Robert W. Karlovich III
Analyst · FBR. Your line is now open
All right, thanks Mike. I appreciate everybody who joined us this morning. I'll be going over our financial results for the third quarter, which we released this morning, as well as some of our thoughts about the rest of this fiscal year and beyond. On our last call, we discussed the notes offering which we closed in October and is now reflected in the financial statements. This offering was significant in that it allowed us to balance out our secured and unsecured borrowings and increase our liquidity. It also extended the debt maturities to November of 2023. Since then, we have seen a new President elected, an agreement by OPEC to limit production, an increase in the stock market and interest rates, as well as dare I say some stability in oil price although the past couple of days may not reflect that. We have also announced the Murphy and STACK projects, as Mike discussed, and have some resolution on the Grand Mesa producers, and gave our distribution guidance in the middle of January. As a result, the notes that we issued in October are trading well above par, which is great to see, and we continue to be pleased with the transaction and the continued transformation of our balance sheet. As we have discussed over the past several months, our financing strategy has been to reduce our committed capital requirements, decrease our leverage, increase liquidity, and improve access to capital markets, all of which we have achieved. This continues to be our focus as well as extending debt maturities and balancing the financing of our capital expenditures going forward. Happy to announce that we have launched an amendment and extension to our credit facility and we hope to have that completed in the short term. We expect to continue to utilize our ATM to fund a portion of our various growth opportunities and I am happy to report that we have financed approximately 50% of the growth capital expenditures from this past quarter with proceeds from our ATM. We expect the same for the upcoming period as well. Our total growth and acquisition capital expenditures has totaled $416 million through 12/31, and including the recent Murphy acquisition we expect the growth capital to total $475 million for fiscal 2017. We have a minimal amount of CapEx committed for fiscal 2018 and are currently running our model with only $100 million of CapEx for next year. To go through some details of our results, our operating income for the quarter was about $23 million, which includes $61 million of depreciation and amortization expense. We generated approximately $121 million of adjusted EBITDA this quarter and have reported approximately $260 million year-to-date. Our quarterly results included the following impacts. A two month delay in volumes from Bonanza Creek on the Grand Mesa pipeline has impacted us by about $5 million. We do expect to make this up through increased volumes in fiscal 2018 and the contract remains seven years with the start date of January 1, 2017 instead of November 1, 2016. We continue to expect Grand Mesa to contribute $120 million of adjusted EBITDA in year one and $150 million in year two, based on the contract starts of November 1. A late start to winter, heating season had an estimated $3 million to $4 million impact on the current quarter between our retail and wholesale propane businesses, a portion of which could be made up with a decent February and March. The Water segment results were slightly under our forecasts as we were impacted by lower skim oil recovered and the approximately $40 hedges we had in place at the higher forecasted volumes. This was an approximately $1 million to $2 million impact on the quarter, and as a reminder, we do not currently have any significant hedge positions in place going forward and should benefit directly from the higher crude price in the current quarter. The Crude Logistics business continues to face margin competition, particularly in the basins where drilling activity and production continues to decrease. We do expect to see better performance from this business going forward with the new assets coming online, stabilizing of the crude market and increasing rig counts in our core basins. Additionally, we have begun leasing more of our storage capacity to third parties and receiving fee revenues rather than utilizing our own storage for contango, which should lead to more stable and predictable cash flows going forward. Going through each segment in a little more detail, our Refined Products segment continues to exceed our original expectations for this fiscal year. This quarter was expected to be a lower EBITDA producing period as the gasoline curve moves with winter blending season and impacts our inventory valuations. We have built inventory during this period and we are well-positioned from an inventory standpoint for the fourth quarter. We generated approximately $30 million of adjusted EBITDA in this business segment during the quarter, and $113 million year-to-date. Similar to last year, we expect a very successful fourth quarter in the Refined business as we continue to grow with our customers along the Colonial and Plantation pipelines. We are currently expecting this segment to generate approximately $160 million of adjusted EBITDA for the fiscal year. The fundamentals of our Water business has improved throughout the year as volumes continue to grow and demand for disposal increases as well. We recognized adjusted EBITDA of $17 million for the quarter, which as I noted was impacted by the hedges we had in place. Overall, volumes are slightly lower than our original expectations, but they have grown 3% since last quarter and we are expecting continued growth this upcoming quarter as well as through next year driven by higher rig counts and additional flow back volumes. We are expecting our DJ Basin business to benefit in the upcoming quarters from additional drilling activity and new Water customers. We continue to see robust drilling and production in the Permian. Specifically, in the Delaware, we're investing in some new infrastructure and focusing on pipeline gathering of the disposal water. We see signs of improvement in the Eagle Ford as well with an expectation that drilling activity will increase as we inch closer to $60 crude prices. At this point in time, we are expecting this business to come in slightly under our guidance and are now targeting $65 million to $70 