ONEOK, Inc. ($OKE)

Good afternoon. We'll be kicking off our session to the 42nd Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. I am Bob Brackett, Co-Head of Energy and Transition here at Bernstein. We are not expecting a fire alarm or a fire drill. And so if the alarm rings, please take it seriously. The first path of exit is out the back door to the right all the way to the escalators that you came up down to the street and wait for further instructions. If for whatever reason that path is blocked, you go straight back. There's a series of internal stair wells that are well marked. Take one of those down and follow the light in path there. Ultimately, this is your conversation. This is a fireside chat and there's fors up on stage, but there's more in the audience. And so ultimately, you should drive the conversation. To do that, you will use either the website you've already pulled up. This pigeon hole -- if you need the QR code, there's a number of blue sheets of paper around the room that you can get that from. And what we'll do is, I'll adjourn in one second, and we're going to follow a pyramid principle, which is we're going to start high. We're going to talk about the macro environment in which ONEOK operates. And then we're going to talk strategy and then we're going to move down into assets and operations. So that's how we'll progress until your sufficient questions come in. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce Pierce Norton, President and CEO; Walter Hoyt, EVP, CFO; and Sheridan Swords, EVP, Chief Commercial Officer. And we know where we're going to start. I was telling them we have the majority of S&P Energy here at this conference this week, think about these folks think about CAMI Exxon and Conoco and Chevron, but you already have the energy S&P, but energy is only 4% of the S&P. So over time, we hope to improve that number. The one thing that everyone is talking about in energy, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz. Like as we talk about ONEOK's business model, they're 90% insulated from their fee-based their revenue is locked in. Nonetheless, they are in the midst of it. And so kind of asking you all, where are we in the Strait of Hormuz issue? And what has sort of surprised you about it? -- what are you sitting here not understanding fully today?

Well, I think I'd go back, Bob, before the board actually started. I think if any of us would have been told that you're going to shut off 20% of the oil supply and LNG supply and LPG supply in the world. What would the price do? I think we've all probably agree that it was almost going to reach in the pop-type level. But and it did shoot up, but it quickly kind of came back down. . And I think as you unpack that, you kind of see why you see the land storage, especially for the crude. You see the floating storage, you see the release of the strategic oil reserves. All of these things kind of help temper, I think, where the price is. Now the longer and longer this more goes, then you're going to deplete those. And so it's going to be a matter of how long it happens. And if it does, how quickly that comes back. The thing that I've kind of realized is that the most expensive energy in the world, the most costly energy in the world is the energy that does not show up. There's a reason why we need energy and it's used for stuff and it's used for the economy. It's used for society. And what's really expensive is when it tense.

Well, that shows up in poor GDP growth. It shows up and frankly, have and have not. Well, a lot of the impact of this energy crisis is being felt in countries and places that we don't spend a lot of time thinking about. But yes, I think that's the case. How does it impact your business then?

Well, you just mentioned that we're 90% fee-based. So we're very insulated from these commodity swings. We do get a little bit of a tailwind for the gas and the commodities that we basically have unhedged. We have a programmatic hedge in place that always hedges so far out. So we came into this year, especially in the first quarter, pretty much 75% hedged. So the impact on this is about the 25% that we don't. And like you said, about 10% of our earnings are really affected by this, but most of those were hedged. So really pretty little impact in the short term. Now in the long term, we do believe that there's going to be a shift of where people get their supply from. It was primarily based on price. What areas the cheapest price, that's where people want to get their supply from. I think this war was really woke us up to the fact that something we probably already know in the Ukraine and Russian war. I think Europe knew where they got most of their natural gas realm. And I think the world is pretty much knew where they get most of their oil and the LNG came from. But you shut those 2 things off, and it really brings home where can we get reliable and resilient supply not only prices?

Yes, there is an argument in some of the Japanese LNG importers talk about diversity of supply is security of supply. And one of the things I think we learned is, certainly, countries like Pakistan and India, where they were getting a discount from their closest neighbor, some of the cheapest LNG on the planet, seemed great to double down on the lowest-cost molecule and now you realize actually a diversity of molecules across geopolitics and maybe even cost is the way to go. What does that mean for you all? You're not going to deliver molecules to India, Pakistan. Does it change your thinking of those customers of yours that are thinking about the U.S. LNG export opportunity?

Well, I think as it relates -- I want to touch base on, we just might deliver some product. We're building an LPG dot.

