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

All right. This is the session for ONEOK. You've got to my left, Sheridan Swords, EVP, Chief Commercial Officer. We've got Pierce Norton, President and CEO; and Walt Hulse, EVP and Chief Financial Officer. So thank you, gentlemen, for joining me. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Mike.

Welcome. This is open Q&A, so feel free to just raise your hand and any time during the session, and someone will come over with the mic and you can ask your question.

So maybe I'll start. Yes, I guess I'd start just high level over the last few years. You've made some pretty significant strategic shifts in the company, diversifying your Bakken concentration, adding more basins, refined products, crude, NGLs, reducing your gas -- natural gas exposure. Maybe you could just talk through that strategic shift you've undergone at a high level? Do you like where the company is now from a mix of assets, markets, cash flow stability? And is this kind of what you're aiming to get to?

Okay. So I'll take that question, Michael. I'd probably start out by saying that in 2021, in the middle of the year, we had decided as a management team that we did need to take a strong look and really assess our competitive advantage. And so I'll kind of tick these -- you mentioned we've done several acquisitions, which is true and some very large ones. But I'd start with Magellan. So what Magellan brought to us was what we call demand pull, where we primarily had producers that was a supply push, and we wanted to get into a demand pull kind of situation. So that's one of the things that it gives us because we got much larger in the refined products business with jet fuel, diesel and gasoline distribution. So that's the -- and it also brought to us cash flow stability, brought to us the ability to sustain the earnings with minimum capital, although we have found ways to enhance and extend some of the systems that we had -- that Magellan had. Then the next one was EnLink. EnLink got us more into the Permian. And if you'll notice, there's a certain order that we went to this. We -- and then we had Medallion, which actually got us into the crude gathering business and was able to connect up to our long-haul pipes that we got from Magellan. So we would have never done Medallion had we not done Magellan first. The EnLink stuff, all of those assets were pretty much on islands. Our assets connected all those. So the whole thing really flowed into our strategy. We want to touch as many molecules as we can for basically as many times as we can for as long as we can. So that's our -- that's the premise of our strategy. You did mention one thing I want to address, though, you mentioned us kind of reducing our exposure to natural gas. That is true on the interstate side. And there was a strategic rationale for that because those -- it didn't fit with our molecule strategy. It was isolated. We could only touch those molecules one time. The company we sold them to, they had many more options to do connect to storage and already connected some of their other assets. So it would be more valuable to them than it was to us. So we did divest of that, but we have actually grown the intrastate side of our business through EnLink and also in the storage side of our business. So we've gotten much bigger on the intrastate side, which is really where we like to be because of the connectivity and then the molecule story strategy.

So I guess with all this M&A activity, I think one of the hardest things for investors and us to really get a good grasp on is the synergies. I think you've outlined $700 million to $1.1 billion of synergies across all this. Can you just make us -- maybe just walk us through the major categories of synergies, how far along you are to achieving those? And when you expect to have all those synergies complete and reflected in EBITDA, if there ever is an end to this?

