Delek Logistics Partners, LP (DKL) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the DELEC Logistics Partners third quarter 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference call over to Robert Wright, EVP and Chief Financial Officer. Robert, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. Participants joining me on today's call will include Avigal Soarek, President and Chairman, Mark Hobbs, EVP, as well as other members of our management team. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that our comments today may include forward-looking statements reflecting management's current expectations and assumptions. These statements involve risk and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those discussed today. For additional information regarding the factors that could cause actual results to differ, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by applicable law, we do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Avigal for opening remarks. Avigal?

Thank you, Robert. Today, DKA reported approximately $143 million in adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter. VKL continued strong performance as giving us confidence in increasing our full-year EBITDA guidance. We are raising full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance to $530 to $560 million. We are also confident that our 2026 growth capital program of $180 to $190 million is expected to generate up to a $15 million run rate EBITDA in 2026, with an additional $60 million of EBITDA growth in 2027. The strong performance continues in all of our segments. I will provide more detail on each of these segments. Starting with gas, we have safely completed the construction of our first sour gas compressor station and AGI well. The system is currently in a commissioning phase, and we are expected to start up the system in the next few weeks. With increasing flexibility, we are well positioned to serve our customer's objective of long-term oil and gas production growth in the Dallaro Basin. From DKL perspective, this will bring additional gas volume to our plant, increase overall system utilization, and likely results in a need for overall expansion of our processing capacity. Moving to crude, both DPG and DGG continue to see strong performance reflecting sustained production across our operating footprint. We look forward to further optimizing and growing the system. Our water business is also performing well, and we are continuing to explore growth opportunities in this space. Our combined gas, crude, and water offering in the Perman Basin has improved our competitive position and established a platform for future growth. We will continue to pursue these growth opportunities in a disciplined manner while maintaining a focus on leverage and coverage ratios. We also intend to remain good stewards of our stakeholder capital. During the quarter, we extended our debt maturities and completed our equity offering to support growth investment while maintaining balance sheet strength. Our Board of Directors has approved our 55th consecutive quarterly distribution increase, raising the distribution to $1.14 per unit. This is an extraordinary achievement of distribution growth, and it reflects an exceptional work of our team. This financial discipline is a cornerstone of our company philosophy. With the foundation we have built and the opportunities ahead, we are confident in our ability to continue delivering sustainable growth and long-term value for our unit holders. I will now turn the call over to Mark, who will provide additional detail on our operations.

Thanks, Avagal. Since joining Delic Logistics in the lead role in July, I have been energized by our exceptional team and the amazing opportunities that we have in front of us at DKL. As Avigol mentioned, we see tremendous growth potential for Delac Logistics, as we are uniquely positioned to meet our customers' increasing needs for midstream services across crude gas and water in the Permian Basin. We continue to see heightened activity by producers in securing acreage and future drilling locations in the northern Delaware Basin, and Permian rig activity is near its highest level of the year, with production continuing to set new records. Crude and NGL prices remain elevated as a result of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and in gas, Waha prices have turned firmly positive, a significant improvement from the negative pricing that we saw in the first half of the year, as new takeaway capacity continues to come online, which has provided much-needed stabilization for local gas markets in the Permian Basin. Together, these higher commodity prices support sustained upstream activity, driving increased demand for our three-stream service platform. Turning to our business, we continued to operate well in the third quarter, delivering safe and reliable midstream services for our customers. During the third quarter, we achieved higher volumes in our gas business versus the second quarter and made significant progress advancing our sour gas solution in the Delaware Basin. We completed construction of our first sour gas compressor station and are in the commissioning phase of our AGI well located at our Libby complex. We are also executing on projects to further optimize our gas system that will not only increase our gas volumes and the utilization of our Libby processing plants, but also improve reliability and redundancy for our customers. Looking forward, we continue to see the need for sour gas services from our customers. And the sour solution we have developed will unlock future growth for producers and demand for our services. As a result, we are evaluating options for future investment that will further expand our sour gas processing capacity at the Libby Complex, providing critical support for our customers' production growth in the region. Moving to crude. Our crude gathering business in both the Delaware and the Midland operated well and maintained high reliability during the third quarter. We experienced a slight decrease in crude volumes in the third quarter versus the second quarter, primarily due to timing of well connections. However, we remain well positioned for future growth, especially in the Delaware Basin, where we continue to see positive results from our three-stream offering. Our decline in water volumes in the third quarter versus the second quarter was driven by a combination of production decline and timing of wells coming online. We expect that to reverse as we move through the end of the year and continue to see tremendous opportunities to increase our produced water volumes across both the Midland and the Delaware basins. Produced water handling and disposal continues to be a critical and increasing need of our customers. Our scale and strategic position across the Permian Basin create unique opportunities for us to service our customers and continue to grow our water business. We continue to believe that our three-stream offering in the Delaware Basin is a critical differentiator from our peers, and we are leveraging these services to develop creative solutions for our customers. With that, I will pass it on to Robert.