They're LPG, but not LNG.

But the LNG piece of that is 18 Bcf a day is going offshore right now in the United States quickly going to be building to 30 Bcf. There's some people out there that say that it's going to go to 36, 40, maybe even 50 Bcf a day. Well, what most people don't realize is that 67% of all the natural gas that's produced in the United States comes with some form of liquids in it, we or not that's considered a wet gas without the oil or an associated gas with the oil. So as that LNG grows and as that -- as the Permian Basin grows, the packing, the bid continent and even the Haynesville and Appalachian, as those all grow, you're going to have quite a bit of liquid to take advantage of, and that's what we do. We're at a very diversified company when it comes to natural gas, natural gas liquids refined products. So we think that growth is going to really help spur kind of the next wave of basically midstream growth projects.

It's funny. Earlier on, we had Kim Kinder, make me happy talk about 26 Bcf a day of gas growth. And then we had Ryan Lance, the CEO of Conoco. I asked him, can Henry Hub ever get to 5. And he broke my heart and said, no, it's always going to be 350 plus or minus, and we got plenty of it. But to your point, right? When I build a longer-term U.S. gas model, you think about the drivers of LNG, you think about data center demand and just power demand, like we love to add the data center to it. You are matching demand molecules against supply molecules. And in between, you shrink that wellhead wet gas massively. And so if you don't actually account for the growth in U.S. NGLs you actually don't quite get right the call on how much work the upstream has to do to pull that stuff out of the ground. And so talk to LNG every incremental gas molecule in the U.S. is an export molecule, every barrel of oil is an export molecule. NGLs are now export molecules. And it's funny you talk to to Pakistan and India where LPG is front and center of how they think about their economy. But what's the NGL export growth opportunity?

That's the business share in Lisa that's right. I think there's a great opportunity in LPG exports or NGL exports, LPG being propane and butane and NGLs will throw in the ethane molecule in there as well. Because people aren't -- the first thing in the United States, people aren't drilling as we talked about, they're not drilling for NGLs. It needs to be exported. It needs to go someplace into the world or else we can't get the gas and crude system are out of the ground that needs to be exported. And today, domestic growth is we do not see any domestic growth in NGL. So everything as well is going to go across the water. Obviously, we've seen that we've been very keen on that. We have a new export dock coming up in the first part of '28, they will export LPGs. We've seen increased exports of ethane, both enterprise and EGC, have brought on new export capacity for ethane, which also helps us because that pulls more of the ethane out of the natural gas stream that benefits our system. So we have more throughput on our system on our in-shell thing. So we think NGLs to be able to continue to help this growth in energy in the United States continue to help grow the security of energy in the United States plays a very important role and I think we're very well positioned for because we are in multiple basins. When it comes to NGLs, we're in the Bakken, we're in -- or the Rockies, put the Powder River in there. We're also in the Mid-Continent. We're in North Texas. We're in the Gulf. We're also in West Texas, each one of those areas. So we pull from a great White with part of the middle part of the United States, which actually gives us a tremendous amount of resiliency on our growth there. But the exports is where you're going to see the incremental molecule grow. And as we continue to grow, we think that there'll be opportunity obviously for our LPG doc, it has expansion capabilities and maybe even beyond that.

And you can deliver, certainly into Europe, you can deliver competitively into East Asia? Or can you deliver competitively anywhere?

I think you can obviously deliver competitively anywhere. There are some areas that want to pull more NGLs out of the Arabian Gulf has always been 1 of our biggest competitors on the LPG side. Now you've got the whole security side of it. On ethane, really, we're kind of the lone star on the ethane side of it, the loan person that's doing that almost all ethane to China is coming out of the United States today. And it's actually been a little bit of a political football in that area. But we deliver ethane into Europe. We deliver ethane into India, and we deliver ethane into China and on the butane and propane, we deliver all over the world.

And there's -- it's kind of funny, I cover the mining side and almost all rare earth processed metals come from China to the U.S., and they will use that as a -- the converse is true with ethane yet the U.S. certainly doesn't -- the politicians of the U.S. don't use that as a tool. -- would you probably you endorse? How do you think about policy in today's world around hydrocarbons? Is there anything that the government should be doing either due to the straight of our moves or even due to sort of this balkanization of world trade and tariffs.

