New Fortress Energy Inc.

Good day and welcome to the NFE Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded, and at this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Brett McGill, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Emma. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to New Fortress Energy's Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. This call is being recorded and will be available by replay within the Investors section of our website under Events and Presentations. There you'll also find our Q2 2022 investor presentation, which we'll be referencing throughout today's call. The presentation includes a series of important disclosures related to forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. We encourage participants to review these important disclosures in addition to the description of risk factors contained within our SEC filings. Joining me here today are Wes Edens, CEO and Chairman of the Board, and Chris Junta, Chief Financial Officer. Also joining today's call are other members of the team, including Managing Directors Andrew Deedy and Patrick Hughes. With that, I'll turn the call over to Wes.

Great. Thanks, Brett, and thanks everyone for dialing in. Good morning. Let's jump into it. As usual, we will go through the presentation we posted to our website last night, and that one will start at the beginning, so page four. Very, very good quarter for the firm by all measures. The total EBITDA, $283 million. If you take actually the last four quarters together, or trailing four quarters, EBITDA is now just a shade over a billion dollars, so $1.05 billion, so a real milestone. We are affirming guidance for the remainder of the year that we expect 2022 to generate approximately a billion dollars in EBITDA, and we're actually providing guidance for 2023 of guidance of $1.5 billion which we think has substantial amounts of upside depending on the timing and nature of the FOMG installation. So from a financial metrics standpoint, a very, very productive quarter. If you flip to page number five, we have many significant updates to highlight for the quarter. I apologize for the dense words on the simplifier, and I like to make things simple. be simple and clear, the reality is we had so much activity for the quarter that even trying to condense down to this list was a bit of a challenge. Let me just touch on the highlights, and Andrew, Didi, and Chris Genta later will actually give a bit more detail on it, but let's just start at the top. Terminals and customers. I mean, our commitment to our customers and our downstream terminals is stronger than ever. This is the core of the mission of the company to help address energy poverty, energy security in the world, while at the same time being a key player in this transition to a cleaner energy future. In the quarter, we substantially completed our Baccarina and Santa Catarina terminals and made significant progress on permits for Ireland. So something we've been working on for a long time, but we are now more optimistic than ever that we will get to a positive resolution for the Irish terminal as well. In addition, we leased one of our FSRUs into the Netherlands for the first exposure to Europe. Europe obviously has had a very tumultuous year with the February 24th invasion of Ukraine. There's a lot of activity from a variety of different nations in Europe to build terminals and get them online, especially with the pending winter coming up. We successfully leased one of our FSRUs into the terminal. Actually, I think that the christening date of that is September 8th, so it will be the of the European terminals turning on. We believe now that Europe is a bright part of our future, and that as we generate FOMG volumes, of course, we'll bring them to all of our customers around the world, but we think that European customers are going to be a big part of what we see. Eventually, the energy crisis will abate, and our downstream customers and assets will are the critical piece of our business model. We've invested nearly $9 billion in eight years building out this infrastructure. This is what it will allow us to take the volumes that we create ourselves, distribute them around the world to our customers, and be a meaningful part of the change in this energy transition. Two other highlights for the quarter. We told you earlier that we intended to self-finance all of our activities. The goal that we set for ourselves is to generate $2 to $2.5 billion of internally generated capital So we didn't have to go back to shareholders, didn't have to do corporate financings in order to do so. The financing markets have been a mess. It's been a very difficult first half of the year. And the financing markets, with all of the inflation and financing challenges in the market, notwithstanding that, I'm very happy to report that we have done what we set out to do. We can now confirm that we do not believe that we need to raise incremental capital to finance our growth. So being self-financing... for us in this market is the top of the list in terms of the accomplishments for me for the quarter. Andrew will speak about that here in just a few minutes. This speaks volumes about the essential nature of our infrastructure assets. It also speaks volumes about the people that actually did this work on our behalf. So I'm very, very, very happy with the accomplishment there. Lastly, we made significant strides in the hydrogen business. As an aside, there was a press release that was issued this morning by Plug Power. We're happy to confirm that we are partners with Plug, that they are going to be the equipment provider to us on our first hydrogen plant. The energy bill that is currently being contemplated by Congress, we think puts the U.S. squarely under the gun sights of being the world leader in the production of hydrogen. I think when you look at energy transition, The nature of the discussion to date has been one that is a bit of a false narrative, in my view. In other words, that we are going to somehow seamlessly transition from dispatchable fossil fuels of gas, coal, etc., directly into non-fossil fuels of wind and solar, and somehow that's going to be a meaningful transition. That is a false narrative. It's a dangerous narrative, in my view, and one that has actually proven itself to be very, very perilous. With the dislocations that have happened in Europe this summer, we now have seen massive switches back to coal. We now expect coal to be used as much this year as it was used during its peak year of 2013. We expect next year to be a higher amount for it. So obviously the energy security has trumped climate change in this particular case. If you believe in the perils of climate change, which of course we all do, the logical answer is you have to be heavily invested in hydrogen and in nuclear. We don't intend to have a nuclear component of our business here, but the hydrogen is something we've talked about for the last two and a half years, and this announcement this morning is a meaningful milestone to actually establish our first project in this regard. So with that, let me turn it over to Andrew.