Welcome to the Pembina Pipeline Corporation 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 the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Scott Burrows, Senior VP and Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. Please go ahead, Scott.
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'm Scott Burrows, Pembina's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. I am joined by Mick Dilger, Pembina's President and Chief Executive Officer, to discuss the announcement this morning of our combination with Inter Pipeline. We are pleased to be joined by Harry Andersen, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Pipelines, Jaret Sprott, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Facilities, Stuart Taylor, Senior Vice President, Marketing and New Ventures and Corporate Development Officer, and Janet Loduca, Senior Vice President, External Affairs and Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer. Also with us today is Cameron Goldade, Vice President, Capital Markets. This call is being webcast and will be available for replay on our website. Throughout this call, we will refer to an accompanying presentation, which also is available for download on our website.
Before we start, I'd like to remind you that some of the comments made today may be forward-looking in nature and are based on Pembina's current expectations, estimates, judgments, projections, and risks. Further, some of the information provided refers to non-GAAP financial measures. To learn more about these forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures, please see the presentation slides as well as Pembina's financial reports, which are available at www.pembina.com or on SEDAR. Actual results could differ materially from the forward-looking statements we may express or imply today. We will begin with slide four, which outlines some of the specifics related to the transaction. Without going through every point on the page, I want to draw your attention to a few key items.
The overall transaction of CAD 15.2 billion is comprised of the offer to acquire all the issued and outstanding shares of Inter Pipeline Ltd. in a share-for-share exchange which values Inter Pipeline common shares at approximately CAD 8.3 billion or CAD 19.45 per share based on the closing price of Pembina's common shares on May 31st, 2001, and the assumption of CAD 6.9 billion of Inter Pipeline's debt. This offer represents a premium of approximately 17.8% to the value implied by the takeover bid announced by Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation. In addition to the compelling strategic drivers associated with this transaction, which we will touch on momentarily, the financial outcomes are equally attractive.
Firstly, the transaction creates a stronger financial platform and adheres to Pembina's financial guardrails, adding significant long-term contracted cash flow from assets that serve customers with many decades of resource life. Secondly, we expect to realize meaningful operating and project synergies through the combination, which I will discuss in more detail later. Thirdly, the transaction will enhance the company's scale and capability. With an estimated pro forma enterprise value of approximately CAD 53 billion and cash flow after dividends of CAD 1.1 billion- CAD 1.4 billion, the combined entity will benefit from significantly enhanced cash flow generation, allowing the company to further accelerate its strategy. Fourthly, Pembina's monthly dividend will increase CAD 0.01 per share or 4.8% to CAD 0.22 per share following the completion of the transaction.
Following the successful commissioning and in-service of HPC in 2022, incremental cash flow per project is expected to support a further increase to the monthly dividend of CAD 0.01 per share. To summarize, Inter Pipeline shareholders will benefit immediately from an offer that provides a premium to the current trading price, an immediate 175% increase to their monthly dividend upon closing, and by sharing in the synergies and enhanced growth potential arising from the combined company. With that, I will turn things over to Mick to outline a number of the additional benefits and future potential value creation associated with this transaction.
Thanks, Scott. Good morning, everybody. Can't even begin to explain how excited I am about this combination. Before I get into it, I want to thank the people on both sides who've worked tirelessly over the last 10 days to bring this transaction over the line. Today, I'm going to talk about the amazing asset integration, expanded customer service offering, the leading condensate delivery system that we're going to have with the combined company, the de-risking of HPC with Pembina's NGL, the meaningful operating and project synergies that will come out of this transaction, the strength of the financial platform, the scale and the capability of the combined company, the readily actionable growth projects, the huge growth opportunities that come together with the companies, and the ability to invest in a sustainable future and be part of the solution towards a lower carbon economy.
First, this is going to be fun. I've done this now a few times, and it's just the industrial logic is literally heavy-duty industrial logic. What I'm going to do here is tour you through by business unit what the combined businesses look like. You're all familiar with Pembina's conventional business trending up and down that BC-Alberta border where all the good geology is, all the way up into Northeast BC. We're going to add Inter Pipe's assets, and you can see that that trend continues right along the Rocky Mountain trend. Now we have the same business, both conventional pipeline business units, but servicing different parts of the province. The same, yet different. What does that mean? It means economies of scale. It means combinable, but it means different parts of the province and more diversification. Next, we're going to look at oil sands.
We're proud of our oil sands business. As you know, we've got two large-scale synthetic crude oil pipelines. We've got the Nipisi pipeline. We have about a million barrels a day of capacity. It's a great business. We add Inter Pipeline's business. Look at the fit. It's perfect. Operating in the same corridors. We're going to have operating cost synergies. We're going to leverage the infrastructure. We've got a huge amount of spare capacity to grow with the oil sands and also to position ourselves for future opportunities. Next slide, gas services. We have a number of world-scale processing centers distributed again along that geologic trend, all the way down to Empress, where we extract, and then all the way down into Chicago, where we have, of course, our working interest in the Aux Sable facility. Next slide. There's Inter Pipeline. They're in the places we're not.