So Bob, that question kind of opens up the door to regulation and how easy or uneasy it is to build assets in the United States to basically supply the services that are going to be needed because basically, you're taking these molecules from a place where they either have no value or very little value and you're transporting them to where they are or where they're actually needed. So they're not necessarily consumed in all cases where they're produced. So our industry is not for deregulation. We are for modernization of the regulation. And what I mean by that is hardly anything that we do in life doesn't have some sort of time clock on it. And so a lot of the regulatory processes don't. You've got to fulfill some requirement, but there's no real time as to when you have to do that. So the actual time that it takes to build these assets, even hundreds of miles of pipeline is extremely short in comparison to the regulatory process to make it happen. So I would like to see modernization of our regulatory process. I know that the current administration is working on this. I know Secretary Bergamo right, they're doing a lot of work in this area. We now actually have a senator from Oklahoma that probably knows more about the regulatory framework than anybody, senator Armstrong. So we're hopeful that, that's going to happen because you really do need some sort of legislative action that it doesn't swing back and forth every four years or every eight years because you need the certainty to make these investments because they are long-lived investments, they're 60, 80 years investments and you really need some certainty to attract the capital that we need, and there's a lot of capital needed.

So drag-reducing agents in D.C. there.

DRA for the legislation. Yes.

The other set of assets you all have is on the refined product side, you've got bidirectional systems there. We've had tons in generals come in and learn words like tank bottoms and pipeline fill and folks, tourists and prisoners in the sector keep worrying about these things. What can happen to the system where Strait of Hormuz stays closed, complexity keeps flowing through the system. Are there signposts where something breaks or gives -- and what would that look like? And would you guys see it first?

Well, I think what you have to look for is it's very complex because you have to look for any sort of demand destruction. All the things that I listed before, like the the floating stores, the inland storage, where are you going to get your gas from is the -- are the assets there to do that. I mean, if we build 40, 50 Bcf a day of LNG export capacity, is there enough import capacity around the world to do that. So there's this combination of things that you got to look at in the world, but I think it clearly points to a positive environment, I think, for the United States to be that security of supply for the world because we have that and I'm sure Ryan Lance would tell you this because I'm talking to them about it, but -- it's not that we don't have the supply. It's that we need to make sure that we have the infrastructure to get it where it's needed.

Yes, I would argue, my analogy is to inflate a bicycle tire you need a pump and to deflate a tire, you need a nail. And so when you look at the capital cost of a pump versus a nail, there are worlds of part, liquefaction is maybe $1,000 a ton on a good day, if you're lucky and you got the right contract. -- regas is maybe $100 a ton and so I'm always confident if the U.S. can build it, it will find especially if it's competing in that home again it's thermal coal and thermal coal doesn't help you with intermittency, it doesn't solve that coupling with wind and solar. And so yes, my sense is get the U.S. infrastructure build, that's where the capital is, and that's where the bottlenecks have been.

Well, natural gas is really the only -- I call it the Swiss Army knife of energy because primary your oil production is used for transportation. -- coal is used for electric generation. But natural gas, when you factor in the liquids and the natural gas, so even the natural gas alone is used for generating electricity. You take it to the gas utilities, but then they turn around and take it to commercial customers, industrial customers or residential customers and strengthening up in the United States, almost 40% of all the energy that we consume for those three actually come from natural gas. So to try to replace it. And I always argue that physics and economics win the battle just almost every time.

Pricing comes to play. Henry Hub price is fine, maybe at $3, maybe it goes up. Waha, Permian prices for gas are negative yet again, you're working to help solve that -- what's the future of Waha pricing? Is it just boom bust like we've seen now for years? Or -- is there going to be a permanent transport linked price that's solved finally?

I think you kind of go back to why is the drill bit running in the Permian Basin, which is the high area and that's basically on the oil price. So yes, it started to come into play that, that negative pricing for natural gas is starting to make some of the producers act a little bit differently, kind of do some curtailments and those kind of things. But it's really going to depend on supply and demand and how the pipes get built in between. Any time that, that gas comes on that fast, sometimes the midstream gets a little bit behind. There's a lot of projects in place. I think that's going to have capacity out there. But it's going to be definitely tight through the end of the year, it will relieve itself a little bit. But if you look at the forward curve, it may kind of compress a little bit again in '27.

