Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We're gonna go ahead and get started. First, remarks here from our co-CEOs, Jim Teague and Randy Fowler. Just a couple of housekeeping things here. We've got Sheila in the back's got a validation for your valet parking tickets. If you need that, see her. The Wi-Fi code, you can see that up here, so hopefully that'll work for you. With that, we'll go ahead and get started. You guys ready? Okay, go ahead.
Yeah. I wanna apologize for not wearing a tie. I didn't get the notice. Randy said, "Well, it went out by email," and I said, "Hell, I don't read half my emails," so I'll be comfortable. You know, it was at this meeting last year that created our Project Nine. It was when Becca asked a question of what would you like to see? I just popped off. It came out and just came through my mouth, and I said, "Well, I'm tired of eights. I'd like to see a nine." Meaning I was tired of our EBITDA starting with $8 billion. We'd like to see it start with $9 billion. Half of y'all took that as guidance. I didn't think there was a prayer in hell, I got back to the office and... Where's Tug Hanley?
Stand up, Tug. I was talking to Tug, and I said, "How could we do something to get everybody." That's good, Tug. Tug, that's good. How could we get everybody bought in to trying to reach $9 billion? Tug said, "Let's call it Project Nine." Okay, that sounds good. I immediately appointed Tug as the chairman of the Project Nine initiative, and he brought a bunch of people by. What we did is we said, okay, if we make between $9 billion and $9.3 billion, everybody below officer gets $3,000. If we make above 9.3, everybody gets $5,000. As it came about, we made 9.309. You guys, this meeting was responsible for Project Nine, and Becca was responsible for asking the right questions.
If you're all really good at your jobs like Becca was, you might be a board member with Enterprise someday. You ready to get started?
Ready.
You got anything?
No.
Okay. Randy and I are a hell of a team. One reason is he's so good at putting these things together, so I'll be more of a color man. Just kinda like Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell and something like that.
I think it was Don Meredith, too.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
This is what Enterprise looked like when it went public. That little pipeline over in Mississippi, it was a line down to some processing plants around Mobile Bay to brought Y-grade up. Enterprise used to have a small fractionator there in Mississippi. In Louisiana, we had a pipeline that our biggest customer over there was Marathon for butanes, but that one going north tied into Dixie Pipeline. In Mont Belvieu, then we had three fractionators, I think three isoms, couple of splitters, nine storage wells, and an MTBE plant.
Mm.
An import facility. It's a nice setup. What did he not have? If you look at Enterprise at that time, we were an island. We didn't have any of our own feed systems to bring Y-grade in, and we didn't have any of our own distribution systems. At that time, we had 500 mi of pipe, so we depended on third parties to get Y-grade into our system. No value chain. No processing plants. When Dan bought Shell Midstream, I forget how many processing food plants we had at the time over there. Seven, eight ?
Mm-hmm.
It was keep-whole contracts. We were selling our products at anywhere from $0.02-$0.06 off Mont Belvieu. Otherwise, we were trucking LPG back. We decided we're gonna build a pipeline from Louisiana back to Mont Belvieu. We didn't have a single contract. Dan said, "You know what? We'll get a return on this pipe if all we have in it is air because the fact we can move those barrels back mean we'll get a higher price on those barrels." It worked. Go ahead, Michael. Who's doing the slides? There it is. That's what we look like today. We went, you know, that import dock, we leased space on a dollar tanking and that 500 mi of pipe's now 50,000.
The storage, we had nine storage wells in Mont Belvieu. Today, I think it's 37, Bob. 20 deep water docks when we didn't have any. We've got 29 natural gas processing locations, but 40 cryogenic trains. 25 fractionators, that includes the splitters, Chris will talk more about that. In two PDH plants soon to be and two IBDH plants. Brent will talk about this, his group, but embedded in that system is a lot of options. The funny thing is when we first went public, we grew by acquisitions. I'm gonna plan a question. Somebody can ask what's the most strategic acquisition we ever made. We grew by acquisition. After we bought MAPL, and we did that in a week, we started growing organically.
Mm-hmm.
I guess well, Navitas was the last acquisition. You got it, Randy.
Okay. Michael, I think we can...
You know, this summer, we'll celebrate 25 years as a public company. You know, Jim's highlighted some of the successes and how we grew the business over that 25 years. It also represents this year will represent 25 years of distribution growth. Some of what we wanna do in the presentation today that you'll hear from us and the rest of the team is how we're geared and positioned to prosper for the next 25 years. I think you have to start with the Duncan family DNA. It provides the continuity, the consistency, the culture of going back and as Dan was fond to say, and doing the best you can every day.
It was that mindset of doing win-win deals with both customers and investors. I think you and Dan had some interchange about doing win-win deals with customers.
Yeah. The most I got my butt chewed out by him was I had done a deal that admittedly was more favorable to us. He chewed me out because he was interested not just in that deal, but in the next deal that we did with him. I told him, I said, "I thought my job was to make money." He says, "Your job is to make money over the long term.
That long-term focus is there. In fact, you know, you hear the expression of think like an owner. We really do think like owners. You know, Randa said just recently, you know, we think in terms of decades, not necessarily quarters. Quarters matter, and we pay attention to the quarters and pay attention to the detail. When we deploy capital, we think about the success of deploying that capital and the returns on that capital over long periods of time. You know, there's no shortcuts. Plants and equipment are built to last.
But it's that long-term focus that's also helped us avoid some financial fads over the years, whether it was, you know, the 50% incentive distribution rights or whether it was coming in and maintaining distribution coverage right on the cutting edge of one time or 0.95 x. I think that's served us well over the years, and it's been demonstrated.
Yeah. The, the next bullet talks about the reliable, cost-efficient, value-added midstream energy, sir. The, the most important two words on that is, or three, is integrated value chain. From the minute we Randy got there six months before I did, from the get-go, we were looking at how do we create a value chain. That first pipeline from Louisiana was what we called it, we controlled that corridor when we put that pipeline in. It's become one of the most important pipes we've got. From there, we started adding other integrated systems. As we've grown, whether it be acquisition or organic, whatever we build or we buy, it has to fit what we already have, or we have to be able to see a pathway.
For example, when we bought those processing plants from Gonterra in South Texas, that's just like Louisiana, we're selling our ethane at Belvieu less $0.03. We had ways out for everything else. We bought a pipeline from Exxon for $100 million. We put it in ethane service, all of a sudden ethane price went up to Belvieu even. We tied that into our anchor in Mont Belvieu. If we're gonna do something, whether we build it or we buy it has to fit what we already have. I like to say that as a country, we have been given a gift, and that gift is oil and gas resources, shale that Tony will talk about. We've been given a gift because so much of it is right here in Texas.
Mm-hmm.
We're going to talk about the Gulf Coast later, but it's right where we live. So we've been able to really capitalize on that.
Of course, we couldn't have done anything with this, the success that we've had without the support and the consistent support that we've had from our banks, you know, which are really our first line of financial flexibility and liquidity, and as well as our debt and equity investors. Certainly appreciative and grateful for that. Yeah. Coming in and hitting on some of the themes that we're seeing as the year shapes up, you know, certainly energy security and reliability have taken a whole new importance on given the invasion of Russia, Ukraine, and again, just the development of geopolitical volatility that we're seeing these days.
well, we've got a slide we think of it in terms of, I think, Jim talks about it being energy evolution, energy addition, as opposed to energy transition. I think energy transition is a misnomer, and we'll show you why. you know, the one thing I think the country is gonna be challenged by, and we continue to see it, is permitting, and permitting reform that needs to happen. We hear that may be coming out of D.C., a bipartisan effort around permit reform. It's certainly needed. I guess the proof will be in the pudding. you know, the people in this room, we all know of Keystone XL and Mountain Valley Pipe and Constitution Pipeline.
You know, the permitting reform goes beyond that, you know. Whether it's the, it gets into some of these initiatives on these renewable sources of power, whether it's a Resolution Copper Mine in Arizona that's running into issues as far as coming in and getting productive, or the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Nevada that's running issues, or the federal ban on copper and nickel mining in Minnesota. We're running into issues across the board, whether it's on green metals and mining. If not here, then where are we gonna come in and source those green metals?
You also, when we're talking about electrifying everything, you know, there's the TransWest transmission line that's supposed to take wind power, wind-generated power from Wyoming and distribute it into Nevada, into Arizona, and into California. This is a project that started in 2007, and now the next expectation of when this project is gonna be up and running is not until 2030. Given the pace that some of our elected officials want to come in and see more of the country electrified, I think we're really gonna be challenged. That's where I think oil and gas and frankly, coal have really been provided the reliability of the power resources at a reasonable price.
You know, the next thing, you know, again, what we'll also talk on is with this U.S. onshoring that's gonna happen, we think there's a sweet spot for Texas and Louisiana, and we'll get to that. Here's a slide that, you know, some of the next two slides really come from information from a gentleman, a professor, Václav Smil. Bill Gates calls him his favorite author. I think he collaborates in the JP Morgan energy paper that, in fact, really just got published here the other day. When you come back in and take a look, really, the energy and the supply of energy has directly led to population growth and improvement in life.
You see this if you start early, and see the impacts of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of more things and the use of coal as a supply source, coal and steam, how you see population growth start to tick up. Oil led to more efficient machines. Ultimately, when you get into the 1950s and where we're more prolific producing natural gas, natural gas liquids, you see the first green revolution, which was agriculture. When you come in there, as far as what we were able to come in and do with seeds, but importantly, the introduction of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that all came from natural gas derivatives and NGL derivatives, really came and really, you know, you see an inflection in population growth there.
The thing to note in all that is the world burns more wood. A lot of times we like to call it biomass, but we burn more wood today than we burned in 1800. On coal demand, we're seeing record coal demand now compared to where we have historically. Again, more oil production, more gas production. And with that, we're not coming in and transitioning to anything. We're just adding more because the world is demanding more energy. What we're seeing is energy consumption per capita consistently goes up over time, and with that comes improvement in lives, whether it's life expectancy, whether it's education, or whether it's income per capita too. It's hard to see here how we can come in and transition.
We think it'll continue to be more about energy addition.
You know, when I look at that chart, and I look back to when I was in high school, so from the time I graduated from high school to today, we've more than doubled the population on the planet.
Mm-hmm.
I guess we expect to do another billion in the next 10 or 12 years. The idea that you're gonna do away with fossil fuels is comical. You watching that clock?
I am.
No, you're not.
It's a suggestion. Then the next thing, you know, you know, you pick your organization as far as what we're seeing and what the expectation is on fossil fuel growth over time. We throw out these, you know, the EIA and OPEC are more bullish. IEA, you know, more think the hydrocarbon demand will be flat over time. Anyway, we throw that out there as reference point. Okay, Bob. Here's another one of Professor Smil's thesis, is really when you come in and you talk about the four pillars of modern civilization, it's ammonia. Think again, think nitrogen-based fertilizers, steel, cement, plastic and petrochemicals.
With this the industrial heat that is required, high, high, high levels of heat, like 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, to come in and do a lot of the fabrication that's required. Each of these materials requires intense heat, and that's where you have really natural gas as the fuel for this. These 4 products consume about 17% of energy supply in the world and are responsible for about 20%-25% of CO2 emissions in the world. Currently, there's not another way to come in and produce these products without natural gas being the fuel supply to create this heat.
You know, if you go back in the '60s, I don't know that plastic would've been one of the four pillars...
Mm-hmm.
of modern civilization. I don't know how many of you were around in 1967 when The Graduate came out, and Dustin Hoffman has just graduated from college, and he's trying to figure out what to do, and this guy pulls him aside, and he said the word plastics. God knows that was prophetic.
It was. You know, you come in and just hitting on a couple of the examples here on ammonia and the impact of nitrogen-based fertilizers. Without nitrogen-based fertilizers, we could only feed half the people in the world. Sri Lanka actually tried this here a couple of years ago, that they came in and banned the use of fertilizers, and they saw their crop yields go down 50%-60% that next year. They quickly did away with that ban. I mean, this is something that's critical just in order to be able to feed the world. As Jim points out, the world just keeps growing. On cement, that's another one. Again, like 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit is what you need to come in and synthesize the limestones and the shale and the clays.
Cement is, after water, it is the most consumed material in this world. You still have, like, 300 million homes in this world that have earthen floors that lead to disease and to parasites. You still have, I think as Jim likes to say, there are a lot of people in this world that would like to have what we have. We see that demand for concrete and cement continuing to go up. You know, then obviously on the plastic and petrochemicals, very close to our hearts and, you know, it goes into everything that we touch in today's world and some things we don't think about, like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.
Okay, this next slide is the story of two days in December. At noon on December 22nd, ERCOT load was fed by 41%, 42% by wind and solar, natural gas by less than 40%. The clock changed to the next day around 10:00, Randy. This one's yours.
Yeah. On this, you can come in and say when the, you know, when the wind stopped blowing after the front blew through, and we had the calm and the wind stopped blowing, and obviously at night, the sun wasn't there. You had natural gas and coal step up, and they were responsible for fueling 88% of the power generation growth that night. Some of what we're seeing, and again, some of where we come back to that this is gonna be energy addition, not energy transition, is, you know, when you come in and you look at studies done on the intermittency of solar and wind, for every 100 GW of solar and wind that you add, you only displace or replace 10-30 GW of natural gas fuel supply.
You still need the natural gas and the thermal, coal also, to come in and back up the intermittent sources of power. That's, again, that's where we keep coming back, that we're into energy addition instead of energy transition.
On the afternoon of the 23rd, the governor called me, the whole purpose of the call was when they knew what was coming, is, are you guys ready? We were ready. We never shut anybody in. We have our plants winterized. There's a heck of a battle. I don't know it's a battle, in the legislature, there's a lot of talk of bills, I think, Bob, you could answer that. There's a lot of talk about bills being introduced to address the need for thermal backup as it relates to ERCOT.
All right. Yeah. Here, the next two slides, we showed you these slides last year, but they're still current 'cause nothing's changed in a year. You know, when you come in and you look at the demand that we're gonna see for green metals to come in, and whether it's EVs, wind, solar, and again, just electrifying everything. We're gonna need multiples of supply of what we have today, and we've already talked about some of the barriers on permitting reform. We still need a lot of these critical minerals if we're gonna come in and make this even energy addition. With that, our view is it's going to take longer, and it's gonna be more expensive. Okay, Mark.
Now-
It-
Go. I'll start it, and you take it. You look at who controls all the processing, it's China.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, what are we thinking? That we're gonna go from energy independence to dependent on an adversary. It makes no sense. Go ahead, Randy. Yeah.
Especially on, Jim, on your point, with the more and more that we're seeing resource nationalism and the trade embargoes, whether it's semiconductors or what next, to come in and have this kind of reliance on other countries. The resource nationalism just isn't in China. It's, you know, I mean, it's in South America as well. These are gonna be some challenges, especially when you come back in and you look at, as Jim said, the way the United States is blessed with the shale plays.
I think you start this one, Randy.
Yeah. Here, you know, we still have a third of the world, so call it 2.5 billion people that live in energy poverty, so they're still cooking with wood or coal or animal waste. With that, just their, you know, where they live and their quality of life is pretty low, and a lot of it just begins with their lack of access to clean fuels for cooking.
You know, if you've ever been to India, and you see the poverty, and you have an appreciation for all the good we do because they've had a program over there to convert homes that are cooking on with wood and coal, even dung, to LPG. It's so simple because you can carry it with a bottle, and I think they've converted 100 million homes. I think Indonesia's doing the same thing. These folks want what we have. Every one of them has a cell phone, so every one of them can see how the West lives. They were ignorant of that at one point, but they want what we have.
The idea that we think we're gonna limit fossil fuels because that's the vehicle that gets that place looking clean in that bottom picture. This one's yours.
Yeah. Then again, this was a cool slide that we saw that you can see where the prosperity in the world is by who has the lights on at night. As Jim said, there, you know, when you come in and you look at where population growth is gonna continue to come, sort of the next 1 billion people, it's really gonna come in India. I think India is looking to overtake China in population this year, Also Sub-Saharan Africa is the next place we'll see the population grow.
Yeah. We were the first mover on LPG exports. Randall was a part of the negotiation that put together our ability to export LPG, primarily propane. We had a joint venture partner that we ultimately bought out. Dan's idea was we'll import in the summer and export in the winter. Well, it didn't work too well. We exported every once in a great while. It was like a light went off in July of 2009. I'll never forget it. Our phone didn't stop ringing. At the time, we could load 5,000 barrels an hour, and we were full. We've expanded that now, about 35,000 barrels an hour, and we're still full. The U.S. is the reason there's been LPG growth.
You wouldn't have what you saw in those other slides of that clean cooking. You wouldn't have that without U.S. LPG because it'd be too damn expensive. In the interest of time, let's move on. I mean, that's the point.
Yeah.
Oh, no, I wanted to make one other point. Back in the day when I was in petrochemicals, our largest feedstock supplier was not Exxon, wasn't Shell, it was Sonatrach. We imported a boatload of Algerian condensate and LPG. They were our largest. Today, I'd have to travel around the world to see my suppliers. Today, if I were still at Dow Chemical, I'd have to drive across town.
