Enbridge Earnings Call Insights: Confidence in 2013 Guidance and Alberta Crude

Enbridge, Inc. (NYSE:ENB) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Confidence in 2013 Guidance

Juan Plessis – Canaccord Genuity: Some of the headwinds you have experienced on the mainline that Richard referred to in his remarks, that may flow into Q1 do you see that at all impacting your confidence on 2013 guidance?

J. Richard Bird – EVP, CFO & Corporate Development: No Juan, not at this point. We are going to continue to be below our name plate capacity in the first quarter but, not to the extent that it should significantly eat into a level of earnings that we had anticipated. So, you could continue to see apportionment occurring as crude comes at us above and beyond what we’re able to accommodate, but not above and beyond what we had provided for our guidance.

Al Monaco – President and CEO: Richard, maybe I’ll just tag on to that. It’s pretty tight right now obviously with the capacity versus supply coming at us. We have undertaken a number of initiatives in cooperation with industry, to approve the capacity, improve the capacity that we have available that includes some things that help us with making sure that the volumes come into our system on a ratable basis. It includes some efforts downstream to make sure terminals and batches are cleared through our tanks in an efficient manner and I was well trying to look at ways from a tankage and terminal point of view to effectively increase the overall capacity and one way to do that is to comingle some of the crudes that we’re seeing. So we’re doing all we can to make sure that we have enough capacity Juan.

Juan Plessis – Canaccord Genuity: Secondly, can you quantify how much your operating cost have increased year-over-year due to the operational risk management plan and if you expect to see some additional or end cost increases in 2013?