Delek Logistics Partners, LP Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Thank you for joining us. My name is Jael, and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the Delek Logistics Partners Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I will now turn the conference over to Robert Wright, Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Good morning, and welcome to the Delek Logistics Partners Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Participants joining me on today's call will include Avigal Soreq, President; Reuven Spiegel, EVP. As a reminder, this conference call will contain forward-looking statements as defined under the federal securities laws, including statements regarding guidance and future business outlook. Any forward-looking statements made during today's call involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from today's comments. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are included in our SEC filings. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Avigal for opening remarks.

Thank you, Robert. Delek Logistics Partners had another record quarter. We reported approximately $120 million in quarterly adjusted EBITDA. DKL is on track to deliver its full year EBITDA guidance of $480 million to $520 million. Delek Logistics continues to make substantial progress in improving its position as a premier full-service crude, natural gas, and water provider in the most prolific areas of the Permian Basin. During the quarter, we successfully completed the commissioning of the new Libby plant. We are very excited about the opportunities this expansion has opened for us and expect to fill the plant to capacity in the second half of 2025. This expansion and our ongoing efforts on acid gas injection and sour gas handling capabilities will further improve our natural gas offering in the Delaware Basin. I'm also very pleased with our crude and water gathering operations. Both VPG and DTG crude gathering operations have started the second half of the year strong with both showing significant increases in volumes. We look forward to continuing to build on this strength through the remainder of 2025 and beyond. Between our two water acquisitions and increasing dedication, we expect to grow our competitive position in both Midland and the Delaware basins. As we have demonstrated in the past, we will continue to grow our partnership to prudently manage leverage and coverage. We not only intend to remain good stewards of stakeholder capital, but we also intend to continue to reward them through our peer-leading distributions. I am pleased to announce that our Board of Directors has approved the 50th consecutive increase in quarterly distributions to $1.11 per unit. This is an extraordinary achievement, and we are extremely proud of our team and financial prudence that have gotten us here. To conclude, we are very excited about the prospect of Delek Logistics. We expect to continue on our value creation path moving forward, and we will continue to grow our distribution in the future. I will now hand it over to Reuven, who will provide more details on our operations.

Thank you, Avigal. As Avigal mentioned, our excitement about DKL's future is growing, and we continue to work diligently to strengthen our advantaged Permian position. As I mentioned on our last call, we have begun commissioning our Libby 2 gas plant. Since then, we have completed the commissioning and transferred the plant to operation. The plant is performing according to expectations. And as Avigal mentioned, we expect to fill up the plant over the remainder of the year. As we also mentioned in our last call, planned CapEx for Libby 2 included investments that will support future expansions of the Libby Complex. Our current focus around the Libby Complex is to continue progressing our sour gas treating, gathering, and acid gas injection capabilities. We continue to believe that our expanded gas processing and sour gas handling capabilities provide a unique offering to our customers and give us a long runway of growth in the Delaware Basin. Additionally, since we are one of the few companies that can handle all three streams—crude, gas, and water—our natural gas gathering and processing expansion is opening additional opportunities for us on crude and water gathering in the Delaware Basin. As Avigal mentioned, we have seen our crude gathering volumes rise to start the third quarter, and we expect to continue to see this trend going forward. On the Midland side, the integration of the two water gathering systems from H2O and Gravity is progressing well, and we expect to use our larger footprint to enhance our combined crude and water offerings in Howard, Martin, and Glasgow counties. Finally, we continue to look for opportunities to make our operations more efficient with the goal of improving margins across our operations. With that, I will pass it on to Robert.

Thank you. As both Avigal and Reuven have mentioned, we are continuing the growth story of Delek Logistics. We remain focused on maintaining healthy liquidity to support this growth while ensuring that our leverage aligns with our long-term targets. Specifically, the success of our high-yield notes offering completed earlier this summer increased our availability by $700 million to over $1 billion. Moving on to our second quarter results. The second quarter adjusted EBITDA was approximately $120 million compared to $102 million in the same period of 2024. Distributable cash flow, as adjusted, was $73 million, and the DCF coverage ratio was approximately 1.22x. We expect this ratio to continue to rise throughout the remainder of the year as our growth projects, including the Libby 2 gas plant, start to meaningfully contribute to our results. For the Gathering and Processing segment, the adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $78 million, compared to $55 million in the second quarter of 2024. The increase was primarily due to the acquisitions of H2O and Gravity. Wholesale Marketing and Terminalling adjusted EBITDA was $23 million compared to $30 million in the prior year. The decrease was primarily due to the impact of last summer's amend and extend agreements with DK. Storage and Transportation adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $17 million compared with $17 million in the second quarter of 2024. Lastly, the investments in the pipeline joint venture segment contributed $11 million this quarter compared with $8 million in the second quarter of 2024. The increase was primarily due to the Wink to Webster drop down in August of last year. Moving on to capital expenditures. The capital program for the second quarter was approximately $119 million, with $150 million of this capital spend related to growth CapEx and around $48 million attributed to the completion of the Libby 2 gas processing plant. The project was very successful and finished on track from both a timing and cost perspective. The remainder of the capital spend for the period was for other growth projects, namely advancing new connections in the Midland and Delaware gathering systems. As to our outlook for the balance of the year, we continue to remain on track for the EBITDA guidance we laid out for the full year of $480 million to $520 million. With that, we can now open the call for questions.

Your first question comes from Doug Irwin of Citi.

