News

A letter from the CEO

With the close of another year upon us, Dallas Smith wanted to take a little time to reflect, talk about some of our achievements together and touch on some of the potential things to come.

2019 has been nothing short of a tumultuous year for our industry, for the province and for Western Canada. Throughout the year, the Petrotranz team has really been operating under one mandate; to ensure we have a broader understanding of our customers business and their pain points within. Then do all that we can, leveraging the tools we have, to help them manage those pain points effectively, while helping to drive maximum efficiency wherever we can. Truthfully, I do not see this changing for the coming year.

We have done this in several ways. First, through working with our customer base as well as their technology vendors, we have helped fund or develop as many integration points as possible, thereby eliminating manual data entry where we can. We have been focused on improving core components of the underlying platform technology in order to drive increased performance, especially during key deadline windows such as forecasting and splits. We have implemented an entirely new underlying technology set for the hosting of our platform within the Microsoft Canadian Azure datacenters, in order to allow the platform to scale up and down based on user demand.

We have also spent the year really doubling down on our commitment here at Petrotranz, to ensuring we have best in practice controls in place in order to ensure the security and confidentiality of industry's data. We have oft been asked through the months and years, "What does Petrotranz do with all of their data?" Our position, Petrotranz does not have any data. We are the stewards and protectors of industry's data and we take that seriously. In 2019, we achieved our SOC 2 Type 1 certification through PricewaterhouseCooper on the two pillars of security and confidentiality. While we have always been diligent in our approach to this, we have taken it to another level and will ensure we are audited on a routine basis in order validate our controls.

Another important update for you as we bring this year to a close, is our commitment to cost efficiency. When Petrotranz developed and brought the Liquids Transportation System (LTS) to the market, the associated fees were $0.20/m3. This was because LTS was a noticeably larger development initiative than then Crude Oil Transportation System (COTS) had been and the industry NGL volumes were a fraction of the crude volumes. With NGL volumes slowly continue to rise and eat away at the spread between NGL and crude, Petrotranz has committed to reviewing this spread and related pricing on a go-forward basis. On that note, the LTS fee will be reduced by 10% to $0.18/m3 effective for January 2020 delivery volumes.

During the entire 11-year history of Petrotranz, we have consistently reinvested in our platform, working to increase the value proposition and related efficiencies to industry, year over year. We have only once ever increased a fee, and this was by a single penny per cube approximately 6 years ago specifically for COTS. The cost of our platform is all inclusive of our services. This includes all on-boarding, training, implementing, and support, not to mention our unwavering commitment to security of the platform and more.

What we have created together is an eco-system specifically for this industry meant to bring maximum efficiencies as I have mentioned. We are grateful to all of you for your assistance and commitment to working with us to find continuous ways to bring improvements. In the coming year, we will be working to invest even more heavily to bring new functionality brought forth by many of you, as well as to reduce some process bottlenecks we have become aware of thanks to the great feedback we get from all of you.

While we do not see substantial respite for our industry here in Western Canada throughout 2020, we at Petrotranz are more committed than ever to helping ease as much pain as we are able. Please to continue to share your great ideas and feedback with our Customer Success team and do stay tuned for further updates as we move into 2020. Thank you all for working so closely with us, we are grateful to have the greatest customer base out there to partner with and effective positive change for. From all of us at Petrotranz, we hope you have a very Happy Holiday Season with your family and friends. We look forward to all we will do together in 2020.

Sincerely,

Dallas M Smith, CEO