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Gibson Energy Inc.
2/19/2025
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Gibson Energy fourth quarter and full year 2024 conference call. Please be advised that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Beth Pollack, Vice President, Capital Markets and Risk. Ms. Pollack, please go ahead.
Thank you, Liz. Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 operational and financial results. Joining me on the call this morning from Gibson Energy are Curtis Philippon, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Riley Hicks, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We also have additional senior management team members in the room to help with questions and answers as required. Listeners are reminded that today's call refers to non-GAP measures, forward-looking information, and is subject to certain assumptions and adjustments and may not be indicative of actual results. Descriptions and qualifications of such measures and information are set forth in our investor presentation, available on our website, and our continuous disclosure documents available on CDAR+. Now I would like to turn the call over to Curtis.
Thank you, Beth. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We'll begin with highlights of 2024, followed by Riley discussing our financial results and position. I will then provide some closing comments. This has been a milestone year in Gibson's history as we advanced our infrastructure strategy and set up our team for the next phase of growth. Since joining at the end of August, I've been pleased with the progress we've made. Our strategy is simple. We focus on our great assets, we remove unnecessary distractions, and implement a goal execution culture that ensures alignment and accountability. On people, we ensure we have the right people, we are organized correctly, remove low performers, and foster an ownership culture. On growth, we prioritize working closely with our customers, growing around our current assets, and building the growth muscle to ensure that we have a pipeline of projects competing for capital. Financially, we are owners, and we stay committed to the governing principles that provide us a strong foundation. To deliver on our strategy, it is imperative that we have the right team in place for this next chapter. On this note, I'm happy to have Riley Hicks, our new Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer with me today. Riley joined Gibson in 2018 and has held critical roles across several areas of the business. Most recently, Riley oversaw corporate development, marketing, and strategy. After working closely with Riley over the last six months, it is clear to me that his financial acumen and proven leadership abilities will be instrumental in driving Gibson forward. Together, we are committed to creating shareholder value and maintaining our strong investment grade financial profile. I'm looking forward to partnering closely with Riley, and I'm confident he'll be a difference maker for the organization. On behalf of the board and the rest of the team, I would also like to acknowledge and thank Sean Brown for his dedication and time with the company. We wish him the best in his future endeavors. In 2024, we demonstrated the value of the Gateway acquisition to our business and to shareholders. I'm pleased to report that we ended the year on a consolidated basis with a adjusted EBITDA of $610 million, an increase over 2023 and a new high-water mark for the company, driven by a full-year contribution from Gateway and record adjusted EBITDA from our infrastructure segment. As we look back on the growth of our infrastructure segment since the transition of our business in 2017, we have now achieved a compound annual growth rate of approximately 14%. Strong performance from infrastructure offset a muted year for marketing, which now accounts for approximately 10% of our adjusted EBITDA and ended the year slightly below the long-term run rate guidance. Overall, strong performance from infrastructure and the continued growth of our long-term, stable cash flows allowed us to end the year with our key financial targets within our key financial targets with leverage of three and a half times within our target range of three to three and a half times and a sustainable payout ratio of 71% within our target range of 70 to 80%. Based on the enhanced quality of our cash flows and strong balance sheet, we have increased our quarterly dividend by 2 cents or 5% to 43 cents per share, marking our sixth consecutive dividend increase and continued focus on delivering value to our shareholders. As we look forward to 2025, we are excited to build upon several recent milestones. In January, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of taking over operations at Gateway and the acquisition has exceeded our expectations and is a key catalyst for our company moving forward. Gateway is a unique, strategically located asset. Its location in the Ingleside Outer Harbor makes it one of only two export terminals in Texas and three in the US with the ability to directly load a very large crude carrier. Its close proximity to the Port of Aransas significantly reduces shipping time and costs for customers. And our unique fungible storage system minimizes the merged costs and inventory carry for our customers. Last year, we reached a new record at the facility when we exported just over two