Enbridge Fireside Chat

Earlier today Enbridge (ENB) CEO Al Monaco held a “virtual fireside chat” with an analyst from RBC. ENB, like the other Canadians, is run more conservatively than many U.S. businesses. We’ve often noted that a bit more Canadian management would be beneficial in the U.S. energy sector.

The slides below are from the ENB presentation deck that was published at the same time.

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We estimate that within the American Energy Independence Index (AEITR), 80% of the customers are investment grade. ENB does better than this with 95% as this slide shows.

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This chart lists the profile of their natural gas customers. Monaco noted that these customers are often “must-run” facilities such as power plants in the north east U.S. and Canada. He also said that many of their liquids customers run the most competitive, complex refineries.

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This slide shows how their EBITDA showed no visible hit from the 2014-16 collapse in crude prices, even though Canadian tar-sands is among the most expensive crude oil to produce.

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This chart lists their top ten liquids customers along with their credit ratings.

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ENB has been reducing their leverage in recent years. This is because their backlog of growth projects has been coming down. In 2015-16 they had a $25BN backlog, whereas today they have half that with $6BN remaining to fund for new investments over the next three years.

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Monaco sounded very calm about his company’s position. We think they’re the kind of company that can get through just about any plausible economic disruption.

We are invested in ENB.