This will offer Sprague’s customers new vessel unloading capabilities, CEO David Glendon said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. The New England terminal handles heating oil, kerosene, ULSD and fuel oil.

As Kildair Service, Sprague will complete the $4.5 million overhaul of two storage tanks and return them to distillate service, Glendon said. Kildair operates a major terminal in Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River, where it maintains 3.2 million bbl of residual fuel, asphalt and crude oil storage.

At the end of last year, Sprague went live with an extensive rack upgrade and automation project at its Bronx terminal and the company is confident that it will result in more customer business in the years ahead, Glendon said. The terminal is the local operational base supporting extensive transportation fuel contracts throughout the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area.

The terminal offers ULSD, ultra-low sulfur heating oil and fuel oil. It could accommodate 200,000-bbl capacity barges and 80,000-dwt tankers.

For the second year in a row, Sprague sold more than 10 million bbl of contracted products to its customers over its proprietary real-time marketing platform and it continues to make investments in the platform to increase that total, Glendon said.

Meanwhile, Sprague said that the warmest weather in November and December on record has spilled over to the first quarter of 2016, with two or three cold days in the mix, Glendon said.

However, a reasonably attractive price contango in the distillate market structure does provide some offsets to the sales volume decline associated with warm weather, he added.

Despite the warmer-than-expected first quarter so far, Gary Rinaldi, Sprague’s chief financial officer, said the company is forecasting normal weather for the rest of this year, especially in the fourth quarter.

Sprague is expecting the gas sales upside related to its February purchase of Santa Buckley Energy, a natural gas marketing and electricity brokerage with about 1,000 commercial and industrial natural gas customers, to offset lower heating oil and natural gas sales in the warm first quarter.

Also, Sprague said that it had increased its total acquisition facility from $400 million to $550 million in the fourth quarter ahead of a tightening capital market.

Rinaldi said the equity markets and capital markets are essentially closed right now in reference to a lack of access to the capital market amid low oil prices.

The higher liquidity provides Sprague with more options to fund acquisitions in 2016, he said.

“I didn’t want to wait until we had an acquisition to test what the debt markets were going to be at that time. So we got out in front of it,” Rinaldi said.