So what we're seeing in our terminal facilities is actually growth in that area. And people are -- I mean, in our areas, a lot of people drive trucks. They drive big SUVs, and those are not the most economical things as far as the consumption goes. So just not a lot of -- just to note a little anecdote here. I was in one of the local car dealerships there in Tulsa this last week, had my wife in there for her car. And I said, "How is this EV thing working for you?" and he said, Pierce, nhe said there will -- this will be the last place on earth that EVs are going to take off. I said why you say that? Because they don't send us any. So think about that. I mean if the car manufacturers are not sending EVs to be sold in the Midwest, it probably means there's not a lot of appetite for. So we have different ways that we find out information, and that's just one of them.

That's helpful. Can you -- is it a simple day Wyoming Coast people to be more concerned about demand structure, but [indiscernible]?

I think the answer is yes and no. Is there going to be more EV penetration on the Left Coast and the Right Coast? Yes. But I think what you got to look at is what are the driving habits of those people. Some of the data that we're seeing shows that, yes, there's more EVs sold in those areas. But a lot of those EVs are actually parked in somebody's garage. They're not using them. They still have their internal combustion engine, and that's more of a vehicle that they're using kind of sporadically, not as their main vehicle. And if you look at the pricing of those vehicles, it is so much higher than most of the people can afford. And so I think you got to look at the population's ability to buy an EV and what are the cost and what are the driving habits of those folks. So as I just told you, the miles that people are driving in the Midwestern part of the United States have actually gone up. I don't think that's necessarily true on the East Coast and the West Coast.

Great. We've hit our time. So thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you.