Enterprise Products Partners L.P.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Enterprise Products Partners first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 1-1 again. We ask that you please limit yourselves to one question and one follow-up. You may get back in the queue as time allows. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Libby Strait, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to the Enterprise Products Partners Conference call to discuss first quarter 2024 earnings. Our speakers today will be Co-Chief Executive Officers of Enterprises General Partners, Jim Teague, and Randy Fowler. Other members of our senior management team are also in attendance for the call today. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, based on the beliefs of the company, as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to Enterprise's management team. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Please refer to our latest filings with the SEC for a list of factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements made during this call. With that, I'll turn it over to Jim.

Thank you, Libby. We have a war in Europe. We have a war in the Middle East. We've got student mobs occupying elite university campuses. We've got a former president being tried for crimes in courts up and down the East Coast. Chaos reigns. In many ways, what's going on today reminds me of the 1960s. We had a war in Asia called the Vietnam War. We had student anti-war demonstrators occupying campuses throughout the country. And while no president was on trial, one was chased from running for a second term. And on top of all that, now, like in 1968, we find that the DNC will hold its convention in Chicago. For those of you too young to know what that means, I suggest you Google 1968 Chicago Convention. But with all this chaos, there is a constant today that should bring calm to investors' concerns in this volatile world. Enterprise continues to deliver. Month after month, quarter after quarter, and year after year, and first quarter, was no exception. Our total gross operating margin for the first quarter was $2.5 billion, a 7% increase compared to the first quarter of last year. Earnings growth for the first quarter was primarily driven by contributions from new assets placed into service during the second half of last year, along with a 17% increase in net marine terminal volumes attributable to continued strength in global demand for U.S. energy, and higher sales volumes and margins in our octane enhancement business. Our system transported 12.3 million barrels a day of crude oil equivalent, that being NGLs, crude oil, petrochemicals, refined products, and natural gas. We generated $1.9 billion in DCF during the quarter, providing a 1.7 times coverage, which supported a 5% increase in cash distributions to partners compared to the same quarter last year. We retained $786 million of DCF. Randy, you're going to get into more color on all this, right? Right. During the quarter, we expanded our Permian natural gas processing infrastructure with the start of our Leonidas plant in the Midland Basin, and our Mentone III plant in the Delaware Basin. Each of these plants has capacity to process more than 300 million cubic feet a day of natural gas and extract over 40,000 barrels a day of NGLs. We currently have three additional 300 million a day plants under construction, two in the Delaware and one in the Midland Basin. Along with our Bahia NGL pipeline, and 14, which is really our 13th fractionator, but we're not going to call it 13. We call it 14. Our plants and the systems that support them are essentially full on the first day of service. With the completion of the three processing plants under construction, we will have a total of 19 Permian processing plants capable of producing 675,000 barrels a day of NGLs. feeding our NGL systems, including one of the world's largest NGL export capacities. We also begin service on phase one of our Texas Western products pipeline system in March, successfully connecting Gulf Coast refined products to end markets in the Permian Basin, with additional phase two destinations in the Albuquerque and Grand Junction markets expected in the second and early third quarters. At the beginning of the month, we received the Deepwater port license for our SPOT project. This is one of the most significant milestones to date in the development of SPOT. We put out a press release on April 9th discussing the project and highlighting the accomplishment of the enterprise team that worked tirelessly for over five years, tirelessly for over five years to obtain the license. I think SPOT's going to be a valuable and highly strategic addition to our asset base as we continue with commercialization. Last week, the EIA reported that the U.S. exported a record 12.1 million barrels a day of liquids, that being crude oil, refined products, and natural gas liquids, to a world hungry for our reliable and plentiful resources that's priced by free market. To put that in perspective, the number was 3.6 million in 2014 and less than 2 million in 2010. Demand for growing U.S. liquids has been and will continue to be primarily in emerging markets. Enterprise will continue to play a key role. We export around 70 million barrels a month of liquids and have an initiative to reach 100 million barrels a month, which does not include spot. We're a significant player in the export market. We expect our growth is going to continue to grow. Randy?