Robert B. Michaleski
Analyst · TD Securities
Thank you, Sarah. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Pembina's conference call and webcast to review our third quarter 2012 results. I am Bob Michaleski, Pembina's Chief Executive Officer; and joining me today are Peter Robertson, Pembina's Vice President of Finance, Chief Financial Officer; and Scott Burrows, our Senior Manager of Corporate Development Planning. As usual, I'll review the quarterly results we released yesterday, spend a few minutes providing an update on recent developments and then open up the line for questions. I'll start with a reminder that some of the comments made today may be forward-looking in nature and are based on Pembina's current expectations, estimates, projections, risks and assumptions. I will also point out that some of the information I provide refers to non-GAAP measures. To learn more about these forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures, please see Pembina's various financial reports available at pembina.com and on both SEDAR and EDGAR. Actual results could differ materially from the forward-looking statements we may express or imply today. And I'll start off by reviewing our Q3 2012 results, followed by a look at our growth projects, and then we can get to your questions. As you know, this is our second quarter of reporting on a combined entity since closing our acquisition of Provident on April 2. I'm happy to say that during the third quarter, we maintained steady performance across all areas of our business and made strides on growth projects while completing the majority of the integration work we needed to do. We have a few things to wrap up with respect to the information systems integration, but we expect to have this completed by the end of the year. Looking at revenue, operating charge and gross profit EBITDA and earnings during the quarter, you can see that each of these metrics has increased for the quarter and year-to-date mainly as a result of the acquisition, but also due to continued solid performance in all of Pembina's legacy businesses. I'm turning now to look at more detail at each business. Throughput on our conventional pipelines averaged just about 444,000 barrels per day during the quarter, approximately 3% higher than the same period in 2011. On a year-to-date basis, throughput is up by 9% compared to the same period of 2011. In the third quarter, this business generated revenue that was consistent with the same period of the prior year. Operating margin improved by 8%, largely because our operating expenses were lower as a result of the timing of integrity and geotechnical work and our power costs were down. On a year-to-date basis, revenue and operating margin were both up for the first 9 months of the year by 8%. Our Oil Sands & Heavy Oil business delivered a 19% increase in revenue and a 21% increase in operating margin in the third quarter of this year. These increases were largely because of contributions from our Nipisi and Mitsue Pipelines, which began adding to our results in the third quarter of 2011. Those pipelines drove up year-to-date performance as well with revenue and operating margin up by 55% and 37%, respectively, compared to the first 9 months of last year. Gas Services processed higher volumes at the our Cutbank Complex due to an increase in producer activity and the new 50 million cubic feet a day shallow cut expansion, which was put into service and operational near the end of the quarter. The Cutbank Complex now has an aggregate raw shallow gas processing capacity of 410 million cubic feet per day, 355 million net to Pembina, which is an increase of 16% net to Pembina. We also now have our Musreau Deep Cut facility up and running, but volumes processed as deep cut don't impact Gas Services' overall processing volumes since they are already counted in the volume process of the shallow cut. In this business, we realized an increase in revenue of 26% and operating margin by 40% compared to the third quarter of 2011. The same factors drove up the year-to-date results with revenue and operating margin both increasing 24% compared to the same period of 2011. We combined the former Provident business results with our Midstream group, so that accounts for the majority of the large increase on a consolidated basis in this segment during the 3 and 9 months ended September 30, 2012. Our Crude Oil Midstream business, which represents Pembina's legacy Midstream & Marketing segment, contributed operating margin of $27.2 million, an increase of almost 41% compared to the same quarter of 2011. Year-to-date operating margin was $87.4 million, which is roughly 25% higher than the same period last year. These increases were driven by higher pipeline volumes, wider margins and additional services offered at the Pembina Nexus Terminal near Edmonton. Our Redwater West and Empress East assets, which were both acquired through the acquisition and make up our NGL Midstream business, generated operating margin of $46.6 million and $11.6 million, respectively, excluding realized losses from commodity-related derivative financial instruments. This represents an overall increase of 52% when compared with the second quarter operating margin of $36.2 million for Redwater West and $2.2 million for Empress East, respectively. We have commenced the process of mitigating a portion of the frac spread risk by projecting a base level of cash flow to cover a minimum of 50% of the related natural gas cost. These transactions will cover the period April to October 2013, to coincide with the expiry of existing instruments and extend to the end of the gas contract year. Corporately, we incurred G&A expenses of $26.9 million during the quarter compared to $13.8 million during the third quarter of 2011, due to the addition of employees who joined Pembina from Provident, an increase in salaries and benefits from existing and new employees and increased rent for new and expanded office space. For the first 9 months of the year, G&A totaled $70.2 million, up from $41.2 million during the same period of 2011 for the same reasons as our quarterly increase in G&A. I'll now provide some highlights with respect to our growth projects, starting with our conventional pipeline business. As you know, during the second quarter, we were happy to announce that we reached our contractual threshold to proceed with the 52,000-barrel per day Northern NGL Expansion. Even with the first phase of this expansion, we don't believe we'll have enough capacity to accommodate our current volume forecast. We are continuing to see strong demand for capacity in our operating regions, namely, the Dawson Creek, Grand Prairie, and the Kaybob, Fox Creek areas. And many of our pipelines are essentially full. This