We straddle gas going east. They straddle gas going west into the Pacific Northwest and California. That straddle plant, I think, is the largest plant of its kind in North America, and they also take off gas out of the oil sands. Again, the same business, but in different parts of the province with different geology behind it. Next slide. Our NGL business, of course, the epicenter is Redwater Complex. We have a new frack down in Empress. We've got the frack up at Younger. Our terminal businesses and NGLs we've just commissioned and are super proud of what's going on at Prince Rupert. Of course, the Vancouver Wharves that we're slowly developing is down in the Vancouver area. Terminals, fractionators, we're about 350,000 barrels a day. Next slide. We add ROF that we currently operate.
It's the sister plant of Redwater. Gets as almost 400,000 barrels a day and of course, that center is like a condensate machine, and HPC is right beside it. Just down the road from HPC is where we're going to build our petrochemical facility. The leverage there, both on fractionation, but also the scale we can bring to the petrochemical business is unprecedented. Next slide. There it is. That is a beautiful thing. That is reaching all the best geology in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. That's oil sands, that's conventional, that's gas transmission, that's processing, that's fractionation, that's exports. The combined company, 6.2 million barrels a day of capacity. That's almost exactly a double of what Pembina had. 8.8 BCF up from 6.1 BCF . 390,000 barrels a day of frack capacity up from 350. Almost 40 million barrels of storage. That excludes Europe.
Europe's another 32 million barrels, that's a lot of barrels. A really meaningful acceleration of Pembina strategy through the combination of Inter Pipeline and advancement of the petrochemical capacity. You'll recall when we delayed our project indefinitely that we said petrochemicals remains in strategy. It just wasn't the right time for us. Now it is the right time. Our great start on propane exports, we plan to grow that as well. Let's not forget the gas and liquids egress down to Aux Sable into the best market in North America for gas. Next slide. That was the industrial logic of the steel and the geology. I'm going to take you through what it means to our customers, and that's one of the most exciting things. You know we call our service offering the Pembina Store. There we go.
The first value chain is the gathering and processing, the gas value chain. We take gas from the field. We deliver it all the way to Mainline Express through various pipelines. The growth of the gas value chain for us will be LNG, it will be methanol, it will be gas to electricity, which we're obviously doing through a number of cogeneration plants. That value chain is going to keep getting bigger, and it's going to keep getting longer. Every time it gets longer, we add value to products. Next slide, please. We have the NGL value chain, which is the second big arrow. NGLs come out of our gas value chain. They feed our NGL value chain. We've got pipelines, all four products, C2+, C3+, crude and condensate, which are on the next value chain.
It goes through our pipes, through Redwater, distributed, now exported. We have Vancouver Wharves, we are exporting NGLs and other products all over the globe now. Next slide. Got a little bit of a gremlin here. There we go. Oil value chain, all the way from field terminals through now condensate. Think about condensate. We're gathering condensate in Northeast BC. We're delivering it through our Peace Pipeline to CDH. Where we hand it off to the Polaris system, the leading diluent distribution system in Canada. It gets the full ride up there. It gets blended with bitumen back down to the recently acquired Kinder tanks. We're taking that product all the way from Northeast BC, right up to Fort McMurray, back down and handing it off to egress pipeline. That's a tremendous service offering. A one-stop shop. Next slide. Got a little bit of a gremlin here.
All right, here we go. That's the good part. These are the overlay of Inter Pipeline on our value chain. More mainline extraction, more fractionation. You add HPC to the NGL value chain, turning propane into propylene, into polypropylene. Huge enhancement. Now we can access higher value markets internationally, and we can convert the product, add value to the product. It can be exported or sold domestically. More condensate services, more oil sand services, more crude oil, more terminals. It's doing more of what we do, but also expanding the value chain. The future of the NGL value chain is adding value to NGLs isobutane alkylate, and it just keeps on going. By combining the companies, we can truly do things that neither of the companies could do on their own. Next slide. There we go. Oh, up one, please.
Now, let's look at the opportunity set. Under construction in combination, we're just over CAD 5 billion. Of course, the big adder there is the HPC facility. We were about CAD 1 billion there. The rest is HPC under construction. You know about our deferred projects of CAD 800 million. I'm not going to go over those again. The projects that become readily actionable upon closing are to tie Cochrane into our Brazeau system and the trip up to Redwater, our isobutane project. Those become readily actionable. Combined projects, we have another CAD 6 billion now. We have tanks, we have cogeneration, we have gas plants, we have export terminal expansions on multiple products. We have ROF integrated solutions. We have additional opportunities at RFS. All that Cochrane C3+ has to get fracked somewhere, and it's going to be fracked at RFS. We have pipeline expansion.
