Enterprise Products' CEO Presents at Master Limited Partnership Investor Conference (Transcript)

Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (EPD)

Master Limited Partnership Investor Conference Transcript

May 22, 2013 8:00 AM ET

Executives

Mary Lyman - Executive Director, NAPTP

Mike Creel - Chief Executive Officer

Analysts

Jeremy Tonet - J. P. Morgan

Presentation

Mary Lyman

Annual MLP Investor Conference and for those of you who aren’t familiar with me. I’m Mary Lyman, the Executive Director of NAPTP. I want to assure you that we have things in control in Washington. Congress has felt fairly gridlock and we are doing our best to keep it that way. The IRS has been helping us a lot lately and we appreciate that.

I’d like to thank our very generous sponsors. We had a record amount of sponsors this year as you can see up on the screen. And if you haven’t already, be sure to stop by the tables of our Platinum Sponsors. They have some good giveaways for you.

Few housekeeping items, attendance is at maximum capacity this year. So please be extra considerate of the presentation timing and your individual meeting starting in, so that we can have smooth transitions between meetings.

Again, this year we are providing all of the MLP presentations and Investor Relations materials here electronically on USB drive, which is actually included in this pen that came with your padfolio.

You can download all the presentations from the computer kiosk in our registration area and there are just three steps and the instructions are located right on the computer screen.

Please note that the 30-minute breakout location following each presentation is outlined in your agenda directly under the presentation track number and since we are in a new hotel this year, we’ve provided you with -- we have map at the registration desk that show the [name of] locations.

Also please note we’ve had a last minute cancellation on our agenda, CVR Partners which was due to present today has very -- suddenly entered into secondary offering and as a result is now in a quite period and cannot present. So they send their apologies and they will not be here today.

One-on-ones, to get a copy of your current one-on-one meetings schedule or make changes you can stop by the scheduling desk and get a current printout. The majority of the one-on-one meeting rooms are on this floor and there are few on the lobby level and a couple upstairs, but mostly on this level. The locations will be noted on your individual one-on-ones schedule.

For those of you who are will not able to stay in this hotel and are staying at the Marriott, shuttle transportation is provided each morning and evening between 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. in the morning, and at the conclusion of presentations, as well as after the reception tonight. Shuttle will be beginning at 3:00 p.m. tomorrow afternoon.

That’s all of the housekeeping item, if you have any other questions, stop by the registration or the scheduling desk.

And with that, I will -- we will start with our first presenter, Enterprise Products Partners. Thank you.

Jeremy Tonet - J. P. Morgan

Good morning. My name is Jeremy Tonet. I cover the MPL at J. P. Morgan. Our first, as Mary said to present is Enterprise Products. The largest publicly trade partnership with the $57 billion market cap. With the presence just about every basin and services across our all midstream, including natural gas, NGL services and crude oil as well. Enterprise is a leader in the space. And here to tell you all about Enterprise exciting story and how they keep beating our earnings estimates is CEO, Mike Creel.

Mike Creel

Thanks Jeremy. Pleasure to be here. Most exciting slide of today I’m sure for most of you is forward-looking statements, so we’ll be right to pass that one. So a lot of new faces yesterday and so I thought just touch again on some of these key investment considerations. As Jeremy said, we are the largest publicly traded energy partnership, Enterprise value of over $70 billion. We rank 64th on the Fortune 500, 226 on the Global For 500.

We have an integrated midstream mix of assets that we’ll talk about. But for us it’s very important to focus on Enterprise as a business not just a collection of assets. We serve producers and consumers of natural gas, natural gas liquids, crude, refined products. We have a very unique set of assets and go about our growth in way that, perhaps a bit different than some of our peers.

That provides us with diversified sources of cash flows which helps us in times where certain parts of the business are not doing as well as others as it tends to, even at our cash flows and reduce some of the volatility and risk in our business.

We will show you some of our growth projects that we’ve got. We will make sure that you have good visibility of the growth. We have about $7.5 billion worth of capital projects that are currently under construction that doesn’t include things that we are looking at for future growth.

