Greg L. Armstrong - Plains All American Pipeline LP
Management
Well, 99.9% of utilization would be an outstanding number. As a practical matter, that would be too tight for the industry. Shneur, you probably need somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% plus or minus of excess to safely operate the basin and avoid huge bottlenecks from time-to-time. Willie went through the numbers with you a bit earlier, but when 400,000 barrels a day of your 2.5 million barrels a day of capacity is in a refinery, any unexpected downtime or extended turnaround, you're going to fill your tanks up and then you're going to run on in the situations not dissimilar to what we saw in 2011 and 2012. We've got quite a bit of headroom now versus what we had back then. Keep in mind, this was a basin in a Permian that was 800,000 barrels a day at total production in 2008, 2009, and we were probably ahead at that point in time, just under 1.7 million barrels a day, 1.8 million barrels a day of takeaway capacity. So, you had a 2:1 ratio. Now, we're tighter than that. but we still got plenty of headroom because we're below that 10% and with the ability of existing pipelines, Cactus, BridgeTex, PE2 to expand and then Enterprise's pipeline coming on, we think we'll stay healthy. What's still hurting us a little bit right now is based on our numbers, if you take existing commitments and you add it to refining capacity, which refiners are going to buy what they need to run their refineries, you've got a ratio of about 80%, maybe 85% of the volumes spoken for in the sense that there's commitments to ship on that. In all cases, the shippers don't have the barrels and so, they're going out and competing for that, and that's why you're seeing spreads come in. If you look at the differential between Midland and let's say Magellan's East Houston, I mean, you got $1.20 price premium at Midland East Houston, but it costs $2.25 to get it there. That tells you that the market is abnormal and you'd run the same numbers going to almost any market that would tell you leave the barrel in Midland, don't ship it out because that's the highest-priced barrel. What that is is because people are bidding it up to fill the commitments that they don't have the barrels for. And that's why I think Harry's comment's very appropriate is as we get through some of these contracts that expire, that, combined with production uplift, will cause margins to reclaim some of the ground. They may never go back to where they were before, but it's going to reclaim a portion of it.