Plains GP Holdings, L.P. (NASDAQ:PAGP) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Brian Reynolds – UBS Group AG: Great. Thanks. I’ll leave it there. Enjoy the rest of your morning.

Willie Chiang: Thanks, Brian.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Thank you. And our next question comes from Keith Stanley with Wolfe. Your line is now open.

Keith Stanley – Wolfe Research, LLC: Hi, good morning. Could you maybe on Cactus just give a little more color on where you are at working to recontract that pipeline timing of when you hope to resolve it and high level goals for that. And, I guess just big picture how you’re thinking about a desire to have contracts with medium-term duration versus operating the pipeline on a less contracted basis depending on where price settles out.

Jeremy Goebel: Keith, this is Jeremy. What I would say is it’s constructive for us to have those dialogue now versus where it was the last couple of years. We expect to give you guys an update on that this year, but for competitive reasons it doesn’t make sense to right now. What I would say is there’s usually a mix and it’s largely we have to clear the base and these pipes need to move barrels every day. And the owners of the capacity on that pipeline should be someone with ratable export takeaway that’s where it’s going. So in a lot of respect it makes sense to contract those pipelines with the third parties that will be exporting the barrels. So we serve the function of aggregating barrels from the lease to the market center.

We have the liquidity in our terminals. They like to partner with us. It’s matching up the supply on one end with their takeaway on the other. So it needs to have a strike a good balance of contracting with third parties and some marketing opportunities. But for us it’s more weighted to contracting and partnering up with the off takers like in Wink-to-Webster to refiners like on our Corpus pipelines as the exporters.

Willie Chiang: And Keith, just to make a – reinforce the point that Jeremy made. Many people we talk to think that – our partners could disappear. We’ve got great partners on this line, folks that are shipping, and so the way I would couch this is, we’ve got a great relationship with our partners and the shippers on the line, and this is just a normal course of business that you have to go on, on renegotiation and negotiations as far as term and tariff.

Keith Stanley – Wolfe Research, LLC: Got it. Thanks. Second question just the company has had really good market-based results the past 2 years on Canadian crude spreads and NGL market dynamics, I think, it’s Slide 9. You’re assuming fewer market-based opportunities in 2024. Is that a function of their specific areas where you just see less opportunity this year? Or is it just conservatism built-in/kind of a lack of visibility at this point? Just how you would characterize that bucket on market-based opportunities?

Willie Chiang: Yeah, so market-based opportunities, you can’t predict them. They’re very difficult to figure out when something might happen. Some of this is weather, some of its other asset rely on and there’s all kinds of things that factor into this. And we’ve been pretty conscious of not trying to forecast in a large capture for things that we don’t know that’s going to happen. So one of the fundamental changes this year is we have, not we, but the industry has Trans Mountain that’s starting up that could impact the opportunities for crude market opportunities. So we factor all this in. And to answer your question, we don’t have a tremendous amount of – we have a modest amount of market opportunities that we have captured that we think we can probably catch.

The answer is, if there are opportunities out there, it’s in our ethos and DNA to capture markets. We’ve got the broad assets in a company with people that focus on this every day. And so, if there are opportunities out there, we’ll capture it. But it’s very difficult to predict exactly where they happen. And, again, this year’s budget is based on a modest amount of market opportunities. And that’s frankly why we move towards the range to give people kind of a range of thought of what those might be. I hope that helps.

Keith Stanley – Wolfe Research, LLC: It does. Thank you.

Willie Chiang: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Jean Salisbury with Bernstein. Your line is now open.

Jean Ann Salisbury – Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.: Hi, good morning. Can you talk through the puts and takes of TMX starting up on Plains’ various assets, your Canada crude pipelines, flows to Cushing, et cetera?

Jeremy Goebel: Hi, Jean Ann, good morning. It’s Jeremy. It’s a function of time, so it’s not just linear, but at start-up you would imagine there’d be less market-based opportunities, but there’ll be the opportunity for more production growth in the basin. It will offset some current flows like rail from the Williston or exports of heavy from the Gulf Coast first. And then, you’ll have replacement of – in our opinion, you’ll have replacement of production growth in Canada. So in that initial period, there’ll be less market-based opportunities, depending upon the flows that go West, if it’s lighter barrels or heavy barrels, that could impact flows to the Midwest of the basin barrels or other light barrels.