Willie Chiang
Analyst · Wells Fargo. Your line is open
Thank you, Blake. Happy Friday, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Earlier this morning, we announced strong results, reflecting good progress towards executing on our full-year 2023 targets and providing us with confidence and our ability to deliver on the plan that we laid out in February. As a result, our comments today will be brief. It's been a volatile few months from a macro perspective with recessionary concerns, headlines in the banking industry and an unexpected OPEC production cut along with the ongoing war in the Ukraine. Through all of this, we remain confident that Plains is well positioned for the long-term as North American supply will continue to be critical to meeting growing long-term global demand. For 2023 and as illustrated on Slide 4, our focus is on execution. And through the first quarter, we've done just that. Reporting adjusted EBITDA attributable to PAA of $715 million. As a result of our first quarter performance and our outlook for the balance of the year, we are reaffirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $2.45 billion to $2.55 billion for 2023. Additionally, we continue to expect free cash flow generation of approximately $1.6 billion and common distribution coverage of 215%, which includes our recent $0.20 per unit annualized distribution increase. Looking forward, we expect that our continued focus on free cash flow supports our previously announced capital allocation framework, which targets multi-year annualized distribution increases of $0.15 per unit, and further debt and leverage reduction. Al will share additional detail on our quarterly performance and 2023 outlook in his portion of the call. Let me shift to the Permian. We continue to capture increasing volumes on our system and we expect production growth of plus or minus 500,000 barrels a day exit-to-exit in 2023 based on an assumed 2022 exit production of approximately 5.65 million barrels a day. While still relatively early in the year, current horizontal rig count is tracking in line with our expected full-year average of 340 horizontal rigs, and we continue to monitor additional data points, including well completion activity and commodity price environment. Consistent with our February guidance and as shown on Slide 5, we expect year-over-year growth in our Crude Oil segment, underpinned by continued Permian production and tariff growth volumes in our gathering and our long haul systems. Before I hand it over to Al, I wanted to reinforce that capital discipline remains front and center as we continue to advance capital efficient NGL opportunities around our Fort Saskatchewan facility, which we expect to share additional detail on later this year. With that, I'll turn the call over to Al.