Greg L. Armstrong - Plains All American Pipeline LP
Management
So part of it's going to depend on how quick we can roll this inventory off that's been building. We've got quite a bit of turnarounds. If you look at our chart, we're expecting a build to start happening in October, November, lot of turnarounds coming. The most quick solution to lower the inventory build is to stop importing more barrels. So part of it, Jeremy, is just how aggressive the Mid-Eastern companies are – countries are in trying to price those barrels into our market. So far they've been pretty aggressive. I think cume to-date, even though we've had high inventory levels and low prices, total imports into the U.S. have been only down about 120,000, 130,000 barrels a day cume to-date. That's pretty amazing when you think about it especially considering that Canada had some – about 200,000 barrels a day of reduced imports in the second quarter over the first quarter because of the Canadian fires. So I'd say whatever activities of foreign countries with respect to trying to push barrels into our market will be – have an impact on that. The other one is just how U.S. producers collectively act over the next 6 months to 9 months maybe 12 months. I refer to it as if we'd have stayed on the 21-day diet we would have been fine. But about – it looked like 10 days to 15 days into the diet, people started picking up rigs and saying let's go back after it again, and that turns it into a 45-day or a 60-day diet. So I think that could extend it. Candidly, we had picked June 30 as kind of our inflection – June 30, 2016 as our point where we thought at that point we'd pick an over-and-under on prices for WTI, probably in the neighborhood of $70, partly because we thought the inventory situation would clean up by then. Or if it didn't, we'd have seen visibility for it to clean up, which means you've had continued production rollover in the U.S. and you've had some concession from the Middle Eastern companies that they've caused enough pain to quit forcing barrels into it, complicate that. I mean there's so many variables in it, Jeremy. If Iran comes on and they don't make room for them, it could get ugly a little bit longer. Again, that would probably hurt our near-term outlook but probably improve the overall long-term because of the rationalization that would have to happen in competitors that we have that have kind of marginal outlooks in that type of environment. So it's, gosh, we think 2016 is kind of the year of transition. We think we've picked to ride it at the mid to late part recovery, but could it be a little bit later? It certainly could, depending on events going on overseas.