Greg L. Armstrong - Plains All American Pipeline LP
Management
Yeah, I mean, if I could probably say what you're thinking, it was a terrible quarter for NGL. And with respect to kind of what's happening, and I'll let Harry kind of help clean up any of my misspeaks here, but clearly, if you follow some of the other MLPs, it was a bit of a warmer weather and it created pressure on margins because of that. So, you have to clear the product out. In addition, what we're seeing and quite candidly, Jeremy, our job is to look around corners and see problems before they show up. In this particular case, we were either late or, in some cases, didn't see it. And there's been a dramatic increase in exports that's kind of changed the dynamics in some of the regional relationships that affect margins. Just to put it in perspective, I think first quarter 2017 exports of propane-related products was order of magnitude 1 million barrels a day. That's up 50% over what it was in the first quarter of 2016, and it's up somewhere close to double what it was in the first quarter of 2015. So, what's happened and, in some cases, we've had situation where we've had inventory that was based on old contract structures and the clearing mechanism was always if you didn't have enough of a warm winter to get it out of that location, you could ship it to a place like Bellevue. Well the infrastructure was basically full, and we didn't have the ability to get that out of there. So, we ended up basically getting our face peeled off on the margin on that. What we've done already is we've changed the contract structure and put basically floors underneath there. We've given up some upside to do that, but given what just happened, we think that's a good tradeoff. And so, where we can, we're basically going through – in fact in many places already, changed the contract structure so that it won't affect the 2018 season. It's certainly going to affect the rest of summer 2017 just because of some of the dynamics. And then, in addition to that, candidly we'll carry less inventory, and I think the market will be a little bit more at risk and have to put a higher value on our storage assets if it turns out that because we don't carry enough inventory, they can't get all the products that they need. The next season around, that should manifest itself into a recognition of the value of our storage.