We do have a very investor friendly format. We have been complicated once upon a time. We’ve been simple and we think simple is better. We are the only Baa1/BBB+ MLP. We have no GP incentive distribution rates which mean that we have a lower cost of equity capital and that translates into higher accretion for our unitholders. We have raised distribution every quarter for the last 35 quarters and the last distribution increase was a 6.8% year-over-year from first quarter of 2012 to first quarter of this year.

Here is our asset base. Your can see that we’ve spend the major basins in the U.S. We’ve got over 50,000 miles of pipelines, 200 million barrels of storage for natural gas, NGLs, I’m sorry, for natural liquids, NGLs, crude oil, refined products.

We’ve got 18 -- 14 Bcf now of natural gas storage capacity. We’ve got 24 natural gas processing plants, 21 NGL and propylene fractionators, offshore hub platforms, butane isomerization, a whole host of assets that connect with each other to provide a seamless set of services to our customers.

Here you can see the mix in our gross operation margins for the last 12 months and on the right side of this chart, you can see the growth capital that we expect to spend from 2011 to 2015.

Again we have 2015 estimate. These are projects that are under construction, that have been sanction. These don’t include projects that we've not yet announced or approved. So you can see here that 53% of our gross operating margin came from our NGL pipelines and services segment, and about 46% of the capital over this time period is going to be spent on that business.

Similarly on the onshore natural gas pipeline and services, 17% of our gross operating margin came from that segment, 24% of our capital is going into that and that includes gas pipelines that we built in the Eagle Ford and Haynesville that are already in the service.

The petrochemical and refined products is about 14% of gross operating margin and it accounts for about 8% of the capital over that time. And the green you can see our onshore crude oil pipelines that’s the pretty big focus for us now, as 13% of gross operating margin for the trailing 12 months, about 21% of the capital that we expect to spend, a lot of that is around the Seaway, ECHO terminal and the Houston area and we’ll show you slide that talk deeply about what we are doing there.

What we did here is put our assets over a map in the U.S. that shows the major shale and non-conventional plays, and you can see that our assets are in the right locations. You can see here that the green is primarily rich gas and crude oil, the pink is more dry gas, where we have some gaps perhaps in the Marcellus and Utica.

We don’t have anything currently operating in their to serve those producers but we're working on the ATEX pipeline that will be capable of moving liquids out of there down to the Gulf Coast to the major consuming regions.

Similarly, you don’t see any assets in the North Dakota area with the Bakken and the Three Forks area. But we do have marketing group there that gathers crude ethylese with trucks. We are looking to see how we can expand that business but its doing quite nicely with limited capital base. And we are also expanding our pipeline system to get up into the Piceance and we’ll talk about some of those projects little more.

Here you can see if not just natural gas and natural gas liquids from 2008 to 2020, we expect production of crude oil in the U.S. to increase by 8 million barrels a day. And you can see a little over half of that is north of Cushing, a little under half of that is south of Cushing, but a lot of these crude needs to come down to the Gulf Coast and we are looking for solutions to facilitate that.

You can see that ECHO terminal that we’ve got that green star on the Texas Gulf Coast is a big focus of ours and that’s because in the Texas area there is 4 million barrels of refining demand, it’s about 25% of total U.S. capacity.

This is a little busy and maybe easier to read when you kind of download the presentation. But what it does, it show the major plays and show our assets that can really facilitate some of the growth there. And you can see in the Marcellus and Utica, the primary assets that we have is ATEX pipeline.

Anadarko in Cana and Woodford area, we’ve got our Red River System and the MAPL, Mid-America Pipeline System. Mississippi, Chat and Lime, the Seaway in the Mid-America Pipeline System again and just going across, you can see that we’ve got assets that are in the right places and we are looking to expand the capacity of those and make sure that we are there to serve the producers.

I’ve talked about visibility to growth, this is the $7.5 billion of projects that we have currently under construction and you can see that of this about $1.8 billion of these assets are going into service this year, next year is a big year with about $4.6 billion of assets going into services, 2015 only shows $1.1 billion of assets going into service in that year. But keep in mind that we are likely going to have other projects that we do later in this year or 2014, that will add to the total that go into service in 2015.

Talk a little bit about some of our selected projects. This is a map that just kind of shows them all in one spot. You can see that we’ve got a couple of big areas that we’re focused on. One, again is the Rocky Mountains, that’s been an area that we’ve focused on for years.

