Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Sharon Lui - Wachovia Capital Markets.
Sharon Lui - Wachovia Capital Markets
I was wondering if you guys could just walk through the cap ex that you guys might have spent in the third quarter, what your plans are for the balance of the year, and maybe just walk through how you get to the $200 million of availability in 09?
William W. Davis
Let me outline that. First of all, as Barry said, our capital excess is to fund growth projects so if that capital isn’t there, we simply can defer the growth projects. So our plan assumes that if we don’t have access to capital, we don’t spend the money going forward. In the third quarter we’ll have spent approximately $55 million of growth capital and in the fourth quarter we’re going to spend roughly an additional $45 million to $50 million.
We’re going to finance the balance of those projects that we previously announced with the alternative capital that Barry mentioned. In other words, we’re going to set up alternative strategies to fund that capital. As a result we get lower economics from those projects for ourselves but these alternative strategies will fund the projects and don’t require us to get into the equity and debt markets which as everyone knows are sort of frozen up right now. That’s about as much detail as I can give right now until we finalize some of the details around what these strategies will look like.
Sharon Lui - Wachovia Capital Markets
Is it safe to assume the projects that have been announced, like the Bear Creek processing plant and the Red River expansion, are still going forward?
William W. Davis
Yes. All the projects are going forward but perhaps under a different financing scheme than we had originally intended.
Sharon Lui - Wachovia Capital Markets
In terms of the difference of returns under your alternative financing strategies, what type of returns are you looking at right now?
William W. Davis
We’re assuming right now very low returns to us on the projects that are financed with this alternative strategy. We think we’ll be able to do better than that but that’s what we’re assuming when we give guidance around our anticipated growth in the distribution and dividend next year and beyond. But until we finalize the details of these, it’s premature to give a whole lot more information than that.
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