I think the other, the other thing that we're seeing with this trend towards onshoring of manufacturing, and then frankly also some of the trends that you're seeing as far as the development of carbon sequestration, ammonia, hydrogen, really, Texas and Louisiana have a sweet spot. In some of that, as far as when you talk about the economy, I mean, those two states combined are the eighth largest economy in the world after France. We already have a lot of industry here. Jim, you wanna hit the next one?
No, you got the first three. Then I jump in.
Oh, okay. When you come in and you look at it in terms of LNG exports.
How many times did we practice?
Yeah, that once. When you come in and you look at just in terms of our footprint of the two states as far as LNG exports, ethane and LPG, largest in the world. When you come in and you look at as far as being a global producer of crude oil and equivalents, fourth largest in the world, these two states.
Yeah, you know, I was looking at that bullet the other night, I got to thinking, I wonder if we're not bigger than that because our petrochemical industry, I don't know what equivalents are.
Mm-hmm.
Tony, is ethylene an equivalent? Is propylene an equivalent, or it's crude natural gas and NGLs? Are polyethylene pellets an equivalent because those are hydrocarbons in a solid form. I think we're higher than that. We've got 17 deep water ports. It's 50% of U.S. water ports total tonnage. I think, Bob, the ship channel is larger in tonnage than Long Beach, Los Angeles and New York combined.
Yes.
Okay, got that right. From a tax business friendly perspective, you know, we can build a pipeline in Texas. We can build a pipeline in Louisiana. We can't build a pipeline out of the Marcellus.
Yep. Okay. Here are some of the industries that really Texas is trying to attract and Texas and Louisiana are trying to attract and being successful in attracting to the states, and many of these are energy-intensive businesses. Again, in states where we can actually build energy infrastructure. We think some of this is right in our backyard, some of this opportunity.
With that, Tony, you got some time to make.
Nice going. You know, there was discussion about whether I was gonna stand up and do this. Feels funny looking down on all of y'all. Okay? I'm kind of a busy body, so start walking around would be maybe not the best. What I decided to do is make a game time call and pull a chair up. Okay? What's important about that is for those of you that were here early, you might have seen Brent Secrest arranging all of these chairs and all of these tables, and I just rocked his world. Okay, let's get started. We got a lot to cover. We're gonna start, we're gonna talk about prices. We're gonna talk about prices in the historical and the future.
I like to break things down into phases sometimes 'cause it helps me think about where we may be going, so we'll do that. We're gonna look at our supply forecast, this year, we're gonna look at it to 2030. We're gonna give you our perspective on productivity, GORs, and the lack of investment pieces that you hear a lot about. I'm really gonna jump off the deep end, and we're gonna look at oil supply and demand in 2030 worldwide. Same warning that I always give you. There's a lot of charts and graphs in virtually all of our stuff from a fundamental standpoint. I want you to think of them as images or pictures, although they all have a Y and X-axis, so you can look at the math later. With that, we'll get started.
What we did here is we went back and looked at crude oil, and we broke it down into three phases relative to the shales. The first one is shale beginnings. During that time period, really not much happened to price. Price ranged between 75, and we have 105 here. Call that 2010 to 2014. The growth from the shales was moderate, and OPEC controlled the market. Okay? We moved into phase II, and what we say there, shale supply surprises global markets. We were very, very focused on adding barrels in the United States. There are times when we added over 1.5 million barrels, so big numbers. OPEC at one point decided, "You know what? I'm not gonna manage the markets.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna manage markets for myself." They, like, they had a price war with the United States. Didn't last long. They realized that they couldn't outlast the United States. They had an agreement to cut production, and now I believe that we're in this discipline and profit phase. OPEC's, it's clear they're setting market direction. We'll look at that in a few minutes. U.S. producers are highly disciplined. They realize it's not a foot race anymore, it's a marathon. Capital markets are requiring returns in more ways than one. When we look at that, when we look at price, we're still a pretty benign or anemic, call it $60, $70, $75 bucks. Okay? Let's go to the next one.
What are the crude oil price drivers the next 12-18 months? I'm not gonna read them all to you. There's about twice as many on the bullish side than there are on the bearish side. That doesn't mean that the bearish side doesn't have an impact or a meaning, 'cause some of these are pretty weighted things, and they've been weighing down the market. The big thing, talking about bullish things, go to the next slide, please. Everyone had a forecast of. See that previous expectation line down there? Everybody had forecasts that kind of looked like that. It pulled all. Something proved all the bulls wrong, and it's that second line, Russian supply and Chinese demand. When you look at what happened in 2022, the world missed balances by about 400 million barrels.
That's a lot. What we do on the chart to the right is we just break that down. That's over 2 million barrels a day, and we break it down between too much Russian supply, other supply besides just Russia, and then global demand growth, and that's because of what happened in China and the knock-on effects. What we know today is we know China is reopening. Their reopening is going very, very well. I would say they're fixed. Most people think that you can look at China and add at least 1 million barrels of demand in 2023 for what's going on in China, probably 900,000 at least directly, and then some knock-on effects. We're all still uncertain about Russia because it appears that, you know, their production's not coming off.
This next slide, we show this just about every year, and I wanna remind everybody that the forward markets aren't intended to predict price. They're a very poor predictor of price if you go back and look at it historically. There are people that are paid to predict price, and so what we've done is we've broken it down between consultants and banks. I'll go to take some of the noise out of it. I'll go to 2024, all right? I'll highlight that consultant that has $117 and that bank that has $68. You probably know who they are, and if you think about what they're saying and you listen to 'em, they're very convicted in their views, and they all back them with some really good data. That's the spread.
That's why people have a hard time. Everyone has a hard time predicting price, that's where people's heads are. Next, I wanna go to that same kind of graph as far as the phases for natural gas. Phase I, you know, remember that natural gas is the easiest molecule to come out of tight rock, to come out of the shale, okay? We got a lot of it quickly. By the way, the second easiest molecule to come out of tight rock is ethane, we'll talk about that in just a minute. For the first 10 years, when we started finding all this natural gas, there was not a way to have adequate markets for it. There simply wasn't.
In looking back, what had to happen is gas had to price itself to knock coal out of the stack, and that's how you got this kind of $3 range, because gas was pricing itself to knock coal out of the stack. All of a sudden, we had the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and gas started getting some respect, but it really didn't last long. It came crashing down, and oddly enough, it came crashing down right in the dead middle of the winter in February of 2023. As we go forward, rather than the $4.50 forward curve that we had this time last year, now we have a forward curve that's, call it, $3.50.
Right before we started this meeting, I looked, and the prompt month in gas has a one in front of it this morning. Specifically, it was $1.99. When we think about what happened, we had a warm winter in the Northern Hemisphere, one, we had one LNG plant in the United States go down. What that told us, or what I think that taught us, is the fragility of natural gas. I don't think that that's something that's easily fixed. There's a significant amount of LNG coming, but natural gas is counting on a lot of things, and it's somewhat fragile. Next slide, we look at the LNG plants. There's nothing new here. We all know that Russia decided that they were gonna use energy as a weapon.
The U.S. got a lot of love and became very quickly the largest LNG exporter in the world. The Qataris are second. We both are growing from where we are today. The only thing I'll add to this slide is if you look at the under construction number, and if you look at Enterprise's dry gas forecast between now and, call it, 2026, 2027, the numbers just coincidentally are the same. As we see it, where we're getting natural gas from today, and our forecast, we'll talk about our forecast next, we have enough natural gas to feed what's under construction. We're not drilling enough today for the likely and the potential, and when you look at the magnitude of those two numbers together, we're gonna need some help. We're gonna need some help from the forward curve.
You're gonna have to get more gas out of Appalachia. You're gonna have to get more gas out of Haynesville. You're gonna have to get more gas in places like the Lean Eagle Ford. The gas is there. You're gonna need permanent reform, particularly for Appalachia, and you're gonna need some love from contracts and from prices to be able to get those incremental supplies up there. Next is our supply forecast. We show what we, what we forecast in the third quarter of 2022 here so that you can see it for comparison. May surprise some in the room that the lines generally look a lot alike. This is for the entire United States. The only place there's really any deviation to speak of is on the gas side. There's our oil number.
What I'll point out is in 2023 to 2025, we're projecting 1.8 million barrels of crude oil growth in the United States, 2.7 you know, up to 2030. There's probably going to be a lot of pushback on that number. People are thinking smaller and listening to what producers are saying and what people are writing about, but I'll remind you that if we go to November, the November actuals as published by the EIA, okay, that number was 743,000 barrels of growth in the United States. Much smaller than we used to do, but a very decent number.
The oil patch had a rough December because of weather. If you wanted to look at that and say, "Well, how do I divide it between 2023, 2024, and 2025?" If you decided to do it evenly, I think at this point, that's as good as any, because it's really hard to call it by year. The other thing I'd like to point out is 93% of the growth that we have in our forecast between now and 2030 is in the Permian Basin. 80% of our growth for NGLs is in the Permian Basin. About 70% of our wet gas is in the Permian Basin and 60% of our dry gas.
You'll notice the spread between the blue line and the dark line on dry gas, that's us marking down our production forecast because of the crash in prices. When you think, "Well, where did that happen?" Some of it happened in Appalachia, some of it happened in Haynesville, Cotton Valley, some of it in the Eagle Ford, for example. Going to dry gas just real quickly. We show an incremental 5 Bcf between now and now and 2025, 10.2 between now and 2030, and we show the growth there. You see Permian 3.6, Appalachia, about 1 million Bcf a day, Haynesville, half a Bcf a day in Eagle Ford. In our prior forecast, we had many of those at higher number. Here's our Permian forecast.
You see the slope on those lines look a whole lot like the slope on the U.S. lines, and we've already talked about why. I'm not going to read them to you, but I will say this, and I think it's really important. Jim, Brent, and myself have the privilege of spending a lot of time with CEO types that are very focused on the Permian Basin, and we have for the last three years. A lot of those meetings, frankly, in offices with masks on. That's how far it goes back. Brent always asks them the question: "What do you think Permian Basin's doing in 2030?" That's not To be fair to them, that's not something that they think a lot about. They think about their own acreage.
I would coach them a little and it was always the same. I would coach them a little and then they would think about it, and they would always answer, almost always with a six in front of it, okay? At the time, I'd say, "Well, we're producing 4.5 million barrels," or whatever the timeframe was. I would tell you, over about the last year when we have that conversation, it's not unusual for them to say, "I think it has a seven in front of it. Not a high seven, but a seven." That you know, I think that's where their head is. The last thing I have is to put this in perspective for you, 'cause I know you read a lot of things, okay?
Our models say that if we're going to be flat production in the Permian Basin for 2023, we need to put an immediate stop to about 30% of our activity, 'cause that's the only way to flatten it out. Brandon Shaw, who leads our supply appraisal forecasting effort, is here, as is our chief geologist, Lance Brown. You can see him at the breakout if you wanna talk about any of this. I think this next slide, for me, is one of the most interesting ones in the package, and it's our perspective on the lack of investment hypothesis. What we did here is we looked at six international oil companies, and you see them listed there, and we looked at what their capital expenditures were in 2014 compared to where they are today.
We looked at their production and their reserves. Now, I'll say this about their capital expenditures. Those capital expenditures are upstream only. They're a publicly traded company, so you can see their upstream CapEx. If we go to the international oil companies, they spent, in 2014, $180 billion upstream at the drill bit, for lack of a better term. Today, they're at $60 billion. If you look at their production profile, it's up. If you look at their approved reserve profile, it's down but of a very minor amount. We thought, "Hmm, that's interesting. Let's do it for 10 shale public players." Okay? The ratios are about the same. In 2014, they were at $60 billion of upstream spending, okay? They're down to $20 billion today, so there's that two-thirds reduction, and their production is up 25%.
You go down to their approved reserve number, that number's up 20%. I want you to hold this thought, 'cause we're gonna talk about it for a couple of more slides. This next slide's just some quotes from Darren Woods at Exxon. He said, "For 2023, we're looking at major investments in Guyana and increased spending in U.S. unconventional assets." He went on to say, "We are targeting 1 million barrels in the Permian Basin by 2027." Mike Wirth at Chevron said, looking at last year, he said, "U.S. production was our highest ever, led by double-digit growth in the Permian Basin.
We expect production to grow, led by the Permian and other shale and tight assets." He went on to say, "Growth matters when it's profitable." If you look and say, "Well, how did you reduce your capital like we just saw?" I mean, it's clear that they're getting a lot better at what they do. They're getting a lot more focused. Engineering only gets better. On the other thing that people forget a lot is we had a massive land grab underway, even in the 2014 timeframe, you know, to the tune... No one knows what that number is, but tens of billions of dollars every year, maybe even more, and that's all done. This is now the oil and gas industry, particularly United States, is very profitable.
The other thing that you see from these quotes is the majors have moved from saying, "You know what? I'm going to, I'm gonna focus on exploration around the world." To say, "I'm gonna focus on producing, short life reserves in the United States." Go to this next slide here. You see a lot written about productivity, particularly almost always, it's about production per lateral foot. There's never a positive thing written about this stat, ever. Okay? When you read it, and it's often published by The Wall Street Journal or by consultants, you think the sky is falling. I think they do a poor job of telling you what really has happened in the oil patch, and that's that first group of graphs. Okay? Lateral lengths have been steadily increasing since 2017.
Up 50% in the Delaware, New Mexico side, 40% on the Texas side, and 25%. We show you same data they're talking about, what's happened per lateral foot, okay, on the next graph. Down 14% for the first three months, up six on the Delaware, Texas side, and down four in the Midland. When I look at those ratios, they seem like, probably a pretty good trade-off, probably. We wanted to take it a step further because I think that you drill oil and gas wells to make money and to have production. Okay? What we did here is we looked at cumulative production for both three and six months from 2017 to 2022, and we show you those numbers. We did the same thing on the Midland side.
When you compare 2022 to 2017 through 2019, the Delaware Basin has a 20%-25% improvement. The Midland Basin has a 10%-15% improvement. Can y'all hear me? No.
Your mic is on.
You got it? Now?
Your mic is off.
It's still on, yes. You wanna bring me another one? You got it now? You good?
There you are.
You're good?
Uh.
No. Okay. Yeah, you can give me a handheld. I'm good. Yeah, give me a handheld. Thank you very much. Can y'all hear me now?
Yes.
Okay, let's. When we compare 20, 2022 to what happened 2017 through 2019, I talked about those 20%-25% and 10%-15% improvement. That kind of improvement, I think higher volume, higher volumes and profits are directly attributable to longer laterals and better management of reservoirs, both pressures and rates. I think also that the more production you get the first three to six months, the better off you are. Michael, I wanna go back to that investment slide. I think if you, if you look at what's really happening, and that is what kind of money are they making? Again, I've never seen the industry this healthy. Then you go and look at our supply forecast.
It's really hard to make a case, in my mind, when you look at it correctly, that the sky is falling. I'm gonna go to the GORs next. The picture on the left shows GOR curve. It shows what happens in a, in a typical Permian well decline rate. The facts are that oil declines faster than natural gas. Should be no surprise to anybody. Okay? Going to the bottom line of what's happening with GORs. Again, oil declines faster than natural gas. Delaware Basin GORs are trending higher than the more established Midland Basin. You see that producers and their midstream companies are contracting accordingly. The good news is both the Delaware Basin and the Midland Basin have a lot of all three. They have a lot of oil, and you can see our view of oil in our forecast.
They have a lot of rich natural gas, they all three have a lot of NGLs. You go and look at profits and prove reserves, and you see it in the results. This next slide, we show some version of it every year, and I'm gonna, you know, cut to the chase. I think we have a habit of overthinking ethane. We have a lot of it. It's the second easiest molecule to come out of shales. We've had a lot of it for a long time, and that fact remains. It leads to a gas-to-crude advantage for the U.S. ethylene producers and really our basic olefin industry. Let's go to the next slide. Simply put, if we look at natural gas versus Brent, you see the spread.
We take that natural gas to Brent, and we compare then to feedstocks that come from those, and that being ethane and Asian naphtha. You see the spread. When you look at a forecast, this one, S&P Global Commodity Insights put together, they go out to 2032, and you look at the spread that they're predicting. It just tells you that now the world, as expected, the U.S. is the clock that everyone else is setting their watch to. There's not a reason, when you look at the gas recruit story that's in front of you, that that changes. Okay, let's go to the next one. I just want you to go to the colors here. This looks at global oil demand growth, all right? Versus 2010. Versus 2010.
Just separate it between the blues and the grays. The grays are, think about it, as transportation fuels, aviation, distillate, and gasoline. The blues are the naphthas that the petrochemical industry would use, NGLs, LPG that petrochemicals would use and that emerging markets would use. Look at the preponderance of the growth in the blues versus the gray. That's what has been happening. It's what's going to happen. If you look at forecasts by the IEA, they say that we'll grow on the petrochemical side 3 million barrels of oil or oil equivalents by 2030, and that half of our incremental crude demand between now and 2050 is gonna be related to petrochemicals. Next, I wanna balance the world, oil markets in 2030. There's a lot of moving parts, but to us, it's really pretty simple.