You’ve got the Seaway pipeline that we’re busy looping that pipeline. The Gulf Coast project as a multitude of those and then we’ve got our ATEX Express pipeline. And again building and refurbishing our refined products pipeline to convert to an ethane pipeline to serve the Marcellus and Utica area.

Drilling in on that a little bit in the NGL space, we’ve got our Mid-America Pipeline system that we are busy expanding yet again. We’ve got about 90% of the project cost that are already locked in. The capacity of that is 275,000 barrels a day and we can increase that to 350,000 barrels a day.

We expect that to go in service in the second quarter of 2014. In Texas, and I’ll start at the bottom is the Texas Express pipeline that we’re constructing. That’s a joint venture among ourselves, Enbridge, Anadarko and DCP Midstream. That’s 580 miles of 20 inch pipe and that’s designed to move NGLs from the Texas Panhandle down to Mont Belvieu area. Again, we expect that to go into service in second quarter of this year -- third quarter of this year. And most of those project costs are already locked in.

Extending up from there, going up to the Colorado area is the Front Range project, again a joint venture among ourselves, Anadarko and DCP Midstream. That project will extend from Piceance Basin kind of around the Denver Airport and connect in with Texas Express, moving NGLs down from that area and that’s about 535 miles a pipe. We expect that to be in-service by the end of the year.

We think these are great projects, Front Range and Texas Express. We’ve got good partners that bring something to the table in terms of expertise, liquids. It’s a great [marriage]. We think it’s going to be a wonderful project.

Here you can see our ATEX Express pipeline. This is a pipeline that we are repurposing a 16-inch refine products pipeline, extending that pipeline with 20-inch pipe into the Marcellus in the Utica area and that will be able to bring ethane down to the new ethylene plants that you are hearing about on U.S. Gulf Coast. It’s got a capacity of 190,000 barrels a day. We expected that to be in-service by the first quarter of next year.

Rounding that out is our Aegis Ethane Header System. We’ve talked about this for quite some time. We’re building pipe from Mont Belvieu over to the Mississippi River corridor. That connects with an ethane pipeline that we already have from Corpus up to Mont Belvieu ties into the ATEX pipeline.

So the ethylene customers that we have will have a steady supply of ethane whenever they need it. It’s connected into our Mont Belvieu storage system. So it really provides a source of ethane that is going to be hard to replicate in terms of security of supply.

This is our crude oil system. Again, we’re pretty focused on crude oil these days. It started with the Seaway pipeline, which was a joint venture between ourselves and ConocoPhillips. ConocoPhillips sold their 50% interest to Enbridge and we and Enbridge reversed Seaway last summer.

We took the third and fourth quarters of last year powering it up to the max capacity. Seaway pipeline as it stands today can move at the most 400,000 barrels a day of crude oil. I think it’s all light sweet crude. In crude, we’re moving fair amount of heavy crude. Anywhere from 35% to 40% of that crude is heavy grade in crude, which slows down the movement of the crude on the system.

So today, we’re probably flowing something closer to 300,000 barrels a day. We're also building a parallel pipeline, a 30-inch pipe that will increase the capacity by another 450,000 barrels a day and provide us some flexibility in terms of using perhaps one of those pipeline for heavy crude, one for light crude and being able to optimize total throughput.

The Eagle Ford crude pipeline is one that we built and will be up and running in third quarter. That’s a joint venture with Plains, going from Gardendale to Lyssy and then down to Corpus Christi. Plains, this is our first joint venture with Plains. They have been wonderful to work with. We think it’s a win-win for both partnerships, very excited about the prospect there and we think there is a lot more expansion around there.

The ECHO terminal is a facility that we have just outside of Houston. In fact, I think it’s inside the city limits. But that’s where Seaway will ultimately connect into. We build storage there. We’re building more storage. We’re going to build it out to 6 million barrels of storage capacity.

We will also loop or link the ECHO terminal with the Port Arthur market and so we will provide those refineries with the access to the ECHO terminal. We think this is going to be a key facility for the U.S. Gulf Coast. And if you look at the refineries in the Houston, Texas City area, this is gong to be a great facility for them.