Sure. Well, I think what -- where I would go with that is to start again at Magellan and kind of walk through sequentially. The Magellan acquisition from a synergy standpoint has far exceeded our expectations. I think we've probably been able to capture 80% of what we thought was there and then found a whole lot more than we had expected. And the reason I think that we found so much more was that they really had limited the capital that they put into the business to about $100 million a year. And effectively, that kind of shut down the organization for looking for opportunities. So there are a lot of real small opportunities where we'd spend $10 million and get $8 million of EBITDA. We have one we spent $12 million, and we're getting $30 million of EBITDA. So some really nice, very high-return projects, but they fall into buckets. The first ones we get are the easy G&A, you can kind of knock those off. Sometimes they take up to a year to get them because of contractual types of things. But for example, insurance. We've been able to fold some of these operations into our insurance and completely eliminate the cost that had been there before. And then the next is things like I just mentioned, the smaller capital projects, quick hits, connects the things you can do. And those have been coming in line, and you'll see -- you've seen them so far, and you'll see them again when we put out the fourth quarter in the refined products business. And then the last bucket is the biggest bucket, and that we like because we have total control over and have had total control over all these synergies with Magellan is that there were some big connections that we had to make to really interplay our NGL system down in Mont Belvieu with the Houston distribution of both refined products and crude that Magellan had. And to accelerate that process, we bought a small little pipeline company called Easton. It kind of -- we were already a customer on Easton. It accelerated by about a year our ability to connect Mont Belvieu to those other Magellan properties. That has just completed. Those connections were just completed here in the third quarter. So we're now starting to see the benefits of that last wave of synergies where we had to spend some meaningful amounts of capital. We did the same thing up in the Mid-Continent. We're not quite done there yet. We're just in the process, but where we've connected our Kansas NGL network to the distributions across the Mid-Continent and into Cushing with Magellan. So we're way ahead of where we expected to be with Magellan. Medallion, that was kind of a plug and play. Most of the synergies that we got there, again, were within our control, but really came around our ability to operate those assets in a way that Medallion couldn't because they just didn't have the balance sheet. They had to really let third-party marketers come into their system to handle product. We've been able to remove the third parties and be able to go directly to the customers and then fill our pipes, which is another synergy that's within our control. And then EnLink, we're just now -- we're about 9 months, 10 months into it. Coming along, the corporate synergies are just about all falling to the bottom line. You're starting to see some of the contractual synergies over the next couple of years that will fall in, and those are primarily NGLs that will roll off contracts from other pipes and then fall on to our system. So we feel -- and we've got a slide in our deck that we're ahead of schedule as it relates to synergies and that what we really have tried to do is make sure that the vast majority of those are within our control and ones that we aren't waiting for a customer to do something where we do have some of that contractual stuff, but we're right on path.

Great. Maybe we turn to the macro a little bit. Maybe just get your general thoughts as we head here into 2026 and maybe specifically drill down a little bit on the Bakken and the Rockies in terms of the volume outlook in the remainder of this year and then more importantly, into '26.

Okay. So I'll let Sheridan take the Bakken question, but just the macro level view of what we have, Michael, is that there is going to be about 13.5 million barrels of oil that's produced here in the United States. And most of that gets consumed locally and what doesn't goes across the water. I think the LNG picture that's developing around the Gulf Coast. You heard the term 30-at-30, which is 30 Bcf a day of capacity coming out of the Gulf Coast area by 2030. That's a significant amount. It's almost double what we have currently. That gas has got to come from somewhere, and it's probably going to come from the Permian and the Haynesville, at least in the near term until something could potentially get done out of the Appalachian area. But that is significant. And then you add on top of that, the AI data centers and the electricity because speed to market is what they're really looking for. And so they're locating these data centers in and around where the producing areas are. It's going to give opportunities for multiple pipelines. In our opinion, you're not going to see any large -- unless you went into spending capital for the electric generation piece of this, you're not going to spend a lot of capital on the pipeline side because they're locating them at or near several pipelines because they don't even want just one pipeline servicing these areas. They'd like to have multiple. So they have backup because of the reliability issues. So I think that's going to be a real driver for natural gas. And even in a flat crude environment, you're going to see the growth because of the gas-to-oil ratios. So we're going to continue -- and there are areas out there that do have liquids in them that are not necessarily. So you got casing head gas that comes with the oil production, you got your gas well gas that's either dry or your gas gas that's got some liquids with it. So all of those are going to continue to grow, which means just more liquids for us and filling up our assets because we do have the operating leverage both out of the Bakken, out of the West Texas area and with the fractionation that we're putting back in at Medford. So you can answer that.

