Kristen Shults; Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer; Western Midstream Partners LP
Welcome to Western Midstream’s third-quarter 2024 post-earnings call fireside chat with our Chief Financial Officer, Kristen Shults; and our newly appointed Chief Executive Officer, Oscar Brown.
Oscar, congratulations on your new role. Why don’t you give our investors a quick introduction, a brief overview of your background, and how long you’ve been affiliated with WES?
Thanks, Daniel. It’s a great pleasure to be here, and I’ve actually had a great couple of weeks stepping into the role. So my background goes back a long ways. I started my career on the banking side and spent 25 years covering energy companies and working with those companies to grow their businesses and provide capital. About eight years ago, I decided to take the challenge of joining industries and joined Occidental Petroleum and spent four years with the company working with them in business development and leading supply chain and also part of our strategy.
Over that time, really had the opportunity to maintain relationships with certain Board members and the CEO and a lot of the leaders over there. And of course, our Chairman is a great colleague and friend of mine.
So after that, we did part ways. So it’s important to note that we did leave. I’d like to say that I very much like Occi, I continue to like them, but I love WES, and the last five years of my life and part of my time has been spent focused on WES as a Board member and as a director. In the interim period between Occi and WES, I did spend a few years in the renewable space. So really got a chance to live first hand within the energy transition and really experience a lot of the challenges that that part of the energy industry is facing.
So I’m very pleased to be back in the oil and gas business, and very pleased to take sort of additional responsibilities with WES. Of course, I remain on the Board, but I’m really excited with the opportunities we have to grow the company and grow the business and make WES even bigger and better than before.
That’s a great lead-in. A lot of our investors are probably interested in hearing more of your top priorities for WES. Can we expect to see any changes in strategy in the near term?
Oscar Brown
As I said, my vision for the partnership is very much in line with the current strategy. Because of my time on the Board, I was really a part of supporting the company’s mission and strategy and vision and all those things and certainly how we think about creating value for our unitholders. And again, those priorities, as we said many times, and I’ll continue to say, are really executing on organic expansion opportunities, focusing on accretive M&A where we can find it. I’ll probably say more than once, we like to hold that M&A to a very high standard. And I say risk-adjusted because it’s important to remember when we have organic growth opportunities, we typically have much better insight and control over our risks and our returns.
And in M&A, you sometimes don’t know what you get. But in the case of Meritage, it was a textbook acquisition and validation of the company’s strategy and how to find accretive M&A and execute and integrate appropriately.
And then finally, all this really leads to probably the most important thing, which is growing our base distribution over time and in line with the growth of the business. So all these should sound very familiar to investors. We continue to look for ways to return capital to our unitholders at the same time, drive this growth, so we have a sustainable business model over time and then, of course, maintain our strong investment-grade ratings on the balance sheet.
Daniel Jenkins
Thank you, Oscar. Kristen, looking at our third-quarter results, can you give us a general overview and an update on what happened during the quarter and what we should expect for the remainder of the year?
Kristen Shults
Sure, Daniel. So the third quarter was another very strong quarter for WES. We had strong customer service, and our system operability was above 98% despite doing quite a bit of maintenance activity and turnaround activity in our plants. Our natural gas throughput increased by 1% quarter over quarter due to Powder River Basin growth and our seventh consecutive quarter of record natural gas throughput in the Delaware Basin. Our crude and NGL volumes decreased by 2%, but this was primarily due to decreased throughput in the DJ Basin with the sale of the Wamsutter pipeline in Wyoming and finally, lower volumes from our equity investments.
Our produced water volumes increased 2% quarter over quarter. We had some of our producers taking volumes off the system for recycling programs. These volumes will eventually make their way back on to the system, but it did cause our throughput to be a little bit lower than what we expected for the quarter. Because of our third-quarter throughput activity and then what we’re seeing for the rest of the year, we actually lowered our year-over-year average throughput growth rates that we put into our slide deck.
So our produced water went from mid- to upper teens to low double digits growth year over year, and our crude went from low teens to low double digits year over year. These changes were really on the margin, which is why we’re still able to say that we’ll be towards the high end of our adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow guidance ranges for the year.
From a financial perspective, our adjusted EBITDA was slightly below what we saw for Q2. Because of the plant turnaround activity that we had, we experienced lower recoveries. And with lower commodity prices, coupled with those lower recoveries, we didn’t have quite as much adjusted gross margin.
