In short: His own company (CEO's book, not an outside rating). 280 Bcf across six depleted-reservoir facilities, ~30% share in both Alberta and Northern California, 38-year operating record and "we do not cut our customers. Never have." ~80% EBITDA margin, ~5% dividend on a 50% payout, 3× leverage. Says the stock "is trading at a discount today" because the contract book is only ~50% take-or-pay — he is deliberately staying short-dated until the insurance value expands, targeting 60% by 2029.
Rockpoint rents out underground space for natural gas. Not tanks — old, emptied-out gas reservoirs deep underground (plus, until 2023, one washed-out salt cavern), which producers, utilities, banks and LNG plants pay to inject gas into in summer and pull back out in winter. It owns six of them, three in Alberta and three in Northern California, holding 280 billion cubic feet, and it is roughly 30% of each of those markets. Toby McKenna is the CEO, so this is his own book, not a neutral rating — but he is unusually explicit about what is and isn't working.
His core argument is scarcity. Nobody can build a new one. You need the right geology, in the right market, near a big pipeline, at a cost that pipeline overruns haven't blown up — and then the killer: the pipeline's spare capacity ("white space") is already promised to producers on one end and to end users on the other, so a new storage site cannot guarantee it could even get gas in or out. Meanwhile the demand for storage keeps rising: LNG export plants, oil-sands operators burning gas to melt bitumen, and AI data centres all need gas on very short notice, and an LNG customer eats about three times the space a traditional utility does. Fewer new sites, more competition for the existing ones. His read-across is the US Gulf Coast, where storage rates tripled in the ten years after LNG exports started — he thinks Alberta's AECO hub is at the same starting line (his words: not guidance).
The counter-intuitive bit worth understanding: cheap gas is good for him. Rockpoint makes money on the spread between seasons and on charging what amounts to an insurance premium for guaranteed access, not on the price of gas itself. When prices are low, gas stays in the ground, and the same molecule can be rented out again and again with no risk — and Rockpoint never bets on direction, never carries an open long or short, and never forward-hedges a withdrawal. Money comes three ways: long "take-or-pay" contracts where the customer pays whether or not they use the space (~50% of revenue, heading to 60% by 2029), short-term deals with banks that are effectively financings, and a 15% "optimization" sliver that is an option, never an obligation. He admits the shares trade at a discount to pipeline-style infrastructure companies, and says the reason is that half the book is still short-dated — he is choosing to stay that way until the insurance premium rises further. The visible overhang: Brookfield owns about 60% and its IPO lockup lapses in October, though a Californian regulatory approval it needs before dropping below 50% likely pushes any real sale into 2027.
0:18We're the largest independent storage company in North America. We've got six facilities, all very strategic. Three are in Northern California, three are in Alberta. In both of those markets, we would have about 30% market share. And so we'll talk a lot about storage today hopefully and we can explain why we're so important.
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