Mackie McCrea
Analyst · Wells Fargo Securities. Please proceed with your question
Sure, this is Mackie again. If you look at a year ago 2015, first quarter versus 2016, we're up about 20% in West Texas on our volumes, and we are up about 10% in the Eagle Ford, which are two of our most active areas. We continue to see growth, and we're optimistic about Delaware and Permian basins, as Tom mentioned in the opening. We've brought on Orla. Within 30 days, it's running pretty close to max capacity. However, we have seen a significant slowdown in the Eagle Ford. We are hoping that we can keep volumes flat for the remainder of the year. There were some volumes shut in and some other issues with producers in the first quarter. We are seeing some of those volumes come back on, so first quarter compared to fourth quarter was down a little bit, but we continue to believe the Eagle Ford will hang in there, the Permian basin, Delaware will grow. The Northeast is growing, it just doesn't show. If everything that we tied into that is dedicated to us flows, our volumes would probably be up 7% or 8% at least in this quarter and ongoing quarters, but the inability to get gas out of the systems in north central Pennsylvania mainly has really minimized or made it very difficult to grow our volumes in the Northeast. But as pipeline projects are completed, certainly some that we're not a part of, but once Rover is completed, it will open up the Northeast in a big way and we'll see significant midstream benefits from that. The other areas are struggles. The Mid Continent, North Louisiana, are areas where we are doing our best just to keep volumes flat because of the amount of rigs that have been pulled out of those areas. And if you look at the first quarter 2016, it started at $42 per barrel, fell to 26, went back up to 30, and I think the average was in the low 30s. Probably about as challenging of a WTI commodity and hence the impact on the liquids related that we've seen in years. We feel like we've kind of weathered the storm. We know we've got, you know, a challenge the rest of this year, but we are extremely optimistic for the long-term.