Our current portfolio, our readily actionable portfolio, and our long-term portfolio are greatly enhanced through this combination, not just as an opportunity set, but also in regard to the ability financially with our new scale to advance these projects. Next slide. We've made a commitment to lower our intensity of all of our businesses, and we've been taking concrete steps in that regard over the last year. You're going to hear a lot more about this from Pembina as we work towards closing and beyond in the near term. We just, as you know, signed a long-term agreement for the purchase of wind energy. We have a cogen built. We have another one under construction, and I'd hazard to say, we're four to five more opportunities with the combined companies. We are handling hydrogen right now. That's within our skill set. We are studying carbon capture.
We're going to do a pilot at Redwater, where we're very well-positioned to learn there. We are very good at sequestration, and our LNG projects, as they arise, will displace coal globally. We are committed to being part of the solution towards moving towards a lower carbon economy. Next slide.
Thanks, Mick. Near-term synergies associated with the transaction are expected to immediately contribute to meaningful adjusted cash flow per share accretion upon closing. On a run rate basis, pre-tax synergies are expected to average CAD 150 million-CAD 200 million annually. As shown on slide 14, approximately CAD 100 million-CAD 150 million of annual synergies will come from lower general administration and operating costs and are expected to be realized in the first year after closing. The remaining CAD 50 million of annual synergies will come from commercial and product optimization, including optimization of the Redwater complex and are expected to be realized in the second year after closing. Beyond that, we expect to realize further long-term synergies through higher capacity utilization and asset repurposing. Turning to slide 15, Pembina remains committed to building the business within our longstanding financial guardrails.
This transaction further strengthens our financial platform by adding significant long-term contracted cash flows and long-lived underlying assets to Pembina's existing strong foundation. Notably, HPC will represent less than 10% of the combined company's adjusted EBITDA once HPC is in full service. The share-for-share exchange will maintain Pembina's strong balance sheet with pro forma adjusted funds from operations to adjusted debt under rating agency methodology of approximately 17%-19% over the next three years. As shown on slide 16, the combination of Pembina and Inter Pipeline further diversifies the company by commodity type through the addition of Inter Pipeline's PDH PP petrochemical business. Our counterparty credit quality remains extremely strong and relatively unchanged. There's a lot going on this slide, and I'm going to break it apart quickly. The blue bars over the years from 2008 all the way to the current state, this is Pembina only.
We call that the stairway to heaven. These are per-share metrics, EBITDA per share. The little diamonds are dividends per share. We signaled with this press release that upon closing, we're going to raise our dividend and then further signaled that next year upon HPC coming to service, yet another dividend increase. Those blue diamonds, what you see is what you get. The red line is the price of oil, the smaller bluish line, gray line, the price of gas. You can see no matter what's happening with the commodity price, we're still climbing that stairway to heaven. The shaded areas, financial crisis, commodity price collapse, COVID-19, some of the worst things the world's seen, we powered through those. We kept raising our EBITDA per share, our dividends per share through all that adversity.
What I really want to draw your attention to today is what happens after we do a synergistic combination. You look at Provident, we had a nice uptick in EBITDA per share, dividends per share after that. After Veresen, same thing. Kinder Morgan, even though we headed straight into a pandemic, our metrics kept improving right through the pandemic. The thought I'm going to leave you with is, what you see is what you get, and that's our prediction of the future is the blue diamonds and the blue bars are going to keep on this trajectory on average. Next slide. As we think about everything rolled up, we're highly integrated. These businesses are readily combinable, and we're going to have tremendous synergies, both operating synergies and project synergies. We're going to enhance the Pembina Store, the customer service offering.
We're sitting on top of, with the combination, even longer life geology with the oil sands. Something a little bit different than Pembina alone is the declines in that geology with the bigger oil sands footprint is dramatically reduced. We've seen the benefits of that coming out of the pandemic, that the oil sands only declined a couple of % and are now back up there compared to other basins on the planet. Our scale, our financial strength, our asset diversity, as I said, the same businesses but in different parts of the province is going to really enhance our ability to make money through additional adversity. We're going to stay steadfast in honoring our financial guardrails, and our ESG focus is going to become more and more apparent as this year moves on and into future years that we will be part of the solution.
We are going to stay on strategy. This combination enhances our journey on our strategy. We're going to keep enhancing value to products, customer services, and bring products to more favorable markets, benefiting our customers with higher netbacks. I guess with that, we'll open the line for questions.
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question over the telephone lines, that is star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, for a question over the telephone lines, that is star, then the number one. We'll pause for just one moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Jeremy Tonet with JP Morgan.
Hi, good morning.
Hey, Jeremy.
Just wanted to check on what you're able to say, I guess, with the history of this all coming together. Was this process really kind of born out of the strategic review that IPL is undergoing now, or had you thought about this in the past? Just wondering, anything that you're able to say at this point on the history of how this came together at this point?