This is ECHO that exists today and you can see the red pipelines or the pipes that we have. We do have other facilities, Morgan’s Point but you can see that we’re not directly connected to a lot of these other refineries. So in order to move crude from ECHO to those refineries, we had to go through third-party pipelines and sometimes two and three different pipelines just to get the crude to those refineries.

So we are planning on building more pipes, so that we can directly connect ECHO to those terminals. We think that’s going to be very important for those refinery customers and we think it’s also going to be important for other pipelines coming into the area to have a central point to locate too.

And here you can see other projects designed to bring crude oil into the Houston area to the extent that we can connect those into ECHO. We provide the shippers and the refiners with the connectivity that they really need.

These are Eagle Ford shale projects. We’ve got about $4 billion of capital that are involved in these various projects and about $3.3 billion of this has already been placed in service. They started with a rich crude oil pipeline going to the heart of the Eagle Ford shale to collect rich natural gas segregated from the dry gas.

From there, we’re taking it to the middle of that map, Yoakum Cryo Plant, where we have three trains built. Those trains were normally sized at 300,000 million cubic feet a day of natural gas. We’re running far in excess of that by about 1.1 Bcf a day in total. So these three trains are doing what we thought four trains would do before.

From the tailgate of that plant, you can see that there is a pipeline, the green pipeline going over to Mont Belvieu that’s for the NGLs coming off the plant. The blue pipeline going over to Wilson is our storage facility, that’s a residue gas pipeline. Taking that residue gas interconnects with a number of other pipelines to give customers the optimal access to price points that provide them the best net backs.

You can see the pipeline that in kind of LaSalle pipeline in blue. That is our Plains joint venture. Again going from Gardendale down to Three Rivers, from Three Rivers, it goes up to Lyssy and connects with our crude oil system and it also goes down to the Corpus Christi area. It’s a lot of work in a pretty short period of time but we’re not through yet.

On the propane side, we have increased the capacity of our export facility. This shows you what we did in 2012. We loaded 46 million barrels of propane. This year we expect that to be closer to 62 million barrels and you can see where the propane is going. It’s going to Mexico, it’s going to Central America. There’s some that’s going to Europe, there’s some that’s going to the Far East. We’ve had interest in Far East customers looking at capacity on the export facility beginning at the time, Panama Canal opens up for its expanded throughput.

You can see the chart on the bottom right is kind of interesting, it shows the top 10 propane exporting countries. You can see that Qatar is there at about 64 million barrels. We expect it to be around 62 million barrel of ourselves in 2013 and for the country as a whole closer to 78 million barrels. So you can see that we become a pretty important force in the international propane export markets.

One of things that has happened with ethylene plant is they’ve gone to lighter and lighter feedstock is they are producing less propylene. This chart shows you the propylene supply, those yellow bars and you can see that they’ve decreased by 36% of this time.

And you can see the feedstock, you can see the naphtha is the amount of a naphtha going into crackers in red and the amount of ethane in blue. What that means is there is a lot less propylene that’s being produced and you can see that demand is not going down but the supply has.

So there is a need for new propylene supplies. That has led us to announce our propane dehydrogenation projects. It’s on purpose propylene project. It’s going to consume about 35,000 barrels a day of propane and produce 1.65 billion pounds a year of propylene. We’ve got that contracted with high-quality customers, long-term contracts. It does take some time to build the same. We expect it to be operational about 2015. Again, we think is part of our C4 value chain.

Moving into the financials, we had pretty good results. You can see that our naphtha gas pipeline volume have increased pretty steadily. What we’ve shown here is we break that down between the offshore and onshore. The onshore is in blue, offshore is in gold. We do have hopes that offshore is going to come back but frankly we think it’s going to be more crude focus going forward.

On the bottom, you can see the NGL propylene fractionation and butane isomerization volumes have increased pretty substantially. Liquid pipeline volumes have also increased. The bottom right is a little busy. The blue bars show our equity NGL production. And you can see that it had been declining a little. It’s back up in first quarter of 2013. That’s primarily because of the production in South Texas.

In those South Texas plants, some of the producers have the option to elect not to process to the extent -- they elect not to process, we can process their gas. And since we’re processing on a variable economic basis instead of fee base, we can extract more value. And so what we have elected to do in some cases is process that gas when they’ve chosen not to and that’s why the equity NGL volumes are up a bit.

