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The midstream energy infrastructure corporation operates largely on the Gulf Coast and delivers natural gas to the U.S.

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The provider of natural gas and natural gas liquids services is based in Houston and owns a diversified portfolio of "midstream" assets focused on processing, transporting, and storing those products.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

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Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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A provider of natural gas and natural gas liquids pipelines and services, Targa Resources owns and operates a diversified portfolio of "midstream" assets focused on gathering, processing, transporting, storing, and selling those products. These assets are located across the Permian Basin, Bakken Shale, Barnett Shale, Eagle Ford Shale, Anadarko Basin, Ardmore Basin, Arkoma Basin, and onshore Louisiana. In July 2022, Targa acquired Lucid Energy, expanding its processing footprint in the Permian's Delaware Basin in West Texas and New Mexico. In 2024, there were reports that Targa rebuffed an informal takeover offer from rival Williams Cos.; Williams denied these reports.

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Targa Resources (TRGP): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Targa Resources

targa resources

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Targa Resource Corp's Fourth Quarter twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. I would now like to hand the call over to Tristan Richardson, Vice President, Investor Relations and Fundamentals. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Latif. Good morning and welcome to the fourth quarter twenty twenty four earnings call for Targa Resources Corp. The fourth quarter earnings release along with the fourth quarter earnings supplement presentation for Targa Resources that accompany our call are available on our website at targaresources.com in the Investors section. In addition, an updated investor presentation has also been posted to our website. Statements made during this call that might include Targa's expectations or predictions should be considered forward looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Actual results could differ materially from those projected in forward looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to differ, please refer to our latest SEC filings. Our speakers for the call today will be Matt Malloy, Chief Executive Officer Jen Neal, President and Will Byers, Chief Financial Officer. Additionally, the following senior management team members will be available for Q and Pat McDonough, President, Gathering and Processing Scott Prior, President, Logistics and Transportation and Bobby Mararo, Chief Commercial Officer. I'll now turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks, Tristan, and good morning, everyone. 2024 was a great year and we are continuing to build on our momentum. Our 2024 results demonstrate our differentiated positioning with record volumes from the Permian significantly outperforming initial expectations driving record NGL transportation fractionation and export volumes that also exceeded expectations. As we look forward to 2025 and beyond, we believe that we are uniquely positioned to continue to deliver significant growth for our shareholders. We have a demonstrated track record of adding infrastructure that is highly utilized and 2024 was no different.

With our additional two Permian processing plants, two additional NGL fractionators and our DAYTONA NGL pipeline all much needed at startup. And we announced three new projects this morning. Our Delaware Xpress project, a 100 mile 30 inches diameter intra Delaware Basin pipeline expansion of Grand Prix that will provide us with additional NGL capacity in the Delaware. Train 12, our next 150,000 barrels per day NGL fractionator in Mont Belvieu and our new LPG export expansion at Galena Park, which will increase our effective export capacity to 19,000,000 barrels per month. Our newly announced projects are needed to accommodate incremental NGL volumes from our five Permian processing plants currently under construction.

These critical projects are core to Targa strengths positioning us to continue to demonstrate attractive returns on invested capital. We have recently accelerated projects and growth spending relative to our thoughts on when we would need additional downstream infrastructure at this time last year. This was driven by more organic growth than previously estimated plus the execution of multiple new commercial deals. In 2024, our Permian GMP volumes grew by 14% year over year with an incremental seven zero nine million cubic feet per day moving through our system. We expected meaningful volume increases, but we were surprised to the upside as our growth far exceeded the high single digit growth we were talking about last February.

Our volume outperformance was really driven by a combination of the advantages of our Permian systems and dedicated acreage being on the best rock in the Midland and Delaware Basins, lower declines on existing volumes, increased producer activity and performance in certain areas relative to initial expectations, higher gas to oil ratios and commercial success bringing new volumes onto our systems. While we expect to continue to benefit from similar trends in 2025, we currently estimate that our Permian GMP volume growth will be more second half weighted. This growth along with several large commercial wins that began adding volumes late in 2025 and into 2026 positions us to drive even stronger volume growth in 2026. These trends and the volume growth we expect to see on our system will drive further increases in year over year adjusted EBITDA and the generation of meaningful adjusted free cash flow. In 2024, our record adjusted EBITDA of $4,100,000,000 was 17% higher than 2023.