Jeremy, I've been thinking about this for 10 years. This is my third try. All right? We know the Inter Pipeline people well. They're great people. We're partners with them at ROF. They've done some great things. We've tried to combine these companies, in my lifetime, literally three times. At the infancy of IPL, back when they were an income fund, when I was with a different company. What year was that, guys? I don't know. Eight years ago? That's how I met Scott Burrows. Didn't work. That's how I met Harry too, by the way. Now, this is third time lucky. I mean, the industrial logic has existed. It's a beautiful thing. The timing is ripe. Scale matters. Service matters. The synergies here are incredible. We always knew they were. This is just the right time.
Got it. That's helpful. Thanks. Maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, but just wondering if this deal closes as is today, would the company look the same going forward, or are there maybe more steps that could be taken, such as IPL then talking about getting a partner for HPC or selling European storage was partially sold, or are there other steps that could happen upon a successful completion of the merger here?
For sure. Obviously, beyond HPC and the effort it takes to run a plant of that size and complexity, there's a lot of fixed costs there, administratively, operationally. If you can add another plant, you're amortizing those costs by half, right? There are huge synergies. The CKPC project becomes much more doable. The IPL people are bringing an organization that we don't have. We had a skeleton organization with CKPC. We never got near as mature as they are. We've got lots to learn from them. Listen, our plant's in a box five kilometers away. We've got CAD 300 million laying on its side in yards there with towers. At the right time, when we learn what there is to be learned after we commission here, the odds of doing another project there go up a lot.
Obviously, we have not been talking to our Kuwaiti partners through this confidential process. That's one of my calls after I get off this call. We'll see what's possible. Yeah. Then Europe, talking to Christian Bayle, he had plans to sell Europe. We haven't studied that. It looks like a good business. Is it strategic? We'll see. That was on their radar, and so we'll investigate it, Jeremy. The guys shortened my press release from 14 pages to five, so just leave it at that.
Got it. Maybe one last one, if I could. This maybe brings back up one of those pages. Just wondering about the synergistic CapEx that you talked about, CAD 450 million to achieve CAD 100 million of EBITDA. It seems like quite a high rate of accretion on that spend. Just wondering if you could provide more details and what gives you the confidence on, I guess, that level of return just off the top with what you laid out there.
Yeah. Listen, Jeremy, that's not the last opportunity. Those are just ones that we felt we could use as a straw man. Cochrane's sitting there. It's not very far from our Brazeau Pipeline. We could just connect it, and we got the capacity, and we can bring it into Redwater, and that makes a huge amount of money. We get to market that product, which IPL with the C3+, they don't get to do right now. We stream that product to HPC. They didn't have the supply for HPC on their own. Now we're essentially them and the meat in the sandwich that they were missing to connect all that. You're going pretty much on existing assets other than a little extension from Brazeau. I've been saying for years, the strength of the value chain is something's always easy to expand.
In this case, it's just the pipeline that needs to be expanded, and everything else is there. So it's a brownfield, but it's almost like just filling spare capacity. Then on the isobutane, turning butane into iso and normal. When we finally got to compare notes with Chris, we were all smiling. We were working on the same stuff, and they were working on that, we were working on that, and now we have this massive supply of butane together. That project will lead to an alkylate project, we hope, and the economics of that look the same as this. We can start to produce octane to add to cleaner burning fuels. I'm just sprinkling ideas. There's a bunch of these. The synergies, the run rate synergies are super exciting. The project synergies are even more exciting to me.
Got it. That's helpful. I'll stop there. Thank you.
Thanks, Jeremy.
Your next question comes from Shneur Gershuni with UBS.
Hi, good morning, everyone. I was wondering if we can start off a conversation or a bigger picture conversation on the synergies. I appreciate the layout on slide 14 where you talk about the lower general expenses and so forth. As I see your assets fitting together, and I think about the industrial logic that you just laid out, I would think that there would be, even without spending a lot of capital on growth projects, the more smaller optimization capital, that there could potentially be some long-term new opportunities even within the existing assets. I was wondering if you can give us a flavor or taste of what that potential is beyond the CAD 150 million-CAD 200 million, just on the assets working together and the fact that they hand-in-glove type effect that you have put together here.
Yeah. That's an insightful question. The answer is yes, absolutely. Listen, when you have breaks in the value chain, there's leakage, right? When IPL can't connect Cochrane to HPC and they need to rely on a whole bunch of intermediaries, there's a lot of leakage, revenue leakage. When you connect the value chain, that leakage goes away. Normally what that means is for every dollar of a fee-for-service income you're getting by connecting those, you probably have another dollar of marketing income. Absolutely, I think we're just getting started on the revenue synergies. As we fill in the value chain and we connect what is not currently connected, and IPL's propane can now get to global markets, for example, right?