million barrels in a single day, which represents nearly half of all US crude exports on average. A significant achievement which demonstrates the strategic and critical nature of our terminal and its value in the US crude supply chain and the value it provides to both our customers and the entire US economy. In December 2024, we successfully extended and amended a key contract at Gateway while welcoming several new customers to our facility, all of which are major global crude exporters. We also sanctioned dredging, which will increase the depth at our facility and reduce customer shipping time and costs, resulting in higher throughput and increased revenue at Gateway. With the benefit of dredging, which is underway and expected to be complete by the end of Q2, and the previously announced Cactus II connection project, which is also underway and expected to be placed in service in Q3, and along with the impacts of re-contracting some key customers, we are on track to achieve our key Gateway acquisition objectives earlier than anticipated, including growing Gateway EBITDA by over 15 to 20% on a run rate basis by year-end 2025. In Canada, we placed two new tanks at our Edmonton Terminal in service at the end of the year under a 15-year take or pay agreement with Sanobis, providing an incremental 870,000 barrels of storage capacity and increasing throughput at the facility as we enter 2025. Overall, we expect to deploy up to $200 million between growth capital projects and share repurchases in 2025, $100 million of which to be predominantly deployed at Gateway. We're also executing on our Cost Focus campaign, which is targeting over $25 million of cost savings by year-end. To date, we have already implemented initiatives that will allow us to achieve approximately 50% of the school on a run rate basis by year-end, with numerous other additional initiatives still being advanced. We are confident that we will achieve the school by the end of the year. Turning to sustainability, we are proud to report that we recently received our fifth consecutive CDP score of A-, reinforcing our leadership and continued commitment to sustainability. All the while, safety remains foundational to everything we do and we are committed to Mission Zero, our goal of zero harm to people. Thanks to this focus and the commitment of our team to work together to keep each other safe, we achieved a new milestone of 8.8 million hours without a lost time injury for our employee and contract workforce at the end of 2024. I'll now pass the call over to Riley, who will walk through our financial results in more detail.
Thank you, Curtis, and good morning, everyone. I would like to start by saying that it is great to meet you. As Curtis mentioned, I joined the company in 2018 and have had the privilege of taking on a number of roles in both the finance and commercial organizations, most recently as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development, Marketing and Strategy. While it is early days in this new role, my focus will be on continuing to grow the business in a disciplined manner while remaining committed to our conservative financial management and key financial governing principles. I'm excited to take on the challenge of this new role and look forward to meeting and getting to know each of you more over the next few months. As Curtis noted, 2024 was a year of milestones for our company. Focusing on our financial results, on a consolidated basis, we delivered another solid quarter with adjusted EBITDA of 130 million, driven by strong infrastructure performance and offset slightly by muted performance within our marketing segment. Infrastructure adjusted EBITDA of 147 million in the fourth quarter was impacted by several non-recurring charges related to ongoing commercial matters. Concurrent with year end, management reviewed outstanding items and accrued for the financial impact, although we will note there remains a potential to recover some of these costs through commercial resolutions in future periods. When normalized for these items, infrastructure EBITDA would have been approximately 153 million, slightly ahead of our third quarter results due to contribution from the two new tanks placed in service at Edmonton, but is partially offset by lower volumes at the Hartesty Terminal. Adjusted EBITDA for the marketing segment saw a loss of approximately 5 million, which was below the quarterly guidance provided on our Q3 call and represents a $19 million decrease relative to the third quarter. This was a result of reduced opportunities for both our accrued marketing and refined products businesses. With respect to accrued marketing, increased demand for Canadian heavy oil, driven by ample egress out of the basin, contributed to narrow differentials and limited volatility during the quarter. Additionally, the overall market structure for accrued remains in steep backwardation. These factors combined to result in fewer quality, location, and time-based opportunities than had previously been forecasted. On the refined product side, the business continues to be impacted by tight differentials, higher feedstock costs, and compressed margins due to tight crack spreads. In terms of our outlook for the first quarter, absent a change in market conditions, we would anticipate another challenging quarter as steep backwardation continues to persist in the forward curve and opportunities remain limited for both accrued