If you go to the blue line, if you look at the forecast of oil or oil equivalents growth, we have between six and nine million barrels. The IEA, in their base scenario, their step scenario, says six, and OPEC says nine, okay? Mark that down, six to nine. I go, and on the left side, we solve for where that supply's gonna come from. You see us at 3.5 million barrels in the Middle East. They have it, make no mistake about it. If you don't believe it, go and look at what the Saudi oil minister said. Not only does he say we have it, but two weeks ago, he identified field by field, okay? North America, you've just seen our forecast, and then Brazil and Guyana.
You look and go, "Well, is it enough oil? Well, is it too much?" If you're on the low side of that demand number, what's gonna come off? That's what we solve for in that, in that middle column there. Certainly Russia is going to come off. You just don't know how much. To solve for it, we have them coming off 2 million barrels, and you can read the rest. If you look on the left-hand side and you believe those three buckets, the rest of it pretty much falls into place pretty easily. There will be times when we won't have enough, and there'll be times when we have too much. Here, just a reminder of what OPEC does when we have too much.
If people tell you that the shale barrel is the swing barrel in the world, don't believe it. The swing barrel in the world, first and foremost, has been the Saudis, it will be the Saudis. The Saudis have massive entitlements. They get bigger every year. MBS, his stated goal, and he's doing it, he's going to transform their economy. They cannot take low oil prices. You see them stepping in, they've stepped in today, to balance world markets. Let's go to my last slide. This one was easy to do because it was a rip right out of the analyst meeting in 2017. Some of you I had breakfast with one gentleman this morning who was at that meeting, I asked if he remembered, he said yes.
Enterprise at that time said we were the United States was producing 8.5 million barrels of oil, we said we thought that was going to 12 by 2022. We had exported 0.5 million barrels in 2016. We said we thought that was going to 4 million barrels. Lo and behold, that's where we ended up, okay? That's not the point of this slide. Not the point of this slide at all. The reason that people come to Enterprise analyst meeting is because what you're interested in hearing is our perspective holistically on things, okay? I can talk about them like they're forecasts, but they really are perspectives, okay? The most important thing on that slide is that little yellow box. When we presented this slide in 2017, it became a distraction for everyone.
I mean, it was a distraction. Finally, I asked whoever was doing slides at the time, I said, "Go to the little yellow box." I said, "It says light and sweet. If it said rich and sour, the calculus would be completely different, but it says light and sweet." We, Enterprise, had a perspective because we had been in the global markets for LPG for, in a big way, as Jim pointed out, since 2009. We had a perspective, okay? We had a perspective about the world's desire for light sweet, so we were very comfortable in showing the slide and discussing it. What's most interesting is for the next three years, myself and the fundamentals team fought this bugaboo, people concerned about, the world was gonna be awash in naphtha. We were gonna be awash in LPG.
I mean, you remember all the articles. There's no way that anybody can drink it all, okay? We always defended it, and we found out that that's simply not the case. We appreciate your interest in our perspectives, and we're very interested in sharing with you. Next, I think this concludes my stuff. Next, I think we're gonna take a break, and then Brent and his team are gonna give you their perspective on the commercial environment. Randy, is that right?
That is absolutely right. I don't know if this is on or not, but yeah. We're gonna take about a 10-minute break. Be back about, call it about 10 minutes after nine or so. We'll get started. Okay, we're ready to get started guys. If you could make your way back to your seats. Our next panel will be our commercial group. I'll let them introduce themselves and we'll go ahead and get started, Brent, whenever you're ready.
On my far left is Zach Strait. To my immediate left is Jay Bany. Right here is Tug Hanley, and then Natalie Gayden, and at that end is Justin Kleider. You heard Randy and Jim earlier talk about 25 years of distribution growth. Today, we're gonna tell you a story about why we are so well-positioned for the next 25 years. What I want you to walk away from this room with is an understanding of how strategic this asset base is, the integration, the optionality, and the flexibility that we have. I would hope that you have an appreciation for the Enterprise culture and the passion of our employees and their dedication.
Lastly, the discipline that we have demonstrated in the past and that we will continue as we build and execute on a business plan and a platform that can support another 25 years of distribution growth, regardless of the commodity environment that we're in. At Enterprise, we have had solid financial performance, and we've done that quarter-over-quarter and year-after-year, but it's not always reflected in the Enterprise unit price. I recognize that midstream multiples have changed over time, but we firmly believe that not all midstream companies are created equal. The time horizon that we have has been and will continue to be longer than the multiple in which we trade. Today, we're gonna lay out why we are so confident about the long-term prospects of Enterprise and why we view that we have decades of opportunity and not just this next decade.
On this slide, you're going to see four assets. All these assets were built between 40 and 80 years ago. Terminal value is defined as the value of a business or a company beyond a series of forecasted cash flows. These assets, I'm going to make the assumption when they were built or acquired, was far too conservative. If you were to look back at these assets, we think Enterprise suffers from some of that same fate. We think the market's recognition of the resilience and the longevity of our footprint is also suffers from the same limited assumptions. The runway that we have here is long. The opportunities that we have before us are robust. We're going to walk you around or walk you through four interrelated themes on the commercial business. We're going to first talk about growth. We'll move on to discipline.
We'll talk about barrier to entry of our assets, and then the last thing we're gonna talk about is volatility. Help me out, Michael.
Here we go. We're there.
Okay. You heard from Tony earlier on our production forecast through 2030. If you were to look beyond 2030, our belief is that these volumes will continue to increase before ultimately plateauing several years down the road. If you look at the breadth of our footprint and the proximity to these world-class at resources, our assets are strongly positioned to handle these volumes to make them available for both domestic and global consumption. Regardless of the demand forecast that you believe in, we think the U.S. producer is gonna be a large part of this supply picture.
Randy had a quote in one of his earlier slides, and the quote was, "Reality is stubborn." We believe that reality will win the day, that even if energy intensity does decline in developed nations, that globally, energy intensity is going to increase as the world's population grows. The world needs what Enterprise and U.S. producers have to offer. Fossil fuels are gonna remain a large part of this mix. We think fundamentals will prevail. We've made significant investments to position ourselves to handle these volumes. We've had some prior announcements about gathering and processing that we're doing out in the Permian Basin, and Natalie's gonna talk about that here in a little bit. The other thing we're gonna focus on on growth projects is what we're doing around our export docks.
We think that's paramount in terms of the volumes that we see and the demand picture we see going ahead. It's gonna be around two themes. It's gonna be about flexibility around multiple products using the same equipment. That increases dock usage at our facilities. The second thing is gonna be about loading rates and how do we get loading rates up. Both these all equate to time is money. It's time is money, both for our customers and it's time is money for Enterprise. With that, Natalie will start us off with gathering and processing.
On this theme of growth, there really is no better growth story than the Permian. Tony told us that 93% of oil production growth in this country will come from the Permian, which means that about 80% of NGL growth will come from here too. In our business, capturing that growth really starts with gathering and processing. We've been pretty successful in the Delaware, contracting long-term gathering and processing deals, and over the last year in Midland, after we acquired Navitas assets last February. We've got four new plants coming online that will add 1.2 Bcf a day of capacity to our system. Tony, if you're right, we're probably not done.
While these businesses can stand alone with great returns, it's really more strategic for us than that. We like to have a front row seat at the wellhead because that's where the value chain starts. I like to think of it as the starting line to win business on every single molecule produced from that basin.
If you go back to the Navitas acquisition and why we did that's a highly integrated asset base. I mean, it gave us a presence in the Midland Basin, which we wanted. If you look at the integration and securing terminal value in assets that are full for a long time, that fit us like a glove. You look at that business, it's seven touches for us.S even opportunities to make money. We get a fee off of gathering, we get a fee off of processing, we'll get a fee on residue gas takeaway. We'll move on to NGL transportation, we'll get a fee on fractionation, we'll get a fee on storage, ultimately that barrel has to clear.
It's either got to go through one of our pipes to a consuming plant, or it's got to go across the dock, and Zach's gonna walk you through with Tug about what we're doing on ethane. We're gonna talk a little bit later about the difficulty of getting long-term contracts in this environment. When you look at ethane exports, which is a big growth area for us, our customers insist on long-term contracts. They recognize it's a single source product. It essentially has to come from this country. They recognize the correlation that it's gonna have between natural gas. They know it's gonna be a preferred feedstock. When you look at the term of these contracts, they're probably as long, if not longer than what you would hear about LNG contracts.
Yeah. Last year, we announced we were gonna build this new ethane terminal. We were intentionally vague on details. We were trying to figure out build-to-make capacity and timing. Let's talk about what we're doing. At Morgan's Point, we're taking one of our ethane refrigeration trains and converting it to an ethane ethylene flex train. Once this is in service, we'll be able to load 100% ethane, 100% ethylene or any combination of the two.
Yeah. There's a reason why this is so important to us and our customers, 'cause if you look at a cracker and there's a planned turnaround or unplanned outage, it's no longer producing ethylene, but oftentimes the back end, the derivative capacity is still online, so they can still consume ethylene. It means a higher utilization of our customer's asset and a higher utilization of our dock asset as well.
Moving over to Beaumont. At Beaumont, we're adding a 5,000 barrel an hour ethane refrigeration train, which once it's in service, our capacity to load ethane increases by 50%. If you look at both sites, both sites we're adding 900,000 barrels of ethane storage tanks, which gives us the ability to load ethane at 45,000 barrels an hour. You ask yourself, "Well, why is that important?" Well, today's largest ethane carrier will now spend less than 24 hours at our dock.
Yeah. Our customers really value the system because the geographic diversity that it offers and the higher loading rates that Zach mentioned. We know why is this important? We expect global trade flows to remain disrupted for quite some time to come. Brent said it, time is money, but every minute a ship is sitting and waiting on a dock, that is a wasted opportunity. We're seeing this market go across all commodities is higher loading rates and larger ships to optimize and maximize freight. You know, we're positioning ourselves to capture those opportunities. There currently are a limited amount of VLEC on the market, the largest ethane carrier. Another benefit of higher loading rates is e-efficiencies in freight, but we're gonna also achieve higher turns, and I'll give you an example. We have one customer with their existing VLEC fleet.
They can increase taking 10,000 barrels a day across our terminal because today it takes four days to load a VLEC, and in the future it's gonna be less than 24 hours. With their existing assets and our higher loading rates, we'll be able to get a higher throughput. Sticking with the theme of growth, ethane exports are really a story of a demand pull. Again, as Brent mentioned, we fundamentally believe U.S. ethane will remain correlated to U.S. gas, making it the most economic cracker feedstock. If you want to be continue to be competitive, you wanna de-bottleneck or you wanna expand, you're going to be looking towards ethane. We're also seeing the effects of LNG prices on ethane as well.
Those who can consume ethane internationally and they can consume it as fuel, they have been doing so. This is no different than what we do here at Enterprise. If the price of ethane goes below natural gas, for example, we'll convert our fractionators to fuel off of ethane in lieu of natural gas. We've been successful in contracting our new expansions at Beaumont and Morgan's Point with long-term take-or-pay contracts, emphasis on term. You know, we have recently executed several contracts, and when we leave here today, we'll be signing another contract for 240,000 barrels a day of ethane and a term of up to 20 years. We still have strong international interest in ethane across our facility, and I'll tell you, my passport is evidence of that.
Yeah, I'll leave you with the demand for this facility, as Tug was saying, is still really high, and we can expand either one of the facilities by just adding additional refrigeration.
Speaking about easy expansions, we're bringing back the Enterprise Houston Ship Channel Ref 4 expansion. This project's similar to the ethane ethylene expansion in the fact that it's all about increasing refrigeration capacity, load rates, optimizing our existing refrig system and dock, and then adding flexibility around the products that we load. The project entails a new propane propylene refrigeration system, a direct butane flow path to an existing unit. Overall, we believe this will add an incremental 8+ cargoes a month to the capacity of the asset. They'll do that through an incremental six to eight thousand barrels an hour of loading capacity based on products ranging from propane to butane to fully refrigerated propylene.
When we think about that optionality in our dual cargoes that we load today, this project will shave off 20 hours from those cargo load ops.
Yeah, we have enough docks. This is no different than ethane. It's all about higher loading rates. The LPG story is consistent with what we have said in the past. It is a supply push. If you look at some of Tony's numbers, exit 2023 to exit 2025, we're expecting propane and butane production to increase around 350,000-400,000 barrels a day. Those barrels will have to clear across the water. Unlike ethane, there's not a home in natural gas, so it's ultimately gonna have to go across the dock. Our export facility already offers the greatest flexibility. We can fully load a propane cargo or a butane cargo or any combination thereof.
Unlike some other terminals in the Gulf Coast that require their customers to load a fixed amount of butane or a fixed amount of propane. We like to give our customers a choice. With the addition of fully refrigerated propylene, this will allow our customers a broader access to freight by being able to utilize the LPG fleet.
Just having spent a little bit of time talking about what Enterprise is doing expansion-wise at the docks in the Houston Ship Channel, probably a good time to talk about what the port's doing or give an update on that. Last month, the port completed their Segment 1A of their Project 11, the deepening and widening of the Houston Ship Channel. This month we'll see a reduction in the daylight restricted travel up to an hour that will double by 2025. At the end of the day, what that means for Enterprise is ships are able to stay on dock longer, still meet daylight sail, and still show up earlier than before. To Brent's point, time's money.
We've seen the upstream community maintain discipline since 2020. They've done a fantastic job. Chasing volumes at all costs is no longer the stated goal for producers. Producer discipline increased borrowing costs and higher capital costs due to inflation, that forces disciplined midstream growth, and this is a very good thing for this sector. The great bid- midstream build-out, it really took off the last several years of the previous decade. I saw a graph a few weeks back, and it said there was a total of four interstate miles of gas pipeline built in this country this past year in 2022. That graph went back 30 years. Far and away, that was the least amount. Producers used to have production curves that all went from lower left, upper right.
Midstream companies like Enterprise would go into their office to try and get contracts. We'd get acreage dedications or take-or-pay commitments, but ultimately, you had midstream companies that felt justified to go into right capital and move forward with projects. In the world that we live in today, and with the restraint the producers have shown, trying to get five-year, seven-year, and 10-year contracts, those are much difficult to obtain. That leads to more caution, and it leads to more discipline when companies try to figure out how those midstream growth needs are met. There's two things that are needed to secure revenue. It's volume and fee. Today, I think there's a lot more conversations going on between midstream companies on how these projects get executed. The graph on the bottom right talks about access to capital for private equity.
We think that market has slowed down significantly just from what we see in the rooms that we're in with and the producers that we meet with. An exit plan for these firms lacks a lot, it lacks clarity in terms of how they get out. In summary, disciplined midstream growth is a much healthier environment than the one that we experienced the last several years of undisciplined growth that led to all these excess capacity issues of certain products.
Yeah, when you think of what Brent's talking about with respect to discipline and look at just overall Permian takeaway for the three primary hydrocarbons, you know, you see these three charts. They all have three kind of distinct stories, but this theme of discipline really underpins them all. You know, talking specifically a little bit about the NGL side, a data point that I think is relevant. From exit 2017 to exit 2019, we grew production by 1 million barrels a day. Two years, 1 million barrels a day. Based on exit 2022 production, we won't hit that same 1 million barrels a day, 1 million barrels of growth until exit 2029. Seven years to do what we did in two years during the last major midstream build-out cycle.
What this means is, to Brent's point, that midstream operators have more time to be thoughtful about how we solve for this coming production growth over the balance of the decade. You'll note specifically in the NGL chart that we don't have the Chinook expansion in these numbers. We excluded that intentionally because of the amount of options we have in front of us within our own asset base, as well as working with other midstream operators to solve our capacity needs. The expansion may still go on as announced. However, we're committed to the right project, not just a project to solve capacity needs.
While you might call NGL pipes have a moderate growth, I'd say dry gas may have been a little too disciplined. It's likely no surprise to anyone here, but dry gas takeaway still is the bottleneck for midstream takeaway out of the Permian this year as it was for last.
There's two new brownfield expansions coming online at the end of this year, and one new 2.5 Bcf a day pipe coming on at the end of next year if schedule holds. Just to get that pipeline to FID, it definitely took several midstream parties and obviously producers to make that happen. I only point that out because you ask yourself why, and one of the reasons could be that that commodity only represents maybe 5% of a producer's total revenue. It's definitely a great challenge. There isn't time to have commitment fatigue on the next pipe, though. You might say one or two pipes, because you can see on that top right chart, the need is pretty quick considering how long it takes to get a pipeline built.
The crude story is a little bit different than both the NGL and gas story. You could argue the industry was largely undisciplined in our approach. You saw 2 million barrels a day of production growth from 2017 to 2019. It prompted the great crude Permian build-out of which we participated. Although Enterprise did it in a disciplined fashion, I would say different than the industry. From a capital perspective, we were disciplined. We repurposed an NGL pipeline for one of our pipes, entered into a JV with EnLink to Webster for relatively cheap capacity. From a contracting perspective, we were disciplined in going out and getting long-term take-or-pay contracts with creditworthy customers. As we look forward to the coming days, really, Corpus pipes are full. We see the incremental barrels.
They'll head their way to Houston. As we value our uncontracted space, we're set up nicely. And then when we think about recontracting and call it the 2027, 2028 timeframe, and you can look at the graph, we think that environment, we can be disciplined there as well.