Beyond what they would've needed for HPC, the rest can go into our unit trains out to Prince Rupert and fetch higher international markets by way of example. That's a huge synergy. They have a lot of proprietary propane, the combined company will capture that. I could go on and on. We're going to keep filling in the value chain. We're going to capture that leakage for our account and for the account of our customers. If you're a customer and you're getting a higher net back because of the industrial logic that was on those maps, you're going to phone us next. You're pretty much compelled to phone us because you're just going to get a higher price.
That's been what we've been trying to do for 10 years, and it's starting to manifest where our marketing pool is getting better pricing than anybody else. With HPC, converting those products, it's really going to end up with much higher net backs of propane for our customers there as well. We're not done. We would like to have the same international value chain on natural gas. We're working, and so is Inter Pipe, by the way, working on different opportunities to enhance the value of all hydrocarbons.
No, that makes perfect sense. Appreciate it. I could probably go on and on asking questions about it, but maybe one specific follow-up question. I understand that it's subject to regulatory approvals, the approval of the Court of King's Bench of Alberta. I was just wondering if you previewed this transaction at all with the rating agencies and other large shareholders. I believe an offer was made for Inter Pipeline recently. Just wondering if you've got those approvals as well too, or those are some of the phone calls you're making today.
Hey, Shneur, it's Cam speaking. Without sort of responding directly to that, I think we clearly mentioned in the presentation, in the press release, that the transaction is within the company's guardrails and adheres to that and certainly have some comfort around that. In terms of shareholders, clearly, this was a confidential process and confidential transaction, so those calls are yet to come. I would acknowledge that we have overlap with many of those shareholders and also know them well.
Perfect. Thank you very much, guys. Really appreciate it, and congratulations on all your hard work.
Thank you. Kindly.
Your next question comes from the line of Matt Taylor with Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co.
Hey, thanks, guys, for taking my questions here. I was thinking about longer term here. You're seeing modest degradation in the fee-based guardrail, but you're still above your target of 80%. I think a key question that I'd like you to answer is, as you're expanding the value chain and you're looking more downstream, can you help investors get comfort on how you're going to protect the integrity of that cash flow stream? Like I said, you're still above the 80%, but historically, that kind of investment specifically, lower contracting, lower valuation. I assume it's your ability to supply the feedstock and push it through your entire value chain is how you're seeing it. I'm just curious on how you're thinking about maintaining the multiple that you've had from traditional investments that are substantially contracted.
Yeah. Listen, I appreciate that question. Listen, we are steadfast in maintaining our guardrails. We've been way over 90%. When we wrote the guardrails a number of years back, we were closer to 80%, and we've been inching all that up. We put everything we do through that sieve, and something that's going to violate our guardrails doesn't make it through the sieve. We're going to have a product mix that's going to manage that. It's going to balance security with profitability as it always has. Listen, we don't want to be 100% fee for service. There's a lot of merit in having 10% or 15% of your business be commodity exposed. We think that's good. I think some of our customers don't mind us being commodity exposed to a point because we sell our product alongside their product. They get what we get.
We have the same skin in the game. There's a lot of layers of why we want to have some commodity exposure. When we know something's going to work, with this scale and flexibility, we can take some commodity risk, prove to the market it works, and then contract it out when everyone thinks it's a great idea. Inter Pipeline's done that on HPC. They had to take some risk, and now everybody's going, "Great idea," and they're all lining up to sign up. That's a model we can follow. We're going to manage that actively. Just let me leave you with one thought. If we could manage our guardrails through three global crises. In a decent market like we're at now, a decent and rising market, not just for one commodity, but for gas, for crude oil, for condensate. This is really just something that we feel entirely in control of. We're not going to let investors down and do something that they don't expect.
Okay. That's great, Mick. Just digging a little bit more there. You're going to build the pet chem facility and contract 50/50, and then Inter Pipe is looking to do the PDH plant at about 60%, moving up to 70%, 85%. Understanding it's hard to figure out the exact percentage for each project, but just looking ahead, is that sort of what you're targeting is maybe a 60%-70% range in terms of contracting and then prove it out, add various different pieces to the puzzle like an alkylate project or butane splitter, and then contract it more longer term?
That's one option. We don't want to be nailed down exactly what we do. Internally, our BD people try to nail us down exactly what we're going to do all the time, but we're going to do what makes sense at the time. After this diversity that we now have, we have a lot of options to take a calculated risk in one area while we term out another. As I think about HPC to date, I'm pretty comfortable at 60%. Inter Pipe is going to have to do what they need to do. Until closing, they still will operate independently. I'm really comfortable at 60%. I like what the spreads look like right now. I wouldn't contract any more of that right now. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't do so in the future. It doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to not contract the next petrochemical plant that we do or our next petrochemical asset. We're going to do what makes sense at the time to manage the portfolio to maximize the risk-return balance.
That's great. Thanks for that, Mick. I agree the industrial logic looks sound. I'm wondering about the competitive environment and now be controlling a significant portion of each of the NGL products. Are you anticipating having to sell any of these assets or restructure any parts of the business to satisfy regulators?