Yes, if you believe the forward curve if you leave any forward curve, let alone if you believe 1 off of a regional hub, but Fair point. But then 1 solution is for you to go out, find customers and contract way too much pipe. The E&Ps they wake up every day thinking about oil revenue. When they think about it, they think about making money off oil and about moving gas, right, at almost any price. Can you get them to sign up like to solve the next problem or will it always be sort of start and stop.

I guess the way I'd answer that is you may not have to. And what I mean by that is throughout history as far as the large natural gas pipelines, it was usually the utilities decades ago, they needed the gas. How was the demand pull, they would take out the space. And then they started to kind of realize it, hey, we got enough gas going to supply in different areas, pumping up and then the producers kind of went into, okay, well, we're going to have to take the space out. What we're seeing is the combination of both. We're seeing the LNG companies and in the facilities down in the Gulf Coast, they're reaching back to make sure they have that supply. So they're actually taking some of that space out themselves. So then you get this combination of producers and basically the demand pull that's contracting this space.

If we think about the backlog of projects that you all have that you're putting capital to work against, some are delivering to the coast. And certainly on the liquid side, right, those are ultimately projects that go inland, and you guys are dominantly started the southern middle of the U.S. and go to the northern part of the middle of the U.S. and you're there, you're bringing stuff to the coast. On the gas side, some of that's coming to the coast. There is latent demand for power demand across the U.S., not just on the coasts, how do you serve that power demand client that wants nat gas, whether it's for data center AI or whatever.

What I would say is, especially we have natural gas assets, natural gas pipeline assets in the Permian and predominantly here so far, that's all want to go to the coast, just as you said. But we also have a way to deliver some of that up into the Mid-Continent as well. We have a big mid-continent presence up there that also we are seeing that data -- we're seeing data center demand up there. We're also seeing outright power demand as we go forward. And Oklahoma does export overall export gas. We're seeing growing in drilling in some new formations, some old formations up there. So we definitely see gas production in Oklahoma continue to go forward. So that way, continue to be able to hit the pipelines that come into Oklahoma and feed the upper Midwest as well. And we also have a gas pipeline in Louisiana, where that is the last mile pipe. We are seeing some LNG demand in Louisiana. But really along the river corridor, we're seeing a lot of industrial demand at, whether it be a steel meals whether it be ammonia facilities for fertilizer or hydrogen facilities is coming in that area as well. So as we think about outside of LNG, there still is other demands, some in the Midwest, but some in other areas as well.

Rank those. If we talk about LNG as demand drivers for your gas product, as LNG their data centers. I don't love AI. But there's data centers, AI data center, I'll say positively. And then there's reshoring. Ultimately, what you're talking about when you're talking of ammonia steel, hydrogen, that's kind of reshoring and where do those -- what's silver, gold brands?

Well, vols definitely right now, LNG is the gold because we're talking about -- we're at 15 to 16 Bcf. -- got another 15 to 16 Bcf coming online. That's FID going forward and that's day in, day out demand. I mean then really, there's been a lot of hype around AI for sure. We think that's more in the 3 to 6 Bcf is really what it is. And the funny thing about AI, even when you get on, and they will contract on firm, so they'll pay no matter what. But the actual demand for gas is intermittent depending on how much people use our computers and everything else, it's going to be up, it's going to be down, it's going to be going forward. And so you probably, because of that scale, 3 to 6 right now is probably you'd have to say, is the silver one. But the other one is one that's coming up, as I said, steel mills, ammonia plants, hydrogen, that's really starting to come up, a lot of Mississippi quarter, and that will be steady demand. That will be all the time going forward. There's not going to be a whole lot of ratability in -- and as we continue to just keep this gas price low as we see and more production come on, low prices are going to bring more of that demand in as well. And we're starting to see a little bit more of that pickup.

It's interesting. You kind of heard a theme about swinging around in volumes. I mean, something that's not getting very much airtime is storage, there's probably going to need to be more storage in the United States because things -- even these facilities, if it's demand all the time with the LNG facilities, those things go down for maintenance. So where is that gas going to go? And I mean, you got 1 or 2 Bcf a day that's down instantly like that. I mean it backs up in the system in a hurry. So there's going to need to be more storage.

Absolutely. I think it was more storage.

Yes. I mean, go back to 23 or 4 when Freeport LNG had their explosion. We lost a B or 2 of export demand and destroyed Henry Hub just backs it all up, took $1.02 up. What's interesting about those 3 demand drivers, LNG feed gas, the facilities run full, and maybe there's some efficiencies and maybe it goes down a little bit over time for the same volume of export, not much. Those are mature technologies. When you talk about steel, ammonia, right? Those are pretty well understood technology is not a big learning curve. The thing with AI is not only is that demand intermittent, that demand has the potential to get super efficient over time. We don't even know.