You know, Jay said this, that graph on the bottom left, that is the definition of undisciplined growth. There's at least one crude pipeline that, in my opinion, should not have been built. You could probably make the case there was two pipelines. As we move forward, the opportunity set for Enterprise is as our contracts roll off and these incremental barrels that come on, their pathway is to Houston. We'll have a lot of opportunity. My opinion is you're not gonna see a greenfield Permian crude pipeline built again, unless Tony's forecast is way understated and the growth percentages start getting a lot higher. I think we're in pretty good shape when it comes to crude oil, when it comes to recontracting and the opportunity that we see moving forward.
Just sticking with crude, briefly on the discipline approach with WTI inclusion into Dated Brent happening later this summer, we find ourselves in a unique situation to help ensure our customers can access the global market through that platform, specifically around quality. Given our integrated assets, you know, we've got gathering, terminals both at Midland and ECHO with both receipts into and out of the system, our long-haul pipelines, and then our Platts-approved docks. We plan to, at key locations, update our tariffs to mirror the specification on Platts, increase our sampling around mercaptans and metals specifically, and police the system. We want to do our part in ensuring that the WTI that clears our docks can land in Dated Brent.
Yeah. The way we view fractionators is the same as what the group's described. It's, it's the right project, which means the right volumes and the right timing. You know, I think we're unique in that we bring up new fractionators, and they're full the day they go in service. How do we do that? Well, we go out and we contract above what we consider kind of our base capacity, and then we lean on our South Texas, Louisiana satellite fractionators. We lean on our storage assets to warehouse volumes until these units can come online. In 2021 at our Analyst Day, we talked about idling two of our least efficient fractionators, and one of those is in service today. The other one will be in service later this year as we wait for Frac 12's completion.
The way I like to think about it is our system flexibility allows for discipline. As we look forward, we're gonna continue to have discipline, use our flexibility as we figure out when we need to build another fractionator.
We touched on this last year, and it still holds true. Any effort to replicate what we already have in the ground has gotten much more difficult to construct and more expensive. We've invested a significant amount of capital in strategic areas where existing footprint and right of way matter. Attempts to construct what we already have in these corridors, it does require a vast amount of capital. Frankly, in this high inflationary environment, that does provide its benefits. We think the cost between brownfield and greenfield expansions has gotten wider. We think that theme is here to stay, and it will continue to get wider. You're gonna hear Graham and Angie talk a little bit later about how Enterprise maintains its assets, and I don't think it's ever been more important how we do that because of the difficulty to replace what we already have in the ground.
When we discuss barrier to entry, I think you need to look at the map on the bottom of this page and look at the vertical integration that Enterprise offers. When you layer in our existing assets, you couple that with the growth that we're seeing from certain areas, specifically the Permian Basin, I think it tells a very compelling story for this company. I told you earlier that volume and fee are what is needed to build new pipelines. Both in declining basins and also small-diameter pipes and highly congested corridors, neither one offers the volume that is necessary to underwrite capital. This in itself is a barrier to entry.
When we talk about our network of assets, we always talk about connectivity and market access. What I'd like for y'all to understand is just how difficult we think it is to replicate our system. Our Gulf Coast distribution system consists of over 8,400 mi of pipe. Using an approximate replacement value of $2.5 million-$3 million, you're talking about $21 billion-$25 billion to replicate. Frankly, I've seen some of those last miles cost closer to $10 million a mile. Building pipe in and around the Mont Belvieu area, around the Houston Ship Channel, and through parts of the state of Louisiana are not an easy task, and they're not getting any easier.
For example, in and around the Mont Belvieu area, sometimes we have to do deep directional drilling, sometimes 60 ft deep, which is much more costly than laying pipe in a ditch.
Another example is our crude distribution system. These are large-diameter pipes that leave ECHO and Enterprise Houston Ship Channel, accessing Refinery Road to the Houston refineries down to Texas City. Those refineries are out to Beaumont. These last miles, they're hard to access. Right of ways are full. You have industrial, residential encroachment, natural waterways. It's cost prohibitive, if not impossible to replicate.
Yeah. If you move east towards Louisiana, we call that group of pipes delivering to industrial complexes around that Geismar, Baton Rouge, New Orleans area, the river corridor. If a new pipeline is required to supply this region, say from the Texas side, you've got to cross the largest swamp in the United States called the Atchafalaya. Not to be so literal, but that swamp is a barrier to entry.
Look, I think this slide does a really good job of highlighting what we call it our direct connectivity. What I'd like for you to take away is that through our direct connectivity or indirect connectivity, we're connected to every ethylene cracker in the United States, and we're connected to every refinery on the Gulf Coast. Brent mentioned earlier, it takes two things to make a pipeline project successful: volume and speed. A lot of the pipelines on this map deliver smaller volumes than the larger long-haul pipelines that we traditionally think of. Smaller volumes makes it that much harder to replicate.
Moving to SPOT. SPOT's all about barrier to entry. I think that's evident just in the permitting process alone. When we started evaluating this project back in 2018, a project to fully load a VLCC in one day with a fundamental belief that it should not take five ships, all the greenhouse gas emissions, the cost associated with that operation, and two weeks to fully load a VLCC. We put our permit in in January of 2019. Our application was originally 10,000 pages, and we expected a record of decision based on the regulations within 356 days. Fast-forward to November of 2022, we finally got our record decision, the first. Our application had grown to over 30,000 pages. Cost exceeded $50 million.
It took roughly three years over the timeframe that we thought we would have received. One, I think that's it shows the determination of Enterprise Products Partners and our fundamental belief in this project. I think the bar to barrier to entry was raised also in the scope of this project, tying it into our ECHO facility. We have access to 7 million barrels a day of supply, crudes from every one of the major crude basins. You talk about the environmentally. We offered up vapor destruction, one of two in the initial permitting process. I think what you see there is the greenhouse gas emissions and the vapor emissions of reduction 95% for vapor, 65% for the greenhouse gas. Now that we have our record of decision, we go into contracting.
I think this is where it could have been put in discipline. We're gonna be disciplined similar to the Midland ECHO systems. We're gonna go out, get long-term contracts with credit-worthy customers. We see as we're doing that, the fundamentals for this project are even better than when we first looked at it in 2018.
Yeah. We've seen this playbook before, using LPGs as a reference. When that story started, first those barrels went to Mexico, then they went to South America, then they went to Europe. As we stand here today, virtually every incremental barrel across our LPG dock is going to Asia. As that supply push continued, those barrels priced in further and further away to get to market. Crude is no different. Today, we're around 3.5 million-4 million barrels per day of crude exports, with U.S. production continuing to climb. We believe that crude exports will grow up to 6 million barrels per day by 2030. As exports grow, the distance to get to market grows correspondingly, and freight becomes a critical link in the supply chain.
The terminal that provides the max benefit to freight, and this is on any commodity, we've talked about ethane and LPG, is the one that can turn the ship the fastest and load it the fastest, re-result in more turns. In the case of crude oil, that is SPOT.
I hinted into some of the inefficiencies that we're seeing today in loading VLCCs. I'd like to dive into a little detail about that and then layer on Tug's comment about these incremental barrels that are coming to get exported. You can see here on the graph on the bottom left, VLCCs that require reverse lightering, those numbers have trended up over the last year. You can see that we're exporting 30 to 35 through reverse lightering. It correlates very well with production growth.
What we've done here has been broken up, the VLCCs into two categories, based on inefficiencies. The bottom darker blue are VLCCs that are loaded at a Corpus dock that can partially load. They go out to a lightering zone. You'll see another one to two ships required to completely load that VLCC. The top bar, those are VLCCs that leave the Gulf Coast that are completely reverse lighter. Think four additional ships to get those loads complete. As we think about the incremental barrels that Tug talked about, they're gonna find their way into that most inefficient category. Corpus pipes are full. There's a cap to how much of the partially loaded vessels we can have.
Spot offers, at the end of the day, a more cost-efficient, time-effective, and a much more environmentally friendly option, not only for what we're doing today, but what we'll see in the future.
All right. Our last theme is volatility. In the new world that we live in, it's a much more volatile world. When I look at the Enterprise platform,
Go back one, Mike.
Go back a couple.
When I look at the Enterprise platform, what I see is it's a bunch of options. The value and option is based on time and volatility. Volatility is created by shocks to the system where the incremental molecule sets the price for a commodity in that specific area. When these things happen in Enterprise, we get to have a front row seat. The front row seat is to watch the market's willingness to pay for certainty. Are they willing to pay for certainty? That certainty that they want, that's what increases this volatility that we've been seeing. We think the volatility that we've seen since 2018, we think that's probably the new norm as we move forward, and we've got to experience that the last several years.
Some examples of volatility that we've seen around the Enterprise assets, if you go back to COVID, that offered us a record opportunity for us to capture contango. It's values that we have never seen before. We all know the story about negative crude prices. That's really what helped us get us through 2020 is that contango opportunity. If you go beyond that, nine months after that opportunity, we had record backwardation. Record backwardation. That was the best opportunity that we have ever seen. You had gas trading around $600, $700 at MMBtu around in Texas and Oklahoma. It wasn't a week after that, gas was back down to $3.
If you look at geopolitical unrest and you watch the Russia invasion of Ukraine, you watch what gas prices did in Europe and Asia, they approached $100. That's the market's willingness to pay for certainty. All right? They had to pay for certainty. The last thing is just the overall economic uncertainty that we see right now and that has existed for a while. I think in my opinion, that creates some capital allocation paralysis or as companies are afraid to step out and figure out how to solve these issues. Tug's gonna highlight some volatility that we've seen around our assets, and we're gonna talk at a high level about how Enterprise participates and how we participated in the last couple of years and some opportunities as we move forward.
The fact that all these assets are so integrated, that further enhances our opportunity to capture these volatile moments.
Yeah. You've heard us talk in the past about what our core strategies are to capture volatility. You know, we've said we like to embrace volatility. Those strategies are time, location, and product upgrade. If you look at this slide, you can really see that the value of those strategies have gone up and how important it is to be able to capture that volatility. I'm gonna walk through a few recent examples on each specific strategy that we've seen, and I'll start with time. In using refined products as an example, we have a tank position in the Gulf Coast. In the month of December, this past December, we started the month out and motor gasoline and diesel were contango, the market set to store.
We went into the futures market and executed that strategy financially to receive barrels in and deliver them out at a later period in time to capture that contango value. We had a winter storm around Christmas that resulted in several refinery outages. The market was now backward. Do not store. We went and unwound that position in the futures market. I will tell you, we did not even put one single barrel into a tank. Just by having the option to physically do so allowed us to capture that volatility. Moving on to location. There are so many examples to list, so I'll try to keep it to a few. It could be Midland to Houston on crude, it could be Waha to East Texas on gas or Waha to the Gulf Coast on gas.
Many more on NGLs, it could be our dock assets as well. Specifically on our dock assets, we have seen healthy premiums across every single commodity. We are at near record levels on ethane, LPG, and crude oil across our assets. Brent said it earlier, there is a premium for certainty in uncertain markets, our docks provide that, it's called reliable supply. On to product upgrade. It really always amazes me how many different products we can get to talk to each other here at Enterprise. If it's normal to ISO with our isom, if it's normal to motor gasoline with our MTBE plant, if it's gas to ethane or ethane to gas with our gas plants, there's others I'm forgetting. Just to highlight a small example, we have a limited refined products blending operation in the Gulf Coast.
With that blending operation alone, we can get eight different products to interact with each other. Just shows you the breadth of what our assets can do. You know, periodically, we get asked on earnings calls about outsized marketing spreads. I think, Danny, you took a look at it, and you gave me some numbers yesterday. If you were to look over the last five years, that range is somewhere around the lowest. It's around the low 700s. The highest is we got up around 900. It averages about $815 million a year. All right? It's hard for us to predict where these opportunities are gonna come from as we go into the year. Invariably, they always appear, and we always go around and capture these volatile type markets. We always say that we embrace volatility.
If we think the new norm going forward is you're gonna have much more volatility, especially in these regional type markets, I could probably make this case that we'll even have more opportunity to capture these type of opportunities.
We haven't shown you a Rocky slide in a while, although somebody did ask me about it last night, I'm proud to have a slide to represent it. Who highlights a declining basin? This is just certainly one of those. It's a great example of an overlooked region that still provides significant value to the integrated value chain today, or significant cash flow to the integrated value chain today. While production behind these assets may not be growing like the Permian, the lack of production, combined with volatile demand from the West Coast market, which you might could blame on renewable energy bubbles and lack of pipeline infrastructure expansions, is really one of the reasons we're able to extract even more value from volatility from these legacy assets.
Yeah. Low-lower supply has certainly added to volatility for the gas markets in Western Wyoming. They're no longer a wash and gas, and as Natalie mentioned, they serve markets like California that have made big renewable pushes without having backup generation. If you look at this slide, you can see that the volatility is very pronounced in SoCal, Kern, CIG, and San Juan. If you look on ethane, it's pretty boring relative to those gas markets. When they decouple, it's time for us to exercise a product upgrade strategy. Kern was over $30 in an MMBtu, so we rejected ethane, propane, and butane at significant margins relative to gas. What are gas processing plants? They're just another option in our kit. They allow us to take NGLs from gas or put NGLs back into gas.
Enterprise is technically not a gas producer, but I will tell you, we can sure make a lot of gas if the market tells us to do so.
You heard from Randy how fragile the grid becomes when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Really when those things turn off, how dependent the energy mix is on natural gas. During these times, we've seen our Texas pipeline demand swing almost 200%. In 12 hours, we can see a high winter demand and a perfect weather, no demand in just 1 day. Last year, we didn't really advertise it, but we doubled the outbound capacity of our Texas salt dome cavern gas storage because we knew that during times of volatility, the market would have a call on immediate demand. What you see during harsh winter events is basin production freeze off, and the market willing to pay for certainty, and most of that certainty is in the ground during those times.
The background of this map is population density by county in Texas. I kind of wish we showed Texas population growth against the U.S., because if you think of the growth of population in Texas and the lack of or nonexistent investment in new gas-fired power gen, it's really one of the large reasons for how fragile the grid can become during those times. Major point here. I did have transition to renewable energy as the gift that keeps on giving, but I turned that one off. If you think about it, transition to renewable energy creates more volatility. Why? Well, renewables are intermittent. Intermittency creates fragility. Fragility creates volatility, and then we participate and embrace it.
You know, as marketing, you know, last year we said we had around 400 million a day of open capacity along this system, from Waha to East Texas or Waha to the Gulf Coast. We like that position. We still have it. Natalie touched on it, but the volatility that renewables have added to the grid are pronounced. You couple that with tight infrastructure that we talked about earlier in the slide, it really does add a lot of fragility to the gas market, and we feel there's going to be great opportunities for spread capture until new infrastructure comes online. I just don't want to discount the fact that even once that new infrastructure comes online, there still is going to be great opportunities due to that volatility associated with the renewable push along the system.
Yes, we've been talking about volatility with respect to how we utilize our existing assets to take advantage of those opportunities. What a refined product system and really what we're doing on TW really shows you is how we use it as a guide on where to go. You know, because that's really at its core what volatility is when we think about where we should go is it's a guide. Brent, you often call this project a COVID baby because it emerged from a challenge during that time to do more with what we had. Identifying the volatility in this Rockies corridor, we'll call it, was a product of that effort.
You know, as we look at what's changed since we announced this at Analyst Day last year, I mean, you can see in the chart the signs of volatility and the market need shows and reinforces us that this is the project we should be pursuing. You know, the TW system will serve as markets that are structurally short products, often leaving rail imports as the marginal barrel to solve that imbalance. When disruptions do occur, such as refinery maintenance or unplanned outages, that marginal barrel can often command a significant premium. Again, you can see that in the charts. On the project execution front specifically, the Permian and Jal terminals will be on at the end of the year, and Albuquerque and Grand Junction terminals will now be on at the end of the first quarter of next year.
When you, when you look back at our TE system, you know, that system really gave us the blueprint on how we intend to execute the TW system commercially. You know, the system can offer 11 different products. They all have their varying puts and takes and relevant geographies. Really, you can sum that system up as a volatility catcher's mitt. That is what we're going to try to replicate on the TW side as we bring that project forward.
If you look at this slide, you can see that on the Chicago component of it, that Chicago versus the Gulf Coast started experiencing volatility following February of 2022. Prior to that, it was pretty quiet. Now, if you look at the PADD 4 spreads from Albuquerque and Grand Junction as example, those spreads have been volatile in the past, they're volatile today, and we expect them to be volatile in the future. I like to think of the PADD 4 refined products market as the Wild West of refined products basis. There's been also some refineries that have shut down or converted to renewable diesel, which is adding to further volatility in these markets. Justin mentioned it, but this is really about us chasing volatility. How does marketing participate in this? One, we are not a refiner.
We do not have to clear refined products on a daily basis. The market tells us to move it from the Gulf Coast, we will. Honestly, I could see us being a buyer of refined products and importing them into our terminals if the market tells us to do so. You can see there's been some time periods where the basis went negative in those various markets along the TW system. There's another value add here that you can't readily see, but those markets are at higher altitude, requiring different grade specifications, lower octane ratings. This will add another product upgrade or blending strategy for us to execute on when it comes online. I started off by saying how we like to embrace volatility. This product is a prime example of us just doing that.