We estimate another year of record financial and operational results in 2025 with over $600,000,000 in EBITDA growth expected this year. We are also in position to deliver significant growth in 2026 and beyond with four new Permian GMP plants coming online in 2026 driving significant NGL volume growth through our downstream assets. The strength of our results positions us to continue to return an increasing amount of capital to our shareholders over time with a 50% increase to our common dividend for 2024 versus 2023 and a record $755,000,000 of common share repurchases during the year. Looking forward, we announced in November, we expect to recommend a 33% year over year increase to our annualized $20.25 common dividend per share. Our focus isn't changing.

Our balance sheet is strong providing us with flexibility to continue to invest in attractive organic growth and to continue to return capital to our shareholders including opportunistic common share repurchases. Before I turn the call over to Jen, I would like to recognize and thank our employees for their continued focus on safety and execution, while providing best in class service and reliability to our customers. Every group within Targa played a huge role in our execution across the year and we are proud of their efforts. We provided our shareholders with the ninth highest total return in the S and P 500 which is a tremendous accomplishment that we want to build on. Lastly, I am pleased to announce that Jen Neal is moving into the President role effective 03/01/2025 after leading our finance and administrative functions for the last seven years and as part of Jen's continuing development, she is going to shift her focus to now lead our commercial engineering and operations functions across Targa.

Thanks, Matt. Good morning, everyone. Building on Matt's remarks, there is a lot of activity on our acreage in the Permian. Starting in the Delaware, our new Bull Moose plant is now online and highly utilized. We also completed the addition of our 800,000,000 cubic feet per day of front end sour gas treating and the 30 inches rich gas pipeline that connects Targa's two largest treating and processing facilities in the Delaware Basin.

These projects bring Targa's Delaware treating capacity to approximately 2,300,000,000 cubic feet per day and create significant system fungibility. We are continuing to make progress on our next two plants that are under construction in the Delaware with our Bull Moose II plant expected online in the first quarter of twenty twenty six and our Falcon II plant online in the second quarter of twenty twenty six. With two plants coming online within a quarter in 2026, we expect to be in great position to handle customer volume growth in the Delaware. Moving to the Midland Basin, our Greenwood II plant came online in late October and was fully utilized at startup. We currently have three additional plants under construction with our Pembroke II plant expected online in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty five, our East Pembroke plant online in the second quarter of twenty twenty six and our East Driver plant online in the third quarter of twenty twenty six.

Across both the Midland and the Delaware, we are evaluating when we will need to move forward with our next Permian plants to accommodate continued growth on our systems. Turning to our Logistics and Transportation segment, Targa's NGL pipeline transportation volumes averaged a record 872,000 barrels per day and fractionation volumes averaged a record 1,100,000 barrels per day during the fourth quarter as we benefited from our DAYTONA NGL pipeline coming into service in late August and our Train 10 fractionator coming into service in late October. Our 30 inches 100 mile intra Delaware Basin expansion of Grand Prix that we announced this morning is needed to accommodate growing Delaware Basin volumes. By moving forward with a 30 inches diameter pipeline, we have the flexibility to consider repurposing part of our existing Grand Prix NGL lines to large diameter gathering lines or residue service, providing the opportunity to further enhance flow assurance and takeaway options for our producers. Our outlook of increasing long haul NGL transportation volumes has continued to strengthen and DAYTONA coming online plus the third party medium term transportation deals that we mentioned previously provide us with flexibility looking forward.