I mean that's very answer, we don't know. The only thing is, if you go back and look at history, when we come up with something that makes us more efficient, we end up in the future using more and more of it. So overall, from an absolute demand doesn't go down, it can actually continue to pick up, even though it becomes more and more efficient.

I'm going to ask a question, then we got 1 from the audience. My question is used to run strategic planning, and I always used to define strategy has tell me what you're not going to do. Don't tell me what you're going to do because that's relatively easy. What won't One Oak do.

I hate to turn this around on you, Bob. But it's easier for me to need to tell you what we're not going to do, but what we are going to do, which is we are focused in the midstream business. We're focused on basically that wellhead to the end user to the demand pull. Like I said, we move multi molecules at the same time. That's going to be our focus in the midstream business. So you can take from that what we're not going to do.

And here's a question. I really like how it's framed. I'm new to ONEOK. Why should I invest into ONEOK on a 3-year investment horizon and what are your top priorities or KPIs that drive the stock price materially higher?

I think Walt can probably answer this question the best because I think it it plays into the amount of capacity we have for this growth.

Yes. I think we're in a very interesting situation here as we look forward to over the next three years. We've got operating leverage built into the system out of the Bakken, out of the Mid-Continent and out of the Permian. So that as volume develops in any one of those basins we can capture it without any real significant capital expenditures. So it's going to be very efficient from a capital standpoint going forward. As you look at the company, the why ONEOK, we've got an asset position in the middle of the country that is completely -- you can never replicate it. It starts out in the Bakken at the Canadian border for NGLs down to the Mid-Continent where you would then turn around and actually bring refined products back north or go south with the NGLs and the refined products. And in that middle swath, between basically Colorado and Tennessee, we're the ones that have the asset position. We can intermingle those pipes between NGLs and refined products to take availability of that capacity to drive demand. So it really comes down to at the end of the day, we're a rate times volume company. We've got a tailwind here as we go forward with commodity prices showing some strength. We're seeing modest pickup right now as people try to get their hands around where global demand is going to be. But if this commodity environment stays, it's very supportive of good modest growth across our basins. And then you've got this LNG and AI demand that's going to drive gas and 67% of the oil or the gas that is utilized is coming as associated gas out of drilling for oil, we're going to be in a fantastic position to capture those NGLs.

So one KPI is your dividend, $2.5 billion, that's a claim on your cash flow. I talked to the sanctity and that's a significant dividend yield. Talk to the sanctity of that dividend and plans for it.

Sure. Well, we are one of the few midstream companies that didn't cut their dividend in 2020. So we have maybe a little bit more modest growth, but it's because we we're starting at a much higher base, and we didn't cut it by 90% and then grew it back. There were only three companies that did that -- or I'm sorry, four. We bought one of them. So there are still only 3 out there that maintain that. So I think that demonstrates the sanctity of the dividend. Our Board feels very strongly that they've committed to support that dividend. We talk about 3% to 4% growth rate in that dividend going forward. We've been at the higher end of that range. Our real focus there is to make sure that we can have a couple of percentage points of growth above our dividend rate so that we can always make sure that even in a down market that we can continue that dividend growth.

So you've got that call on cash flow. You've got some maintenance CapEx. That's the easiest CapEx to spend, and you're starting to approach an inflection on growth CapEx. And so you're going to start to see a free cash flow inflection. Balance sheet is 4x net debt to EBITDA, which feels comfortable and we can talk to that. So at some point, you're going to have a high-quality problem of free cash flow is what I just laid out will make sense? And if not correct me, and then talk about this high-quality free cash flow pre.

We've captured it exactly right, mid-'27. We start to see our CapEx, the larger projects like the doc that we're building down in Texas City. Those start to roll off. And then you get into our kind of expand and extend our asset position which tend to be the $200 million, $300 million, $500 million projects, which are significant because if you're doing it at 4x, they're giving you some meaningful EBITDA, but they're not the $1.4 billion, $1.5 billion that would put pressure on the balance sheet. We can support that kind of growth, dedicate about $2.5 billion a year annually to CapEx and still have a significant amount of cash to delever. The rating agencies are perfectly happy like you are at 4x. We aren't getting any pressure from them. We think it's probably better to run the business closer to 3.5 or even down to 3x debt to EBITDA. So as we see that free cash flow after we've taken advantage of any real high-quality projects, we'll continue to see our balance sheet come down support that dividend. And once we get that in place towards our leverage then stock buybacks would be the less that would be there on the table.