I think by most measures, Enterprise has had a very successful first 25 years as a public company. I think the graph on the bottom of this page shows you a portion of those 25 years. It's a graph that I think all employees of Enterprise, past and present, should take a lot of pride in. What you heard today is the story about why we are so well-positioned for this next 25 years. The value of this company is going to be extended by growth. Tony talked about what we see coming out of the Permian Basin. It's going to be strengthened by discipline. Let's recognize that producer discipline is a very good thing for midstream. It's gonna be protected by barrier to entry. Everything we have in the ground today is worth more money than it was yesterday.
Lastly, it's going to be enhanced by the volatility that we have experienced recently that we think is the new norm as we move forward. Individually and collectively, each of these increases the value of the fully integrated asset base. It increases the value for our customers, both domestically and internationally, and also of Enterprise unitholders. The last thing I'd like to add is what separates sustainable versus short-term success is the culture of an organization. I think what we have here at Enterprise is very special. You know, Dan had a motto, and it was a very simple motto. It was, "Do the best you can every day." I think Randy showed it earlier. That motto still lives on at our company today. Thank you for your time.
That's to go forward. Yeah. That's back. Over here.
If you hadn't figured out, there's a few years ago, we decided we weren't gonna curl up in a corner when things got volatile. We decided we were gonna embrace it and make money out of it. I think these guys just showed you we've got the footprint to do that. A lot of you ask about outsized spreads every year, and we say, we tell you what they were, but we also tell you we're gonna always have them. They'll just be in different places, and that footprint is what allows us to capture wherever they are. We broke petrochemicals out from the commercial group because when Becca came on the board, the first thing she wanted to talk about was petrochemicals. Right, Becca? You take that first slide, and then I'll get into the other.
Every year, we start off the pet chem segment with a re-review of fundamental concepts because I think it's pretty important to understand where the industry's going before you can really understand how it's gonna impact the Enterprise pet chem business. This year, I have two concepts that I wanna go through. The first one is around growth. The chart on the lower left there shows per capita GDP versus petrochemical consumption.
You can see that as a country becomes bigger or more affluent, that they consume more petrochemicals. This makes a lot of sense if you think back to what Randy talked about how petrochemicals were one of the four pillars of modern civilization. It's because petrochemicals go into virtually every product that you buy. Virtually every product that is manufactured today has some tie to petrochemicals. As someone becomes more affluent and buys a bigger house, all the products that they put in that house have more petrochemical demand. The second concept is the crude to gas spread. You see this chart every year on the lower right, and usually it's for different reasons. What I wanna talk about today is the impact to petrochemicals.
Really, this chart is the whole reason we have a petrochemical industry in the U.S. It's because of crude to natural gas. The way to think about this is the rest of the world uses a crude-based product to make ethylene. They use naphtha. In the U.S., we use predominantly a natural gas-related product, ethane. The difference between crude and natural gas is the advantage that the U.S. producer has. It's not just that. Lower natural gas means lower energy costs, and petrochemical facilities, in particular, use a lot of energy. There's two key advantages that the U.S. petrochemical industry has over the rest of the world. That's feedstock, and it's lower energy costs. If you think about this, one, the world's gonna need more petrochemicals because the population's growing and becoming more affluent.
Secondly, the U.S. is one of the most cost-advantaged place in the world to do it because of feedstock and energy costs. We should see more petrochemicals in the U.S.
Hang on a minute. Back in the early 2000s, a huge petrochemical consulting firm came out with a statement that said that U.S. ethylene production would shrink from over 50 billion pounds a year to 35 billion pounds a year because U.S. crackers could not compete with Middle East crackers. Today, we have 94 billion pounds a year of ethylene production in the U.S., most of it located on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. Okay. This is what ethylene and propylene volatility looks like since 2005. And it was like that prior to that. Believe me, I lived that for 23 years. This is what I think a lot of you guys think about when you hear us saying we're in petrochemicals. But that's not us.
What we wanna show you that you can apply a midstream model to petrochemical commodities and have, and have a much more stable earnings than. The other thing is when things are good, petrochemicals are their own worst enemy. They just go out and build plants. Hell, I sponsored a couple. Invariably, they work it off. Earlier this week, I was with some CEOs from three different petrochemical companies, and they were asked, "Are you in a recession?" They said, "No, we're in a trough right now, near-term." What they said was they expect the second half of 2023 to be much better. I was surprised when they said, "We think 2024 will be like 2021." You invariably grow out of your inventories. You invariably eat up your overused capacity, and then here comes another. This is, this is not us. Wade.
The chart there on the lower right, you can see the same lines, the same volatility from the previous chart we just looked at. Ethylene, propylene prices, very volatile. You see the chemical industry being affected by that and their profitability. The blue chart or the blue bars beneath that, those lines is Enterprise's petrochemical gross operating margin. You can see that we have a stable base, but then when prices blow out, we take advantage of that or are advantaged by that. Why is that? Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we're fee-based for predominantly most of our revenue. The other piece is how we structure our contracts. I'll go by business segment so you can understand a little bit better. On the propylene side, we have PDH.
We've talked about this many years in a row. We're all cost-plus on that, so that's all fee-based. We do get a little bit of benefit if we run above nameplate. We get to take advantage of that propane propylene spread. Our propylene splitters. We buy refinery-grade propylene. We sell polymer-grade propylene. The way that we've turned this into a fee-based business is that we buy our RGP on a PGP minus basis, and we sell our PGP on a PGP basis. What we've done there is we've created a fee base. On top of that, about half of our contracts, we added a provision so that we get a kicker when the RGP, PG spread blows out. We're allowed to take advantage of that spread or participate in that spread when it's wide.
That's why you see the propylene margin for our business growing when that spread's wide. Our ethylene business is almost all fee-based. The only piece that's not is when we run above nameplate on our export facility, we're able to take advantage of that volume for the ARB. Our C4 business, that has some commodity exposure to it. Our IBDH plant that we started up in 2019 is the same model as PDH. It's all fee-based. Our high purity isobutylene plant, again, we sell on a cost-plus basis, so that's fee-based. Our MTBE plant, we're exposed to the normal to gasoline basis. MTBE is octane. It goes into gasoline blending.
The way that we try to turn that more into a fee-based is that we hedge the normal to ArbOp spread, and we do that one to two years out. We still have a little exposure on what we call the uplift, which is the premium that MTBE will sell at versus gasoline. And you'll see in years where that spread has blown out like last year and the first quarter of this year so far, that we benefit on that spread quite a bit. We are still predominantly fee-based as a total segment, and it's because of the way we structure our contracts.
What I like to call it is that we want an annuity with upside, that's why what we're trying to build in. Without mentioning any names, what about your idea of creating more refinery-grade propylene?
Yeah. I mean, even on that, it's fee-based with an upside kicker.
Okay. What are you talking about? You want me to do it?
Sure.
Okay. You know, I was in India. Brent and I were, and Bob, we met with Reliance Industries Limited, and they took us up to that huge refinery. It's 1.2 million, I think, barrels a day. We went back to Mumbai, and we had a meeting with the Reliance Industries Limited CEO. He said, "Jim Teague, that refinery you visited is gonna be a huge petrochemical complex. I'm gonna do crude to chemicals." Now, they're primarily interested in aromatics in Asia, I think. While here, we're interested in olefins. Chris Nelly's team has been in discussions with several refiners about how do you produce more propylene and less gasoline? If you believe gasoline slack to declining and propylene's growing at one point... Did I totally screw you up?
No.
Propylene's growing at 1.5 x GDP, it looks to me like you'd wanna produce more propylene. We're trying to be creative in how we grow this business. I don't think you're gonna see a PDH 3. There's only one person that can authorize a PDH 3, and I think I can talk her out of it. We have plenty of dehydrogenation. Where we wanna grow is a building on that annuity with upside concept. I think you're gonna get into the other... Okay, this is mine, isn't it? Okay. I can't. I can barely see it, but it's not in my package. What I wanted to make a point of, you see the growth of our petrochemical business.
You notice in 1979, if I'm not mistaken, I don't know where Randy is, but I think that was the first tower that Dan built in Mont Belvieu. Oddly enough, it was a refinery-grade propylene tower. You can see the steps along the way as to what we put in. I wanna focus on the one that says DK, Diamond Coke. As I look back, the Diamond Coke acquisition, where we got salt dome storage and how many splitters?
Three splitters.
Three splitters was the most strategic acquisition our company has ever made. Now, I'm not convinced we knew it then, but we had nine salt dome wells. Because of that acquisition, we now have 37 salt dome wells. You wouldn't see all those towers, you wouldn't see that highest rate export without those those salt dome caverns. That's the base that allows you to put up 12 fractionators, a PDA, two PDH plants, two IBDH plants, an ethane export, an LPG export, an ethylene export, a propylene export. It all comes. The base of that whole thing are those 37 caverns, and that's what we got. Randy, I can't remember what we paid for it. DK, Diamond Coke, $150 million? Huh?
$120 million.
$120 million. Not only was it the most strategic, it was the best price.
Wanna talk a little bit about why we're fee-based and really how we're the same as the rest of Enterprise. As I think about all the Enterprise businesses, there's really four core competencies, four things that we all do the same, and it's no different for petrochemicals. We store, we like hubs, and we build those hubs out. We transport through connected headers, we export, and we process. If you think about the petrochemical business on those terms, it's really no different than any other business within Enterprise. In fact, if you think about the products that we handle in petrochemicals, they're really very similar to the NGL business. Think of propane as propylene. Think of ethane as ethylene. Think of butane as butylene. Really, for that matter, a lot of our customers are the same.
The only real difference is we have smaller volumes in petchem and the prices that we get are a little bit higher, and they have to be because of the smaller volumes. We show this picture most every year in some part of the presentation. I don't think we've ever shown it for petrochemicals. I wanted to show it this year with all the petrochemical assets so you could get a sense for the scale of the business. Really, we have massive assets. If you look at in the upper left-hand corner, you can see all of our PDH and IBH assets. They really take up that whole section. Even in the front ground of that, you can see all the petrochemical assets.
Our petrochemical business is the largest producer of propylene in the U.S., and with PDH 2, we'll be the largest global producer. The same with our isobutylene business. We're the largest producer in the U.S. These are massive assets with very good scale.
For the longest, how we priced our propylene frustrated me to no end because it was called a contract price. Buyers and sellers would talk most of the month until somebody caved and everybody agreed to a price. It was the 25th of the month in which you were producing before you really found out what your price was. We decided this doesn't work for us. At the time, our propylene system was like Hotel California. It was easy to get in, but you could only get out through Enterprise, which discouraged people from wanting to do storage deals with us. We wanted to go to an index price, there's no way to go to an index price with a closed system.
We opted that we were going to open our system up, allow people to nominate out on our pipelines, on their pipelines. We were gonna make it a storage hub with a distribution network and an export capability. That index price brought in supply, and hydrocarbons is, has been, and always will be a supply-driven business. It also brought in options, things like backwardation, more opportunity to do contango when it made sense. We've been pretty successful on creating a hub for propylene, and the traded volume is just going to the Northeast. I have a lot of hope that this becomes much bigger as time rolls on.
Yeah, the way to think about a hub, it's not just a storage facility. It's really the connectivity that you have that makes it a hub and makes it valuable, makes people wanna be in that system. As you saw from the chart or a couple slides ago, the history of the petchem business, we've built our propylene system out over the last 40+ years, and it's a really massive system today that stretches the whole Gulf Coast. We go from Corpus Christi all the way to the river. We gather RGP from all the refineries along the Gulf Coast. We have pipeline connectivity to the Midwest, where we also receive RGP.
We're able to receive RGP from 2/3 of the refiners on the Gulf Coast that export refinery grade, and we're connected to almost 85% of the consumption on the U.S. Gulf Coast. The system that we have is very well-connected, and that makes the hub valuable.
Let's talk about exports. On propylene, you get about $0.06 a pound. Is that right?
At times, we can get that. Typically, it's $0.025-$0.03 per pound.
How much is that a barrel? $5, $6?
$5, $6 a barrel, yep.
On ethylene, how much per barrel do you get?
It's, it's about the same.
Okay, on ethane, I'm looking at you, Zach, what do we get? Give it to me in dollars per barrel. $2.50? $3? Okay. Same thing on propane. Ted?
$3.
$3. Okay. My only point is we're talking about $3 to $7 or $8. You hear a lot about Corpus Christi and crude oil exports, we're having a record year, record month, I think, in crude exports. Jay, what is the spot rate for a crude export?
$0.40.
$0.40. I'd rather have $3-$8 on the light ends. We're gonna export over 73 million barrels of hydrocarbons, I think, Zach, this month, and a vast majority of it is that $3-$7 a barrel. Now, yeah, we invested in refrigeration, but I'd still rather have what we have. Until spot comes on. I just wanted to make the point that we are a huge exporter of hydrocarbons, but we certainly like the light ends better than the $0.50. I can tell you, spot won't go for $0.50. Okay. That's what our ethylene system looked like in 2018. We had a dream.
Yeah, this is what it looks like today. In a pretty short period of time, we've built out the system. Today, we modeled this after the propylene system. We have a pipeline that stretches from South Texas to Mont Belvieu. It's the Houston Ship Channel and all the consumers and producers along that. We have connectivity to our hub, and you can see the volumes that have grown in our hub. This is a system that's grown pretty quickly. If you think back to what I talked about on the very first slide, the fundamentals, that's the reason why. It's because petrochemicals, ethylene and propylene in particular, the production and demand have grown, and that's what's driven the need and the demand for our system.
The dream that these guys have is to have that pipeline all the way to the river. We've got a pipeline we can repurpose if we find that we've got the demand over there. The two companies I'd like to point out you have connectivity to are Celanese. Celanese and Oxy, both huge short. Celanese doesn't produce ethylene. Oxy's is down in Corpus, and it's tied to a Mexican joint venture, if I'm not mistaken. On the river, you've got people that have huge shorts, I think, in ethylene. The dream is to have a header system from Baton Rouge to Markham, where it ties into Equistar and Oxy pipe all the way to Corpus. The dream is to have a header system much like the Aegis ethane system.
I'd call it a strategy rather than a dream, but.
Okay. Well, he's lucky it's not February when we cut bonuses. Okay. I think Zach already hit on what we're doing in terms of expanding our ability to export ethylene in combination with ethane in our flex train. The expansion at the ship channel on the LPG, which I think they mentioned, gives us more capability to export propylene. From an export perspective, if you look at the chart last year, we exported at almost 35 million barrels of petrochemicals. Remember, those are $4-$7 a barrel exports.
The reason we're doing the expansions is because the demand's there. Higher fees, more volumes, it's a good business to be in.
That's yours.
Yep. I'm just gonna wrap it up with where we started at. A couple key concepts I want y'all to walk away with today. One is that the margin that we produce for the petrochemical business is stable, fee-based, but we also participate in upside when spreads blow out. It's a really good business to be in, but predominantly fee-based.
In 2019 or 2020, I gave these guys a challenge. I said, "I wanna see $1 billion of gross operating margin out of petrochemicals by 2024." They did 1.1 in 2021, and 1.2 in last year?
A little over $1 billion in 2021, $1.2 billion or $1.15 billion-ish last year.
You should've rounded up. These guys have gone far beyond what I expected, and the problem is, there's no going back. It's only up to the northeast from here. I think. Is it Graham and Angie?
I think we have question and answer next.
Oh, do we?
Yeah.
Okay. Randy, do we have question and answer now?
Yes, we do.
Okay.
Okay, we're gonna take questions.
Randy, you wanna come up and. You're gonna get some questions. You may as well come up.
We're gonna take questions now. When you ask a question, if you would, since this is being webcast, state your name and the firm, if you don't mind. Just raise your hand, and we'll get to you. Over here.
Neal Dingman with Truist. My first question may be for Chris, just following on what you were just saying on propylene. I'm just wondering, near term, could you talk about what the growth opportunities, I would say, between this year and next year? You know, you mentioned that you're the largest producer right now of propylene and Jim mentioned about the, obviously, the margins are superior versus some of your other products. I'm just wondering, what is the growth opportunity maybe through next year that you see?
I think the most significant that we have coming up is the startup of our second PDH. We'll be mechanically complete here in a few weeks, and by the end of the first half of this year, so end of second quarter, we'll start that facility up, and it'll start generating a whole bunch of fee-based revenue, cost plus propane based economics on that.
Then just lastly, you mentioned that you can take advantage of some of the blowouts in different things. Can you tell us again, I'm just trying to make sure I understand that, based on sort of the fee base that y'all have, how do you take advantage of, when you have some of those blowouts temporary blowouts and such?
Yeah.
Thank you.
I'll take that. I'll give you an example of a contract. One of the things we decided is we really need to give these guys a exposure to polymer-grade propylene. The refinery propylene index doesn't do it justice. What we did is we said, "Okay." In one particular case, we said, "Okay, we're going to give you exposure to polymer-grade propylene. We'll buy you a refiner grade at polymer-grade less 7 or whatever it was, 8, I can't remember. If it gets above 14, we share that spread 50/50." This month it's been about $0.34, that's how that works. Annuity with an upside.
Michael?