million for the full year, with an exit run rate of $80 million or higher. The Crude Logistics business generated about $17 million of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter, with Grand Mesa operational for two months and contributing the majority of the EBITDA for this segment. The other assets performed okay during the quarter, but at the expense of our marketing division which continues to struggle in the current environment and supplements the various assets. We have and continue to focus a significant amount of attention on this business segment, and with the recent startup of the Houma Terminal and the upcoming terminal at the Port of Point Comfort, we do expect improvement. Grand Mesa alone should produce $30 million in the upcoming quarter and over $130 million next year. With Houma operational and assuming crude stays in the mid-$50 range, our current expectations for the crude marketing and logistics business is between $65 million and $70 million of adjusted EBITDA for the year, and looking ahead to next year, we expect this segment to contribute over 25% of our EBITDA with Grand Mesa again contributing around $130 million to the bottom line. Retail Propane generated about $32 million of adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, in comparison to $23 million during the same quarter last year. A small portion of this growth is related to our acquisitions, but generally speaking, we are over 20% better compared to last year. December was a very good month and January started well but has seen a warm-up over the past couple of weeks in certain years. Recent data projects slightly warmer than normal temperatures in the upper Midwest with slightly colder than normal temperatures in the Northeast, the areas we have most of our propane locations. We continue to expect an overall normal February and March, which should bring us in line with our guidance of $105 million for the year. Rising propane prices may have a slight impact to retail margins over the next couple of months, but we expect this to be minimal and to be recovered as prices stabilize. I will reiterate, we are basing this guidance on normal winter weather and corresponding volumes in our operating areas over the next couple of months. Finally, our Liquids segment performed mostly in line with our recent guidance, with our wholesale propane business slightly outperforming budget and our butane business coming in slightly below as an offset, as they continue to carry the burden on high-cost railcar leases. We have over 850 cars with leases expiring in 2017. Those cars have an annual cost in excess of $9 million, a portion of which will be returned and others which will be renewed at much lower rates going forward. The Sawtooth storage facility remains under plan. However, we are making progress on contracting for the upcoming storage season, which should benefit next fiscal year. The assets from the recent Murphy acquisition will be included in this business segment going forward, beginning with this upcoming quarter. Our liquids logistics business generated approximately $26 million in EBITDA this quarter and has generated $47 million year-to-date. The wholesale propane business is expected to benefit from rising propane prices, which would more than offset any impact seen on the retail side. We are currently forecasting $85 million to $90 million of adjusted EBITDA for the liquids logistics for the entire fiscal year, and we expect growth in this business next year with the new assets at Port Hudson and Kingfisher, increased utilization at Sawtooth, and reduced burden from the railcar leases. Overall, we expect to be at the low end of our EBITDA guidance for the fiscal year 2017. Our distributable cash flow for the quarter was $85 million and has totaled approximately $280 million for the past 12 months, resulting in a TTM coverage of about 1.5x. We expect this trailing month coverage to continue to increase to 1.6x next quarter, with an expected distribution increase to $0.44 per unit per our guidance, and we expect to stay approximately 1.6x covered next year as we increase the distribution to $2 per unit annualized, a 28% increase over last year. We are targeting to cover our distributions in every fiscal quarter going forward and beyond fiscal 2018, and we expect to grow the distribution approximately 10% per year thereafter while maintaining coverage between 1.3x to 1.5x. This includes the distributions to our Class A preferred units and our excess cash flow will be used to fund our organic growth opportunities and continue to delever the Company. Looking at the balance sheet, we continue to target compliance leverage of less than 4x by year-end, compared to our covenant level of 4.75x. The pro forma adjustments to compliant EBITDA continue to reduce, and reduce even more rapidly with the startup of Grand Mesa. As I mentioned, we are working on amendment and extension to our credit facility and our core bank group has been very supportive through the process. We hope to announce that extension in the near future. We have reiterated numerous times in the past, we are targeting compliance leverage of 3.25x or better, which we are expecting to achieve at the end of fiscal 2018 or next March, and we'll continue to manage our business with that target in mind. These leverage metrics excludes our working capital facility, which is governed by a monthly borrowing base determined by our receivables and inventories. This facility was approximately $875 million at 12/31/16 as our inventories are at seasonal highs and commodity prices have risen over the past few months. The balance is expected to decrease significantly by the end of this fiscal year as we reduce inventories. As a reminder, this facility is excluded from our covenant calculations. In summary, we are excited about the future of our businesses and the position we are in today. We have significant cash flow growth next year with a full year of Grand Mesa, Houma, Collins, additional Colonial lines base, Point Comfort, an increase in rig counts, increased higher crude prices, and continued focus on full utilization of our assets. We will continue to focus on our balance sheet, safely operating our assets, and growing our businesses in a prudent and thoughtful manner. We appreciate your interest and support and we look forward to seeing and speaking to many of you in the near future. Candice, we would now like to open the line for questions.