One of the reasons you reduced that net debt to EBITDA for any industry is you're afraid. You're worried about the industry headwinds and whatnot. The other reason is you're opportunistic. We want to build a bit of a war chest or some balance sheet strength to do things. You guys have been acquisitive in the past and you've built out that footprint. But what is the role that M&A plays for you all going forward?

Well, we definitely want to -- I won't call it a war chest, but we want to be in a position to take advantage of any opportunity that was present itself. If we get down to 3x and we want to stay at the higher than 3.5x. That gives us $4 billion of cash that we can be opportunistic with. There aren't really many opportunities that we're going to come across that are going to be in that that range in the space where we are now, we're in the $2 billion at 1 range or very large and you wouldn't be in that position. So I think we want to be opportunistic. We're not worried about the business, but we do see the advantage of running at a low level of financing so that over time, we don't bump up against 4x. We bumped up against 4x here because of two very large acquisitions that we made. -- that repositions the company when necessary.

And you were able to do that and whether the Question from investors. A lot of your competitors peers seem to be diversifying into the wellhead. -- why and how does your discipline to not do so pay off?

Well, I believe that's because we are large enough that we don't necessarily have to do that. And so I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about as far as the first thing on the midstream

footnote is Williams?

Okay. Well, I think Williams kind of has really leaned into the natural gas side of the business. The reason we like the multi-molecule model is because at some point, this natural gas gets saturated here in the United States. I know we're talking a lot about LNG. We're talking a lot about data centers and electric generation and those kind of the industrial load. But at some point, does that tail off. But the 1 thing I think you can say with a surety is that a lot of the natural gas is going to be used the liquids are going to be used for decades and decades. In fact, if you talk to the pet chem guys and talk to the folks associate of American Chemistry Council, which is those people they'll tell you that they really -- if you talk to anybody in the oil business or the gas business or any other we like the multi molecule. -- model for the long term.

And I think that the investor base that we have likes that 90% fee times volume, stable cash flow that's coming in every time. Clearly, if we were to go towards the well ahead, we would be taking on meaningfully more commodity risk and variability into that stream. So we just don't think that's what invested. If they want that, they can buy oil and gas.

You're putting steel in the ground will be there for the next generation to operate. If you do an upstream CapEx, it's going to feel like head and sugar cubes directions. And suddenly, you're like, what are we spending all this money on and you'd be on a treadmill -- so

In those multiples that those assets trade for are significantly less than ours, so...

Despite the fact that they take more risk, right? It's kind of a a bit of a funny upside to reporting. talk to , and then we'll kind of shift now talking to operations. We got through another winter in the Mid-Con. We got through winter storm Fern some point in my adult life, we started naming winter storms, which is a whole separate topic. But nonetheless, Fern came and went, operationally, you guys were robust. What were lessons -- what happened, what were the lessons learned?

I think even if you think about for, I think you may even want to go back to urea a little bit Okay, where there from that? Because if you think about it, then we had a lot of gas that went off-line at that time. We had a lot of people worried about being able to get gas to their systems. We had a lot of failures that were happening at thumb. You come to firm other than that we did have gas go offline. But now we had a bunch of storage on there to be able to replace that gas as well. We knew what systems we shouldn't shut power off to conserve power because that's killing the gas going in -- so I think you look at what happened during Fern as an industry, we did a lot better during that period of time. Now what we do know is that every year, we have winter. Every year, especially you talked about in the Bakken, some of our areas, we're going to lose some gas is going to be shut in for certain things. And it's all kind of relative. If you are minus 50 in the Bakken, not a big issue. If you're 20 in West Texas, that's an issue. -- and they're going to start checks they're just not ready for that kind of thing. So we continue to put money into being our systems to be resilient as we have been. During firm, we didn't have any of our facilities go down. We lost some gas at the wellhead because some of the producers facilities went down, but our facilities all were up and running during that period of time. And we want to continue to be able to be there for both sides of our customers are our supply customers, the E&P companies and also our downstream customers that are taking the energy we are delivering them and deliver them into the end user.