Given the anticipated growth in our Permian GMP business, our outlook for NGL supply growth remains robust and our downstream system expansions will be much needed to handle growth from our systems. Our next fractionator in Mont Belvieu, Train 11, remains on track for the third quarter of twenty twenty six and is expected to be much needed at startup. Our newly announced Train 12 is also expected to be much needed with startup estimated in the first quarter of twenty twenty seven. In our LPG export business at Glena Park, our loadings averaged a record 14,000,000 barrels per month during the fourth quarter and we remain on track to complete our 650,000 barrel per month expansion in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty five. Given our fractionation expansions that will result in incremental propane and butanes in the Targa system, plus the continued strength in global demand for U.

S. Sourced LPGs, we expect our LPG export expansion project announced this morning to be much needed when it comes online in the third quarter of twenty twenty seven. The addition of a new pipeline between Mont Belvieu and the Galena Park and another refrigeration unit will significantly increase our loading rates and enhance our facility flexibility. During the fourth quarter, we purchased BP's twelve percent interest in Cedar Bayou fractionators for net cash consideration of approximately $111,000,000 and we now own 100 percent of CVF. This transaction allows us to provide our partner with liquidity while simplifying our operational structure at an attractive return.

We also announced this morning a definitive agreement to repurchase all of the outstanding preferred equity in Target Badlands LLC, which holds our North Dakota assets, for approximately $1,800,000,000 When we executed the Badlands transaction in February 2019, we were in the midst of building our largest project ever, Grand Prix, and multiple plants and fracs to help commercialize Grand Prix. We maximized proceeds without any TRGP dilution with the structure, which was critical to us at the time given our large capital lift and strength of conviction in our outlook. We have now taken out the last piece of creative financing that we utilized back then to keep investing without dilution. Rationale for taking out Blackstone now is simple. The preferred had a low double digit cost, essentially $180,000,000 of fixed annual charges.

With the strength of our balance sheet, we can refinance it with much lower cost debt, providing more than $80,000,000 of annual cash savings and have minimal impact to our leverage ratio. We will now own 100% of the Badlands again, which is a strong fee based free cash flow asset, characteristics that made it attractive for joint venture investment in 2019 and make it attractive for us to fully own now. With an effective date of January 1, we will benefit from owning 100% of Badlands for all of 2025, resulting in approximately $180,000,000 of incremental EBITDA. As Matt mentioned, we have accelerated significant spending into 2025 that we were not forecasting at this time last year because of the outperformance of volume growth in 2024 and our expectations for continued growth looking forward. Through the end of twenty twenty four, our ROIC over the past five years was 21%, which is strong given we had the second largest project in Targa's history, DAYTONA, and several other major projects come online and only partially contribute to 2024.

We provided an illustrative framework last February that detailed a multiyear growth capital spend of approximately $1,700,000,000 to support high single digit growth in Permian volumes. While this framework holds, we clearly benefited from a lot more volume growth than that in 2024. And given our additional commercial success, are likely to see more volume growth going forward. This growth accelerated several downstream projects, which added capital to 2025. The framework should continue to be helpful in a lower growth environment, but our capital spend over the next few years is likely to be higher.

Four plants come online in 2026. We will need additional processing in 2027 and beyond, and that volume growth has accelerated downstream spend. Importantly, these projects are all core to Targa and leverage our existing footprint and we believe will continue to result in attractive rates of return driving increasing EBITDA and free cash flow over time. As a result of our strong returns and attractive growth, we continue to return meaningful increases in capital to our investors. We opportunistically repurchased $755,000,000 of common shares at a weighted average price of $127.2 during 2024, a substantial increase over the $347,000,000 of share repurchases for full year 2023.

In 2024, we returned 42% of our adjusted cash flow from operations to shareholders. This was higher than we expected at the beginning of last year, but the strength of our results positioned us to return capital to shareholders more quickly. Consistent with the multiyear framework we've previously discussed, we continue to model returning more than 40% of cash flow from operations to shareholders on a multiyear basis looking forward. We will continue to focus on an all of the above approach to creating value for our shareholders. Maintaining our strong balance sheet positions us to both continue to invest in attractive organic growth opportunities, while increasing our return of capital to shareholders.