Yes. Mike, when you think about the Bakken, the Rockies, if you think about the growth out of the Rockies right now, we saw growth from '24 to '25 into the Rockies, and we're going to see growth into '26. The crude oil production, we think, is going to stay relatively flat up there. And with the GOR, you're going to see low single-digit kind of growth on the gas side of that. The good thing in the Rockies right now, we have capacity up in the Bakken. We have processing capacity. Our capital is going to be lower than you've seen in the past because we've built that operating leverage that we've talked about before that we were able to grow in as we continue to grow. Right now, in the Bakken, we kind of see what happens every year, and we've got to plan on it. It's -- we haven't looked up there, I think it's like minus 9% right now. So it's -- which is normal for them, but we do see heater treaters come on at this time of the year. And so we always see a little bit of dip in our volumes in the fourth quarter and into the first quarter. So nothing unusual right now going on volumes right now. We continue -- we have talked to a lot of producers up there. The big ones, ConocoPhillips and they are continuing to go forward strong. They're going to drill through this. A lot of the big boys are going to drill ExxonMobil. They're all going to kind of keep their drilling programs that they have going on. We are seeing some private equity in certain areas get a little aggressive at this time because this is their area that they're going to drill. That's all they have. They have this. And there's a lot of areas up there at this crude environment that people can make money at, if this is their one area to grow. So we're going to see them continue to grow some volume out there. So you take that, that's why we think we'll see kind of low single-digit continued growth up there in the Bakken.

Maybe just on the Bakken. So I think Bison Express starting up, I think, Q1 '26. And just curious with the start-up of that gas residue pipe, if that has implications on your ethane recovery as you look out to '26. And if I recall correctly, you usually don't put much in the guidance for ethane recovery. It's more of an upside optionality. But yes, just curious if -- what you think about that.

One of the thing about Bison, we need a little bit more gas. A lot of that's been contracted, continue to go on that. And that comes on. I don't see it having too much of an adverse material impact on that. a lot as you see basically just the difference between having gas up in the Bakken versus Henry Hub, which is really -- when you talk about our discretionary ethane, that's really what we're doing is we're natural gas out of the Bakken to the Henry Hub price because we're buying -- basically buying the ethane off of a natural gas price up there. So I think that's still going to flex a little bit. But I don't think all of a sudden, you're going to see the Bakken price have substantial move to Henry Hub price and then what you've seen in history.

Maybe back to Pierce's 30-at-30 comment, I like that one. There's been some talk or chatter lately about Mid-Con permits and maybe rigs ramping up to support some of this LNG build-out wave over time. So you guys are a big player in the Mid-Con. So curious if you're -- what you're seeing there or hearing there on that front.

Mike, what we've seen is that as Pierce kind of talked about it, when you have all that demand for gas and you're starting to see gas prices in really nice attractive levels, you're in the high $4 and especially when you see crude at the $60 range, you're seeing a lot of the producers try to go to a more gassier or what we call the condensate window. And the Mid-Continent is prime for that. It has an oil window, it has a condensate window that a little bit of dry gas window. And we are starting to hear producers talk about into 2026 in the Mid-Continent moving more to that condensate window. Now the condensate window, I mean, the gas is still rich. It's a very rich gas. The thing that we like about it is that IP is at a much higher rate than we see in the oil part of that window, continue to go forward. So that -- we've always felt the Mid-Continent has been kind of our high gas price option that you'll see more volume come on, seeing more of that. And that doesn't take into account. We're still seeing that I've talked about before in the western side of the state, the Cherokee formation that has -- we've got a lot of people very excited about that formation over there, which is still a little bit oilier, but it does get some pretty good gas coming out of there, and they're continuing -- as we've talked to them, they are wanting to continue to drill that out, explore that, expand that as well. So for a long time, the Mid-Continent, we've kind of called it to be flat and going forward. But now it continues to become more and more exciting for us for increased volume growth out of that. And obviously, we've still got a very nice position on the NGL outlet where we get most of the NGLs coming out of the Mid-Continent. And with our EnLink acquisition, we've more than doubled our G&P presence in there. So all that -- as we continue to grow, we have a wider footprint, we can handle more area. That was one of the synergies that we had with EnLink is EnLink has a very large contract with one producer that there are certain parts of it, they could not service because they were not close enough and it became uneconomic for them. But when you put the legacy ONEOK system with that expands our reach and now we're able to get some very nice -- not get -- we have that contract. We just don't have to release those acreage. I think so that's been very nice. So we continue to see that growth in the Mid-Continent and pretty excited about it.