Additionally, there was a distribution payment from one of our JVs that we didn’t receive this quarter that we expect to receive next quarter. And as we’ve talked about many times, our OpEx was a little bit higher, especially during the second quarter and third quarter just from maintenance activities that pick up during that time period. So as we’re looking forward into Q4, we expect our adjusted EBITDA to tick back up as those turnaround activities have subsided and much of the maintenance work will have subsided as well.
We also mentioned in our press release that we had executed an agreement pertaining to our Mi Vida JV, where we essentially created a plant within a plant type of structure. So we now have 100 million cubic feet a day of dedicated processing capacity that will become part of our Delaware Basin complex processing capacity in mid-2025.
Daniel Jenkins
I know we will provide our full outlook for 2025 in February, but are there any early insights you can give us into next year?
Kristen Shults
Sure. Maybe just a few notes. When we’re looking at capital for 2025, we’re expecting capital to be lower than it was in 2024. We’re going to finish the vast majority of the construction on North Loving this year for it to be ready to be placed in service in Q1 of 2025. So don’t expect to have a plant, which is a very large capital project impacting our capital budget.
We do expect to have more spend in the PRB as we’re building out that system more. And as we talked about on prior calls, we’ve had a lot of commercial successes up in the Powder River Basin.
More insight will come on the February call as it relates to EBITDA, but to provide a little clarity on what we’re seeing right now in terms of throughput in 2025. When we look at the forecast that we’ve been receiving from our producers for next year, we expect the growth in the Delaware and DJ Basins to moderate relative to what we’ve seen in 2023 and 2024. We’ve had a few years now of increased activity levels and incremental wells coming online. And while activity is still very strong in those basins, that steady activity is leading to more moderate growth rate.
Additionally, when we look at our total portfolio growth, our average year-over-year throughput increased from 2023 to 2024 in part due to the acquisition of Meritage Midstream. And so this year, we haven’t had an acquisition like this. In fact, we’ve been divesting of our assets. So with that, we won’t be including 23,000 barrels a day of crude oil and NGLs, and we won’t have 38 million cubic feet a day of natural gas throughput associated with those JVs that we divested of this year. Those volumes that are lost from those asset sales represent approximately $26 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2024 that will not repeat in 2025.
With that, over the next few months, we’ll be receiving updated forecast from our producers as they continue to work through their budgets and their changes in the overall environment, and these forecasts will allow us to provide further thoughts and guidance in February. We’re still really excited about 2025. We’ve had a lot of growth projects going on this year. The PRB has been doing incredibly well. But just wanted to give a little bit of context of ’25 relative to 2024 just because we did have such large throughput increases in ’24 because of the inorganic opportunities and uptick in activity that we saw in prior years, too.
Daniel Jenkins
Thanks, Kristen. Oscar, would you end by reiterating WES’s capital allocation priorities going forward?
Oscar Brown
Sure, Daniel. We’ve worked really hard over the past few years to grow the business, prudently allocate capital, improve the strength of our balance sheet, and generate leading returns for our stakeholders. In fact, since becoming an independent partnership, we have reduced our net debt balances and lowered our leverage ratio considerably. We’ve also paid out almost $4 billion to unitholders through distributions and bought back over $1 billion of our common units or about 15% of the unaffected unit count.
Now that we have comfortably achieved our 3 times leverage target a little sooner than we expected, we plan to continue focusing on the following three priorities: organic growth, accretive acquisitions, and increasing our distributions to unitholders. Regarding organic growth, and this one is my favorite way to grow the business, we’ll continue to work with our customers to support them with projects that meet their needs and generate the returns our unitholders expect with reasonable payback periods. Organic growth tends to be lower risk than acquisitions.
That said, we continue to evaluate acquisitions that are accretive to our free cash flow and returns over time, such as the Meritage acquisition. We want to follow our customers where they need us, and we need to be able to add value as an owner to drive those returns. Even on a risk-adjusted basis, acquisitions are still held to a higher standard.
And finally, the reason for our first two priorities is the most important one, driving long-term distribution growth. We have said and I continue to support, we will grow our distribution in line with the overall growth in our business. If we are unable to find organic acquisition or other opportunities that can generate sufficient returns and long-term free cash flow growth over time, we also have our enhanced distribution framework to return additional capital to unitholders as well as the ability to repurchase units.
Daniel Jenkins
Oscar, Kristen, thank you both for joining us today. For our listeners, if you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Our contact information is located in the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at westernmidstream.com.
