Robert Karlovich
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is now open
Thanks Mike. A few additional items to note related to the sale of the Propane business. We do plan to reduce [indiscernible] proceeds from this transaction especially initially. We obviously look at our near term maturities and higher cost debt initially as well as making sure we maintain liquidity under our credit facility to fund our growth opportunities that Mike discussed. We also evaluate other balance sheet opportunities around the preferred units and be opportunistic, but the goal here is simple, we want to lower leverage and the ability to self fund any internal capital without reliance on the equity capital markets or the debt capital markets. This transaction allows us to manage near term debt maturities, liquidity and growth capital free of any debt capital limitations or need to issue equity. While we may be a smaller company, immediately after the closing of the sale of Retail Propane, as Mike mentioned we are now more focused with crude and water making up a significant part of our earnings portfolio and growing those businesses significantly. The Refined Products business will continue to be an offset to commodity prices and our Liquids business will continue to have a certain amount of seasonality in it. We expect leverage to be around 3.5 times upon the closing of the Propane sale which his almost a full term reduction from our March 31, ratio and nearly 2 turns lower than our peak leverage last September. We continue to target leverage of 3.25 or lower for our business portfolio and will be at that level or lower based on our fiscal 2019 guidance released today. With regards to deleveraging, we reduced debt significantly during the fourth quarter as well with proceeds from the Retail West DCC sale and our JV with Sawtooth being implied to debt reduction totaling approximately $240 million including the repurchase of 71 million of unsecured notes at just below par and the remaining proceeds applied to our credit facility. Our compliance leverage has been reduced by 1 turns of the decline of September and currently sits at 4.4 times. We were able to reduce debt this patient quarter while also being able to fund our growth CapEx for the fourth quarter which is still approximately $51 million which was primarily focused on our water and crude businesses. Our fiscal fourth quarter results were highlighted by continued strong results in our water business, strong volumes on Grand Mesa and a normal winter for our Retail Propane businesses. Additionally our Refined Products business came in right in line with our guidance for the quarter, but has seen more stabilized margins over the past few months. Unfortunately, we had to manage through a significant decline in propane prices in February and a glut of product that caused another mess in our liquid segment this year which was off $15 million from guidance. We also had certain one-time charges impact our general administration costs by about $8 million. Overall we reported adjusted EBITDA of $156 million for the quarter and $408 million for the year. Obviously we were sure of our expectations this year; however, the overall businesses have either improved since the start of the year as is the case for Refined Products or continued to growth throughout the year which we have seen with Water and Crude. We will walk through the impacts on liquids and what we believe will result in improvements in that segment going forward. I'll go through the results for each segment and discuss our guidance ranges for the upcoming fiscal year. We'll start with Crude. The Crude segment generated approximately $32 million of adjusted EBITDA this quarter with Grand Mesa contributing $46 million in gross and approximately $39 million on a net basis. The remainder of Crude Logistics segment operated at $7 million loss for the quarter, the first without Glass Mountain which was sold in December. That loss includes funding our commitments on third-party pipelines, operating in our marine, trucking and rail businesses and our stored terminals at Cushing and the Gulf Coast. Full year adjusted EBITDA totaled over $118 million for this segment compared with $59 million in the prior fiscal year, 98% growth year-over-year driven by Grand Mesa. Financial volumes on Grand Mesa averaged about 109,000 barrels per day for the quarter and physical volumes averaged about 103,000 barrels per day during the quarter. Volumes continue to increase on the pipeline and we expect that volume growth to continue this upcoming year as well. We are forecasting an average of 115,000 barrels per day on Grand Mesa for the upcoming year. So the increase in volumes this fall once the gas gathering and processing bottlenecks in the DJ Basin are alleviated. We're seeing increased margins in the other basins as well and starting to see higher utilization rates on our camputation [ph] assets. We're moving significant volumes through our Cushing terminal and all the other benefits that come with crude oil over $60 per barrel. We are optimistic about this business for the upcoming year assuming crude prices stay above that $60 per barrel level, rig counts remain steady or grow in our core basins and production volumes continue to increase. We are evaluating several gathering and transportation opportunities in the Crude business and will update the market as soon as we have something ready to announce. With the increase in our [indiscernible] on Grand Mesa, higher margins in the basins we operate and expected increase