I wanted to start with the processing plant here. I realize you talked about ramping to capacity in the second half of the year, but just wondering if you could share where you're seeing volumes trending today as commissioning was completed. And then the press release pointed to further expansions here potentially. Just curious how you're thinking about any timing of those expansions and whether those would also include more treating capacity along with more processing.

Yes. Doug, thank you for joining us. As we said in the prepared remarks, we're really excited about the operation and what we have done there, both on the capital side and the operations side, and it's all coming together very nicely, and we are very happy about that. So with that said, I will let Reuven—who takes the lead around that activity—give some more color.

Thank you, Avigal. Thanks for the question. As Avigal said, the plant was completed on time. The commissioning phase takes some time, but it was done according to our planned schedule and with a big focus on reliability. As we are speaking right now, we are flowing gas. We're doing it gradually, and we expect to run full by year-end. The execution of this project within the timeline and the budget is what gives us the confidence and the comfort to reaffirm our guidance of $480 million to $520 million. In addition to that, our focus is now on the sour gas processing and we're working—we already constructed the Amine unit. And now we're working on drilling the AGI wells and executing on other infrastructure-related projects associated with the sour. So we are on track on that project as well, and we are coordinating the timeline and the efforts with our producers.

For more development, we have to stay tight. We obviously have the opportunity. We said in the previous call that we have made some investments, but we will announce it once we feel that we are ready to announce it and not announce it before. So that's very much on our mind.

Understood. And maybe just a follow-up on the sour gas treating side. We obviously saw some assets change hands in the Delaware recently. Just curious your view of that deal, how kind of those assets might compare to your footprint right there in the Delaware as well and just—your views just on the broader competitive environment for treating capacity in the Delaware as it seems like it's becoming an increased focus for some players in the basin.

Yes. Doug, I think you're absolutely right. You covered the sector very well, and you're the one, obviously, Northwind, you're probably referring to that is a very close system to us. There is some similarity in configuration, but we also have capabilities that are not necessarily in the open. Mohit will cover that in a second. With that said, every time that we see such a high multiple in our neighborhood, it's a good thing for us, and it shows the intrinsic value that we see in the DKL asset, and we are very proud and excited to develop them to full capacity to the benefit of the unitholder. Mohit, do you want to explain the difference between the systems?

Yes, Avigal, thanks. So Doug, I think we've talked about this multiple times in the past. This transaction is a great reaffirmation of our strategy. And as far as the gas processing, gathering, and our entire business and the delivery is concerned, we're very happy to see that benchmark. I think I mentioned this on earlier calls; I don't know if you got a chance to listen to it. Northwind just has trading capacity. They don't have processing capacity. We have a much bigger and fuller strategy around natural gas, including sour gas gathering, treating, processing, and we like our comprehensive system a lot better. But this definitely provides us a benchmark. We followed the transaction very closely, and I think it's a great reaffirmation of our strategy, as I mentioned before.

Your next question comes from the line of Gabe Moreen of Mizuho.

Just wanted to stay on the M&A topic. Just kind of wondering your latest thoughts in terms of what you're seeing out there in the market. Obviously, you've got a lot of liquidity now on the DKL side post the high-yield offerings. So just wondering what you're seeing out there, whether in the Delaware, Midland, water, crude or gas, or otherwise?

So thank you, Gabe. We do have liquidity, but our first thought is to create value for investors. We've done that through increasing distribution. We have done that in inorganic development. And we are doing that by reducing our cost of capital, and that was a very big initiative for the time. Specifically on the high-yield market, when we are looking at M&A, we are looking at three things: it needs to be free cash flow accretive, it needs to be accretive to the leverage ratio, it needs to be accretive for coverage ratio, and it needs to fit our strategy. We are always looking. And if the opportunity presents itself, we are not trying to make a move, but we are also on the sell side if the opportunity presents itself on the other side, we can do the other way around. So we are not—I want you to fully understand that we are not married to an asset. Our whole purpose in life is to create value. And we can—as we demonstrated in the last year, we can play on each side of the table by creating huge value for investors. So I think that's the message.

And then maybe if we can talk about just what you're hearing from producers in their plans. Clearly, there's been a lot of commodity price volatility, where you're feeling about where you may come in, in the $480 million to $520 million range for guidance? Just maybe your latest thoughts there, given all the shifting background there.

Yes, absolutely. So let's start with the easy one. Let's talk about producers. So we are—as I said many times in the past, we are in the most prolific area of the Permian Basin. We feel very good with our guidance of $485 million to $520 million. I think we are one of the few who reiterated guidance versus the sector that took some breathing room on their guidance and took them down just a little bit. So you need to feel very good about that. You probably also heard me saying in the prepared remarks that we see an uptick in volume in Q3 on crude, both from the Delaware system, the DDG, and the Midland system, VPG. So that's another thing that you need to feel good about. We have a very good relationship with our customers. We have a mature customer base. We have a great opportunity to work with our breakeven in our area. So I don't think that any—there is now where crude is stable around $65. I don't see any problem with where we are, given the lowest breakeven. So we feel very good with where we are.

There are no further questions. That concludes our Q&A session. I'll now turn the conference back over to Avigal Soreq for closing remarks.

Thank you. So I would like to thank my colleagues here around the table. I would like to thank you, the investors, sell side, buy side, and I would like to thank the Board of Directors and mostly to thank our entire employees that make our partnership as good as it is. So thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.