And the demand side is actually growing there because after after COVID, we saw a lot of influx of people coming into the Oklahoma area. Oklahoma has always been a net exporter of gas. A lot of people don't realize that even during the dead of winter, like January, February, the Oklahoma area producers have exported around 3 Bcf a day. So the -- and the capacity and the volumes have been larger than where they are today, even though they're growing. So the capacity is there to export the gas from Oklahoma and you just need it on the demand pull side, which that's what the LNG is going to do and the AI data centers.

So maybe if we shift a little bit to 2026. I realize you're not going to give us guidance right here. But if you want to go ahead, but you're probably not. So maybe you could just walk through at a high level, how we should think about what are the drivers of growth in '26 versus '25. How big a factor is volumes versus butane blending spreads? And then within that context, on the third quarter call, you kind of pulled back your 2026 outlook. So can you also just speak to that decision?

Sure. Well, the good news about the growth into '26 is it's really driven by the projects that we've been working on and completing. I had mentioned before the Eastern connections that just finished up in the third quarter. We're going to enjoy those here in the fourth quarter, but we'll get a full year of them going into '26. Those connections that we've made up in the Mid-Continent that we're doing right now in the fourth quarter, we'll get all of those in '26. We'll bring on the Bison Pipeline, which was mentioned here a second ago, which actually sends gas down to the Cheyenne market. That will come on. That's fully -- that's contracted. So that starts day 1 when it comes with those contracted rates. And then we've got the Denver expansion of our refined products pipeline, which also comes in, in '26. So we have a lot of kind of stair-step items that will fall in that are not reliant on the drill bit. As we look at '26, one of the reasons you highlighted the spread between butane and RBOB, it's been about at its lows here through most of '25. We've kind of got that marked into our view for '26. So any upside that we get there is -- will fall to the bottom line. But I think really where we -- why we backed off is as we saw crude go from a $75 price, which is where we were when we started to put that outlook out there to a $60 price, we've just seen producers kind of back off a little bit. They haven't stopped drilling. They still have the same number of rigs. But I kind of use the analogy, they were going 75 miles an hour they're still going fast, but they've kind of backed up and they're going 60 miles an hour now. So just not leaning in quite as much. So on the margin, while we think there's still going to be growth, it's not going to be as robust as we thought it was going to be.

Maybe just also on '26, just as we think about the major capital projects that are on the board? And how do we think about just directionally '26 CapEx versus '25?

Yes, '26, there's quite a few of them that were in the process here on '25, still continue in '26, get wrapped up in '26. I mentioned the Denver pipeline. We get the first phase of the Medford frac done in fourth quarter of '26, and then we get the second phase in early '27. Those are 2 bigger projects that roll off. So we'll start to see that real kind of reduction in CapEx in '27, but '26 is going to be pretty similar to '25.

So maybe just to round out this topic, M&A. You've done a lot as we discussed. Would you say that -- what is your appetite for M&A at this point? Do you feel like you've basically built out what you want to build out? Or do you feel like there are still areas where you'd want to fill in?

Well, I think we always -- back when we got together in '21 and came up with our key criteria that we were looking for, there are several of those things that still exist. Do we -- would we like to have even more free cash flow? Yes. Would we like to have maybe a little bit more scale? Yes. Do we want to continue to diversify? Do we want to expand and extend our existing assets? The answer to all of those is yes. But we're in a position now because of our asset mix and the opportunities we have on synergies that we can be patient about this. And everything that we know exactly right now what it is that we would like to look at as it relates to M&A. But we don't feel like any of the things that we would be really interested in are necessarily what we would say, well, we got to go get something done today. So we think we can be patient, and we can, again, be intentional and disciplined in what it is we're going to do on the M&A front. I mean you can see by what we did of doing Magellan and then doing EnLink and then doing Medallion and then the Easton is in there. All of that stuff was very intentional, and we could see how all those pieces came together that fit the puzzle that we have today.

Can you folks describe the wellhead to water strategy and just the competitive landscape as you see it today?