So here's a way that we described that and what our people have embraced is that the assets that we put in the ground pub and the assets that we operate every single day, 24/7. That's our promise as a company to basically provide society with energy that they need when they need it the most. And when you're talking about Fern, Yurie or whatever the name is going to be in the future, there will be more. That's what we're there for.

Interesting, you just said that there's value in having storage near the upstream. 20 minutes ago, you said there's a lot of value having gas storage or the downstream LNG talk to that specific investment opportunity. It seems it could be bite-sized -- what's the opportunity set? How do you go out and secure that storage? Is it geologically constrained? Is it permit constrained? Why not go whole hog where you -- we talked about this last year where that storage issue is out there. Is there something big could you double?

Yes. We are we are actually expanding our storage facility today. With the EnLink acquisition, there's a storage facility we have in Louisiana, Jefferson Island storage. And we are expanding that out to 10 Bcf from Bcf going forward. We see some other opportunities in Louisiana be able to do that. We see customers coming in the storage to. We just talked about utilities after year are much more interested in storage. The storage that we have in Texas and Oklahoma has all been 100% subscribed, and we've actually expanded that a couple of times. And going forward, in Louisiana, we're seeing much more from the LNG side of it coming in there as well and they need it because if they go down, just what they said they're buying a lot of gas they need to be able to put that gas someplace when they have bubbles on their systems and in some of these industrial customers also need storage as well to be able to manage their exposure to natural gas prices. So we see that opportunity. We got just going on. We're looking to other geological formations that we're close to or have already have some storage facilities that we see if we can be able to expand that even more for -- but I think people are more -- there's a lot of projects out there looking for short, looking at storage and there's different kinds of storage. You can have salt storage, which has a high in and out rate or you can have formational storage, which is you got to take it in not a lot slower, but it can be a lot cheaper

For depleted reservoir to storage?

Depleted reservoir to storage, yes.

And so 1 you're looking to, it feels like it's an active market. And how do you -- how do you sort of frame the economics of that, right? How long can that gas sit, right? How often do you have to cycle through storage for it to make sense.

A lot depends on how you contract it. Typically, the way you're going to contract a salt formation is you're going to have a pretty good rate for capacity, and then you're going to charge for every turn because the people come in there, they're going to want to turn that pretty quickly. The formation store is going to be a little bit more long term. You see more of the utilities come in there could be a little bit more on an emergency situation and some of those. So it kind of depends on who are your customers and stuff like that. If you can get a little bit of both, that's really good, and that's typically what you do. You get a little bit of both types of customers in each one of your storage facilities -- we have both. We have both formation storage and solar storage.

And then coming back to data centers, you've disclosed up to or greater than Bcfd opportunity set around 40-plus counterparties looking at data center opportunities. Any color there, type of counterparty scale of the project time lines of the project?

Well, I'll tell you a little bit, when we talk about $40 million we're talking about hyperscalers, and they're all trying to put something together to entice one of the big boys, the meta, the Googles, the Amazons to come in and buy their products. So really, when we actually get into there and you get through working with the hyperscales helping them at your customer is really going to be an Amazon or a Meta or something like that. And not all 40 are going to go. They're all targeted at that word. And they're all coming in at different sizes. But we have lately -- we first started seeing they started coming in they were building them right next to the natural gas infrastructure because, obviously, power was an issue to get in there. So we're going to build near natural gas. We're going to build our own generation, and that's how we're going to get the power. And they're putting it in areas where they were looking, they go, hey, we got a lot of gas pipelines there. We have some competition. But what we found out is they started off at maybe 100 million a day, and then they go, well, maybe it could be bigger. Then the next thing you know what they're going had. Can you give us instead of $100 million, can you give us $600 million today. Well, that's a big difference in trying to deliver ability into that. So all of a sudden, instead of being, hey, I got a 3-mile lateral. Now they need to be at 150 miles of pipeline to get back to where I can source that gas and have that capacity. So also on the project became much bigger. So we're seeing that kind of going on, right, as we can go forward definitely because that's where our assets are. We're seeing Texas is a pretty hot bed right now, multiple locations in Texas. Oklahoma has quite a few as well that we're seeing going forward. And Texas seems to have more of a environment that people are looking to bring that industry in there.

And timing will depend on really how quickly they can access the generators for the power, whether or not they're recip engine or turbine combined cycle, whatever it is, that's going to be -- we can lay the pipeline. We can get the supply contracts in place way sooner than they necessarily can get the and get the equipment to generate the power.