marketing and refined products. Given this outlook, we would anticipate adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter to be around breakeven. That being said, marketing now represents a smaller proportion of our business at approximately 10% on a trailing 12-month basis, which minimizes the impact of muted segment performance on our overall results, and we continue to be well positioned from a balance sheet perspective given our commitment to our key financial governing principles. Further, we anticipate that headwinds facing the marketing group will be temporary in nature and will begin to reverse as pipeline egress starts to tighten in the back half of this year and into 2026. In the meantime, market conditions are ever changing and our team is well positioned to take advantage of any opportunities that arise, but we will not in any way change our risk tolerance to chase market upside. With respect to our full year 2025 marketing guidance, we will look to reevaluate and provide an update on the first quarter conference call. As previously noted, we believe current market conditions will be temporary and we remain confident in our long-term normalized outlook. Turning to distributable cash flow, Gibson generated approximately $71 million in the fourth quarter, which was a $17 million decrease relative to the third quarter. Consistent with our previous commentary, this delta was driven largely by lower marketing results and partially offset by lower taxes and lease costs. As the fourth quarter concluded the 2024 fiscal year, I would also like to compare -over-year results. On an annual basis, the infrastructure segment set another record, generating adjusted EBITDA of $601 million, representing an increase of $107 million over 2023, a result of record-setting volumes achieved at Gateway and Edmonton and partially offset by decreased volumes at Harvesty. -over-year, infrastructure volumes increased approximately 25% or 142 million barrels. In the calculation of our adjusted EBITDA, the company has excluded certain one-time, non-recurring items that impacted our 2024 results. At the same time, marketing adjusted EBITDA decreased from $145 million in 2023 to $63 million in 2024, an $82 million decrease due to the reasons previously discussed. As such, on a consolidated basis, 2024 adjusted EBITDA increased by $20 million to $610 million, a 3% increase over the prior year and a new high watermark for Gibson. These results contributed to distributable cash flow of $375 million in 2024, a decrease of approximately $11 million related to 2023, primarily as a result of muted marketing performance. As Gibson has done to date, we will continue to adhere to our financial governing principles, which include maintaining a strong balance sheet, remaining fully funded for all growth capital, and ensuring our dividends are fully covered by stable, long-term, -or-pay cash flows driven by our infrastructure segment. At year end, our -to-adjusted EBITDA was 3.5 times compared to 3.7 times exiting 2023 and within our target range. On an infrastructure-adjusted basis, our leverage of 3.6 times is also below our target of 4 times. Exiting the year, our payout ratio as both a percentage of distributable cash flow and infrastructure-only basis was 71% at the bottom end of our 70 to 80% target range and well below our infrastructure-only target of less than 100%, highlighting the sustainable nature of our dividend. We have ample headroom with respect to all metrics, providing a significant financial flexibility and not withstanding any continued softness in our marketing business. This financial flexibility supports the 5% dividend increase we announced yesterday. In terms of capital allocation, we continue to remain disciplined and focused on maximizing shareholder value. In December, we announced our 2025 guidance of up to $200 million in growth capital and share buybacks. With continued growth in our free cash flow from our infrastructure segment throughout the year, the quality of our cash flows has improved while we've maintained the strength of our balance sheet and our financial flexibility. The infrastructure results in 2024 marked new highs for the company due to the goal to a successful first full year with Gateway in our portfolio and continued strong and stable performance from our legacy infrastructure assets. We have great momentum entering 2025 with exciting growth projects underway and expected to be completed in Q2 and Q3 at Gateway. These projects will allow us to achieve our previously communicated EBITDA run rate growth target for this asset of 15 to 20% by the end of the year. We continue to maintain our strong and conservative financial profile and disciplined approach to capital allocation, which provides us with significant flexibility, including low leverage on both the total and infrastructure adjusted basis, increasing quality of cash flows as a result of relative growth in our infrastructure business, and significant liquidity with a staggered debt maturity profile. We remain confident that our asset mix and strong balance sheet continue to offer an attractive total return proposition to our investors and supports the sustainability and continued growth of our dividend. We are pleased with both our fourth quarter and full year results in 2024, as well as the strength of our balance sheet and our continued financial flexibility. I will now turn it back to Curtis for his closing remarks.