Hey, Michael Bloom with Wells Fargo. I think I have a couple for Tony and then maybe one for the commercial group. Just for Tony, you talked about the need to the extent there are LNG exports above what your current forecast is, they'd need more gas. One of the places you listed was Appalachia, but I'm wondering how you think we get any more gas out of Appalachia. Second question for you is just you manage that OPEC's gonna manage the price. What do you think that price now is that OPEC needs to float their economy?
Okay. Both good questions, Michael. We modeled that Appalachia has something bigger than 1 B and probably something smaller than 2 Bs, somewhere in that range of incremental capacity that's coming even before Mountain Valley. It's not a lot, Michael, but it's not nothing. Other, other than that, you have to have permit reform. I think the poster child in all of this is Mountain Valley. We'll see what happens. Do I think you're gonna have sweeping permit reform in the Northeast? I wish. It'd be good for liquids business on the Gulf Coast. Jim, I don't know how you feel. I have my doubts.
Yeah. I'm a little more optimistic. Randy and I were in Washington not long ago, we got from Democratic senators that there is a bipartisan support for permit reform. You think about it. If they wanna electrify, they gotta build transmission lines, and if they're gonna build transmission lines, they gotta have permit reform. There's a certain senator from West Virginia that is not gonna let that just be transmission lines. I'm a little more optimistic. When I was at AFPM this week, the CEO of AFPM that spends, I mean is in D.C., He asked me what I hope for this year. I said, "I hope for permit reform." His comment was, "I expect permit reform." We'll see.
That'd be wonderful. Relative to OPEC, I think the quote that a lot of people have or number that they have is to look at the Saudis' entitlements. They'll say, you know, people do a calculation and say, "Oh, they need 100 plus dollars a barrel," for example. If you go back and you look at, because they're public, which is really great 'cause people like I can, myself and our team can dig in, that's really not their marker. I think their behavior has been that once crude gets something that either has a six or even a seven in front of it, they begin to have trepidation. They begin to speak up. It's not that they do it overnight, but they begin to speak up that, you know, we're watching these markets and we don't like these prices.
Do I think it has to be 100 for the Saudis? I do not. exactly what their range is gonna be, I don't, I don't think there's a fixed number, Michael. I think, you know, they don't completely control the market. It depends on a lot of factors. I also don't think that they want $140, to be honest with you. I don't think the Saudis want $140 at all, so.
Thank you. Just one quick follow-up, if I may, just on clarification on the Cheniere expansion. Can you just, I wanna make sure I heard that correctly. Are you now not doing that expansion? Just where does that stand?
That was in relation to Cheniere? I think we have some opportunities to move Y-grade, and we're working with other pipelines where we're have JV ownership in, and we're trying to just figure out. I think Justin said it. We're just trying to figure out the right deal. That, that project is on the table. We're just trying to figure out if there's a better way to do it than doing it with Cheniere. Let me do it. Let me add a little clarity. We're gonna do the Cheniere expansion, just not now.
Thank you.
Hi, Keith Stanley with Wolfe Research. You gave a lot of details on seeing more marketing opportunities, just given volatility across markets, locations. Obviously hard to predict, I guess my question is, last year, I think the company had a record about 25%, 26% of gross margin from marketing and spread related opportunities and commodities. Do you see that as kind of a new normal going forward for the company, that you could have those levels of opportunities? When you talk about Project 9.3, what are you assuming for that area of your business, which is pretty sizable?
Let me be clear about something, and Randy, you may help on this. When you say marketing has a lot of contracts that are fee-based. Most of our LPG exports, for example, go through marketing. Marketing holds those contracts, and those are fee-based contracts. Don't get confused with what's shown in marketing and what is spread-based. Is that fair, Brent?
Sure.
I don't know how to answer your question without knowing. It's not 25%, it's something less than that because all of our... Do all of our export deals go through marketing?
They all do.
be it ethane, propane, propylene, whatever, it goes through marketing, and those are fee-based bid deals.
Okay, maybe I could rephrase it. Just, you had a really good year last year in terms of having a lot of commodity and spread-related opportunities, and it doesn't sound like the tone is that that's dying away or moderating.
Well-
in any way in the future. How are you thinking about that in your outlook?
The way I think about it is, we will have those opportunities. They will just be different, and that's what I tried to say earlier. The footprint gives us the opportunities. Right now, he's talking about MTBE uplifts. That's been $0.85 on top of a $1.40, $1.50 normal butane. That's $0.85, and that's a gallon. It was one time, hell, it was flat, but it's blown out now. If that doesn't blow out, then refinery-grade propylene will blow out. Are you gonna have a north-south spread? Are you gonna have something on crude oil? It, you know. Are you gonna have a west to east? It's always something. I hear this a lot, but we've said it in an earnings call. Spreads are normal. It's just they're different every year.
I probably didn't satisfy you, but sorry, but that's the answer.
Okay. Over here.
Hi. Theresa Chen from Barclays. I actually have a question for Tug related to the demand pull aspect of ethane trade flows and the many stamps on your passport. As we think about the substitution in terms of ethane for natural gas fuel switching, what are the limitations of that in your industrial customers for, you know, thermal gen et al? Then also, as we think about ethane as a feedstock in the Far East for petchem cracking, as Russian naphtha incrementally makes its way to India and other markets, and our ethane has to compete with that, how do you think about that as far as ethane export economics go? I have another question for Chris afterwards, please.
I'll try to answer your first question on the fuel component of, on LNG. Each facility is different. Certain facilities, for example, can, you know, consume or burn more ethane, but still have to have a limited amount of natural gas coming in, you know, a fractionator, a cracker or a refinery, so it's kind of a mixed bag on the question. I will tell you that higher prices, when we saw LNG prices at those really elevated levels last year, people started to get creative. You know, we saw refineries burning propane internationally. When refineries consume propane in lieu of natural gas, that's more propane demand across our docks. Those facilities that can receive ethane specifically, you start to really tune your asset to knock out that expensive LNG price.
There's a big, economic motivation to do so. It's by facility, so it's kind of a mixed bag on that. Your second question was, naphtha weight on, ethane in the Middle East?
Deeply discounted Russian naphtha.
Yeah. You know, on that, on that note, just I look at the naphtha barrel, and it's got a lot more homes. It can make its way in a lot of different markets versus just the cracker pool. We'll have to see how that plays out relative to, you know, ethane. If you look at the Middle East, you know, you can see the CPChem deal with Qatar. I mean, they're acutely aware of, as well, the advantages of ethane. You know, others are making investments over there, as well.
Let me give you an example. When I had a Zoom call recently with the CEO of Reliance. I should have said a big Indian oil company. They take about 85,000-90,000 barrels a day of ethane from us. When I talked to him about what the guys talked about that we were doing to expand our capability to export ethane. His right-hand man was also on the Zoom, and he turned to him, and he said, "You need to order another ethane ship 'cause we're gonna want more." He knows how to crack naphtha, but he's gonna take more than 100,000 barrels a day of ethane.
I am convinced that at least in India, they burned a lot of ethane this year because they could land it a heck of a lot cheaper than LNG.
Chris, on your views, on the octane enhancement business, can you talk about your outlook? Generally speaking, is it possible for you to repeat what you did in 2022, just given the global tightness of octane, and in part due to, you know, the sulfur restriction stringency increasing in multiple markets that typically has inverse relationship with octane?
Sure. You know, our MTBE is 100% exported. As you think about naphtha, and Tug alluded to it a little bit, its place in the fuel market versus petchem. Cheap naphtha has generated a demand for octane.
To go back to what Tug talked about, even though if naphtha is discounted, and Jim hit it as well. Ethane is still much more competitive than naphtha. I mean, octane, our view is, demand is gonna remain pretty strong.
You know, I looked down our arb sheet this morning. I think ethane's selling for 12% of crude. You can even add freight. That's pretty damn competitive feedstock.
Okay, our next question, Gabe.
Gabriel Moreen with Mizuho. Brent, I just wanted to maybe ask on SPOT in terms of how costs are trending there as this takes a little while, I think to get across the finish line, and also to what extent costs are your Enterprise is trying to mitigate those potential costs and plan for them, and what extent it's coming up with customer conversations and then the prospects for having a financial or strategic partner in the project.
You wanna take that, Jim, or you want me to?
I think Graham can take the cost part, huh?
Okay. Question, Graham, was about cost on SPOT.
Yeah. Certainly in an inflationary environment that we've been in since and you look at when we filed a permit back in 2019 to where we are today, costs are up. Costs are up considerably. We are still working to mitigate those costs. you know, it depends on when we get the license and actually what the market for some of the final commodities and labor is gonna be when we actually move forward with it. certainly costs are up quite a bit from when we first initiated the project, and you can look at, you know, we're in probably growth rate of 20%-25% from that time.
We have been scrambling. Brent and Tug spent 18 days in Asia. When was that? November?
October, November.
I met 'em in Mumbai, so I didn't spend 18 days in Asia. But I've met with CEOs of major producing companies and major oil companies, and my pitch has been, "You ought to want this built as bad as we wanna build it." By and large, we're getting positive comments. Now you gotta get 'em across the finish line, but I personally think this is a project that needs to be built. I think it's gonna be something. We just need a few, I had one guy that he was our anchor. One CEO said, "You know, if it worked for us then, I don't know why it wouldn't work for us now." Another said, "Jim, this is a topic of discussion in our commercial group every day.
I think if you look at costs, and yes, the costs to build this have gone up, but if you look at freight, and we spent a lot of time talking about freight, the cost of freight's gone up even higher on a percentage basis. You look at Aframax vessels and what's been taken out of the pool, you look at the order book as you move forward, that order book is not very deep. When you look at how we commercialize this, yes, we want long-term deals, and we're gonna need long-term deals, and it's gonna be part from a producer push. In the end, I think producers are gonna have to sign up for something. We're gonna watch the flow patterns as more and more barrels make their way to Houston.
As more barrels make their way into a market, that's how arbitrage opportunities start opening up. If you look at, you know, the class of shippers on this, I do think you're gonna have larger U.S. producers step up to help push this thing over. I think you're gonna have people that have a large freight position on the water that are very large crew traders that want a piece of this. We've had conversations on the demand pull side, and I think we may get a couple of those, but I think the majority of this is gonna be from a producer push here U.S. I think it's just more consolidation upstream in the Permian Basin. I think that helps, frankly. Then also just the trading community that see the advantages from a freight perspective.
Maybe if I can just ask a quick follow-up to Tony. You've got a half a B coming out of Haynesville through 25 in terms of growth. Seems a little stingy relative to some other folks out there. Is that just a function of the forward curve, the LNG growth air pocket we've kind of got here? Is there some other fundamental you've got on the Haynesville relative to other basins?
We adjusted it, quote-unquote, real time for what's happened to prices. If there's anything in our forecast that, you know, is likely to change first, that could be it. Had we not adjusted it and we've shown, for example, 4 Bcf of Haynesville growth, there'd been a lot about doubts about that too, so we felt we had to address it.
Okay. We have time for one more, Brian.
Hi. Brian Reynolds from UBS. Maybe just a quick follow-up on the SPOT. Curious if you could just discuss some of the signposts that could support the FID in a few years. I think, one, you talked about still looking for licensing. What's the update there from the USEPA in terms of timeline? Second, what upstream infrastructure are you guys looking at that needs to be done before you could start seeing more flows ultimately coming to Houston, either from Canada or Permian? Thanks.
Let's Bob Sanders answer that.
All right. This is Bob Sanders. As far as the timing, we've submitted everything to MARAD relative to the license, all 8 items. We've had very good conversations with them. I would say we expect the license in the early summer timeframe of this year. I'll pass the second portion of that off to somebody else.
It was about the capital associated with upstream for spot?
It's all embedded in spot.
Yeah. I mean, everything in the capital we're talking about is everything that's in relation to SPOT, building a pipeline down from ECHO to Oyster Creek, and then everything we're doing offshore. In terms of infrastructure that's needed upstream of ECHO, you know, we've spent all that capital already. I mean, Jay talked about the position in terms of supply up to 7 million barrels of access to crude barrels. I don't think there's anything that's needed upstream.
Okay. With that, we're gonna go ahead and take a 10-minute break, we'll have another Q&A session at the end of the presentation. Let's get back about 10:55 A.M. Okay. Thank you. Okay. If you could return to your seats, we're gonna get started. Our next session will be with operations and Graham Bacon and Angie Murray. I think as people gather, if y'all wanna go ahead and get started, we're good.
Okay. Are we on? Yeah, it sounds like it. Good morning. My name's Graham Bacon, and with me is Angie Murray, our Senior Vice President of Technical Services. You'll hear us discuss three major themes this morning. First, you'll hear us cover our safety and environmental performance. You'll also hear about the supply chain and associated costs and how we're managing those in an inflationary environment. Then you'll hear us discuss reliability and how we sustain our assets for the long term. You'll also hear about how we incorporate data throughout all of these areas and use that as a means of driving continuous improvement. You know, Jim talked about Project Nine earlier and the goal of reaching EBITDA of $9 billion last year.
One of the keys to that was making sure that we didn't compromise on our safety or environmental performance and/or setting up our assets for the long term. As I switch to safety, you can see that our TRIR last year was another record of 0.33, continuing a long downward trend in the incident rate that we've had. You know, our safety programs are focused not only on preventing employee injuries, but they're also focused on preventing those large disruptive events that can have an impact on a community or our business. The way we go about managing that is through strong safety management systems.
We've got safety management systems for process and pipeline and integrity management. They really drive and guide how we function. The key to any safety management system is really strong leadership. At Enterprise, I think we've got outstanding leadership from Randa, Jim, and Randy on the safety side. We meet with them weekly to cover any type of safety issues, and they really drive accountability through our organization from a safety standpoint. We're held just as accountable for our safety performance as our commercial groups are held for their financial performance. We also continue to drive a culture in our organization for strong safety performance. I personally meet with all of our field supervision and management regularly to drive that consistency of culture and how we manage our safety performance.
We're also continuing to use data more and more to evaluate and drive our programs, whether it be categorizing every incident that we have and then looking for trends so we can find ways to continue to improve in that area. Another example is the amount of audits that we do. We conduct a significant amount of field safety audits, and we analyze that data a lot more rigorously than we did just a few years ago because it helps us really focus and drive our safety programs. The other area that we're really focused on and probably lead the midstream industry is in our training. You know, I think everybody's heard the shifts of the people in this industry retiring and the next generation of workers coming on.
The way you get those new workers up to speed as quickly as possible and replace that experience is through strong training programs. It's those training programs that we use to focus on not only regulatory compliance, but really skills training. On the regulatory side, we did over 37,000 task qualification trainings just to meet PHMSA regulatory requirements. Then we trained over 3,500 people in new skills to allow them to do their jobs better. Being able to do their jobs better and be more confident in their jobs also leads to better safety performance. You know, safety performance and environmental performance really go hand in hand as well.
Last year, the release volumes that we had were about 50% of the three-year average, previous three-year average, so we're continuing to drive down the incidents that drive those type of releases. The other area that we're driving down, environmental emissions is on the greenhouse gas side, and Angie's gonna talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, that's right, Graham. Just last year, our greenhouse gas emissions intensity for 2022 fire-based assets was a record low of 1.8, down 5% from our previous year low. We've incorporated the impact of the Navitas acquisition on our emissions reporting, which you can see here. Over the short term, we're really focused on targeted and cost-effective methods to reduce that emissions intensity from those assets. We're looking at methods such as recovering product during maintenance activities and also including emissions and considerations in the initial project design. Whether it's a small project or a large project, making sure that we design our projects with low emissions on the front end really is the most cost-effective way to drive long-term emissions intensity reduction.
Many of you may have heard about the methane rule that came out this past year as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. This is basically a tax on methane emissions. We've evaluated the impact of the methane rule on our business and can confirm that we do not expect any financial impact as a result of this rule. This is really due to our longstanding commitment to sustainable operations with emissions and low emissions design in mind from the front end. Then thinking out towards the long term, we're really focused on step change reductions in our emissions, and we see two primary methods to achieve this. One is expanding the use of hydrogen fueling. We burn hydrogen today in our fractionators. We use the excess hydrogen we produce off of our sy-facilities to burn hydrogen, displacing the need to burn natural gas.
When our PDH 2 facility comes online this year, we'll significantly expand the use of burning hydrogen in that facility to reduce the emissions from that facility. We've also developed areas where we can further expand the use of hydrogen fueling across our heaters throughout our facilities. Another area where we're focused on step change reductions is by implementing carbon capture and sequestration at our gas processing facilities. This is the highly concentrated CO2 that comes off of our gas treating facilities, where we can cost-effectively capture and permanently sequester the CO2 that's emitted, significantly reducing our CO2 emissions. Not only are we focused on reducing our own emissions, but we're also developing solutions to provide industry opportunity to decarbonize their assets as well.
We're jointly progressing a project with Oxy to provide a complete CO2 transportation and sequestration solution across the Gulf Coast area from Houston to Beaumont. Once complete, this project will have the ability to permanently sequester 1.2 billion tons of CO2.
Yeah, I think one of the things that's key to Enterprise is we really integrate our environmental group and our business practices. The methane rule is just one good example of that, where we're not gonna be subject to those taxes, which allows us to focus in other areas. Let's shift gears to supply chain a little bit. You know, last year, supply chain was all the issue, particularly in relation to the chip shortages and how it could impact our business. We discussed how we had done some pre-buying of those type of components and gotten ahead of the market. That really paid dividends this past year in terms of our ability to execute both capital projects and maintenance projects, where we didn't have the shortages of those type of components that we need on a regular basis.