is a good problem to have, of course, and is lending confidence in the 2 new expansions to our conventional pipeline systems, which were approved at the Board of Directors meeting yesterday. We have issued a news release regarding those projects after markets closed yesterday, so please refer to those for complete details. I'll just provide the highlights here. The first expansion is Phase II of the Northern NGL Expansion. This project will increase the NGL capacity on both our Northern and Peace systems from 167,000 barrels per day to 220,000 barrels per day. It's expected to cost approximately $330 million and should be completed in early 2015. To accomplish this expansion, there are a number of things we have to do. We plan to install 4 new pump stations, upgrade 3 existing pump stations, add additional operational storage, reconfigure existing pipelines and build a total of approximately 94 kilometers of new pipeline. The other expansion mentioned in the release is on our Peace crude oil and condensate pipeline. This project will increase our crude oil capacity on Peace from 195,000 barrels per day to 250,000 barrels per day. It's expected to cost approximately $250 million and should be completed in 2014. To accomplish this expansion, we plan to install 5 new pump stations, upgrade 6 existing pump stations, add additional operational storage, reconfigure existing pipelines and build a total of 10 kilometers of new pipeline. There will be an additional capital of approximately $125 million required to tie in producers to both the expanded systems. So all in, we're looking at total capital investment of about $670 million over the next 2.5 years. Given this large capital investment, we're looking to underpin these expansions with commercial arrangements with our customers. We're confident that the support will be there since we were recently able to secure contracts for our Northern NGL Expansion and capacity is still at a premium. We will also be required to obtain the customary regulatory and environmental approvals before we are able to proceed. This is truly a remarkable growth story. Three years ago, these assets were in modest decline. But as we said many times, our assets are located in the right geology. By the middle of 2015, we expect to have added 250,000 barrels a day of capacity, which represents a 40% increase across our major systems. For the pipeline portions of the Resthaven and Saturn projects, we are looking to break ground on construction shortly. We have received the required regulatory approvals, have awarded construction contracts and expect to begin construction on both projects during the fall and winter of 2012, 2013. Now turning to Gas Services. For the Resthaven and Saturn facilities, we have now ordered a significant portion of the major equipment and we've begun to receive that major equipment at the site. Once complete, these facilities are expected to add an additional 330,000 million cubic feet a day net of enhanced liquids extraction capability, and approximately 25,000 barrels a day of NGL volumes to Pembina's conventional pipeline systems, further evidencing the need for the expansions I just talked about. In our Midstream business, we are also working on a number of growth projects. Our crude oil midstream group is continuing to develop plans to build out our truck and first full-service terminal footprint. During the third quarter, we broke ground on the new joint venture of full-service terminal in the Judy Creek, Alberta area that we expect to complete in April of 2013. This project will provide additional services for customers in the area and will help secure additional volumes for our conventional pipeline systems. Our NGL Midstream group continues to be very busy, particularly at the Redwater site. On September 1, we brought on our first of 7 fee-for-service cabin storage facilities at the site and we're aiming to have another completed in the first half of next year. We also completed and brought onstream the 8,000 barrel per day expansion of the Redwater fractionator, on-time and under budget. This expansion will help ease capacity stream, but we also continue to progress the proposed 70,000-barrel per day C2+ fractionator at the Redwater site. In the long run, we see the requirement for more frac capacity in Alberta, and so are continuing to solicit customer support and are completing preliminary engineering work for the project. Should we receive the customer support to proceed, we expect the new fractionator would cost approximately $400 million. Also looking long term, we recognize that having export options for Canadian-based production will benefit pricing environments and allow for the continued development of our resources, especially in light of changes to the Alberta energy industry such as the Cochin Pipeline Reversal. We're looking for ways in which we can participate on this front. While it's still early in the game, we're investigating offshore export opportunities for propane and butane that would allow Pembina to leverage our existing assets and provide a solution for Canadian producers. Given our existing real assets, we're also investigating options for how we can optimize and expand our footprint. In terms of financing, on October 22, we closed the operating of $450 million of senior unsecured medium-term notes, which have a fixed interest rate at 3.77% per annum and will mature on October 24, 2022. We're currently in a position of strong liquidity with cash and unutilized debt facilities at the end of the third quarter of about $690 million. After taking the $450 million medium-term notes into consideration, the proceeds of which were used to repay a portion of our existing credit facility, we currently have about $1.1 billion in cash and unutilized debt facilities. Our DRIP also continues to be a source of consistent cash and is raising approximately $20 million per month or about $240 million per year. Given this, we believe we have the financial flexibility to pursue our capital plans and execute on the projects we discussed today. Now prior to opening up the lines for questions, I'd like to remind you that Pembina will be hosting an Investor Day in Toronto on December 4. Our executive leadership team and business vice presidents will be giving presentations on our growth strategy and discussing in detail our 2013 capital spending plan. I'd like to invite anyone wanting to attend to contact our Investor Relations department or access the details on our website under Presentations and Events. We'll be issuing a press release with webcast information in the coming weeks as well for those who won't be able to attend in person. So with that, I'll now ask the operator to open up the call for questions and answers. Over to you, Sarah.