Williams Companies Inc. Q1 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-04-30 11:51:11.0

Tags: Call Transcript, Business, Earnings, Marcellus, Games, Personal Technology, Seeking Alpha, Williams Cos Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) The first question comes from Carl Kirst with BMO Capital.

Carl Kirst - Bmo Capital

If I could start with the Marcellus and not necessarily to steal any thunder in front of May 12, but Steve can you give us any sense of what you are thinking? We know you're only going to go into an area if you can get big. You mentioned being large scale. Do you have a sense of the capital investment dollars you are thinking in this region over the next three years? Two, with respect to looking at it as far as how should we think of returns in the current environment, only noting that I saw in the midstream section that you guys had converted some of the keep-whole volumes to fee-based. I don't know how material that was but I didn't know as you were looking into the Marcellus if you're thinking about this more in kind of a fee structure or if it's just kind of the same model in the Rockies sort of placed on top of the Marcellus.

Steve Malcolm

I will offer a few comments and then turn it over to Alan, but you're right. You have been listening to me that we have talked about the fact that an important part of our midstream strategy is creating these large-scale positions where we can exercise some market power and that has certainly been the case with all of the basins that we have moved into. That is our game plan with Marcellus. Many producers have said that the midstream challenges are daunting. We have had several calls already from producers asking for help. So we are very excited and expect to be able to create the same kind of system that we've created in other growth basins. Alan, any other thoughts?

Alan Armstrong

Carl, I would just add that the majority of the business there, there's really not very much that we are counting on anyway in terms of processing revenues there, I think the majority of our business will be fee-based business there and somewhat exposed to gas price there which is a nice upset to our midstream business obviously.

So I think there will be a mix of that kind of business. I would just add to Steve's comment about the infrastructure and the need for it up there. As we see it, there's a lot of pipelines crisscrossing the Marcellus area today. But the degree of volumes that we think are going to build very rapidly out of that area are going to cause need for a system that can get producers the very best price rather than being dedicated to one particular pipe in an area that may be overloaded. So, we think there is a good opportunity for some large-scale infrastructure up that set some supply hubs in the Marcellus and we are excited to be talking to a lot of interested producers. As soon as we made that announcement, we saw a lot of interest in that kind of project.

 

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