DCP Midstream, LP Common Units

Morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the DCP Midstream Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are on the listen-only mode. After this week's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press the star, then the one key on your touchtone telephone. Please be advised, today's conference may be recorded. If you recall operations at any time, please press star, then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to our speaker host, Mike Solman. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to the DCP Midstream fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. Today's call is being webcast, and I encourage those listening on the phone to view the supporting slides, which are available on our website at dcpmidstream.com. Before we begin, I'd like to point out that our discussion today includes forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ due to certain risk factors that affect our business. Please review the second slide in the deck that describes our use of forward-looking statements. And for a complete listing of the risk factors, please refer to the partnership's latest SEC filings. We will also use various non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measure in schedules in the appendix section of the slides. Vodder Van Kampen, CEO, and Sean O'Brien, CFO, will be our speakers today. And after their remarks, we will take your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Wouter.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us. Before we cover our Q4 results and our outlook for 2022, I'd like to spend some time reviewing our 2021 performance. Entering the year, we said 2021 would be successful if we could accomplish three things. First, control what we can control by maintaining our cost savings and strict approach to capital disciplines. Second, reduce our absolute debt and further strengthen our balance sheet. And finally, accelerate our progress on sustainability and emissions reductions. While we found ourselves battling through a continued global pandemic and the impact of winter storm Uri, I'm once again extremely proud of our team performance. For the year, the business exceeded all of our financial targets, generating record results for the partnerships. We produced approximately $1.3 billion of adjusted EBITDA and approximately $870 million of DCF, $59 million over the high end of our guidance. We also generated a record $500 million of excess free cash flow, which has more than doubled year over year. And we accomplished all of this while maintaining approximately 100% of our 2020 cost savings. These results highlight the strength of our fully integrated business model, which includes a diversified GNP franchise that positions us to benefit from strong commodity environments and supplies volumes to our downstream logistics network. During the year, we took critical actions to accelerate our progress towards successfully executing a long-term sustainability strategy. We were recognized with the GPA Environmental Excellence Award for the sixth time we established a board-level sustainability committee. We added an executive leadership position to lead our sustainability and energy transition efforts. And we released our second annual sustainability report, which substantially increased our transparency at large. We had great activity, but more importantly, we delivered great results. From 2018 to 2020, we saw a 16% reduction in our total greenhouse gas emissions and a 23 percent reduction in methane emissions. And we fully expect to see those trends continue when we report our 2021 emissions numbers later this year, and as we make continued progress towards accomplishing our 30 by 30 target. We were also able to make significant progress in strengthening our balance sheet. We entered the year with a goal of finishing 2021 at 4.0 times leverage, and I'm extremely pleased to report that we exited the year with leverage at 3.8 times. This trajectory has us on an accelerated pace to reach our 3.5 times target and allows us to advance our strategy towards returning additional capital to our unit holders this year. We plan to execute the strategy by increasing our distribution in 2022 and pursuing additional capital allocation options, which I will discuss later on the call. But first, I'll turn it over to Sean to walk through our Q4 results and 2022 guidance.