Cheniere Energy, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's Chenier Energy Q3 2022 earnings call and webcast. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Randy Bathia, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Chenier's third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The slide presentation and access to the webcast for today's call are available at Chenier.com. Joining me this morning are Jack Fusco, Chenier's President and CEO. Anatole Fagan, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, and Zach Davis, Executive Vice President and CFO. Before we begin, I'd like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from what is described in these statements. Slide 2 of our presentation contains a discussion of those forward-looking statements and associated risks. In addition, we may include references to certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA, and distributable cash flow. A reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measure can be found in the appendix to the slide presentation. As part of our discussion of Chenier's results, today's call may also include selected financial information and results for Chenier Energy Partners LP or CQP. We do not intend to cover CQP's results separately from those of Chenier Energy Inc. The call agenda is shown on slide three. Jack will begin with operating and financial highlights. Anatole will then provide an update on the LNG market, and Zach will review our financial results and guidance. After prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. I now turn the call over to Jack Fusco, Cheniere's President and CEO.

Thank you, Randy, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today, and thank you all for your continued support of Cheniere. I'm pleased to be here this morning to highlight our third quarter 2022 results and achievements and discuss our positive outlook for the remainder of this year and into next, all of which continues to demonstrate Cheniere's market leadership and excellence throughout our business. Since our capital allocation update in September, we have remained laser focused on our operations, ensuring reliable LNG production and supply for our customers amidst global energy shortages and challenges. In fact, just last week, we had a daily production record for the company, producing well north of seven TBTU of LNG, and also a daily record at Sabine Pass of approximately five TBTU of LNG. My congratulations to the Schneer professionals for a job well done. Additionally, in conjunction with Bechtel's engineering and construction, we are off to a great start at corpus stage three. We have rolled up our sleeves, hit the ground running and have already seen some early signs of potential acceleration on that project. Across the LNG market, volatility continues to dominate, driven by short-term supply-demand pressures. Recently, from record-breaking warmer weather, near-term prices have retreated from the highs we saw barely two months ago. Nevertheless, we are largely insulated from these price swings, given the highly contracted nature of our business and we remain focused on long-term value creation as our priority, with short-term market dislocations only serving to accelerate our long-term plans, as you heard from me and Zach in September. Now, please turn to slide five, where I will review some key operational, financial, and strategic highlights from what was yet another very successful quarter. For the third quarter, we generated, consolidated, adjusted EBITDA of approximately 2.8 billion and distributable cash flow of approximately 2.0 billion as margins in the LNG market remain significantly above historical norms and our focus on execution and our operational excellence program continue to be rewarded. Today, we are reconfirming our full year 2022 EBITDA and cash flow guidance, both of which were recently increased by over a billion dollars when we announced our capital allocation plan in September. In transit LNG shipments and commodity price volatility increased the degree of difficulty in pinpointing the forecast, but we are tracking to the upper half of the EBITDA and DCF ranges currently. Later on this call, Zach will provide you with a few early data points on how 2023 is shaping up ahead of providing full year guidance on our February call. As we've discussed, the reliability of our LNG operations is more critical than ever, given the volatility present in today's market. During the third quarter, we produced and exported 156 cargoes of LNG from our facilities. Of that, approximately 70% of that volume landed in Europe. By comparison, during the third quarter of last year, less than 30% of the volume produced by Chenier landed in Europe. Not only did this shift underscore the value of our destination flexible LNG, which can quickly respond to market signals to reach end users of the greatest need, but is also providing meaningful energy volumes to Europe at a time when the region is facing significant challenges. The fact that these challenges could persist for a number of years has hastened a renewed focus on the criticality of energy security as governments and utilities the world over advance strategies to mitigate energy supply risks for the long term. Anatol will provide further insight into the current market dynamics in a few minutes. During the quarter, we announced our 2020 Vision Capital Allocation Plan, a revised comprehensive long-term capital allocation plan designed to maintain investment grade credit metrics through cycles. further return capital to shareholders over time, and continue to invest in accretive organic growth. The plan envisions $20 billion of available cash through 2026 and over $20 per share of run rate distributable cash flow. Zach will review some of the key features of the plan in a few minutes, but we believe our new 2020 vision is an excellent capital allocation framework for our stakeholders, and the plan follows our significantly accelerated execution under the long-term capital allocation plan we implemented just over a year ago. Before moving on, I also want to highlight important organizational announcements I made during the quarter. Organizational clarity and operational excellence are two of my key priorities, and as Cheniere has grown and evolved, so too must our organization in order to maintain the incredibly high operating standard we have set for ourselves. In September, we announced the promotion of Corey Grindle, currently Executive Vice President of Worldwide Trading in London, to serve as Chenier's inaugural Chief Operating Officer, effective January 2023. Corey has been at Chenier for nearly a decade, and his leadership and contributions have been an integral part of building the exceptional operating platform we enjoy today. Prior to his role overseeing worldwide trading in London, Corey was SVP of gas supply and was the architect behind Chenier's gas procurement program, which today is one of the largest holders of pipeline capacity and purchasers of natural gas in the United States. We look forward to Corey's continued leadership as COO, building upon our Safety First culture and reputation as a leading reliable supplier of LNG in the world. I'm pleased to welcome Corey back to Houston in his elevated role as COO. You all will begin to hear from Corey directly as he participates in investor conferences and these earnings calls next year. Turn now to slide six. I'll give you a brief update on construction and execution across our Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi sites. First, last week, commissioning was completed for the third marine berth at Sabine Pass and consistent with our track record, the third berth achieves substantial completion ahead of the guaranteed schedule and within project budgets. The third berth will not only provide increased flexibility to our marine loading operations, particularly during suboptimal conditions like fog events, but also serves as a brownfield infrastructure that we can economically leverage as we develop our expansion plans at Sabine Pass. Now moving to Corpus Christi Stage 3. As I mentioned before, we are off and running, and the project is making excellent progress. Inclusive of the early limited notice to proceed we utilized at the start of the year, we've invested approximately $1 billion to date on Stage 3. The LNTP not only provided cost benefits, enabling us to lock in prices early, but also provided some significant construction schedule advantages with early site work, such as accelerating placement of piles and soil stabilization. Long lead time equipment orders have been placed with suppliers and key equipment manufacturing is expected to start before year end. We recently held a groundbreaking ceremony at the Stage 3 site, and it was exciting to see such overwhelming support for the project across a broad spectrum of stakeholders who helped make the project possible, from regulators, government officials, to our long-term customers, EPC and equipment providers, banks, and of course, our employees. As we work towards first LNG from Stage 3 in late 2025, I look forward to upholding Chenier's stellar reputation on safety and execution in partnership with Bechtel. Thank you all again for your continued support of Chenier. I'll now turn the call over to Anatole who will provide an update on the LNG market.