Hess Midstream LP (NYSE:HESM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Doug Irwin: Great, that’s helpful, and maybe a follow up just on kind of guidance. You maybe talk about how you’re factoring third party volume mix in the kind of your €˜23 volume guidance. And then as we kind of think about the 10% growth in both €˜24 and €˜25. Is that pretty much all driven by MVCs in Hess’ outlook, or does that kind of assume some third-party volume index as well?

John Gatling: Yes, so the third party, we’ve been staying consistent without third party assumption, which is about 10% for both oil and gas, with our strategic infrastructure and our position in the basin, we obviously can attract volumes into infrastructure. And we’re going to continue to focus on that. But as we’ve seen over the last year or so, it’s been in the kind of a 10% range. And that’s essentially what we’re planning for into the future. And so, as we talk about the growth and kind of transitioning above MVCs, heading into 2025. We kind of, we expect that to be about the same percentage of between split between Hess and third-party volumes.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of John Mackay with Goldman Sachs.

John Mackay: Hey, everyone, thanks for the time. I wanted to pick up on Doug’s first question, just on the $1 billion potential incremental cash returns? Can you talk a little bit about maybe just, it’s a $1 billion of potential, maybe just some of the puts and takes on actual kind of willingness to deploy that. Because if we look at a $1 billion, that’s 15% of your market cap or something right now, that’s a pretty big number. Is that someone dependent on share price? Could it swing more towards a larger distribution increase? Just trying to think of the, again, the puts and takes on us actually kind of seeing that $1 billion come out over the next three years.

Jonathan Stein: Sure. So in terms of capital allocation and in terms of, I’ll call it willingness or focus on that $1 billion and what it for, as we’ve said, really, the focus of our financial strategy is really on, of course, maintaining our financial strength, but in terms of our leverage target, but also prioritizing return on capital. We’re very fortunate that, as we’ve talked about, with the investments we’ve made historically, we can really get this 10% per year EBITDA growth and volume growth, as we described, really under stable capital. So there’s really, at least nothing, of course, it’s always look at, we’ve talked about bolt-on in the past, but absent anything like that. There’s really nothing in our plan, or we certainly don’t need any of that in order to be able to achieve the growth that we already have in our plan.

So with that said, then that $1 billion is the prioritization of that would be for returning capital to shareholders. Of course, everything every transaction will be subject to market conditions and board approval at the time, but that is the priority in the financial strategy that we’ve laid out. In terms of share repurchases versus dividend increases. Of course, we’ll make a decision at the time, but we do have gotten very positive feedback and we’re very positive ourselves and the strategy we’ve executed so far, which has been share repurchases, and then with those shares repurchases, utilizing as I discussed, in that previous answer was utilizing the fact that we have now lower share count, to be able to just really increase the dividend.