Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (NYSE:EPD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jim Teague: I don’t think we’ve ever set a goal like this before. So thanks to Becca Followill for being the catalyst to it. We achieved it through everybody doing what they’re supposed to be doing, attention to detail, our employees work their butts of for this. And frankly, it created a lot of excitement. You had those posters up everywhere you’d go within Enterprise. And when a truck driver is asking you, how are we doing on Project 9, you know you’ve got some excitement. Project 9.3, we triggered like 9.3 in 2022 was quite an achievement. So we’d use that to start on the 2023.

Randy Fowler: And I don’t remember the last time we missed on internal goal.

Jim Teague: You just guaranteed guidance.

Colton Bean: And then maybe just a couple of questions on processing. So I think first, the Midland assets were down about 50 million versus Q3. So any indication as to whether we’re at or closer to the fee floors for Navitas now? And then second, keep hold pretty strong margins despite very high Rockies gas prices. So just curious if that was hedge related or any other comments there?

Jim Teague: Natalie, can you answer that?

Natalie Gayden: Yes, Colton, I’ll do my best. Midland down slightly in volume. There was — if you remember, there is a, I’ll call it, a Christmas winter event, where there’s some production loss in the field just a little bit. I think it’s a little bit longer to get or producing longer to get back up during that time. I wouldn’t count the Rockies out, to be quite honest, high gas prices are pretty good. So watch out for the Rockies. We’ve hit the C4 maybe once or twice, but Waha has been really volatile. So anyway, some processing margins probably down a little bit, but there’s some offsets, there’s some headwinds or some tailwinds that come from that.

Colton Bean: And so it sounds like on the Rockies, the higher price and drilling activity maybe offsetting the replacement cost there for the keepwhole contracts?

Natalie Gayden: Yes, it’s a fair assessment.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Harry Mateer with Barclays.

Harry Mateer: Randy, a follow-up question on the new leverage target. So historically, the sense I’ve gotten from you is that you preferred the flexibility of being in the BBB ratings category, but a leverage policy is a policy. So it begs the question given the rating agency upgrade targets are generally around 3 times up into low single As. Is that something you guys now would be open to and potentially welcome?

Randy Fowler: Harry, I’m going to send this one over to Chris.

Chris D’Anna: Harry, I appreciate the question. From our perspective, despite the lower leverage target, we’re still very comfortable at a high BBB rating. From our standpoint, what we don’t want to do is have the agencies upgrade us to at A minus and that removes the flexibility for us to be aggressive when it comes to external M&A opportunities, because what we don’t want to do is whipsaw the fixed income investor from a high — from A minus rating to a high BBB rating. So we want to maintain that consistency. So we’re very comfortable maintaining the BBB plus rating across the three agencies.