We do not anticipate needing to sell any parts of the business.
Okay, great. Last one on de-risking HPC, you mentioned your ability to source a good chunk of propane supply. Can you just dig a little bit more into that on what factors you guys saw in taking HPC and bringing it in-house for you that gives you an advantage and will help de-risk that project with your opportunity set as opposed to sitting in Inter Pipe?
Let's just start with supply. We have three times as much supply with the combined companies as that plant needs. We have enough supply for that plant, for Rupert and for another plant, and then we still have some left over. I think that speaks for itself. In terms of the risk profile, they've done a great job. Hats off to them, what they've been able to do through the pandemic. We were lucky in a way that we had not really started. We took a write-off, and I believe the write-off is going to come back, a write-up, I guess, in the future. They closed it off, and they did a fantastic job, kept everyone safe and healthy. Hats off to them. They're over 90% done, completed. They've got a sound team ready to go.
It's dramatically de-risked from starting over. The market is cooperating. The world needs a lot of this product, a ton of it. It's short. There's nothing coming on to fill the void. The market is de-risked, the capital is de-risked, the organization is de-risked. The encore will be if we are able to do another one, then all the learnings come and dramatically de-risk the next one, that Pembina would have faced all the risk of the next one. This team that we're going to inherit are of great value to us. We're embracing this project. We're embracing the team, and I think it's going to be super fun and rewarding.
Great. Thanks, Mick. Thanks for taking my questions, guys.
Cheers.
Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Kuske with Credit Suisse.
Thanks. Good morning. Mick, maybe if you could just give us a bit of color on how you think about IPL fitting into the Pembina family in the spectrum of past transactions that you've done. Is this more like a Provident, I guess more than a decade ago or about a decade ago, or a bit more like a Veresen or KML?
I would say it's a bit different than all those. The pet chem step out is massive and advances our strategy. As I mentioned earlier, we pulled back on pet chem, we pulled back on LNG, but we were very clear in saying they remain within strategy, and we meant it. That's a wonderful step out for us. As I said earlier, we are going to be in the petrochemical infrastructure business. We are not going to be in the commodity chemical business. We think there's a huge opportunity for chemical infrastructure without being in the commodity business. We think that the market will understand that, as they have understood that when we entered the frac business, which was all typically commodity exposed, and we converted that to fee for service. The petchem is an awesome step out.
The Polaris addition, we've been trying to secure what we call a diluent backbone. What we mean by that is a delivery system to the oil sands. We're the largest gatherer of condensate through Peace, through Drayton, through Goshen. We bring it to the center, we put it in CDH, and then we don't have control to interface with the oil sands customers, the demand-side customers, and now we do. If you're one of the big guys, or even if you're one of the smaller guys and you've got condensate in Northeast BC, we can get you your own condensate. We can make that condensate into that blend that you want through CDH. It's really just enhancing and filling in some missing parts of the existing business. Veresen was different in a way because it was a gas step out.
We were NGL and crude and condensate, and we weren't gas. Every time we went to a customer, they'd say, "Great, what about gas?" We'd say, "Well, here's a phone number." We fill that. Here it's just kind of extending our value chain and enhancing the offerings. The offerings aren't unique. They're what we do now other than HPC. They're just in a different geographic location. That's the coolest part about this is we get the synergies, but we actually increase our business diversification, our geographic diversification greatly. I can't overemphasize that the average decline of Pembina pre this transaction and post of the underlying geology is way lower. It doesn't sound like a big deal. It's a huge deal.
That means if we hit the skids in another pandemic or whatever, God forbid, we're going to be declining at a way lower rate. That's worth a lot. It also means we're going to bounce back way faster. If you look at, this is our Advantage Canada discussion. The Permian with 30%, 40% declines is going to take a long time to come back. The oil sands guys are already back because they have low declines and high sunk costs. Their incremental cash to keep producing is low. That's a huge attribute of our new business.
That's really helpful color. Maybe just as a backdrop of volumes have increased out of the basin over the last sort of six to nine months in a pretty steady lockstep fashion, which highlights your return to a more normal environment. Credit quality has improved among the producers and on the verge of having egress improvements on really all the hydrocarbons out of the basin in Western Canada. When you have that kind of positioning, how do you think about the future for a combined Pembina- Inter?
Like I said, the guys wouldn't let me print the last 10 pages of the press release. We'll be working on unveiling the other ideas we have. I'm so excited. I just can't wait to let that come out as soon as is reasonably practical. You're right. I mean, we've got all three commodities performing. We're getting the egress we haven't had in a decade. Profound changes are coming to the basin. The oil sands is arguably one of the top two or three oil-producing regions on the planet. The Montney is arguably the best gas, NGL, condensate producing resource on the planet. We're the largest service provider by far in both of those areas. We have egress, and we've got tons of spare capacity. Like, midstream pipe assets are half full. They're oil sands assets. We're maybe 75%-80% full on a lot of our stuff. The torque is just unbelievable in each of the businesses and when you combine them even more so. I think we're on a very good path.