Yes. There are customers that care about time. They're customers that care about price, and there's customers that care about the quality of the product, we're a commodity business, so we can put that 1 to the side. And -- is it fair to say they are much more time sensitive than price sensitive, and therefore, they are good customers.

Absolutely. They're -- I mean, it is -- speed to market is something we hear all the time from these guys.

Do they understand what you all do? Or does that even matter?

We've had to edge case some Yes, there's been some that have come in and said, "Hey, I want all this gas. Can you get that -- that's just -- you got a pipeline right there, can we deliver off that pipeline? And will that pipeline moves 1/3 of what you're asking? You get some of that that we've had to -- that's why -- and we're going to have -- it's going be a lot more than we thought it was going forward. So there is some education in there as we go forward. But the market is maturing a little bit on getting understanding that more and more in but I think Paris is right, probably the bottle like the biggest bottleneck we see right now is getting the power generation secured.

You're about a year away from this cash flow inflection. To do that, you got to deliver on time, on budget, a number of projects, give the audience some conviction that those are under control, and what are the milestones to start turning on your key major projects over the next 12 months.

Well, we are -- here's a couple of projects we have. We have the Denver expansion is supposed to be coming up a third quarter. We're down to the end. And it's looking good. We're going to be up on time to get to go forward. We have the Medford fractionator expansion. Same thing as we're going to see the first phase come up at the end of this year, a next phase coming forward. Because we're where we're at in that cycle, very comfortable all the -- the assets are secured. The supply secured. We just got construction to continue to go in there. We've got many milestones we're looking. Obviously, we -- even we put the schedule out there, we had contingency for certain types of things. Now as we look at that contingency budget, on both cost and schedule, where we are at this time, extremely comfortable where that Getting into '27, we have a gas plant out in the Permian, 300 million a day gas plant coming online. It's earlier, but everything is pointing to that, that on time, supply issues have been an issue. We've been able to secure that some time ago, and it's rolling out as we continue to go forward. Since we sit there, we track those of many KPIs. We have a whole team doing that. We've been building long projects for an extended period of time for the last almost 20 years, we've been in a big organic growth mode during that period of time. So those -- as we talk about those big projects, we are very comfortable we will have them up on time but

And one of the areas that people are starting to focus now on is compression because we have such a large footprint in 3 different basins, we've standardized our compression. We inventory compression 1.5 years, 2 years forward, so that we can move those from basin to basin, if we had to -- we typically don't have to because we position them in the right spot, but compression will not get in our way from growth.

And the only thing I'd add to that, Bob, I mean we have done 5 acquisitions in 3 years. We've demonstrated the ability to bring in numerous synergies, find even more synergies than what we originally thought when we were buying these assets. And the thing that I would say, some assets that you can buy you're counting on a synergy that you've got to get somebody else to say yes to or a new contract or something like that to make it come to fruition. All of these synergies that we've done with our current contracts and current companies that we bought, that was within our control. That's important. So when you have something in your control, then it's just a matter of focus and getting the right resources on it. We've done that. We're very confident and you see it in our numbers.

There are synergies you control, synergies you -- and then synergies you make up to the acquisition price look attractive?

At the bottom exactly --

Let me just say that, but I will say in these acquisitions, we've been surprised when we've gotten the teams together, the team that we bought and our legacy teams together and we get people down in the workforce really talking and understanding. We've probably found more synergies than we thought that was going to happen that came out just bubbled up from beneath this, which has been very exciting to see that happen. And that gets you people excited. The next thing you know that it keeps happening.

Almost literally the definition of the word. Like we used the word to mean like we saved money, but actually the synergies like yes, on a more -- we've got about a minute left. In that last minute, what ultimately is the value proposition owning or buying One Oak stock.

This is one of my favorite questions, Bob, because the value proposition is found in our assets and our people that run those assets, the ones that construct it, that build it, operate it and what that results into is we have developed a multi-molecule fully integrated. I can't emphasize that in a fully integrated set of assets that can bring tremendous amount of value all the way from where you move the molecule to where it's consumed that provides us with -- our target is the mid- to upper single digits on our EBITDA growth over the next 5 to 7 years. And it provides us an opportunity to increase our dividend. So that is the value proposition for ONEOK.

Fantastic. With that, I thank you all, and I thank you in the audience.