TC Energy Corporation (NYSE:TRP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Linda Ezergailis: Just as a follow-up to the Coastal GasLink, just to help us better understand the next few months. At what point in March or April, will you have a clear sense if you’ve completed all the critical path elements before your construction windows close. And when would typically those windows reopen later this year?

Bevin Wirzba: Linda, a great question. There are certain activities that are winter-only construction. Right now, we’ve got plans in place to deliver those here in February and March, as you say, some of those scopes in the event that they are not accomplished would go — would drift into the early 2024 time frame if we’re not able to accomplish them. We have, though, developed mitigation plans and have developed a path to see good visibility into whether we’ll be able to complete those here in the next month or so. The best visibility, though, that I can give you to whether we’ll complete mechanically by the end of the year is probably in the June, July time frame. There are some winter scope items that even if we can’t complete here on plan, we can recover through the balance of the year. Not all of the winter scope that is currently planned needs to be pushed into a new season.

Linda Ezergailis: And just as a follow-up as it relates to your — some of the challenges that your contractors have been having. Can you give us an update on what contingencies and mitigants you have there? Have you entered into any new agreements with new contractors? Have you revised some of your commercial arrangements and realign them with the new realities for some of the other contractors. Can you just help us understand what’s going on in that work stream?

Bevin Wirzba: Yes, great question. As I mentioned earlier, the productivity last year and what we were able to accomplish was tremendous, but it put not only ourselves, but our contractors in some challenging situations. And so we’ve repositioned our contracting strategy in 2023 with those contractors to be — to better align the risks that are going forward and ensure that those contractors are able to complete successfully. So we’ve repositioned our contractor base. All of our workforce came back after the Christmas break. We’re seeing some ability to attract higher quality talent, which has been really a strong indicator that we can complete by the end of this year.

Operator: Our next question comes from John Mackay of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

John Mackay: Maybe staying on the funding side. You talked a little bit about the ability to maybe defer some CapEx or push out some projects or kind of reduced scope here or there. Maybe you can just share some more detail on what you’re thinking about there? How much could be in ’23 versus what could be more of a ’24-plus impact?

Joel Hunter: John, it’s Joel here. Yes, we continue to look at our portfolio and look to ways to optimize it. I would say to you that we did move some projects from ’23 into ’24. We’re not going to give you the specifics around that. But obviously, as we optimize portfolio, the important thing to remember is that we’re not going to jeopardize the reliability or the integrity of our system nor our — to meet the needs of our customers. But we continue to refine the portfolio, and I would just point you to our outlook for this year, which is that $11.5 billion to $12 billion of capital spend.