Thank you, Riley. In closing, the business delivered another solid quarter, which marked the end of a strong 2024. Despite a complex and evolving energy market, we remain focused on financial discipline and operational excellence, demonstrated by our adjusted EBITDA and infrastructure EBITDA, reaching record highs in 2024. We also see a number of tailwinds for Gibson as we complete our growth projects and are well positioned to benefit from a favorable macro environment for infrastructure. Globally, we are seeing strong demand for energy, a growing focus on energy security, and increased recognition of higher quality assets. Lastly, I would like to express my appreciation to the Gibson team for the organizational progress that has been made and for safely delivering a strong year in 2024. I'm excited to see what we'll achieve in 2025. And I will now turn the call over to the operator to open it up for questions.
If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star one one on your touchtone phone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Jeremy Tanec with JPMorgan.
Hi, good morning.
Morning, Jeremy.
Just wanted to dive in a bit more on the marketing, kind of a big gap versus what we were looking for previously. As far as the conditions that led to this, you know, the 2024 marketing, you know, below the 80 to 100 range, could you provide a bit more detail on the components? What were some of the, you know, bigger drivers to the Delta for the quarter and really just more? Do you see that persisting in 2025? Is there any reason to believe that 60 million or so of marketing EBITDA would be, it would be higher in 25 than what we saw in 24?
Yeah, sure, Jeremy. It's Riley here. Thanks. Thanks for the question. In terms of the fourth quarter, the negative quarters, it's really a result of all kind of key factors within the market working against us. Within our refined products business, we continue to face headwinds, including increased speed stock costs and tight crack spreads. In addition, that business is impacted by seasonality. Typically, we see softer demand for paving asphalt in the winter months, given the Canadian winters, and we would build as much inventory as possible through the winter as we can. This was exasperated this year as we have an upcoming turnaround in Q2. So we built even more inventory over the months than typical. So as such, this business was impacted by both tighter margins, but also we didn't recognize some of the profit associated with the products that we were storing over the months. In the past, we've seen some of this in the refined product side, and typically we've been able to offset these headwinds on refined products with our crude marketing group. Unfortunately, in Q4 here, the opportunities didn't really materialize first in the fourth quarter, as ample egress out of the basin, combined with record low inventory levels, resulted in steep backwardation and very little volatility within the market. As such, we typically would stay within our risk profile and our current risk tolerances. We opted remain on the sidelines rather than chasing marketing upside. In terms of 2025, we would see Q1 facing some of the similar issues, not quite as significantly backwardated in 2025 at this point. And moving forward, we're going to reevaluate our guidance for the full year and provide an update on the Q1 call.
Okay, understood. So we'll wait for that then. And then just for the infrastructure with the 15 to 20 percent higher, as you said by 4Q25, could you just remind us, I guess, what base you're working off there or maybe what, you know, in absolute terms, what that number would look like for kind of a regular EBITDA run rate for Gateway?
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Jeremy. So I think when we did the Gateway acquisition, we would have announced it at around nine times multiple. That would imply kind of 40 million EBITDA at Gateway per quarter when we acquired it. So I would calculate the 15 to 20 percent growth off that number.
Sorry, what was that number again?
40 million Canadian per quarter.
Got it. Okay, I think that does it for me. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Aaron McNeil with TD Cowan.
Hey, morning all. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe I'll just kick off with a clarification question. You did address it in the prepared remarks, but, you know, leverage exited the year at the high end of the range. You've got the dredging project underway. You know, you've indicated that marketing could be challenging in Q1. How should we think sort of the competing objectives of remaining in that leverage range and sort of executing on capital allocation priorities beyond sort of the dredging project specifically as it relates to, you know, incremental growth capital or the buyback?
We're still comfortable, Aaron, as we look at the year. We were expecting coming into the year that the front half of the year was going to have a heavier spend related to the growth capital projects with the timing of the dredging work as well as the timing of the cactus connection. And we also were expecting that coming into the early part of the year was likely going to be a little quieter from a marketing standpoint. So when we look at the full year, we're still comfortable with how all this goes around. And in the front half of the year, we weren't planning a lot of share buybacks to begin with. That was always intended to be heavily focused on growth capital in the front half of the year.
Gotcha. Makes sense. Switching gears, you know, just on TMX in the event that it gets expanded, can you kind of paint a picture for us in terms of what the potential upside might look like there?