Our compelling value proposition continues to be supported by growing EBITDA, meaningful increases to common dividends per share, a reducing share count and an excellent outlook. 2024 was a big year for our company and I'm so appreciative of the efforts of our employees. We have a lot of momentum and are excited about the future. I will now turn the call over to Will to discuss our fourth quarter results and our 2025 outlook. Will?

Thanks, Jen. Targa's reported quarterly adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $1,122,000,000 a 5% increase over the third quarter. The sequential increase was attributable to higher Permian volumes, which resulted in higher system volumes through our integrated NGL business. Full year 2024 adjusted EBITDA was a record $4,100,000,000 a 17% increase over 2023 and was supported by record financial and operational metrics across the company despite weak natural gas and NGL prices. We also benefited from stronger than expected natural gas and NGL marketing opportunities across 2024 with approximately $100,000,000 of optimization opportunities that were not included in our original guidance.

During 2024, we spent approximately $3,000,000,000 on growth capital projects. Growth capital spending came in ahead of our previous estimates as a result of the acceleration of spending attributable to our Permian commercial success in various growth projects that shifted spending into 2024. Our net maintenance capital was $232,000,000 At the end of the year, our net consolidated leverage ratio was approximately 3.4 times below the midpoint of our long term leverage ratio target range of three to four times. With our strong balance sheet, we have stable mid BBB investment grade ratings with each of the three rating agencies. Turning to 2025, we are very excited about our outlook and expectations.

We estimate full year 2025 adjusted EBITDA to be between $4,650,000,000 and $4,850,000,000 a 15% increase over 2024 based on the midpoint of our range. We expect continued volume growth in the Permian Basin will drive operating margin across our businesses. The Logistics and Transportation segment is well positioned to benefit from full year contributions of our DAYTONA NGL pipeline and Trains nine and ten. Our outlook assumes commodity prices of $1.55 per MMBtu for Waha Natural Gas, zero point six five dollars per gallon for our weighted average NGL barrel and $70 per barrel for WTI crude. Our cash flows are greater than 90% fee based and we have hedged about 90% of the remaining 10% non fee margin through 2026.

The increasing fee based margin across our businesses will continue to provide us with cash flow stability and the fee floors in our GMP business support our ability to invest across lower commodity price environments, while positioning us to benefit from higher commodity prices. Relative to our full year 2025 financial guidance, a 30 move higher in commodity prices would increase full year adjusted EBITDA by around $130,000,000 while a 30% decrease would reduce adjusted EBITDA by around $80,000,000 This momentum will position us well going into 2026. We estimate 2,600,000,000 to $2,800,000,000 of growth capital spending for 2025 and our capital budget includes spending on the three new downstream projects announced today in addition to the five Permian plants and Train 11 currently underway, spending associated with the recent commercial success that Matt highlighted, modest spending associated with long lead time items for our next potential Permian system expansions, and we are continuing to evaluate when we will need to move forward with spending on incremental long haul NGL transportation. As Jen mentioned, our third party medium term NGL transportation agreements provide us with flexibility and baseload volumes for our next NGL pipeline expansion when needed. Our estimate for net maintenance capital spending is $250,000,000 Similar to year end 2024, we expect to end 2025 with our leverage ratio comfortably within our long term target range of three to four times, providing continued flexibility going forward.

In February, we closed on a new five year three point five billion dollars revolving credit facility maturing February 2030. The upsized revolver enhances our liquidity position and flexibility to continue to execute on our strategic priorities. Our available liquidity at the end of the fourth quarter pro form a for the new revolver was approximately $2,800,000,000 There is no change to our assumption that we may be subject to the federal minimum tax in 2026 and a full cash taxpayer in 2027. Any favorable tax policy changes by the new administration, such as reinstating bonus depreciation or eliminating AMT, would reduce our cash taxes relative to our expectations. I would like to join Matt and Jen in thanking our 3,400 employees who have made our success possible, the team effort every day as we continue to execute on our growth program.

And with that, I will turn the call back over to Tristan.