utilization in our transportation assets we are forecasting 2019 adjusted EBITDA for this segment to be between $145 million to $155 million which is based on our current set of assets and does not assume any significant capital investment into this business. Going to Water, Water adjusted EBITDA was $32 million for the quarter which included a realized loss of skim oil hedges of approximately $3.5 million. Full year adjusted EBITDA for the Water segment was over $115 million, an 83% increase year-over-year. Water volumes averaged 760,000 barrels per day this quarter, and 707,000 barrels per day for the year. Volumes for this quarter were slightly impacted by a delay in producer completions coming on line during January and February in both the Delaware and the Eagle Ford. Volumes increased in March and we are currently disposing over 900,000 barrels per day through April and May. Our skim oil production was over 4000 barrels per day during the quarter with an average crude cut of 0.53%. Skim oil volumes for fiscal 2018 have averaged approximately 3200 barrels per day with a 0.45% crude cut. We have continued to layer in hedges and have hedged approximately 78% of our expected skim oil production at approximately $56 per barrel through March 2019 to limit any direct impact from crude oil pricing changes. We also have some hedges running through December 2019. We have invested approximately $105 million of growth CapEx this year in the Water business as we add disposal capacity and carrier pipelines to support our existing and new disposal customers. Looking ahead to FY 2019 we expect to invest approximately $250 million in our Water business, including approximately $140 million to $150 million in acquisitions that have already been identified and negotiated to date. We are constructing 12 new facilities with multiple wells at each location primarily in the Delaware. We are also adding over 100 miles of pipelines and we'll have approximately 500 miles of pipelines connected to our facilities between owned and producer owned connections by our fiscal year end including a new 55-mile trunk line from New Mexico State line to Pecos, Texas that will connect 15 of our facilities in the core of central Delaware. Our expectations for the growth in the Water business are high for FY 2019. We believe we have built a world-class disposal business particularly in the Delaware and DJ basins and we are not slowing down on that build up. We have numerous producers from majors to independents, contracting with us to be the Water disposal partner. We are adding pipelines and facilities if needed and building those facilities soon after start up in these basins. Our businesses run rate approximately $165 million annualized today with over 900,000 barrels per day on the system. We're including the volume growth expected on existing platform and the growth capital we are investing this year through acquisitions and organic growth, we expect to generate adjusted EBITDA of between $200 million and $225 million in FY 2019 with over 1.25 million barrels per day on this system by the end of this fiscal year. And as Mike mentioned, we see continued growth in this business going forward as well. Our Liquids business had adjusted EBITDA of $15 million this quarter and $50 million for the year. The wholesale propane business did not perform to expectations in the first quarter. This business was generally on plan through January, but unfortunately did not perform in February and March. Excess propane supply, low demand and a falling propane price in February resulted in high inventory volumes and sales price lower than our cost. Also the Conway market experienced an unprecedented pricing drop of $0.30 per gallon from December to March significantly eroding the value of volumes flowing out of storage. Our Butane business saw higher butane margins and volumes during the quarter. However, it continues to be burdened by railcar lease costs. We plan to return a number of railcars this year to right size our fleets in both propane and butane for the current business environment. The Sawtooth joint venture is off to a positive start with higher volumes contracted for the upcoming storage season than the prior year. We're working with Magnum, our new partner to grow the volumes and bring Refined Product storage online by the end of this fiscal year. As a reminder we own 72% interest in Sawtooth and bagged another three-year option to buy our remaining interest. Our guidance range for the Liquid business is $55 million to $70 million which assumes a similar business environment to this year and our reduced investment. Our Liquids team has made several structural and commercial changes to its business to mitigate the impacts experienced last year, including improved sales contracts, additional cost reductions including the railcar savings, more rigorous supply modeling and hedging. With the structural and commercial changes made to this segment, as well as emerging market opportunities, we would expect to exceed the current year's results. Retail Propane EBITDA was $65 million for the quarter over $109 million for the year. This includes Retail West and the Retail East portions of our business. We knew January would be a good month for Retail when we last reported our earnings and forecast at that time called for a cold February and March. Unfortunately the forecasters were only half right. February was abnormally warm especially in the eastern region. March was on the cold side and additionally April was colder than normal particularly