Yes, the big, you know, immediate impact for us is more throughput through the Edmonton facility. And so we're already seeing that today with TMX's current expansion. And as I think about expanding it further, we obviously just added two tanks in the end of December. And as part of that project, we did the groundwork to get ready for adding two additional tanks. And I would have said coming into the year that we really didn't have that in the plan for 2025. We thought that was a little further out. It's been interesting as we've seen a lot of talk about in sort of accelerating the TMX expansion and in fully utilizing the TMX capacity that we're seeing increasing discussions over potentially accelerating some of that Edmonton expansion.
Thanks, Curtis. I'll turn it back.
Our next question comes from Robert Hope with Scotiabank.
Good morning, everyone. Curtis, you've been in the seat for almost six months now. You know, you did highlight a number of changes in the organization, but what do you think has been the most impactful change or changes so far? And kind of what is left for you to do with the organization in terms of restructuring and changes?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. You know, the biggest thing that we spent the most amount of time on over the first six months is really the people side of things. Coming in with a fresh set of eyes in the organization, we've really looked hard at who do we have in the organization? What is the structure? How focused are we on the business? And had a real push to say, let's make sure that we've got the right people in the seats. Let's remove low performers. Let's also look hard at how we're structured and are we as efficient as possible. You see a fairly significant restructuring amount in the quarter, and that's related to that. We've made a number of people changes as we've addressed, you know, what is the most efficient, focused on the business structure. Let's remove things that aren't value added and let's remove low performers. That's the most impactful work. Really, that's been a lot of focus of the team and I'm quite confident that's going to pay a lot of dividends over the next couple of years.
I appreciate that. And then maybe just over to South Texas, with the dredging project being announced as well as some other contract wins there, what does the commercial tension look there for further commercial initiatives and further contract extensions?
We've been pleased with how that's gone. Good activity in the terminal, good re-contracting last year. At the end of last year, we also announced a couple new customers coming into the terminal that are great, sort of super major oil exporters that are added to the terminal that are, we're excited about what they'll grow into in time. I'd also take one more macro step back and look at everything that's going on in the world right now around tariffs and sort of geopolitical right now. And I think you're seeing a significant shift with the new administration where there's a lot of push, you know, there's sort of one sort of drill, you're seeing a lot of sort of pro-energy sentiment within the US, but you're also seeing a significant push to look at trade balances around the world and to increase the influence of the US and global energy markets. And so I expect you will see increases in crude exports coming out of the US. And I think we are exceptionally well positioned to be a beneficiary of that. You already see it just recently in the last couple of weeks with India making comments about increasing energy imports from the US. You know, one of the prime ways you're going to do that is through crude exports out of Corpus Christi. And yeah, we're pretty excited about that. So you combine that with the good work that team's doing right now to increase the capacity with the dredging and the cactus connection, all of a sudden we're really well situated to be able to increase the throughput out of that facility at the same time where we're expecting you're going to see some increase in demand.
Appreciate that. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Maurice Choi with RBC Capital Markets.
Thanks and good morning, everyone. I just want to come back to the marketing business. You mentioned quite a number of market conditions that you said worked against you in Q4. But were any decisions that your team took, including on the accounting or accrual or revenue recognition side of things this quarter that was different from the past? And if I could just have a quick follow up on that, what is the total fixed cost of this business?
Yeah, thanks, Maurice. It's Riley here. So there was no one time accruals or anything like that that we took in the quarter. It was really just a function of challenging market conditions. You might also say there was no kind of one time trades that caused us to go negative. In terms of the fixed cost of the assets to run, obviously the refineries and asset that has to be run, we have employees to pay and fees to cover, including storage points across the US to get to markets. In terms of a dollar number, we don't typically talk about that or release that. So we'll keep that to ourselves for now. But there is some fixed costs we have to cover and the fixed cost of the assets to run, we have employees to pay and fees to cover. So we have employees In this quarter, we were unable to do so.
You've got to add that we're pretty confident on, as we look at the cost structure going forward, that the marketing business will contribute positively in the year. We look hard at our cost structure and how we're set up for the current market conditions. But I would also caution that this is a business that is a very attractive feature of the Gibson overall business. You look at over the last six years, on average, it's contributed $110 million of EBITDA per year. There will be some volatility in that, but we'll also be very cautious not to overreact to a couple of quiet quarters. We want to make sure preserve that earnings capability of that business.