But more importantly, you can see the red line and those are our fee-based volumes. And you can see that we have steadily increased our fee-based volumes. In fact, we have increased in the Rockies by renegotiating some of those people contracts to fee based contracts. We think that's important for the producer as well as for enterprise because if a producer is subject to a people contract, Enterprise gets all of the uplift from the NGLs and that just incentivizes them to drill.

So converting that to a fee based contract and they’ve got the uplift from NGLs and encourages them to drill more, gives us more volumes to process and to transport through our pipeline. And that’s proven to be pretty good successful combination for both of those.

You can see what that’s done in terms of our gross operating margin, $1.2 billion for the first quarter compared to the $4.4 billion for the entire 2012. Distributable cash flow continues to grow. Distribution as I’ve said, we will increase distributions every quarter for last 35 quarters. Bottom right is another busy chart this shows our retained distributable cash flow.

You can see that we retained about $1.9 billion in 2012 but in full disclosure you will see that we’ve also highlighted in gold the amount of non-recurring items. So this comes from assets sales and things that we don’t expect to continue going forward but all of this cash flow with cash we put back into the business to help fund our growth and to make sure that we don’t have to be back in the capital market as frequently as we would otherwise.

We have had a long history of retaining distributable cash flow and we have always maintained that it make sense for our long-term investors if we’re trading at 5% yield and we can retain some of that cash flow, redeploy and do projects that yield 15% cash on cash returns that provides us with more cash to increase distribution going forward, increases the value of the partnership, limits our need to go to the equity capital markets and we think that’s been pretty successful model.

This chart shows you the distributable cash flow and gold bar show the amount of distribution that we’ve paid to our limited partners. The little bit of green in there shows the amount that we’ve paid to our general partner including the internal distribution right and you can see that has gone away.

The blue is the retained distributing cash flow. The silver is retained as well but it’s non-recurring and so this is how we can look at how do we fund ourselves going forward with appropriate mix of retaining cash flow and using the capital markets in a prudent way.

From the debt side, you can see that’s from 2009 through first quarter of 2013, we’ve issued over $11 billion of debt. Over half of -- almost half of that has been in the 30-year market, over 30% has been 10 year. Our view is that we’re funding long-term assets, we want to do it for long-term debt.

We’re taking advantage of the debt capital markets in the low interest rates. So while we’ve done all this, you can see also that we’ve gone from 7.9 years of average maturity to 14.3 years. So we’ve linked in that maturity profile and at the same time we’ve taken our average cost of debt down from 6.1% at the end of 2009 to 5.4% today. That is going to be pretty meaningful going forward in terms of the accretion that we have on our projects to our unit holders.

And this attempts to kind of quantify the accretion side of the equation. What we’ve done here is that, okay, let’s take a look at the project that we’re putting into the service between now and 2015. And let’s assume that we had cash-on-cash retains anywhere from 10% to 17.5%.

We’re taking our cost of equity capital. We’re assuming that we’re going to keep increasing our distribution every quarter like we have. And so that’s important because we’re not saying our cost of equity capitals going to be static, it’s going to say the same. It’s not, every time we increase distributions, cost of equity capital goes up. We’ve taken the 10-year cost of debt. We’re blending that together to get an average -- weighted average cost of capital and that’s 4.7% over this time.

So dropping now to the bottom, if we’re earning 10% on this assets and our cost of capital is 4.7%, the amount of accretion and distributable cash flow per unit goes up 23% at the end of this time. And if it is at 17.5%, that accretion is 55%. And again this assumes that we don’t do any more projects other than those that are already under construction.

So we think this is a pretty powerful slide. It demonstrates the fact that if you are prudent about the way you manage your balance sheet, you do good projects. You de-risk the projects to make sure you have fee-based contracts with high quality customers. This is kind of the thing, we think MLP investors are looking for.

And then no presentation would be complete without this one. What we’ve done here is we’ve shown Enterprise and nine other investment asset classes. And we’ve shown it over time. If you look on the right side for the first three months of this year for three, five and 10-year compound annual growth rate, Enterprise is at the top.

