Provident's Midstream business unit offers customers several types of services and contractual arrangements. These include:

• Fee-for-service processing - NGL owners (typically natural gas producers) deliver their NGLs to Provident and pay us a fee to transport, process, fractionate, store, distribute or market their NGLs.

• Fixed-margin business - Purchasers (mainly of ethane) pay Provident a fixed margin (over Provident's input costs) to purchase NGL products.

• Proprietary NGL production marketing - Provident buys the NGL content of the raw gas stream, extracts and processes the NGLs, and sells them into the North American market. In this way, we make a margin on the difference between the price of the natural gas from which we extract NGLs and the crude oil-related NGL products that we sell to customers (this difference is known as the "frac spread"). Provident's proprietary NGL production marketing is mainly the result of our business at our extraction plants at Empress, Alberta.