Thanks, Will. For the Q and A session, we ask that you limit to one question and one follow-up and reenter the queue if you have additional questions. Latif, please open the line for Q and A.

Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Jeremy Tonet of JPMorgan. Your question please, Jeremy.

Jen, congratulations there. First off, and just wanted to go I guess into I guess the forward outlook at this point with the guidance you provided. I believe there was commentary that activity would accelerate over the back half of the year. And if I think about the CapEx pull forward here, it seems like things are going better than previously expected, growing faster. I'm just wondering any high level thoughts you could share, I guess, on how the trajectory of EBITDA could grow across the year, the back half higher?

And really, how we should think about 2026 at this point, given the trajectory later in the year as well as some of these growth projects being pulled forward here? Thanks.

Yes, sure, Jeremy. I'll start. The growth outlook, I'd say for us is really strong relative to where we are sitting last year at this time. I'd say the multi year growth outlook has improved really for every year. As we look at this year specifically, we're pointing to more back half growth.

Last year, we saw really strong volumes the first part of the year and that continued through the rest of the year. This year, as we look at our producer forecast, it is more back half weighted and the commercial success on the deals we talked about in 2024 really start contributing kind of second part of 2025 and into 2026. This year is also for Q1 is impacted by weather. We've had just round after round of freezing weather that's impacted our Permian volumes, and then impacted our NGL volumes downstream. So we have had some weather headwinds here in the first quarter, but our outlook for this year is really strong and we just kind of look through the bottoms up build of our producer forecast.

2026 looks like it's potentially even a stronger year than 2025.

Jeremy, I just add, when you think about four plants coming online in 2026, we're not trying to look too far beyond this year. We're really excited about this year, but four plants coming online next year as well. We've just got a tremendously strong outlook of multi years of growth here that we're really excited about.

Got it. So 2026 looking better than 2025 at this point and long term growth outlook today looking better than it did in the past. So got it there. And then I believe there was some comments on optimization that occurred in 2024 and is not, I guess, in the EBITDA guide for 2025. And obviously, you're not baking the business around this.

But is there any reason to think that some optimization does not materialize again in 2025? Just wondering how we should think about that?

I would say that we're already that we're always pretty conservative when we guide to full year EBITDA. And when we think about marketing opportunities and our footprint across both the natural gas and the natural gas liquids side, each year opportunities present themselves, but it's not part of what we forecast in a meaningful way. We let those present. That's one of the reasons that in 2024, you saw us increase our guidance range in August, then you saw us in November, say, we thought we'd be at the high end of the range. And then you've, of course, seen us today beat all of that with where we ended up for 2024.

So similarly, as we think about this year, I'd expect opportunities to present themselves, but it's not something that we bake into our overall planning process until they're accounted for essentially.

Got it. So optimization still very much possible upside to the plan. I think that's it for me. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Keith Stanley of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead, Keith.

Hi. Thank you. Good morning. Wanted to start on the Badlands buy in and just clarify, did Blackstone have an option to put the preferred interest back to you at a certain point? Or was the timing just you have excess balance sheet capacity?

And I think Jen, you noted $80,000,000 a year of cash savings from doing this. And so you're just opportunistic on it?

I'd say that what we announced today was us being opportunistic and saying that from our perspective with the strength of our balance sheet, with the cash savings from refinancing a higher cost, low double digit preferred, being able to put it on our balance sheet at a much lower cost of debt made all the sense in the world to us and we quantified for the savings for you of around $80,000,000 on the call. As with any structure like that, yes, there are eventual options for a partner like Blackstone to get out, but by no means were we anywhere where we had to make a decision. For us, it just was really on the backs of a really strong twenty twenty four year end leverage ratio of 3.4 times. We're taking on a tiny bit of leverage here and generating $80,000,000 of cash savings and now go back to owning 100% of a stable fee based asset that's throwing off a lot of free cash flow.

Great. Thanks for that. Second, I just wanted to ask on buybacks given some of the growth commentary including '26 potentially even being stronger than '25. So when you think about buybacks and just capital allocation generally, the stock has rerated a lot. You're getting great returns on organic growth.

