Fracking's latest casualty: The Master Limited Partnership
In the 1990s, Kinder Morgan, a multi-billion dollar oil and gas pipeline company, pioneered a bit of corporate gymnastics known as a master limited partnership, or MLP. The Wall Street Journal explains MLPs this way:
Master limited partnerships basically give special tax breaks to companies that get almost all their revenues from natural-resource businesses. That typically has meant pipeline companies, which charge toll-like fees to move oil and gas. The partnerships don't pay corporate taxes to the federal government, distributing most of their cash flow to shareholders—and to the general partners who run the MLPs—in dividend-like payments.
These payouts have made them increasingly popular with investors, especially baby boomers hungry for high yields in an era of ultralow interest rates. Energy companies have also embraced them as a way to raise equity and issue debt backed by specific assets such as pipelines.
The MLP structure allowed Kinder Morgan and its family of associated corporate entities to get very very big, and it made the company’s founder and CEO, Richard Kinder, very very rich. You see, when these parts of the Kinder Morgan empire pay their profits to shareholders, one of the shareholders is the parent company, which is an MLP itself, and Mr. Kinder owns a 23 percent stake in this MLP with a $37 billion market value.
But here’s the crazy problem: Kinder Morgan’s MLP leviathan got so big and was so lucrative for its shareholders that it bumped up against its own size and their own shareholder expectations for ever-growing pay-outs. MLPs have to keep acquiring to keep increasing dividends, but there was just nothing big enough left out there to give Kinder Morgan the bump it needed to meet shareholder demands.
And those demands also left Kinder Morgan, as a company, short on cash (yes, this sounds odd, but you know, capitalism!). The company was suddenly challenged to expand its over 80,000 miles of pipelines, either by acquisition or actual construction.
So, in a deal that will total $44 billion (or $71 billion if you count debt), Kinder Morgan will eat its kin and become a very large and slightly more typical C corporation. This theoretically leaves some profits more open to corporate taxes, but, lest anyone thinks this is a boon to federal coffers, it will save the new super-sized energy company $20 billion in income taxes over the next 14 years.
The deal will also take what was the second largest energy MLP (according to WSJ, the New York Times says they are the largest), and create what is expected to be the third largest energy company in the U.S., behind Exxon and Chevron, with an estimated value of $140 billion.
The new structure also allows Kinder Morgan to move more quickly to expand the pipeline network already pulsing with the massive, fracking-driven expansion in U.S. oil and gas prospecting. Since 2009, oil production is up 55 percent, natural gas production has increased 23 percent, and, according to the Journal, much of that is in parts of the country with insufficient pipeline infrastructure.
But have no fear for Kinder Morgan, they have also started investing in rail-, truck- and barge-based ways of moving all that carbon-rich fuel. Anyway you look at it, Kinder wins.
The environment however?
Oh, and one more word on Mr. Kinder:
Mr. Kinder, a lawyer with a penchant for deal making, left Enron Corp. in 1996 after being passed over for the CEO position. He and another lawyer, William Morgan, created Kinder Morgan the next year. They started with $40 million in assets purchased from Enron, which was eager to jettison the staid pipeline business in favor of conducting flashier financial engineering.
Yeah, the guy who outsmarted the smartest guys in the room is about to expand his grip on U.S. hydrocarbon production:
Kinder Morgan's new structure, Mr. Kinder said, will allow the company to move more rapidly to take advantage of the need for more energy infrastructure.
"What has happened in shale plays across country has stood the transportation network on its ear," he said. "We would look upon this as an opportunity to grow even faster in the future."
The deal is subject to regulatory approval. At least officially.
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