So I guess when you say all that and recognizing that you are probably looking for a refreshing Q1 call, should we walk away thinking that you structurally believe that this business has changed or is this more of you and your executive team trying to ensure that we manage our street expectations a little bit more reasonably? Yeah,
it's more of a managing expectation. The reality is when we look near term, good egress out of the Western Canadian basin is it reduces some of the marketing opportunity in the near term for us. But if you step back from that, boy, what a great outcome for our customers. And so I think this increasing egress out of the Western Canadian basin suddenly is very healthy for our customers. You see all of our customers on the oil side having good strong years, looking hard at expanding their production. All of those things together will ultimately make for a stronger Canadian business, but it will also eventually lead you back to running into some more tightening of egress, which will bring marketing back into play in a bigger way. And so I don't view this as a structural change. I view this as a temporary factor that nicely benefits our customers, in particular on the infrastructure side of things that we'll go through for a bit here. And I also think as we grow the Gibson footprint over Canada and the US, we suddenly are no longer just the Western Canadian marketing business. There suddenly we have an ability to have a marketing footprint in the US as well with our great asset base there. And so I think if anything, I'm excited structurally about having just sort of this full sort of Western Canada right to the coast sort of view of the business and view of marketing opportunities and infrastructure opportunities.
Thanks. And just finishing up on a follow up on a past question about the changes in the company. I guess more pointfully, Curtis, do you believe that you have the right team and organization in place right now to execute on your strategy? And if not, what segments do you think requires incremental focus?
We're getting there, Boris. Obviously, you're never completely done, but we've got a very strong team, a very experienced team. We've made a number of changes in the group. We've also done a lot of things in the background just on how we operate from a focus on goals and alignment of the entire organization and driving some accountability and focus around sort of key goals in the organization. I think that's going to set us up really well. For me, from sort of getting the team fully in the final stages of adding a chief operating officer that will expect to have an update for the here shortly on that, that's really the key outstanding individual that will be announcing shortly.
Great. Thank you very much. Our next
question comes from Anthony Linton with Jeffreys.
Hey, good morning, guys. And thanks a lot for taking my questions. Sorry, I just sort of revisit some of the questions that have already been asked this morning and maybe just bringing it all together.
When
you think about that long-term outlook for marketing of that 80 to 120, and just some of the potential for the various pipeline expansions that have been out there, how does that sort of funnel through into how you think about that over the next couple years? And then it sounds like the offset there is there'll be some incremental tankage. When do you expect to have greater visibility around that?
Yeah, thanks, Anthony. Riley here. I think with the expansions on the pipes out of the basin, I think it's early days and remains to be seen kind of what projects are going to get done, which grades are going to move out of the basin. And we would do that from a Gibson perspective positively. I think egress out of the basin results in extra production and more growth deployed by customers upstream, which creates opportunities for infrastructure business. From a marketing standpoint, we continue to view this kind of market headwinds as temporal. Even with egress out of the basin, we've seen kind of significant backwardation that we haven't seen in the past. We are starting to see a portion that come back to the market a little bit. So we have some positivity around where the back half of the year and into next year go.
Got it. All right, that's helpful. And then maybe just a couple of cleanup questions. Just on the outlook for growth capital in 2025, it sounds like just reading through your prepared remark, no changes to the plan, the allocation towards the buyback this year.
No change. I think the one interesting thing from a capital allocation standpoint that's maybe advanced over the last few months is I've been very pleasantly surprised by the number of growth opportunities right around our current assets. And so we've been very deliberate on messaging that we see lots of very good opportunities directly around our Western Canadian and our gateway asset in particular. And so lots of interesting work to do around that. That is pulling forward more interesting growth projects over and above the dredging and cactus connection that I expect will be likely closer to the $150 million of growth capital than the $100 million that we talked about at the tail end of last year. And so that's a positive thing. We still have some work to do to go through that. And there's some timing of when that'll actually be deployed. But it's been encouraging to see how much interesting projects we've got working with our current customers around our current facilities.
Got it. Okay. Now that's helpful. And then just the last one for me, the $25 million in cost savings that you've talked about previously, you picked up $5 million from that in 2024 from the interest refinancing. Can you just maybe talk about some of the other levers you have available as you look to achieve that?
