New Fortress Energy Inc.

Good day and welcome to the New Fortress Energy third quarter 2024 earnings results conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Matthew Reinhardt, Managing Director. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining today's conference call where we will discuss our third quarter 2024 results. The call is being recorded and will be available by replay on the Investors section of our website under the subheading Events and Presentations. At the same location, you will find a presentation that we will walk through on today's call. Please review this, as it includes important information on forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. With that, let me hand it over to our chairman and CEO, Wes Edens. Wes?

Great. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everyone, for dialing in. So, as usual, we will refer to the deck as we flip through here, but let's start at the beginning. So, page three, first with the quarterly financial results. Q3, adjusted EBITDA, $176 million. That was basically right on top of what we forecast here last summer. From an operational standpoint, the quarter was a very placid one. So we continued to operationalize FLNG operations. I'll talk about that in a minute. We sold our first full cargo. It was sold and transported to Europe. We obtained the non-FTA permits in Labor Day, which allowed us to then ship to non-FTA countries, of course, Looks like that band is likely to be lifted in the presidential election, but that was a good milestone for us. We are reducing our guidance in the fourth quarter modestly due to some maintenance that we've taken here, so we're going to have lower volumes in FLNG. The unit is back up and is running well now. We've been working on optimizing production, but we're very, very happy with the production of it, and I'll talk about that in a second, but that's good. We also are going to bring... which has got some accounting implications, but it's nothing but positives from an operational standpoint, from a business standpoint, but Andrew will talk about that in a minute. The claim from FEMA is something I get asked about all the time. We continue to have conversations with Weston, which is our contractor, as well as with the Corps and with FEMA, and expect as expected. We do think that the resolution of that is pending and is positive. We don't have anything specific to report on it. Obviously, the impact of a FEMA settlement in a quarter, the fourth quarter or first quarter, would materially affect what our forecasts would be. And also to the extent that these new strategic options that we are pursuing, that I'll talk about at some length, come to bear, they could move things around. So actually the ability to then forecast specifically away from operations is a little more complex just because these are such big and large individual transactions. So notable events, let's flip to the following page. Start with fast FOMG. Prior to the maintenance event, we ran for 14 days on an hourly basis at about 105% of main place capacity, so working extremely well. This is now the time of the process and the liquefier of the event. Sit down with the vendors and brainstorm about de-bottlenecking and operational changes that you can implement to increase production. We had a big meeting in Houston on Monday exactly on this that went really well. Our team is quite positive that there's a number of short-term additions that we can bring into it to add 3 to 5 to 10% of nameplate capacity. That is consistent with other people in the industry. This is just a natural process to go through. First, get up and running at full nameplate. Second, make those adjustments that allow you to enhance what you're doing. Very, very good news there. We're just completing our fourth cargo, I believe, this morning. One thing about this, I've been asked some questions. The Penguin is about 170,000 cubic meters of storage. The average ship that we're filling on our run back and forth to Puerto Rico is about 135,000 cubic meters. That buffer provides us a tremendous amount of operational flexibility. So when there is weather, when there's a storm that has gone through and there are swells and you have to maybe delay a day or here or there, that 35,000 cubic meters of buffering basically means that we expect to have no downtime from an operational standpoint as we load, and that's been our experiences thus far. So all going well and going to plan, but, you know, FLNG has moved squarely out of the – the construction phase into the last stages of commissioning, and now operationally we're performing kind of extremely well. You know, Brazil, I'm going to leave Andrew to talk about this, but, you know, the big construction continues. You know, the bottom line from our standpoint is On time, on budget, the EPC is performing extremely well, and there's a tremendous beehive of activity there, but I'll let Andrew talk about that specifically. Lastly for us, a big focus for the company has the corporate refinancing and capital formation that we did in the quarter, culminating with the signing of our agreements here this morning to kind of finalize it. But in simple terms, what we did is we refinanced, and extended out 100% of the 2025 corporate debt, two-thirds of the 2026s into a single class, and then extended the vast majority of the revolvers to 2027. Lastly, we also completed a $400 million equity raise that I actually personally participated in, a significant amount of investment back in October as well. What this has done is it basically has added significant liquidity to the company, and also has extended debt maturities that now allows for us to really pursue the next series of things I'm going to talk about here in a very ordinary course of events. So that's great. It was done very collaboratively with our bondholders and our banks. We're blessed to have a very, very professional and broad-based group of lenders that worked with us well. And now it sets the stage for us to focus on the strategic goals that we outlined the other day. But before I get to that, let me turn over the rest of the updates to Andrew. Andrew?