You could probably get pretty good returns on M and A as well. So how are you thinking about prioritizing capital allocation at this point, including buybacks, just given kind of the overwhelming growth potential that you're seeing?

For us, it continues to be in all of the above approach. I think that we clearly have a lot of really attractive organic growth capital investment opportunities that we can invest in and you're seeing us do that for our producers and customers. And that will of course be a core area of focus for us moving forward. While we're doing that, you also saw us execute on record repurchases in 2024, meaningfully increased the dividend in 2024. And now of course we have the expectation of a 33% increase to the common dividend in 2025.

What we really like about our repurchase program is it's opportunistic. So to the extent we see a disconnect between our belief of the value of Targa and what the market presenting to us, we've got the financial flexibility with the strength of our balance sheet to step in. So you saw us in 2024 execute a lot of repurchases in the second quarter. We knew how strong our 2024 was going to be. We were relying on volume growth showing up.

It was showing up in spades even more than we expected. So you saw step in because that was supporting a strengthening short, medium and long term outlook of growth. Similarly, we executed on a lot of great commercial opportunities. That's supporting an outlook of significant growth in 2026 and beyond. We've got a ton of conviction in what we have going on here and are really proud of our employee execution across engineering, operations, commercial, accounting, everybody in the organization is moving in the right direction.

And that means that as we look out over the short, medium and long term, our forecast is strengthening. And that's on the backs of really strong organic opportunities. And we've got the flexibility financially to execute opportunistically on repurchases when we think that it makes sense.

Thanks. Our next question comes from Jackie Galitis of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, Jackie.

Hi. Thank you so much for the time. First, just wanted to start, you pointed to commercial success really driving some of the capital spending higher. Where are you seeing the success across your footprint? Is this mostly on the sour gas opportunities or is this more across like the entire GMP segment as a whole?

Yes, sure, Jackie. I'll touch on that and then Pat, if you want to jump in. I mean, I'd say we've really seen good commercial success in both the Midland and the Delaware. We actually included in our investor presentation a slide which highlighted what we characterized as three larger deals. All three of those were in the Delaware side of the basin.

It just shows that there's still a lot of activity and a lot of acreage positions available. And we have millions of acres already dedicated. That's going to provide us nice growth. But we continue to execute and have some wins with our producer customers on, I'd call it kind of step out acreage developments. And we've seen that on both sweet and sour.

So I think the fungibility of our system being able to have significant amount of treating for both CO2 and H2S and the fungibility to continue to operate when plants are in maintenance just provides an overall very good level of service for our customers and it's really paying off for us.

I would add is, as Matt alluded to in the investor presentation, really the example we gave there was just illustrative. I mean, there is a long list of new transactions that we did in 2024 and have already completed in 2025 that is adding to the overall acreage position that we have under contract and our growth going forward. And that's why when you listen to our prepared comments, etcetera, we say back half loaded '25 and '26. We've got a lot of line of sight on the stuff we've had under contract plus this new added acreage and drilling commitments that our producers are bringing to us. So we really are excited about the short and long term outlook for our growth in the Permian Basin.

Got it. Appreciate that. And then just moving on to what the faster than expected Permian growth kind of implies looking at those long lead items for potential Permian expansions and evaluating incremental additional long haul. What is what does the cadence kind of of those additional plants beyond '26 might look like? And at what point do you kind of expect to move forward with this additional infrastructure from here?

Sure. Good question. And frankly internally, we're trying to estimate and do the best we can for having the right amount of capacity and not too much and not too little. What you see is four plants coming on in 2026. That's higher than normal.

If you look in 2025, we have two plants coming on. So you're kind of a three plant average for those two. We're currently evaluating 2728. We have multiple sites already picked out for new processing plants in the Delaware and Midland and we're determining best location and best timing for those. So, I think as Jen mentioned, we gave a framework which pointed to $1,700,000,000 of CapEx for call it two plants a year.