That's great. I'm looking forward to those 10 pages. Thank you.
Cheers, me too. See, I told you guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Robert Kwan with RBC Capital Markets.
Good morning. To start, wanted to come back to the pro forma asset base and the pieces that might move around. You talked about PIC, or calling PIC in the European storage, but can you talk about any plans to divest any of the other major assets in the initial year post-close? Whether that's enhancing returns in the deal, strengthening the balance sheet. Specifically, just there were a lot of assets that Pipeline acquired that you had a chance to buy, but you didn't, like Cochrane, Redwater, and especially the high debt leverage, low return Corridor Pipeline.
All the assets you mentioned we like a lot. We've wanted to own them all. There's always assets. Every time you grow, Robert, you always want to hi-grade. If I could look back at them and say, "What is something we could have done better?" I think we could recycle a bit better. That's something that becomes possible as you grow, and as your expectations grow for assets, you look at the complexity of operating smaller assets that distract your whole management team. Those will float up, and I expect there will be some things that we shed. We have not concluded that yet. It took us a while to, by way of example, to get our head around keeping Vancouver Wharves. Now we're digging into it. We're fully integrating it, and we see opportunities.
We like the team out there. It's becoming clearer to us that asset in the long term is going to fit in to what we do, or at least a great deal of it. It's just too early to say. Christian Bayle has signaled, and the sale of European Storage was what the trajectory they were on. I've no reason to disagree with that. We have export terminals already, and those are export and import terminals. We'll just see what's possible there. It's just too early to know.
If I could just turn to the guardrails and the pro forma metrics. Specifically, you've got the 14% combined with EBITDA, and you've noted that it excludes APIP, but what year are you using? Given IPL message, some pretty different EBITDA numbers during the ramp-up period. What is your underlying polypropylene assumption? If you can give any sensitivity as to where those metrics start to move around, like a 10% change, does it take you out of the guardrails?
Robert, it's Cam. I'll take a crack at that. I think, as you can appreciate, we're trying to be informative with the numbers. Also, we're generally not a company who provides long-term guidance. So, I think the way we've tried to characterize the combination is as Pembina as it sits today, and then a run rate as HPC gets online and ramps up, and noting the profile there. I won't go specifically into parsing some of those assumptions that you mentioned, but as you said, you noted the assumptions on the APIP. This is more of a run rate type level that we see and what we think the longer-term profile of the business looks like.
Yeah. Robert, I would just add that IPL has done a great job, I would say they could contract that asset much more highly. They've indicated that previously. I can substantiate that. The company with its greater scale and flexibility will make a decision for hopefully what's right for the combined company. That's a toggle switch that can be toggled.
Just to be clear, though, Cam, the 14% is a lot more akin to IPL's long-term Heartland number, not their Frontier number?
Yeah. I don't know if there's that much difference, Robert. It's probably somewhere in the middle.
Then last, just one question. I apologize if it was in the press release. Do you have [audio distortion] ?
Yeah, we don't publish that, Robert. It'll come out in the circular when it's mailed.
Thanks very much.
Your next question comes the line of Patrick Kenny with National Bank Financial.
Good morning, guys. Just maybe looking beyond the closing of the transaction here, can you just speak to how this combination might accelerate your plans to build out that new fractionation opportunity up in Northeast BC, as well as maybe execute on phase 8, 9, 10? Also speak to maybe if this transaction changes your plans at all surrounding the expansion out at Prince Rupert, just thinking about the dynamics here of looking to maximize the value at HPC going forward?
I can't promise specific projects, but imagine there's going to be 100,000 barrels a day coming out of Cochrane. We get a bunch of that through egress already. All that product is going to flow now on Brazeau, and it's got to be fracked somewhere. We're pretty full already. I think you can draw some conclusions on what that might mean at Redwater. We've got a lot of product, and now we're going to have more product, and HPC can't absorb it all. That means it's got to go somewhere. You know what? Rupert's a pretty good spot to take it all. This certainly improves the odds of Rupert expansion. I think the odds were very good anyway.
I don't want to say it's certain, but it continues to improve the odds there. As you know, we're looking to go from 25,000 barrels- 45,000 barrels a day out there. We're studying an option to use larger ships to improve our economics, which will result in enhanced netbacks, not just for us, but for customers. There's lots of examples like that, but that's an obvious one. You can just see how it kicks off a whole bunch of things all the way up and down the value chain.
Got it. Thanks for that, Mick and t hen maybe for Scott here. Just looking at the combined dividend increase here of, call it 9% to 10% once HPC is fully up and running. I know you expect to be well below your payout target range there of being below 100% of fee-based cash flow. Now thinking about the CAD 6 billion of unsecured growth combined, the significant free cash flow that you've highlighted in the press release, any color on what your longer-term target growth on an AFFO per share basis might look like or dividend growth beyond the initial 9%- 10%?