It's really been a push inside the company to really focus on cost. And I guess it's every organization has gone through this, that you've gone through an inflationary period. And there's a tendency in every company to sort of accept that as the new norm. And what we've taken opportunity here is to say, okay, let's pause on that. Let's look hard at what is real cost increases and where are there opportunities for us to rethink about how we're doing things. And we've actually had a significant push right through the entire organization to rally around this and look for opportunities to implement cost savings that save money and sort of no dollar is too small. And so we've really rallied the entire company around this and encouraging the very high level of participation to the company. So everything from cutting the watering of plants in that office to making fairly significant operational improvements in the field. But it's really driven around, we want everybody focused on this and we believe there's significant cost savings. And so in the script of the start, we talked about the fact that we're already implemented over half of that $25 million. And not all those are sort of clicking in quite yet from an impact. But by the end of this year, already half of those savings will be realized. And so we're sort of midway through February and already tracking over half. And so I feel pretty good that we're going to exceed the $25 million by the end of the year. Got it. Okay, that's super helpful. Thanks very much.
I'll turn it back.
Our next question comes from Benjamin Fem with BMO.
Hey, thanks. Let me start off on gateway. Like once you execute on this 15 to 20%, give it a growth end of 2025. How do you think about organic growth of that terminal beyond that period time?
Sure.
I think for me, there's two main things I think about sort of next near stage after that. One is additional tankage. And so we have room for additional tankage at Gateway. A number of our current customers are pushing us to look at bringing in more Eagle Ford barrels into the facility. And with Eagle Ford barrels, you do require additional segregated tankage. And we're happy to do that for customers under contract. And so that's an interesting one where you see a fairly rapid sort of deployment of capital to address that tankage situation. I think the second one is a non-capital one that midway through last year, sort of late last year, we received approval from the port to do night moves of vessels. And the night moves of vessels is a bit of a game changer from an efficiency and throughput of the facility. And so I think that's still something that we're early on truly understanding what is the impact we can do and just how many additional vessels that we can turn through that facility. But we're already seeing the impact of that, that you're suddenly able to have some sort of single day turnarounds of vessels. Whereas previously, we would have always looked at sort of a two day loading window per vessel. We're seeing some opportunity to potentially contract additional slots in the facility without any additional capital.
Are you logistically maxed out at a million barrels? Just given that land position and...
Yeah, no, Ben, we're not. Right now we're obligated with kind of the regulatory at a million barrels, but that's something that can easily be changed.
And got it. And, and I think you mentioned the, or you did mention the 40 millibit, but can you remind us the hedging program that's feeding that? I think you put on some hedges when you announced the acquisition, just how long that duration is and your overall assumptions.
Yeah, thanks, Ben. We obviously have a hedging program in place to de-risk our assets and our cash flows. For 2025, we're about 80% hedged at that facility, in and around 1.37, call it. For 2026, we'll start to explore putting on further hedges. We're going to pick our spot here, depending on what happens with tariff and FX rates.
Got it. And maybe a cleanup question I on marketing. Are you able to share roughly the percent in the quarter between the cracks and the trading side of things? And I'm assuming on the trading side of things, if you're not doing any trades, there's fixed commitments that push it to a loss position. Do those fixed commitments start to roll off more in 2025?
Yeah, when we think about our trading business in Q4, it would have been slightly above break even, and really the loss would have been related to our refined product business. So, we continue to think that we're well set up from an infrastructure standpoint to take advantage of market conditions as we change, and we're ready to kind of tackle some of those opportunities as they come up.
Okay, just to clarify, so your fixed commitment says it's typically quite a rateable event from 2024 to 2025?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, fairly rateable over the years for sure. Okay, thank you.
Our next question comes from Robert Cotillier with CIBC Capital Markets.
Hey, good morning. I just wanted to confirm that, you know, given that you don't expect long-term change to the guidance at this point for marketing, I just wonder what level of crack spread and differential do you need to see to get back to the 80 to 120 if we assume, you know, an environment with normal volatility and no moose-jaw turnaround?
Yeah, I think, Rob, we're, you know, we work on maybe having some more transparency around those numbers moving forward with an investor day, but I don't think we're going to release those type of numbers on the quarterly call.