Thank you, Mark. As Avigal and Mark have highlighted, the partnership delivered another strong quarter with a adjusted EBITDA of $143 million. Importantly, we achieved these results while staying disciplined on our long-term leverage and coverage targets. During the quarter, we raised approximately $220 million in net proceeds through the largest primary follow-on equity offering by a midstream MLP in the last decade. Together, with our second quarter refinancing of the 2028 and 2029 senior notes, these actions have strengthened our capital structure, extended our maturity profile, and positioned DKL to fund future growth while maintaining strong liquidity, which ended the quarter at approximately $1.3 billion. We ended the quarter with leverage of 3.85 times, our lowest level of the year, which gives us more capacity to fund attractive growth opportunities. As we've noted before, our 2026 growth capital program of $180 to $190 million is expected to generate up to $50 million of run rate EBITDA in 2026, with an additional $60 million of EBITDA growth in 2027. Following our August equity offering, our sponsor, Delic's ownership of Delic Logistics Common Units, decreased to approximately 58 percent. Additionally, our strong and growing third-party business continues to increase our economic separation from Delic. In 2026, on a pro forma basis, we continue to expect approximately 80 percent of our run rate EBITDA will come from third parties. Turning to our results, as mentioned already, DECAL posted another strong quarter with adjusted EBITDA of approximately $143 million in line with the same period last year. Distributable cash flow as adjusted was approximately $73 million, and our DCF coverage ratio held steady at approximately 1.11 times. We are also proud to announce our 55th consecutive distribution increase, which brings the quarterly distribution to $1.14 per unit. As to our segment results, starting with gathering and processing, adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was $88 million, up from $83 million in the third quarter of 2025. This improvement was driven primarily by higher utilization at the Libby gas complex and strong realized margins in our crude business. In wholesale marketing and terminaling, adjusted EBITDA was approximately $21 million in line with the prior year period. Storage and transportation delivered adjusted EBITDA of $20 million, compared with $19 million in the prior year period. Moving now to capital expenditures, third-quarter capital spending was approximately $55 million, including $48 million of growth capital, focused primarily on the continued build-out of our new sour-gas gathering infrastructure. Importantly, these investments enabled the completion of our first sour gas compressor station and AGI well at our liby gas complex during the quarter, further expanding our capabilities in the Delaware Basin. The remaining capital went to planned reliability and maintenance activities. Looking ahead, as Avigal noted, we remain confident in the partnership's earnings trajectory, and we are raising our full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $530 to $560 million. With that, we will now open the call for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that when you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Doug Irwin with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, Tim. Thanks for the question. I wanted to start with Libby 2. Can you maybe talk a bit more about how you're thinking about the volume ramp now that it's online, and maybe how dependent that $60 million of 27 growth is on that ramp schedule? And then maybe looking a bit further ahead, you mentioned evaluating further expansions. Just wondering how soon you might be in a position here to make a more formal decision there.

Okay, absolutely, Doug. I will start and I will hand it to Mark. Obviously, we are very proud of gathering, treating, and processing. We are developing the AGI in a commissioning phase, like I said, in the prepare demand. We are very happy about that. We have a unique solution. We are very happy about the ROC. And the gas oil ratios that we've seen around it. Obviously, the long haul pipeline that was built is also helping that capacity. So we're very happy about where we are. We see more gas coming on the horizon that we want to see if we can give solution for. And that's another opportunity in our way. So we are very happy about where we are heading. The team is very focused and taking the opportunity ahead of us. Mark, why don't you chime in?

Yeah, sure, sure, Abigail. Thanks, Doug. Great to hear from you. Appreciate you joining the call. Look, as we said in our prepared remarks, we We had a lot of good accomplishments around our sour gas solution in the third quarter. We completed our first sour gas compressor station. We are commissioning the AGI well, as Abigail said. And, like, when you think about the ramp, you've seen a steady ramp in our total gas volumes from quarter to quarter, you know, throughout the year. We're continuing to see that increase now that we're moving into the fourth quarter, now that we're a month into the fourth quarter. And we're really weeks away from the kind of the full commissioning of our integrated sour gas solution. And there's wells that are waiting for this to come online. And so we do expect to see a pretty substantial jump. If you look at the average of what we had at over 90 million scuffs a day between Libby 1 and Libby 2 and total gas volumes in the third quarter, a pretty substantial increase of that utilization of both our plants as we move through the individual. And look, on the timing as far as future investment, you know, we're evaluating the options. As Avigol said, we love our location. We love the rock that we're sitting on top of. And based on what we're seeing from our customers on the production side, you know, we're going to see additional volumes coming our way. And so we just want to make sure that we're ahead of that and we can provide that service for them.

Got it. That's very helpful. And maybe a follow-up on the equity issuance during the quarter. Could you maybe just provide a bit more context around that decision? Was the main priority just improving the balance sheet? Or is it maybe part of a bigger strategy here? And to that point, we've seen an uptick of M&A in the basin here recently. Just curious to get your thoughts on your appetite to potentially be either a buyer or a seller in the current market.

Yeah, so thank you for that question. As I said many times, if you look on the intrinsic value of each one of the asset DAG, we're probably looking at we should have a nine-handle on the left side of our unit price, and that's what we are heading, and that's what we think the valuation needs to be. Obviously, we are looking at the seller market distance seconds. Valuation is high. That's the reason I'm saying the nine-handle. We need to make sure that our organic projects are well-funded and we are ready to do them on time. That's part of the logic of what we just did. Obviously, when you finish those projects and ready to commissioning, like we just finished one, that's going to give a nice bump in valuation that we are very happy about. So the combination of managing leverage ratio, coverage ratio, and the strength of the balance sheet is critical for us. Obviously, we have plenty of liquidity in the balance sheet for future opportunity. I'm very happy about the return on the organic project we have seen. We invested $185 million and seeing around $75 million of EBITDA between this year and next year, and that's a very, very good return that we need to make sure it's well-funded and well-executed. So we're in a very good spot, and we have a very good way ahead of us.

Great. Thanks for your time.

Thank you. Appreciate you.

A reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. As there are no further questions at this time, I will now turn the call back over to Abigail Sarek, President and Chairman, for closing remarks.

Thank you. I want to thank the colleagues around this table, Mark, to you and your leadership team and the rest of the great employees that we have in DKL, to our board of directors, and to the investors that tasked us. We'll keep growing this company. We'll keep developing that and making sure that we are rewarding our investors. That's our commitment. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.