You know, a lot of our supply chain issues have really abated from where we were a year ago. Yeah, there's still pockets where there's some where there may be some delays. Probably the most significant area that we still have issues with is that of electrical infrastructure, not only for our own assets, but those of our transmission providers. We continue to see some issues with there. More so delays, some cost increases that we are seeing in those type of components, but both our supply chain and our project teams are hyper-focused on looking at creative solutions to address that. You know, the other big issue, you know, coming out of last year is inflation, and it can't go anywhere without being asked what's the impact of inflation on our cost.
I really like to put that into three different buckets. We've got our fixed costs, we've got our variable costs, and we've got our project costs. I'm gonna catch the first and the latter, and Angie is gonna talk a little bit more in detail about variable costs. On the fixed cost side, when we look back at 2022, we were about half of the inflation rate on our fixed cost in 2022. I want to attribute that to, I think a lot of it's just diligence in spending.
Our supply chain over the years prior had really done a great job of getting out in front of our service contracts and putting caps on escalation that we could be exposed to in any year. Year on year, we continued to build on that and rarely had to utilize those. Last year, it really came into play as price increases came into the market, and we had effective caps. We also leveraged the size of Enterprise's organization to achieve economies of scale.
We don't often always know what that means, but when we acquire an asset like Navitas, it gives us a glimpse into what we're paying and what a smaller midstream would be paying, and I can tell you that the savings are real. Last year, we also really doubled down in the supply chain group on understanding the cost and the impacts on all of our suppliers and analyzing the supply chains of our suppliers so we could get a look into the future on where we might see disruptions either in cost or schedule. That also paid, has paid out dividends as we've been able to get in front of the market at times just because of that extra research that we've done.
You know, on the variable cost side, we don't often control the underlying commodity price, such as natural gas or power that influences those. Yeah, we can do some hedging, and we have some ways to recapture some of those costs. What we can really control is the efficiency of how we operate assets. A couple of years ago, we stood up a group within Enterprise, our operational analytics group, to really focus and use some of the new data tools. I can tell you, they've really far exceeded the expectations that I had for that group going in, and Angie's gonna go in and dive in a little more detail on that.
Yeah. If you remember last year in this meeting, we talked about some of the data initiatives that we were implementing to really drive down our variable costs. We talked about how we believe the success of these initiatives were due to our ability to get the information in the hands of the key decision-makers, allowing them to make better, faster, and more informed decisions. We've really expanded the use and of the philosophy of that over this past year and also expanded the content in these models. In order to explain where what we've done and where we're headed, I wanted to take a minute to contrast to where we started. If you think back five years ago and you think about the way that we scheduled volumes across our assets, we really focused on two main things.
One is how much volume do we need to move? Two is, could our assets physically move that amount of volume? The concept of optimizing our variable costs in our day-to-day decision-making wasn't really factored in during that time. Looking back over the past few years, we've brought in models and tools to allow us to incorporate that decision-making on a daily basis. Initially, they were built out with considering the efficiency impact of our operating assets. Trying to minimize our power consumption, our energy consumption, and then also looking at historical prices for power and gas and optimizing around that. We saw a lot of benefit from these models.
One thing that the last couple of years has taught us is that using historical pricing for power and gas is not a good indication of prices for today. The price today may not be a good indication of the prices we may see tomorrow or even this afternoon. We knew that we needed to expand our models and make sure that we incorporated the real-time aspect of power price fluctuations and gas price fluctuations. We've done just that. We've built out the models where we have the ability to bring in real-time power and gas pricing, the ability to forecast prices. Also we've incorporated the complexities of our power contracts across our asset base. By doing this, we've really seen an incremental variable cost savings.
We're all in, we're looking at about $20 million per year of variable cost savings across our assets. We're not done. We're gonna keep optimizing and keep finding ways to drive down those costs.
Yeah, thanks. On the project side, the cost impact on projects really varies. If you look at some of our projects that we've done and are doing, if you take a PDH 2, for example, or even a Frac 12, we contracted those years ago on a lump sum EPC basis. We're not seeing any cost impact at all on those projects, and they'll be coming in under budget. That strategy has really paid off. You know, those projects will be finished and up and operating this year as well, as Chris touched on PDH 2. Those are really on track.
When we look at some of our newer projects, such as the facilities projects that we're building, we're probably seeing on the order of 10%-20% increases in price that's driven by, you know, labor increases, material increases, some of which we've shown on the previous graph. Those can vary based on location. Wage rates vary on location, wage availability varies. It's hard to put a number on a general number because of those differences. Again, I think it's probably on the 10%-20%. When we look at pipeline projects, those are a little bit different.
Angie, I don't know if you can go back to the screen that shows the relationships that we have between underlying price of steel and pipe mills. Oftentimes, the pipe mill have better availability. When they do, we can take advantage of pricing, and sometimes we'll do pre-buying of pipe in order to take advantage of that dislocation between the price of steel and the price of pipe. When the mills are full, that again, that can dislocate even further. We're trying to avoid those type of situations. When we look at the labor market for pipeline installation right now, we're seeing that still to be very competitive.
From a pipeline project, we're not seeing quite the amount of increase that we might see on a facilities type project. Let's switch gears a little bit, you know, we talked in the commercial marketing groups talk a little bit about embracing volatility. From an operator's perspective, it's, I can't say that we're truly out to embrace volatility, but I can tell you that Enterprise over the last few years has developed new tools that really allow our operations group to take advantage of that volatility and give us insight into how we can manage that better.
Yeah, that's right. When Graham talks about these, disruptive events and volatile events, think about the hurricanes, the freeze-related events, even the significant power curtailment on the Texas grid that we've seen over the past few years. These events are typically highly volatile, very disruptive to our business, very short in duration. They may be a couple hours long, they may be a week long. One thing that we've learned is that we can really perform during these events. One of the ways we do it is by making sure that we have information in the hands of all of our decision-makers so that they can make quick decisions during this time.
We've spent a lot of time and energy on making sure that we've created dashboards and tools and information that's readily available for our employees, so when we have these type of disruptive events, that they're ready and armed with information to make good decisions so that we can keep our assets running and take advantage of these type of volatile situations. When I was thinking about what we were doing related to the disruptive events and kind of reflecting on the past year, it reminded me of a couple of years back in this meeting when Britt Seay talked about the elephant in the room, and y'all may remember he had a big elephant on his slide at the time.
He was talking about the elephant in the room in the context of the overbuild of crude pipeline takeaway capacity out of the Permian, and him and Jay even talked about that a little bit earlier today. When I think about this past year on our industry, the elephant in the room for me has been the disruption to the Texas power grid during these freeze-related events. I'm really proud to say that during these times, we delivered on all of our customer commitments. We delivered much needed gas to power generation facilities so that they could deliver power to our communities. We were able to accomplish this through several factors. One is intentional investment in the hardening and winterization of our assets. Jim talked on this a little bit earlier.
Also mentioning the training that Graham talked about earlier, making sure that our employees are trained and ready for these events, making sure we have the right procedures in place so that we know how to respond, and then also the expanded use of data. That our employees have the information that they need when these events occur so that they can make the right decisions at the right time.
That increasing use of data has really allowed us to drive towards solutions and improve the way we respond. You know, if you pick up the paper, listen to the news, everybody's talking about artificial intelligence these days. In the maintenance world, that's been an issue that we've been hit up with year-on-year about how to improve reliability using artificial intelligence. There's a lot of salesmen out there trying to peddle new products. At Enterprise, we always look at something that really will fit uniquely to our situation. We've developed some tools in that area, I think, that are gonna allow us to take us the next step forward in how we evaluate maintenance and reliability.
Yeah. When we're responsible for the reliability of our assets, and we get approached by many companies who have developed tools for around predictive maintenance and improving reliability. We've evaluated many of these tools, and what we found is that they can be costly to implement and also very time-consuming given the breadth and diversity of our assets. What we've done is our reliability engineers have teamed up with our data scientists and developed an in-house, cost-effective, really targeted tool for advanced asset monitoring, where they've leveraged the massive amounts of data that we pull in every single day that we collect across our assets, and they've overlaid advanced machine learning techniques that identify outliers in our data.
Those outliers provide us clues into where we need to look for potential problems within our assets so that we can get in front of those early, improving the reliability of our assets. Another way that we really improve the reliability and focus on reliability is investing in our assets. If you think back to the slide that Brent had up early on in his presentation, where he talked about our TE assets that have been in the ground since the 40s, our Seaway splitters have been in the ground since the 70s. These are still operating today safely, reliably, and highly utilized. That's through the investments in the maintenance and safety and integrity of those assets. We spend over $400 million each year investing in our assets and their safety and reliability and modernization.
We spend $150 million of that $400 each year just on asset integrity-related projects. When you think about all those and you divide them up into the projects, we execute 1,600 projects each year on asset-related and maintenance-related projects, each about $250,000 or less. These are typically small projects in scale, but big in impact in terms of modernizing our legacy asset base, improving the utilization of our assets, and making sure that our assets are safe and reliable for the long haul.
Yeah. These are not the type of projects that we typically get asked about in investor calls, but they are critically important to sustaining the long-term viability of our assets. And if you think about these projects in aggregate, almost all of them have some type of very attractive return. So year on year on that $400 million, we're getting a very attractive return on what many people believe sustaining type capital projects, but often they're also have some growth elements to them as well as just cost savings. I'm gonna close out, you know, from an operations perspective.
Year-on-year, quarter-on-quarter, we continue to set operating records, and we do that because we're focused on continuous improvement, whether that's in the safety and environmental side, the way we work to sustain the reliability of our assets for the long term. But it really doesn't happen without a culture and a group of people that are really driven towards continuing to improve our assets and keep them there for the long term. And we wanna just take the opportunity to thank each and every one of them for what they bring every day. And with that, I think we're ready to turn it over to Chris and Daniel. All right, Daniel, I guess we got the last section of the day.
Before we dive into the numbers, I thought I would just take a few minutes and just update what Enterprise has done over the past year with respect to ESG and sustainability. As Angie just mentioned, we've seen a 26% improvement in our CO2 intensity over the past 12 years. As a result, we've.
Noted by Institutional Investor magazine of being a leader in both ESG governance and governance for that matter. Then Sustainalytics also named Enterprise as one of the top-rated in the industry for ESG and sustainability. Then just two weeks ago, Newsweek magazine named Enterprise as one of the most trustworthy companies in America. I think, you know, how we accomplish, and Angie touched on a lot of this with respect to how we've accomplished this emissions reduction, so I don't really wanna belabor that point. I will point out in addition to just focusing on absolute emission reductions, we're also focusing on how do we improve the design of new assets going into service.
I think if you take a look at the second PDH plant that'll come online midyear this year, by retrofitting that design to utilize the hydrogen that's coming off of that plant as a fuel source, it has a 90% reduction in that plant's carbon footprint as opposed to powering that facility with natural gas. One of the other things that wanted just to hit on quickly, that Enterprise has a very diverse and collaborative workforce. We're committed to having a safe working environment for our employees where they can thrive. Again, you know, as Graham just alluded to and closed up with, our operations folks do a tremendous job keeping our assets up and running each and every day. you know, Daniel, with that, why don't you take a couple of minutes and go through what Enterprise is doing to protect against cyberattacks?
Okay. Thank you, Chris. It's been nearly two years since the cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline, and we certainly haven't forgotten about it or the attacks that have affected multiple others in our industry and others since then. We continue to maintain the most effective tools and technologies for managing cyber risk. This includes our network infrastructure, our filtering services, and monitoring tools. We strongly embrace the zero trust framework, which we've implemented in part through our integrated systems review process. This process enables supervisors to review the access levels to critical files, directories, and systems on a quarterly basis for all employees and contractors. Because employees are our first line of defense, we've recently enhanced our phishing awareness campaigns in order to provide more tailored and targeted phishing tests to employees in order to increase their skepticism of incoming messages.
We've saw an uptick in click rates initially upon rolling out this program, but since then, we've seen them return to more historical normal levels, despite the higher level of complexity. I'm pleased to report that the TSA approved our cybersecurity implementation plan in January of this year. Enterprise submitted this plan in response to the security directives that were issued by TSA in 2021 and then extended in 2022. Just this month, earlier this month, we submitted our cybersecurity assessment program to the TSA and expect their staff in our offices within the next couple of weeks to review the program with us and provide their feedback. Lastly, we continue to invest time and resources into our business continuity in cyber and continuity and recovery capabilities, just in case there is an attack that ends up disrupting one or more of our networks.
Unfortunately, we don't expect the bad actors in this space to give up or go away anytime soon, so we'll continue to focus on these areas long into the future. Shifting gears into our financial results. In 2022, Enterprise reported $9.4 billion in total segment gross operating margin. This was an increase of $850 million over the previous year. The partnership's performance was driven largely by records in many of our assets. We had higher margins in our gas processing and octane enhancement businesses and a strong contribution from our Navitas Midstream acquisition. As Graham alluded to and the commercial team described, we've our operational performance was excellent in 2022 with filling the pipe and maintaining it.
We reported 10 operational records, including natural gas liquids and natural gas pipeline transportation volumes, total equivalent pipeline transportation volumes, and NGL terminal volumes. We reported 13 financial records, including gross operating margin for two of our business segments and in total, and records in Adjusted EBITDA and distributable cash flow. Our strong cash flows last year helped us fund $4.1 billion in distribution paid to our equity investors, $3.4 billion in acquisitions, $250 million in equity buybacks, and $1.8 billion in sustaining and growth capital expenditures. Next slide. This slide I think demonstrates our long-standing history of building assets that provide attractive long-term returns on invested capital, and I think it also shows the resiliency of our business model even during some of the various commodity cycles.
I think these returns and our financial performances has enabled us to continue focusing on strengthening our balance sheet, on funding additional capital growth projects, and it's also provided some flexibility in our capital allocation approach. Chris is gonna talk about each of these areas in more detail and give us further insights into this approach. Chris, I'll turn it back over to you.
Perfect. Thanks, Daniel. Starting with the balance sheet, you know, I think what we've noticed here over the last couple of years is, and the commercial team talked about it too, is the increased volatility in not only commodity prices, but also in financial markets. When we saw this, we saw a lot of our customers, both upstream of our assets and downstream of our assets, look to reduce their leverage their businesses are more directly exposed to these swings in commodity prices. Typically, Enterprise's business runs at about 80% fee-based cash flow, and as a result, we can run at a little bit higher leverage than some of our customers. We made the decision earlier this year to reduce the midpoint of our leverage down from 3.5 x down to 3 x.
As a result of this, S&P took note of this change in our financial policy and upgraded Enterprise to an A-minus rating with a stable outlook. We feel like we're setting the new standard for what a midstream balance sheet should look like. I guess before we, you know, kind of get away from this change in the rating, you know, I think I probably should clarify some of the comments I made on the last earnings call when the question came up of do you wanna get upgraded. You know, I made the comment that we wanted to retain financial flexibility.
I think what Enterprise has done over the years is work tirelessly to get the balance sheet into position to where we can go, you know, make a $3 billion acquisition like Daniel just mentioned, without having to go preview that for the agencies. Up until, you know, call it mid-Feb, we had no idea what the upper leverage threshold was for an A rating for a midstream infrastructure company. We needed to get that clarity before we could really come out and tell the investing public that we're comfortable that we have enough financial flexibility at the A rating. S&P came out and said that we would have to see our leverage increase north of 3.5x on a sustained basis for them to consider a negative outlook for our A-minus rating.
I think with that, we are very comfortable with the new rating, and, you know, happy to have it. I think when we look at the right side of this page, what you'll see is that we have no additional maturities for the remainder of this year and a very manageable debt maturity schedule for the forward coming years. I think that's noteworthy, especially given, you know, what we've seen in an inflationary environment. Enterprise took advantage of the Fed zero interest rate policy over the prior decade and really went long onto, you know, getting fixed funding cost of debt. We've issued approximately 82% of our $28 billion debt portfolio in 10 and 30+ year securities, and that's got a weighted average cost of debt of 4.6%. That's 98% fixed.
Again, it's got a 20-year duration on it as well. Despite the record increases in interest rates that we've seen over the prior 12 months, we've not seen a material increase in our interest expense. Again, as you look at the graph of what's coming up for maturity, we don't anticipate seeing a material change in our interest expense in the years to come as well. With respect to growth capital projects, we do have, let's call it ballpark $6 billion of projects under construction that will come online later this year through 2025. Most of these projects are fee-based in nature. Keith, to your question earlier, this will continue to increase our fee-based component of our cash flows. You know, these projects are, as Jim and Randy mentioned earlier, they are in the sweet spot.
If you look down the list of projects on the left side of the page, the bulk of these projects are located in Texas and Louisiana. These projects are again, on the left side, grouped by reporting segment. As you heard the commercial team describe earlier this morning, they're really developed more along the lines of that vertically integrated network that we've built. You know, the gas gathering lines that Natalie is building out in the Permian basins will feed the four gas processing plants. Those mixed NGLs coming off of those plants will flow through our NGL pipes to the frac complex that we have in Chambers County. Zach's got a new Frac 12 that'll come online mid-year this year.