Yeah, Pat, I think that's a little tough to answer right now, only in the sense that we got a lot of work ahead of us to turn a bunch of these ideas into reality, other things that we've been working on to bring forward. When I look at the dividend run rate increase, we've kind of been in that 4%-6% over the last decade. This path is one we've been on before. We did a bump with Kinder a little bit early. We obviously didn't have one during the pandemic. We did a second bump after the Veresen transaction. Longer term, I think we'd be more back in that 4%-6% range. Hopefully we can have cash flow per share growth ahead of that. Overall lower our payout ratio to free up funds for the CAD 6 billion of projects we talked about. There's a lot of work ahead of us to turn a bunch of those projects into reality.
Got it. Just a cleanup question on, I know you touched on the competition approval process there, but just looking at the six-month timeline here, first glance looks to be somewhat aggressive relative to its precedents out there. Unless I missed something. Perhaps just provide a bit more granularity on the process there.
That's our expectation. Could it be faster? Yeah. Could it be longer? Yeah. That's our best estimate right now.
Okay, fair enough. I will leave it there, guys. Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Praneeth Satish with Wells Fargo.
Thanks. Good morning. I just wanted to ask in terms of where does Brookfield stand in the process? Did you engage with them at all during the process? If so, do you get the sense that they're supportive?
To get data room access, we signed an NDA, and we had no contact with Brookfield during that time period. We have no idea where they stand.
Okay, got it. Just one more for me. I guess, in the past, IPL had talked about really pushing further into petchem, including potentially an ethane cracker, an acrylic acid plant. I'm just curious in terms of where you stand on that and just pushing further into the petchem business beyond PDH and PP.
We want to supply said cracker. At this time, we don't have an interest in participating in that kind of an asset. As good as our scale is now, that's just kind of, we feel we'd be over our skis in that. We have literally billions of dollars of potential investments to support that kind of a development. We think it is coming and we can provide sufficient volumes, I think, on our own to facilitate that kind of a development and provide ethane at a cost that would be attractive to a new entrant whilst also adding value for our shareholders.
Got it. That's it for me. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Robert Catellier with CIBC Capital Markets.
Just a couple of cleanup questions here. There was a time in which you had an eye on basin diversification. Obviously, with this transaction, there's going to be a fair bit more concentration. Can you tell us about your view on basin concentration currently and where that might go, let's say, in the next five years?
Yeah. Robert, the way I think about it, you're right. It's more investment in WCSB. It is a logical conclusion of our assertion that it is Advantage Canada for the foreseeable future. The way I think about it is, as we march down the value chain and we turn products into polypropylene or export, the concentration in Western Canada, yes. If those products are going globally, what does that really mean?
I mean, it means that you're actually diversifying all over the world, and you're diversifying to demand-side customers rather than just supply-side customers. Yeah, the assets are in Western Canada, but the markets are everywhere. We think of this transaction as a really meaningful step with HPC and the access to additional product, which will help us push down the value chain and access those demand-side markets, which is really the ultimate diversification. When you can put a product on a ship and take it anywhere, and you've got great geology, then you've arrived. That's really the best way to do it rather than saying, "Well, I'm in the U.S. or I'm in Canada." What really matters is where your customers are. That's where the diversification comes from.
Operator, we might have lost Robert.
Still there?
Yeah, we're here.
Okay. A question for Scott. I thought that there's some competing influences here on the financial guide rail. One was the change to the fee composition, the other being the increased scale and the free cash flow number. I'm wondering if there's any appreciable change to how you expect to manage the balance sheet. You already touched on the payout ratio, but if you could touch on those two things, please.
Sure. I think as we've said many times, obviously we have that guardrail for a reason, so we don't plan to go anywhere near that. There is a slight downturn as HPC comes online, but you also see a substantial step change in the balance sheet as HPC comes online as well. You have to look at those things in order. We recognize that in 2022, while you're still spending essentially all the capital to get it online, and you have none of the EBITDA, those metrics are higher than we would like, obviously, long term. When you start looking out to 2023, 2024, you get to run rate HPC, you get the synergies. Those leverage metrics improve pretty substantially. When we look at the metrics, we're still in that guardrail of 17%-19%.
We start at the bottom end. We trend towards the top end a little later in the forecast. We see actually, when we look across the leverage profile, absent 2022, on our S&P credit metrics, we actually see an improvement across the basis. If the question is, are we taking a little bit more commodity exposure? Yes. The overall balance sheet metrics improve as well. That's how I think about it.
Okay. Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn it back over to Mick for closing remarks.
Again, thank you to the teams on both sides. Tremendous effort. Lots of all-nighters. We're uber excited about the combo. It advances our strategy dramatically, and it just enables so many more things that we're very excited to have you along on the journey. Thanks for your support, and enjoy the reopening of society along with summer weather. All the best.