MPLX LP (NYSE:MPLX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Mike Hennigan: It’s a good question, Brian. I’m going to let Shawn give you a little more color. But I will say, at the MPC side of the house, we had a really strong year. Safe, reliable operations is key to our business on that side. We ran 96% utilization. If you’ve followed some of the activity during the year, we had deferred some turnaround activity to the back half of the year. But overall, it was a very strong utilization. So I’ll let Shawn comment a little bit on the L&S side.

Shawn Lyon: Hi, Brian. This is Shawn. As Mike said, we had a strong year in ’22. We had several records across our assets on the terminal pipeline side. And in ’23, we’re continuing to see another strong year. And we’ll be matching the refinery rates that MPC and others habits. And then also we’re excited about the growth out of the Permian and some of the pipelines coming out of the Permian. So, again, just like ’22, we’re excited to see again another solid year in ’23 as far as volumes and growth.

Brian Reynolds: Great. I’ll leave it there. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks.

Shawn Lyon: Thanks, Brian.

Mike Hennigan: Thanks, Brian.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from John Mackay with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

John Mackay: Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the time. Maybe I’ll pick up on the CapEx guide. You touched on some of the moving pieces. But I’m just curious if you could break it down a little more for us just in terms of — and it can be loose, I suppose. But just how much of the guide is going towards these kind of named projects you’ve talked about, like the next Permian processing plants, versus going to the smaller bucket of one-offs versus I guess what we’re calling kind of the emerging opportunities on the transmission side, any sort of breakdown there or kind of trend maybe even year-over-year would be interesting? Thank you.

Mike Hennigan: Hi, John. Good morning. I’ll start and then I’ll let John add some color. So in general, most of the capital program is targeted at what we’ll call the smaller expansion to bottlenecking projects. I know people like to see flashy big projects, but we actually get the best returns as producers grow, whether it’s in the G&P side or in the L&S side of the business. As production increases, we have a pretty big system that we can continue to bolt-on to add to expand a little bit here and there. It’s where we get our higher return projects. Now, we’re still going to add to the platform. As you mentioned, we got a couple of processing plants coming on, which will continue to increase our base, which then allows us to add some gathering to support that, et cetera.

But the real story behind our growth, and if you step back, we are pretty large, as I just mentioned, about 6 billion of EBITDA. So our face plan is we’re going to have mid single digit growth in our system, have good discipline so that we get high return projects, continue to add EBITDA, and at the end of the day look for those other opportunities like you mentioned in low carbon. There hasn’t been a lot today. There’s been a lot of rhetoric around it. And there’s a lot of talk about different things. We’re obviously involved in projects that are looking at CCUS. We’re involved in a lot of stuff that’s down the road, but not going to be hitting the 2023 earnings profile in a strong way yet. I am a believer over time, there are going to be more opportunities for us there.

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