All right. In terms of the infrastructure business, what was the nature of the non-recurring charges for commercial matters that you took there? Is there anything unusual there in terms of provisioning, or is this just, you know, took a big bath in a quarter?
Hey, Rob, so the one thing I have is really, you know, really driven by my new eyes coming into the organization and a real push to say, let's work through some things with some urgency. So we talked about already from a people standpoint that we work through a number of people things, and so you saw a significant people restructuring charge. On the commercial matter side of things, you know, there's no sort of one overly material item, but in aggregate, what we have here is that we had just a lot of a backlog of various commercial matters with customers that have been built up over a couple of years, and you look at that and the thing about those types of situations is they don't tend to get better with time. There's not a lot of upside of not properly recognizing the cost of that and moving to some urgency to get those resolved with your partners and your customers. And so that's what we've had a real push on that. You hear me talk a lot about where our goal is to remove distractions, and so I think some of these things become a bit of a distraction, and let's go resolve them. Let's take those issues away and sort of get back to working well with our customers. And so that's what you see. It's a bit of a, you know, these have been hanging out there for a couple years in some cases on some of them, and we've got a real push to clean that up and move forward.
Yeah, that's a very helpful context. And then just one quick cleanup on Gateway. I think the progress on the project shows it's on schedule, but from what I saw, the documents were silent on the budget. Is it on budget?
It is, yes. Okay, thanks. That's it for me.
Coordinator, as a reminder, to ask a question at this time, please press star 1-1. Our next question comes from Patrick Kenney with National Bank Financial.
Thank you. Good morning. Just on the environmental remediation charge taken in the quarter at the Edmonton terminal, I know it's a one-time provision as well, but just wanted to confirm, Curtis, if your team has fully completed the review of all potential environmental liabilities, not only at the Edmonton terminal, but also Hardesty, Moosejaw, Gateway, and others.
More, Pat. Yeah, so this, we'll talk first on the Edmonton terminal one. So this is a pretty unique one in that this is related to a material that we were handling really 30 years ago, and there's a contamination issue that has been monitored and was flagged as an issue over the last year. And over the last year, we worked very closely with the regulator to come up with a remediation plan. And just the nature of the remediation will be fairly time-consuming. And so it's a fairly significant charge, but because we developed a very detailed plan on how to remediate, and now we're actioning that, we thought it was important to fully recognize that impact. That charge is related to the cost over the next 10 years. And so just from a cash flow perspective, it's important to recognize that's the remediation and monitoring cost related to that over the next decade. We've also, as we talked about, looking hard at if we do understand all of our exposures around the business, we spend a lot of time looking at what else is out there. And I'm quite comfortable with where we're at from an environmental exposure. The team's done a great job take a lot of pride in being great stewards of the environment. We've got an outstanding team that works through these things. There's absolutely nothing of the scale of this and uniqueness of the Edmonton one out there. There's always going to be little things that you're working at. 70 years in this business, there's always going to be some things that we're working at that's sort of a constant thing, but nothing of this magnitude.
Okay, that's great. Thanks for that. And then maybe just back to where the balance sheet is currently. I know in the past, dispositions were required to bring the ratios back onside and just want to get your thoughts around potentially looking at some smaller asset sales to provide a little bit of cushion going forward on the financial position and what assets in the portfolio you might consider to be non-core.
Yeah, thanks, Pat. You know, really at this point, we've divested, we spent a bunch of time this year to Curtis's point, kind of cleaning up our business and divesting our non-core assets. So we sold $30 million worth of non-core assets throughout 2024. And that would have really cleaned up our portfolio of kind of non-critical assets, everything that would remain we would consider to be core to our business and tied in synergistically with our main assets at 710 Harvestier or Gateway. So at this point, we're not looking to dispose anymore.
Okay, that's great. I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you.
There are no further questions. I'd now like to hand the call back to Beth.
Thank you, Liz. Thank you for joining us for a 2024 fourth quarter and full year conference call. Again, I would like to note that we have also made available certain supplementary information on our website, gibsonenergy.com. If you have any further questions, please reach out to myself or investor.relations at gibsonenergy.com. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.