I think what we're seeing is here in the short medium term, it feels like we're higher than that. And that's why you've seen CapEx move higher and it's accelerated some downstream spending, all of which is core to us. It's kind of right down our fairway of what we do, gather and process and then handle the NGL volumes downstream. So, we'll continue to kind of figure out what the right cadence for plants is. It's two for '25, we have four for '26 and I'd say we're evaluating '27 and '28, but we see significant growth really in all of those years.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Manav Gupta of UBS. Please go ahead, Manav.

Good morning. My question here relates to you are obviously involved with the Permian gas egress pipeline. I'm just trying to understand the scope over there. Obviously, it looks like a very strong demand outlook driven by LNG, coal to gas switching and data center. So just trying to understand this entire conversations that you're having with the people about possibly investing more with Permian gas egress out there.

Hi, this is Bobby. Yes, as we announced our partnership with Whitewater and Blackcomb, We're excited to get that done, excited to get that pipe online in 2026. We continue to talk to anyone and everyone about egress. Obviously, there was another pipe that got announced coming out of the Permian that will help with egress of natural gas as well as supplying new demand from LNG and data centers. That team is out there figuring out what the next pipe is, where the next demand is, data centers, LNG, those conversations are ongoing constantly.

And we're in that mix every day. So we're figuring out when that next pipe is needed, where that next demand center is. And as we evaluate some of that intra Permian Basin pipe we've got where we can deliver gas that can get burned at data centers or power plants in the Permian. So we're working on those things every day and all day and figuring that out. But we're excited to see Blackcomb come online in 2016 because it will be much needed when it does.

Perfect. Obviously, you have a very strong organic growth pipeline. I was just trying to understand the appetite for some bolt on deals also. And the reason I'm asking is one of your midstreamrefining peers is seeing some activist pressure to start divesting some of their midstream assets. And I'm just trying to understand if there is what would be the appetite for small bolt on deals that you could do?

Yes, sure. In terms of gas takeaway, we invested 17.5% in Blackcomb. And as we look at being part of the solution for additional takeaway in the Permian, I think there will be other opportunities afforded to us to invest in other pipes. And as Bobby mentioned, we're looking at multiple opportunities. When is the next one going to be needed?

And what would be an opportunity for us to make a commitment to a pipe and then have some investment opportunities? So yes, I'd say we will continue to look to invest in long haul takeaway. We're also evaluating, we mentioned, as we're putting in the Delaware Express 30 inches NGL line, we have some Grand Prix pipeline in the Delaware and we're evaluating whether we want to make those large diameter gathering lines or potentially making that residue lines as well to continue to aggregate natural gas residue from our plants to aggregate for additional long haul pipe takeaway. So we do have additional opportunities on the residue gas side. And as we continue to grow, we'll continue to look to see if additional investments there make sense.

And on the broader topic of M and A, I don't really think our posture has changed a whole lot. I mean, we have a lot of organic growth opportunities that we see. That is our primary focus. That is what we're going to be spending most of our time on. We've looked at some of these bolt on transactions.

I'd say we have a high bar and nothing has just either transacted with other parties or they've held. So we've continued to focus on organic growth. I think the bar for us continues to be high and we'll just kind of continue on that path.

Thank you. Our next question comes from A. J. O'Donnell of TPH. Please go ahead, A.

Hey, good morning, everybody. Maybe the first question is just on the outlook. I was wondering if you could spend a bit of time just talking about the expected returns on the projects that have been announced. Should we still be thinking about these around that 5.5 times build multiple that you've guided before? Or have the returns in any way changed?

Good morning, A. J. This is Jen. I'd say that everything that we provided in the framework before really holds, which is we've got a demonstrated track record of being able to do better than that 5.5 times multiple. And our expectation is that we ought to be able to continue that track record going forward.

