RGC Resources Inc.

You will now be placed into conference. Good morning.

I'm Paul Nestor, President and CEO of RGC Resources. Thank you for taking time on this Friday to join us for our fourth quarter and 2021 fiscal year. earnings call. It's a beautiful day here in Roanoke, Virginia, and I hope you are enjoying the same wherever you are. First, a few administrative items. We've muted all lines and ask that all participants remain muted. After the presentation is completed, we will take questions. The link to today's presentation is available on the investor and financial information page of our website at www.rgcresources.com. All right, let's get started. As our forward-looking statements disclaimer, this presentation does have forecasts and projections. Our agenda for today's call is on slide two. As we said, we're going to review our operational and financial highlights. And I failed to mention that with me today are Tommy Oliver, our CFO, and David Garcia, our Director of Finance. As you all know, Tommy and David join us for each call. We'll also go through our 2022 outlook, and again, we'll take questions at the very end. Moving on to slide three, our customer growth results in the Renault gas utility were outstanding in fiscal 2021. We added approximately 600 customers. I think the actual number was 597 in the fiscal year, which was 8% better than 2020. We've been talking about our main extension miles in the previous calls. We did another two and a half miles in the fourth quarter, including phase two of the Blue Ridge expansion, bringing the year-to-date total to seven miles, an outstanding result, 71% increase over 2020. Moving on to slide four, fourth quarter volumes were really pretty good. You know, the residential volumes show a decline of 5%. We did have a much warmer September 2021 and September 2020. In fact, there was a 77% decline in heating degree days in September. But the absolute decatherm change on those residential volumes was only 9,000. So the 5%, a little misleading. It really wasn't too bad. Our overall industrial volumes continued to be down in this fourth quarter, primarily due to the large customer that fuel switched natural gas in 2020. As we've discussed previously, this customer switched back to coal in 2021. Our year-to-date volumes are up and stronger and we've talked about that as we've gone through the fiscal year. The large customer we just mentioned really has weighed on the year-to-date industrial volumes, but if you analyze our top 10 customers, which are primarily a mix of both industrial and commercial, eight out of those top 10 customers have increased their gas consumption in 2021. Building suppliers, auto parts manufacturing, and consumer products manufacturing continue to have noticeable year-over-year increases.

Moving on to our capital spending on slide six,