Yes. I mean the wellhead to water strategy is just basically we have customers and everybody else that wants to give us natural gas, go through our processing plants, take their NGLs down the pipeline and be able to move it across the dock to be go forward. We have some producers that want that as well. Also from our side, we look at it is we want to control our complete destiny, meaning that as we get liquids down into the Mont Belvieu area, we want to make sure they clear into the market center. When we decided that -- we had been looking at the LPG dock for 10 years and trying to understand when do we need to get into it? What's the right time to be able to and what are all the issues. Through all that study, we found there's a couple of things that we wanted. One thing is we wanted something off the Houston Ship Channel, and that's what a lot of our customers wanted us that way. We wanted to have a nice -- be able to have a green -- a brownfield that the cost isn't so much. That's what NPL brought to us as well. But most more, we want to be able to clear our liquids out there. Our liquids today are already moving across other docks. We're not contracting across other docks, but they are moving across other docks. But we went in and looked at it and looked forward into the future and said there's going to become a time when there's only going to be probably one customer, one export customer that does -- their export capacity is greater than their fractionation capacity. And if we get to that time frame, we did not want our liquids to be disadvantaged going into the marketplace. But one thing we have and we went through this whole process, one thing we have is we have supply. And that's why in this whole 10 years, we've had many, many people come to us, both want to help us build an LPG dock or want us to build an LPG dock so they can take and have an alternative to the incumbents into the marketplace. So as we did that, we found the right opportunity with MPLX to be able to execute that, be able to go forward. So now we can control our destiny. We've got customers that want to control their destiny from the wellhead to water, and we want to control our destiny from the wellhead to the water to make sure that our product can be able to clear. But with the MPLX dock that we have a low capital -- lower capital because it's a brownfield dock. It's very close to Mont Belvieu. So our pipeline capital out there is low as as well. And then also, it's very close to open water, which we are getting premium pricing for that to be able to go forward. When we saw that opportunity, we jumped on it. We thought this was something that we can use and we can compete in the marketplace, and we've been able to shown that we're able to do that. Tremendous amount of people come in very interested in the capacity across that dock. We're working -- it comes up in '28. We're working through a lot of things right now to finish contracting that. But as I mentioned on the call, we're very -- we are very satisfied where we are on that contracting journey as we continue to continue to go forward on that. And like I said, we're able to get -- our customers, they see and value that superior location close to open water.

[ Anything about the permian reduction. ]

So the Permian, we think overall, Pierce -- we think here for a period of time, the United States is going to stay in the approximate range of 13.5 million barrels a day of crude oil. But not every basin is going to be the same. The basin that will grow the most will be the Permian. That's where we see most of the growth is continue to come on. So with that growth, obviously, you're going to get more gas coming out. We're seeing the Delaware even gassier as they drill out in that area, even more gas coming out. With that increased gas is increased liquids. You're going to get a lot more liquids coming out of the Permian. So the Permian is going to -- we continue to think it's going to be strong as we continue to -- if you listen to a lot of the producers, if they have a Permian presence, they're going to favor that Permian presence more than some of the other areas. That's where they're going to put -- not all, but most of their drilling budget is going to be in that area. So we continue to see that growth in the Permian. And you're seeing as we see more natural gas pipelines being built, more NGL pipelines being built, everybody is kind of seeing that more fractionators being built, a lot of that's being driven out of the Permian. I said the Bakken, we're going to see a little bit of growth, Mid-Con that we're excited about, but you're talking about a much smaller basin than you're thinking about the...

There's 2 market indicators there, I think, out there that one is even this week, I think the prices of Waha went negative, maybe down into the $6 range. So that's an indication of a pretty severe tight capacity out of the basin. So any kind of maintenance or any kind of upsets, then it goes negative almost immediately. So that's one of the market indicators. And the other one is just talking in terms of the pipes that we're going to be involved in, which is the Eiger pipeline, started out about 2.4 Bcf of capacity then we've recently announced, had enough interest in that pipeline to expand it to 3.5 Bcf. You got at least 10 Bcf that needs to get down to the LNG facility. So you got way more demand down there capacity-wise of the LNG than what we have today. And so the market is saying we're going to build -- we're going to back these pipelines coming out of this because we're not -- we wouldn't be going down this road to expand these capacities just because you got to have contracts behind them, and there are. So I think the market is saying, I'm willing to step up and take capacity on these pipelines, both the LNG side of it and the producer side. So -- and then the fact that you've got those lower prices tells you that the market is really tight out there on capacity. So it's going to grow.