You saw in 2024 the strength of our results with really weak commodity prices. To the extent we do ever see commodity prices move higher on the natural gas and NGL side, we've got that asymmetric skew to the upside, which would provide incremental returns that you really haven't seen play out here recently despite us putting up really attractive rates of return on what we've invested in. So I think continuing to use the 5.5% or a little bit better is a reasonable starting point as you're modeling out our business. And of course, we're working every day to figure out how to utilize those assets to drive those returns higher. I think what's been great for us is everything that we brought online has essentially been full at startup other than Daytona, which is an asset that we expect to ramp over time.

But even the ramp there has been faster than expected and that's why we've had to do some of those medium term NGL transportation agreements. So part of how we get better returns is that when assets come online, we've been able to commercialize the volume growth more quickly than when we made the FID decision. And the strength of our commercial team is certainly helping us to do that, and we'd expect that to continue going forward as well.

Okay, great. Maybe just one more then on Q4 results and kind of talking about how those assets ramped in the service pretty quickly. But just noticing that there was a pretty big step up in frac volumes versus NGL production. Just wondering if you could provide some comments on there. Was there any third party step up involved in that increase?

Hey, A. J, this is Scott. Yes, we saw a really nice quarter in the fourth quarter. When you look at our volumes overall, when you look at fourth quarter of twenty twenty three to fourth quarter twenty twenty four, our volumes grew by 29% over that timeframe. A lot of that was because we brought on Frac Train nine during the third quarter and then of course Frac Train 10 that came online in the fourth quarter.

So that allowed us basically to utilize frac volumes that we had been offloading at times to other third parties as well as our volume growth that we saw from all of our processing plants and then being able to work off inventory that we had stored. So all of that is really part of the benefit that we saw of the 1,100,000 barrels that we saw during the fourth quarter. Needless to say, when you think about the number of plants that we've announced on the Delaware side, on the plants that we've announced on the Midland side, and each of those plants contributes 35,000 to 40,000 barrels a day of volume, much of which will be directed to our pipelines and much of which will be coming to our fractionators. That gives us line of sight and the reasons why Train 11 was announced previously and today Train 12. So when you think about when those are coming online in the third quarter of twenty twenty six and then of course FracTrain 12 now in the first quarter of twenty twenty seven.

All that lines up very well with the plant cadence that we've already announced today.

Okay. Thanks for the color. I'll turn it back.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Blum of Wells Fargo. Please go ahead, Michael.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. I had two questions on volumes. I'll just stack them here together. The first is on the fourth quarter.

Your Permian volumes sequentially were up only a little bit only modestly Q3 to Q4 and that's in spite of the fact that you've been bringing on plant you brought on plants in the second half of the year. So just wanted to maybe you could just talk a little bit about any dynamics going on that we should be aware of there. I thought maybe the volumes will be a bit higher. And then for the full year, you said you grew volumes overall 14% in 2024. What does guidance assume in 2025 for volume growth?

Related to the fourth quarter Permian volumes, I mean, the trajectory of growth that we've been on was pretty staggering when you think about moving across the year and volumes moving up two seventy seven million cubic feet a day Q2 to Q1, '3 '11 cubic feet a day Q3 to Q2 and then the 83,000,000 cubic feet a day of growth Q4 relative to Q3. We tried to call it out in our press release quarter over quarter commentary that we did have a low margin contract that rolled over at the very beginning of the fourth quarter. So that's what was going to create some of that noise quarter to quarter that we certainly wanted to make sure that we highlighted for you. I'd say that when we think about our growth 25 relative to '26, we had the Bull Moose plant just come online. We've got another plant that comes online later this year.

We've talked about a back half ramp. We're certainly above that low that sort of high single digit framework that we said underpinned the growth in the $1,700,000,000 case that we published last February. So I'd say expect higher growth than that. 2024 was a really strong year. We're really pointing to 2026 and the four plants as our next strong year, but we're going to continue to have really attractive Permian growth across 2024 sorry, excuse me, 2025 as well.

But again, just trying to remind everybody, we're going to see a lot of that growth materialize back half because as Matt said, that's when a lot of those commercial arrangements really start to ramp up in the back half twenty twenty five and then provide significant incremental growth in 2026, which is what is underpinning the four plants in 2026.

Targa Resources (TRGP) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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