You’ll notice that in orange is the AMZ of the Alerian Index, the MLP index, which tells you that MLP has been a great place to be over the last five or 10 years. What we would suggest is that if you like the MLP space then Enterprise is certainly a good place to look.

And with that, I think we’ve got time for couple of questions. Sure.

Question-and-Answer Session

Unidentified Analyst

(Inaudible)

Mike Creel

Question was, how much ethane rejection that we think in our system and I’ll rephrase that, how much we think overall. We think it’s somewhere around 175,000 barrels a day. We’ve heard numbers at 200,000 barrels a day and heard a lot of questions about how long is this going to last. We’re not going to be Pollyanna here. We know that.

We are going to be oversupply ethane and that’s likely going to continue until 2016 or so, when these ethylene crackers come on board. I think we and others are obviously looking at ways to mitigate that. But I think we’re in a long-term, at least two to three-year period where we are going to be oversupply ethane?

Unidentified Analyst

Talk a little bit about the PDH facility that you are building down along the Gulf Coast, about a half dozen of the players have announced new PDH facilities. Can you talk about the economics there? How that may have change with all the new entrance in the market? What assumptions you guys are making to make sure that’s a good project for you guys going forward and what might occur to get some of those other participations to back out, cancel the projects?

Mike Creel

Along PDH, you’re right, there have been a lot of PDH facilities announced, but not quiet clear, how many of those get build. We know ours is going to build. We’ve ordered long-term, long lead items and so that is going forward.

The economics to us are pretty much the way we contract them for is a more or less a totaling arrangement. It’s a fee-based arrangement with a fee tied to the propane price, the utility price, so we are not taking that risk. We don’t know how other people might be pricing their services on the PDH plants, but we knew that we’re not in the position to take the commodity price risk or the utility risk, so we’ve fairly complex formula to insulate us from that.

We do think that will serve along with the export facility to remove propane from the market, tightened propane prices, which in turn should encourage ethylene plants to use more ethane, which will take care of some of that overhang and we also know that ethylene plants are looking at ways to retool to consume more ethane. So, well, I said that there is going to be an overhang, it may not be as bad as people think because of the economics of using ethane.

Unidentified Analyst

Hi. It’s a somewhat similar question which is, how do you foresee the export of liquid natural gas affecting if it all your propane export business?

Mike Creel

We don’t see that affecting the propane business at all. The LNG is principally going to countries that are importing LNG today. We think that from a domestic supply standpoint that really isn’t the problem, there is enough natural gas that producers will produce, whatever is economic and if we need more natural gas to export and we do it at right price then U.S. producers can produce it with no problems.

From the propane side, what we’re saying is, propane going into South America and Mexico, a lot of that’s for heating. They don’t have the infrastructure to use natural gas right now. And we see more and more of it, particularly as the Panama Canal opens up maybe being use as feedstock for some of the petchem plants they don’t have access to light in feedstock.

Unidentified Analyst

I didn’t quiet understand your cost of capital calculation. You get at 5% plus, equity is got to be 9%, seems like it would be more like weighted average cost of capital, so that’s a big tie. Could you, this slide was up so quickly, so I didn’t quiet get it?

Mike Creel

Yeah. We did that on purpose. It is confusing. What we did is we took our current yield and we said, okay, we’re going to increase our distribution every quarter for the next five years. And so as we increase distribution the cost of that equity capital goes up. So our cost of equity capital is 4.5% to 5% over that time. You layer in our cost of debt capital that, I forgot what the number is, but it’s 3.7%, maybe little less, 50-50 debt and equity, and so that’s how you get down to that 4.7%.

One other thing that a lot of MPLs do when they look at their cost of capital, they will take their current yield and say, this is our cost of equity capital. Well, they forgot two things, one is they forgot they are going to increase their distributions and sometimes they conveniently forgot, they haven’t seen a distribution that they pay out, which effectively increases our cost of equity.

And so all we are trying to do on that slide, let say, because we have no IDRs. We have a low-cost of equity and debt capital, we’re able to get more accretion out of our project, all things being equal then some by that has, maybe a lower investment grade credit rating or our subinvestment grade credit rating, and incentive distribution rights. And with that, I think we are out of time. Thank so much for your attendance.

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