Could you just describe the industrial logic of taking part ownership of pipelines where you don't -- where you're not necessarily the operator?

So the Eiger pipeline is a subsidiary of the Matterhorn pipeline. And so the Matterhorn pipeline is a pipeline that EnLink invested in. So this is what gave us the opportunity. But the industrial logic behind this is that we have -- we control gas coming off of our gas plants today. And then we need to put them into the market, and we want to make sure that we can get our producers a good netback on their prices. So it was better for us to go in there and buy that capacity, help these projects get built on the Matterhorn pipeline, we did take out capacity. And so that's what's going to be [indiscernible]. When the Eiger pipeline project came to us, we looked at it as an investment. We like the thesis of that you're going to need more pipeline capacity, natural gas pipeline capacity coming out of the Mid-Continent. We looked at who they had contracted, where they're going and how it was going to be done and because of we are already going to have some ownership in it due to the Matterhorn ownership that we had, so it made sense for us as we look at the economics. And now that it's been expanded, it looks even better for us on an Eiger standpoint. It's going to be a really nice project for us.

And if we didn't have the capacity, we'd be experiencing that negative $6 range for our producers. So because we have that capacity, we can give them a much better netback than what you have if you didn't have it. So -- and it goes back to what I said earlier, which is we want to touch basically as many molecules as we can, which includes methane as often as we can for as long as we can. So those pipelines go a long way between Waha and the Gulf Coast.

In the last earnings season, one of your competitors on their earnings call mentioned they were looking at maybe repurposing an NGL pipeline leaving the Permian into a nat gas line. And they painted kind of a tough environment for recontracting NGL lines. And just curious your guys' reaction, what you're seeing out there and how you expect things to play out.

Yes. My assessment is that particular NGL pipeline was moving product from -- basically from one customer and that customer is coming up on to contract and decided to go a different way. So they were losing a substantial amount of the volume. So you all of a sudden, you -- I got a whole -- I think that's a 24-inch pipeline that's 600,000 barrels a day of NGLs. All of a sudden, you're going to lose it one swap. It makes sense for them to take it over into the natural gas system, which helps frankly, tighten it up. We've expanded the West Texas NGL pipeline to 740,000 barrels a day. And when we did that, it was contracted at a nice return, but we also had a lot of upside or capacity that wasn't contracted because of how we went about building that pipeline a little bit or the looping. We looped it a little bit out of time until we had the loop remaining. And so we have a lot of what we almost think about free capacity on that pipeline. So right now, we think we are in a very good position, and we've proven that we can contract that capacity based on the fact that we have bringing the Medford fractionator on at a certain time, we'll have frac capacity, and we have pipeline capacity going on as well. And then we continue to grow our G&P to fill part of that capacity along with being able to get third-party processing plants in the area. So I think we've been able to compete. Yes. Is the Permian the most competitive basin out there, not only for natural gas, for G&P, for crude, for all that? Yes, it's the most competitive basin, but it's the one growing the fastest as well. So we still -- the other thing you got to think about NGLs is NGLs is not just a pipeline. You got to have a pipeline, you got to have a frac. You got to have the whole value chain really to compete for that. So just because one portion of it gets a little overbuilt, maybe in the gas pipeline, that doesn't mean the other portions are. They're still seeing a lot of fractionators being built down during the period of time. So we're still -- and they're being put in. These are greenfield projects. So the TNF that has to support those projects is at a higher level right now. So we think we compete and have been able to compete very favorably in the Permian and be able to continue to bring more volume to our system.

All right. I think we are basically at time. So thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Mike.

Thanks, Michael.