From there, we can take those purity products, upgrade those in PDH 2, for example, or we can transport, store, or export those products across our docks. This slide is my favorite slide in the deck because I really think it speaks to the attributes of the business over the last five years. Why am I focused on the last five years? As you all probably recall, in the fall of 2017, Enterprise made the decision to moderate its distribution growth. You know, historically, we had grown the distribution at a 5%-7% per year growth rate. In the fall of 2017, we shifted that down to about a 2%-3% distribution growth rate.
We did that because we wanted to become less reliant on external capital markets to fund growth, we wanted to be more self-sufficient. Said another way, we wanted to use some portion of retained cash flow to reinvest in the business. As Daniel mentioned, with, call it 12%-13% historical returns on invested capital, by doing that, you've seen in just since 2017, a $3.7 billion increase in our EBITDA. That growth in our base cash flow had a compounding effect where it lowered our leverage from 4.1x to 2.9x at the end of 2022.
Also, if you look at the graph on the lower left, being more disciplined with respect to deploying capital has come down from a peak spend of $4.2 billion in 2019 to $1.6 billion in 2022. I think if we've talked about our spend for 2023, it's gonna be somewhere in the $2.4 billion-$2.5 billion area.
Again, longer run, I think, you know, we're comfortable that our growth spending organically will be $1.5 billion-$2 billion per year. What that does is if you take that combination of growing base level of EBITDA with more disciplined capital spend, you see in the bottom right side of the graph, a fourfold increase in our free cash flow per unit metric since 2017, going from $0.70 a unit to $2.81 a unit. Let's take that one step further and layer in that distribution growth moderation of 2%-3%. You can see again that combination of growing the base level of cash flow, disciplined capital spending and reinvesting in good returning projects.
We've seen our discretionary free cash flow, or said another way, free cash flow after distributions go up from a negative $0.99 per unit in 2017 to a positive $0.91 per unit in 2022. How does this impact and relate to investors? It allows us to do what Enterprise has always done, return capital to our investors. We've got a 24-year track record of returning capital to investors, and as an MLP, that's primarily been through the form of distribution growth. Over the last few years, we have opportunistically bought back stock, that's added to that amount. I think as you see at the bullet here at the top of the page, since our IPO, we've returned over $47 billion to investors.
Again, you can note it in some of the call-outs, you know, that Enterprise along this 24-year history has taken measures along the way to improve distribution coverage. If you think about that 2017-2018 time period where we moderated our distribution growth rate from the historical norm of 5%-7% to that 2%-3%, what impact that had on distribution coverage. We went from an average of 1.2 times coverage in, immediately prior to that decision, to more like a 1.7 times distribution coverage. That should give investors confidence that we have the ability to continue to grow our distributions back to our investors. Again, continuing to focus on that five-year period.
Over that five-year period, we have grown even with 2%-3% distribution growth, we have returned over $24 billion to our LP investors in that timeline. To put that number in a little bit of perspective, if you think about the number of midstream companies that have a market cap of $24 billion, there are only eight. Enterprise is an absolute big believer in returning capital to investors. As Randy mentioned, earlier this morning, you know, later this summer will mark our 25th year of consistently growing the distribution, and this will put us amongst the bluest of the blue chips. When we thought about that feat, and that's something that we're extremely proud of, we wanted to put a slide together that kind of demonstrated where Enterprise ranks amongst this peer set.
On the left side of the page, you can see in the graph how Enterprise's metrics stack up against those that have grown their distribution for 25 consecutive years. On the right side, you can see how we measure up against those that have grown their distribution for 40-50 years. you know, the energy industry is a capital-intensive industry, our returns may not ever equal those that you see in consumer discretionary and healthcare industries. If you look at dividend yield and cash flow yield, our metrics do measure up and compare very favorably against this Dividend Aristocrat peer set. As I mentioned earlier, our credit rating and our leverage metrics, we believe, are setting the standard for the midstream industry, and we feel like we screen very well against this peer set.
Throughout the day, you've heard, you know, everyone at Enterprise talk about how we're building long-term assets. We fund those assets with long-term capital. I think here as this page focuses in on the, on the equity owner's side of the equation. If you exclude EPCO and affiliates from our unitholder base, 63% of our units are held by individuals and trusts. Again, that's not surprising to us. The MLP product was generally marketed towards retail investors, so you know, this doesn't come as a surprise at all. In the graph, the pie chart on the lower right side of the page, again, Enterprise has a long-term nature and outlook, so 51% of our units have been held for over five years, and 82% have been held for at least one year.
Our investors, our equity investors share a similar mindset as Enterprise. What finance section would be complete without talking about capital allocation? You know, kind of close things up here today talking about that. Really no change from what, you know, we have been saying. I think that's one of the themes, and Angie mentioned and brought out the elephant in the room. For me, the elephant in the room is we want to be consistent in the message that we deliver to our investors. You know, we're gonna continue with the all of the above approach. We're gonna continue to reinvest capital into our business, both from an organic project perspective. When acquisitions make sense, we will, you know, be acquisitive.
As Jim mentioned, this morning, you know, acquisitions have to be two things first and foremost. They have to be complementary to our existing asset footprint, and they have to be accretive. That's work. You know, we're gonna continue to try to grow the business, but do it smartly.
As I mentioned earlier, we have a long track record of growing the distributions, and as an MLP, that is gonna be the primary way in which we return capital to investors. Buybacks will continue to be a part of our capital allocation philosophy, but because they're not as direct to all unit holders and they're less tax efficient, they're gonna continue to be opportunistic. We're gonna look for that market volatility in periods of dislocation when we come in and be aggressive with respect to buybacks. We're absolutely committed to a strong balance sheet, I think is evident by the recent upgrade by S&P. We do feel like with this upgrade, we still have the sufficient amount of financial flexibility to continue to grow the business as we see fit.
I think with that, Randy, I think we're ready for Q&A, or Jim, you guys are.
After us.
Closing remarks?
Yeah.
All right.
We didn't want you to get to sit down during Q&A.
Well, thank you for that. Test this. Okay. Good deal. Well, you can tell from the presentations that you've heard this morning why we're excited and why we think we're well positioned for the next 25 years. I think you can see with the one, the history that we've had where we've demonstrated that we can deploy capital at attractive rates of return. Given the capital projects that we've talked about and what we have that'll come in service later this year with PDH-2 and Frac 12, two more natural gas processing plants, you've got visibility to an additional ramp up in cash flow coming later this year and more, more so in 2024 is when you'll see it. We're excited about that. Jim?
Proven business model. I remember it was before we went from Shell Midstream to Enterprise, the deal was all but done, sitting down with Dan and some of his folks and mapping out what we wanted the value chain to look like. At that time, before, Enterprise didn't have any gas processing plants. We had, I said something about this earlier, we started mapping out where we stood in each step of the value chain as it goes across, from processing through storage and distribution pipelines. That's where it all started, that's been the business model ever since. It has to fit. We have to pay, Brent calls it touches. I call it paying ourselves.
That business model you see with our ethylene story and our propylene story, it's the exact same business model. That business model works. If it works, don't try something else. You won't see us buying some terminal in California, for instance. We don't do one-offs. The business model works.
The other thing that we're again, looking to be a responsible company and try to be a good citizen in our community. You've heard that from Graham and Angie and Chris highlighting some of that, but really a responsible provider of energy product and services to the world and the world's got a growing appetite for energy. Chris also hit on our track record of returning capital to investors. We think we've built a durable company. We talked a lot in here about the geopolitical volatility in the world and volatility of commodity prices in the world. We felt like we built a durable company to come in and be able to come in and take advantage of opportunities through that volatility.
Then, and again, that sort of fits into the financial strength. You know, it was one of those things, when we lowered our leverage objective, it wasn't necessarily to come in and we didn't even think about an upgrade to A-minus at that point in time. That wasn't the goal. I think the A-minus is more of a representation of the way we've managed the business and the margins of safety that we wanna come in and build into the organization.
I think that A-minus is also gonna be a commercial selling point because it tells our customers that we'll be there for you. Reliability is absolutely key in our business. We, you know, they'll always try to leverage you with the lowest common denominator, and you just have to say, "No, we'll give you reliability." In some cases, we'll guarantee it to a point, ex force majeure. You want me to do the recognition? There's two executive vice presidents that did not have speaking parts that I wanted to recognize and share with you some of what they have done for us. That'd be Bob Sanders back here. Stand up, Bob. Bob has... Huh?
I thought I had to vote.
No, you didn't. I said executive vice president. What'd I say? What'd I say?
I thought you said executive.
Anyway.
I oh.
Anyway.
I call Bob the executive vice president of everything. He's been around 44 years. He has the right to stick his nose anywhere he wants to, and he takes full advantage of that right. If you don't believe me, ask Brent Secrest. Some of what you heard about SPOT today. Bob, along with Graham and Hap, were totally involved on getting our record of decision. They were the drivers. They were on the phone with MARAD every week, Graham, and in Washington countless number of times. They pushed that. Bob also was highly involved with the Houston Ship Channel on getting the ship channel widening in the WRDA bill.
He was up there with the port and on his own a lot of times, lobbying, and he kind of likes it, you know. He loves this stuff, seeing senators and congressmen and all this. When we got in the WRDA bill, there's this thing called a New Start, and you have to have a New Start designation in order to get funding for your for what you have in the WRDA bill. We all felt like Norfolk would get at least one of the major port New Starts because of military, and we were hoping that there'd be two major port New Starts. Bob and Hap and our lobbyist in Washington, D.C., they never gave up. Two days before the inauguration, I got a call. Hap, was his name Jeff Miller, I think.
He said, "Look," and I'm not gonna mention the guy's name, but he said, "You need to call this CEO, 'cause he's tight with the White House, and you need to tell your story and see what he can do for us, for us." I did. Two nights before the inauguration, I got a phone call from this CEO, or actually a voicemail, and he said, "You know, I don't wanna upset the apple cart, so the only thing I'm gonna tell you is read the news tomorrow." The day before the inauguration, Houston was named as the New Start, and these guys had a hell of a lot to do with that. I think Bob lives in Austin. We have been really involved with the Texas State Legislature.
Bob was one of the driving forces that got us legislation from the state that says the Houston Ship Channel will always have two-way traffic. That was important because we could see large cargo ships coming up the ship channel that would've put us in one-way traffic. As a daylight-restricted company, we can't have that. We've been taking a much more proactive role. Eminent domain. Every year, we have to fight the farmers and the ranchers. It is one of those cases where the Tea Party people and the liberals are on the same page, which is a dangerous combination. We decided to get proactive. Hap was instrumental. You didn't stand up, Hap. Hap was instrumental in getting eminent domain legislation and getting everybody on the same page. Really what we decided is we don't need eminent domain for the lowest common denominator.
We need eminent domain for the standards we set.
That's back to win-win with landowners and pipeline companies.
Yeah, I'll end with this. Thanks to Graham and Kevin Ramsey, is we take less... Where's Graham? Less than one half of 1% of our right of way purchases to eminent domain is what I remember. When you have a chairman who's got a lot of ranch buddies down in South Texas, you damn well don't wanna take them to eminent domain. I think we're open for questions.
Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna go and take some questions. Jeanne, have you... No. Okay. Questions?
You guys are gonna be like a bank meeting. We never get questions from bankers.
John Mackay from Goldman. Thanks for the time. spent a lot of time today talking about kind of shifting from, you know, greenfield to brownfield, trying to do more with less, trying to be more disciplined overall. Also showed that chart of ROIC over the last couple years, averaging around, you know, 12%, let's say. With this kind of new shift of, again, doing more with less, is there a chance we start to see that ROIC move up on some of these assets? Is that kind of the base behind all this?
Yeah. I think when you start... I'll let Jim speak to the new assets. Enterprise is a big ship, so there's a lot of deployed capital under what we currently have at that 12% level. To come in and inch that big ship up further is, you may need to see more capital employed over time at higher rates of return to nudge that up. We feel very good about the projects that we got coming.
Yeah. Yeah. I look at two ways. If we've got a PDH, costs a lot of money, then I want it to be an annuity. We'll take a little lower rate of return on an annuity. If I see something that we think has a lot of upside, we may take a lower to make the investment, but we expect the rate of return to be pretty damn high before it's all said and done. The classic example of that is Lou-Tex Pipeline. We didn't have a one contract, but we knew we had our own production, and now that's one of the most important pipelines we've got. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. Absolutely.
Just hang on. Buy units. We'll return money to you.
All right, we got one over here. TJ.
I didn't know if you had a follow-up. Hey, Randy. TJ Schultz with RBC. Randy, I think one of your comments earlier was that Enterprise over the last 25 years has avoided a lot of the fads and pitfalls that others have fallen into, and I think that's pretty clear in your track record. Here more recently, you have maintained the phrase energy transition as a bit of a misnomer. How active or not active are you in looking at things like CO2 transportation and hydrogen?
Good point.
What were some of the learnings from marketing the Oxy CO2 LOI, and how could some of that stuff compete with more of your growth capital that's leveraging your footprint?
Yeah. Everybody knows we've been public. We're working on a deal with Oxy. I think we're getting close. Where's Kerry? We're getting close to locking down with him. Kerry? Uh-huh?
Yes.
We're approaching it a little differently. They are permitting the port space, we will build a pipeline from Beaumont, ultimately Beaumont to Houston as a header system to move CO2 from emitters. We really can't use tax credits, so we told them we don't want the 45Q. You guys. We just want a fee. We'll build the pipeline, we'll bring it to the sequestration site. Just pay us a fee. No matter what we do, it's got to make money. The other thing that we're doing, and I don't know if Angie touched on it or not, but the other thing we're doing is trying to look at our own house. We capture CO2 at our gas processing plants.
Where do we sequester that? How can we sequester that and pass the 45Q back to the producer who in many cases owns the CO2? I think y'all, Graham, y'all mentioned using hydrogen in PDH 2. Yeah. That's a 95% reduction over what it would be with natural gas. Every company from Korea and Japan that come in our office wants to talk about ammonia exports. I think that's a ways down the road, but we're perfectly positioned for ammonia exports. We got the docks. We know how to do it, and we know how to build pipelines. Right now, the immediate opportunity, I think, is taking care of... We produce 150 million PBT a day of hydrogen, and we've, historically, we've sold that to people like Air Products and Air Liquide.
As those contracts roll off, we'll probably burn that hydrogen in place of natural gas, which will help reduce our emissions. We'll see where it goes. We've got a team that's dedicated. We've got a commercial component in that team. They're talking to everybody and their brother. They even. I guess, Kerry, have you traveled internationally yet?
Fixing to.
Fixing to. Okay.
Thanks.
Chase Mulvehill, Bank of America. I want to come back to SPOT. Not sure if you'll be willing to kind of talk to the cost competitiveness of SPOT versus Corpus. And, you know, you've talked a lot about SPOT. But we haven't talked about the potential, you know, partnerships and the sell down. I don't know if you could maybe speak to kind of how are you thinking about that. You know, how much you might be willing to kind of sell down. Just a little bit on SPOT. Thank you.
Yeah. We are open to joint venture in SPOT. I think it's a little early. I think what we're finding is this regulatory decision has some value. I think some of the things, you know, people are gonna have to put their money where their mouth is. Using SPOT, Bob, is 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions first. Huh? 95% reduction in VOCs versus lightering, 65% in greenhouse gases. Do you wanna be environmentally sound or not? That's one of the selling points. The other selling point, I think Jay mentioned it, you're gonna have a constraint in Corpus, that's gonna be pipelines. I don't see anybody underwriting a new pipeline.
That it does. A lot of these barrels, I think they're gonna be drawn to Houston, and I think SPOT becomes a magnet to your pipelines. To be. But we're open to joint venture partners, and we've danced with a couple, but, you know, we had. We're not down to the serious stage yet, but we would be willing to be. Oh, hell, I opened another question, huh? I got a chairwoman back there that she loves anything on the water. If I had a number, a set number of contracts, the answer is yes. It doesn't have to be contracted full for us to sanction it.
Tristan Richardson, Scotiabank. Jim, you and Chris Nelly talked about even with financial flexibility, there's a very high strategic bar for acquisitions. A couple of deals you've done over the past few years have been really focused on the supply funnel. Just seeing, are there any opportunities out there you see more downstream, whether it be with your PGP strategy or TE Products corridor, that you couldn't replicate organically?
Yeah. We're trying to think, we're not there yet. Okay, what's our next step in petrochemicals? You know, I think we've pretty well played out our C3 value chain with our PDH plants. I think our C4 value chain, maybe that has some opportunities, we're looking at some things. I'm not gonna tell you what they are, but... Who said wait? Oh. We... I'd like to extend that value chain. Carin Barth, one of our directors, is back there. She originally came out of The Sterling Group, if I say I'm gonna build an ethylene plant, she's gonna raise 10 kinds of hell. I'm not gonna say that. That's not in the plans.
Okay. I'll tell you what, that we're gonna have lunch, and you'll have an opportunity to ask more questions with management. With that, we're gonna conclude the presentations. Lunch is served out the door around the corner here in Grand Ballroom 2. Again, if you have parking or valet tickets that need to be validated, Sheila's got those stickers. Thank you very much for joining us today, and that concludes our presentations.