in the east as well. This led to strong margins and volumes for the business, but not quite as high as we'd hoped for early February. The business still be our original budget and performed very well for the year. During the quarter we invested approximately $2 million in acquisitions and growth capital Retail Profane. Overall we invested growth capital of $50 million in the Retail Propane business for the entire year. With the sale of this business segment we will only get the benefit of one quarter results in fiscal 2019. Since this time last year when we announced that we were evaluating certain asset sales, we had generated over $1.1 billion in net proceeds in cash flow from this segment after including the cost of acquisitions, growth and maintenance capital invested which as a reminder the segment generated $91 million of adjusted EBITDA in the prior fiscal year. That was over 12 times cash flow from last year. We believe that we are making a good decision to adjust our strategy and focus on some of our other core businesses going forward, but we also believe we have executed the sale of Propane in a way that generates an excellent value to our shareholders. We are still analyzing the tax gain that will be recognized from the sale of Retail Propane, all of which will be recognized in the 2018 tax year. However, we do expect to have certain losses to offset this gain through the remainder of this year including the tax losses related to Sawtooth transaction and we also expect to generate an ordinary tax loss through our depreciation and amortization. We will provide a more thorough update on the tax applications on our next quarterly earnings call. Refined Products reported adjusted EBITDA of $26 million this quarter and approximately $49 million for the year. We've seen a recovery in line space values and rack margins on Colonial which is a benefit to our business. We continue to optimize our line space in an attempt to maximize margins and shipper history. Line space values do not appear to be the primary driver of rack margins this year which is a significant change from last year, rather colonial rack markets are pricing around local supply-demand fundamentals versus export economics to Latin America. Mexican imports are declining as the refinery operations slowly improve as well. With the addition of our gas blending business and incremental storage, we expect to carry a slightly higher inventory balance through the upcoming fiscal year, most of which will be financed through our working capital facility. However, we are looking at ways to optimize the financing of this inventory going forward. Our FY19 guidance range for the Refined business is $55 million to $88 million which similarly uses this past year as the downside scenario, adjusted for our new gas blending operations. As a reminder, the Refined business should generally be counter cyclical to our Crude and Water businesses. Our corporate costs were $12.9 million this year an anomaly as we incurred several one-time items including a $3.5 million Workers' Comp adjustment related to prior years, a $1.5 million legal settlement and additional legal costs of about $3 million compared to prior year. These costs were not expected and also are not expected to continue at these levels. Our full year costs were approximate $34 million and would have been in line with our guidance without these items. Going forward we expect corporate and other to be $25 million to $30 million of expense. I think it is important note that we have changed our method of guidance for this fiscal year. We're providing ranges for each of our business segments. As a reminder, our diversified portfolio is meant to be structured so that we should not always operate at the high end or low end for every business in the same period, but rather have offsets at some level that balance the cash flows. Obviously it is not perfectly correlated, but it has worked for example in FY’17 when Crude and Water struggled the Refined Products business performed well and FY’18 was the opposite. Our current expectation is similar, with the higher crude oil price we would expect the Crude and Water segments to also perform extremely well this year with refined products potentially trending to the lower side of our guidance. We declared a $0.39 per unit a $1.56 annualized distribution for this quarter. Management expects to recommend to the Board that we continue at this distribution rate until at least our fiscal third quarter distribution which would be declared in January 2019 as we rebuild coverage to our targeted 1.3 times coverage or better. In summary, we are starting the new chapter at NGL following the closing of the Retail Propane sale. We are very appreciative of the people who worked in our retail business and how they have grown that business and operated safely over the years. It was a great platform to launch our public company and initiated the growth of our business platform, but our strategy is changing. We are looking at our higher returning and what we believe should be higher valued businesses to be our growth vehicles in the future. We are narrowing our focus, reducing indebtedness and moving to a self funding model for our organic growth capital. We should now be able to achieve our target leverage of 3.25 times in a short timeframe, rebuild our coverage to our targeted 1.3 times or better and like to grow our distributable cash flow per unit from there. Thank you for your continued interest in our partnership, we would now like to open the line for questions.