Kinder Morgan, Inc. (NYSE:KMI) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Diesel volumes continue to be lower primarily in California as the growing renewable diesel volumes displacing conventional diesel, were initially transported by methods other than pipeline. However, the reduction in conventional diesel volumes does not reflect the true economic picture for us as the RD hub projects we placed in service earlier this year are largely underpinned with take-or-pay contracts. So we get paid most of our revenue even if the volumes do not flow. That said, renewable diesel volumes on our pipelines have been ramping up considerably since the RD hubs came online, up from 700 a day in Q1 of this year to 24,000 a day in Q3. Overall jet fuel volumes increased 5% for the quarter versus third quarter 2022. Crude and condensate volumes were up 5% in the quarter versus third quarter 2022, driven by higher Bakken and Eagle Ford volumes.

In our Terminals business segment, our liquids lease capacity remained high at 95%, excluding tanks out of service for required inspections, approximately 96% of our capacity is leased. Utilization at our key hubs at Houston Ship Channel and New York Harbor strengthened in the quarter versus third quarter 2022, and we continue to see nice rate increases in those markets as the fundamentals improve. Our Jones Act tankers were 98% leased through 2024, assuming likely options are exercised. On the bulk side, overall volumes were down 5% in the third quarter 2022, primarily from lower coal, grain and metals tonnage, partially offset by increases in pet coke and soda ash. Grain volumes have minimal impact on our financial results. So excluding grain, our bulk volumes were down about 3%.

Financial results benefited from rate escalations in the quarter. The CO2 segment experienced lower overall volumes and prices on NGLs, CO2 and oil production versus the third quarter 2022. Overall oil production decreased by 2% from the third quarter last year, but was above our plan for this quarter. For the year, we expect net oil volume to exceed our plan, largely due to better-than-expected performance from projects as well as strong volumes post the February outage at SACROC. These favorable volumes relative to the 2023 plan helped offset some of the price weakness that we’ve experienced. With that, I’ll turn it over to David Michels.

David Michels: All right. Thanks, Tom. So for the third quarter of 2023, we’re declaring a dividend of $0.2825 per share, which is $1.13 per share annualized or 2% up from last year’s dividend. Before I get into the quarterly performance, a few highlights. We’ve continued with our opportunistic share repurchase program, as Kim mentioned, bringing our year-to-date total repurchases to 28.5 million shares at an average price of $16.58 per share, creating very good value for our shareholders. We ended the third quarter with net debt to adjusted EBITDA of 4.1 times, which leaves us with good capacity under our leverage target of around 4.5 times, despite $472 million of unbudgeted share repurchases during the year. And while, as Kim mentioned, we are forecasting to be slightly below budget on full year DCF and EBITDA, more than all of that can be explained by lower-than-budgeted commodity prices.

Meanwhile, we continue to see better than budgeted performance in both our natural gas and terminals businesses. Now on to the quarterly performance. We generated revenues of $3.9 billion, which is down from $5.2 billion in the third quarter of 2022, which is down $1.3 billion. Cost of sales was also down $1.3 billion, and that is due to the large decline in commodity prices from last year to this year. As you will recall, we entered into offsetting purchase and sales positions in our Texas Intrastate natural gas pipeline system, and that results in an effective take-or-pay transportation service, but it leaves our revenue and cost and sales, both exposed to price fluctuations while meanwhile, our margin is generally not impacted by price. Interest expense was higher versus 2022 as we expected, driven by the higher short-term rates, which impacted our floating rate swaps.

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