Cheniere Energy, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the second quarter 2025 Chenier Energy earnings call and webcast. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Randy Bhatia, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Chenier's second quarter 2025 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 would 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 financial 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 2025 guidance. After prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. I'll now turn the call over to Jack Pusko, Chenier's President and CEO.

Thank you, Randy. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today as we review our results from the second quarter of 2025. Our momentum from the first quarter propelled us forward in the second quarter, which was highlighted by our formal FID on Corpus Christi mid-scale trains 8 and 9 project and our upwardly revised run rate production and financial forecast. Our proven growth strategy is built upon leveraging our significant brownfield platform to deliver highly visible, financially accretive growth projects. In Corpus Christi, mid-scale trains 8 and 9 is further execution of that strategy. In addition, our tireless debottlenecking efforts are bearing real fruit as we're able to increase our run rate production capacity of our existing large-scale trains to 5.0 to 5.2 million tons per annum each. economically adding about a million tons per annum of production on a run rate basis. Our intent is to execute our growth strategy with a phased approach. First, on the regulatory front, we will seek to permit the maximum site capabilities for both Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi. These additional development projects represent an opportunity to further leverage our brownfield platform to over 100 million tons per annum. Second, we will execute our strategy in a financially disciplined way, and we currently have line of sight to grow our operating platform by approximately 25% to a total of 75 million tons by the early 2030s and retain optionality for even more brown filler growth beyond this. We're focused on capturing the moment and delivering accretive growth into the next decade. Please turn to slide five, where I'll highlight our key results and accomplishments for the second quarter of 2025. In the second quarter, we generated consolidated adjusted EBITDA of approximately $1.4 billion, distributable cash flow of approximately $920 million, and net income of approximately $1.6 billion. Today, we are tightening our full year 2025 guidance range to 6.6 to $7 billion, consolidated adjusted EBITDA, and raising our guidance range to $4.4 to $4.8 billion in distributable cash flow. Given the financial visibility our highly contracted platform provides, we are tracking well to deliver financial results within these upwardly revised ranges. During the second quarter, we successfully completed our large-scale maintenance Turnaround on frames three and four at Sabine Pass, safely and on budget. Extending Sabine Pass's record of consecutive man hours worked without a lost time incident to over 13.5 million hours. This was not only the largest turnaround we've ever completed, but also one of the largest turnarounds ever executed in the LNG industry. And I'm exceptionally proud of our team for once again demonstrating Chenier's safety first culture and our execution and operations capabilities. To provide some context, the complex turnaround saw trains three and four down for a little over three weeks. And during that time, over 1,650 contractors were on site, helping complete over 2,550 work orders and over 17,000 tasks, including the repair and replacement of nearly 1,000 valves and the testing of over 3,500 flanges. Mother Nature further contributed to the challenge with some unfavorable weather during that span, but the team once again delivered. In addition to the large maintenance event at Sabine Pass, we also optimized and planned maintenance at Corpus Christi, accelerating and executing a maintenance turnaround in the second quarter that was previously planned for the third quarter. This work was built into our full year forecast. but did further amplify the seasonality of the second quarter by adding to the impact for maintenance activities in terms of both lost production and O&M expense. On the commercial front, I hope you saw this morning we announced the new 1 million ton per annum SPA with JIRA, one of the largest buyers of LNG in the world, and the first long-term contract we have signed with a Japanese counterpart. We've enjoyed a long and successful commercial relationship with JIRA on shorter-term business, and we are excited to expand that relationship with this long-term SPA that extends through 2050. This agreement, along with the Canadian natural IPM deal signed in second quarter, help provide further certainty on our ability to meet our recently increased run rate growth and financial forecast and support future growth. During the quarter, we continue to execute on our comprehensive capital allocation plan and provided an update in late June in conjunction with the FID of mid-scale trains 8 and 9, where we now forecast to generate over $25 billion of available cash through 2030 to reach over $25 per share and run rate DCF. During the second quarter, We deployed another approximately $1.3 billion towards our capital allocation priorities. We funded nearly $900 million in growth CapEx, mainly on Stage 3 and Mid-Scale 8 and 9, paid our quarterly dividend, and repurchased approximately 1.4 million shares for over $300 million. Zach will have more to share on capital allocation in a few minutes. Please turn to Slide 6 where I'll provide an update. on our construction commission and development activities at Corpus Christi. Construction and commissioning continue to progress on an accelerated schedule on stage three, where the project has reached almost 87% completion. And we're proud to announce that the substantial completion of mid-scale train two has been achieved this week. First LNG production was achieved in June, followed by a little over a month of commissioning. Almost half the time is train one. as lessons learned on train one accelerated the commissioning and enhanced the early performance of train two. I continue to expect the first three trains to reach substantial completion by the end of this year and have increasing confidence that train four will be in commissioning and producing LNG by then as well. As noted, we made positive FID on Corpus Christi mid-scale trains eight and nine back in June and have issued full notice to proceed to Bechtel on that project and related to the bottlenecking under a fully wrapped lump sum term key contract. The overall project is expected to add approximately 5 million tons of capacity by 2028. I look forward to updating you on mid-scale eight, nine milestones as a project progresses. I'm proud of the team coming together to FID one of the most attractive LNG projects in the world, taking advantage of our brownfield positioning with best-in-class EPC and SBA partners while holding to the Chenier standards that you have come to expect from us. Last month, we initiated the pre-filing process with FERC on our next large-scale growth project at Corpus Christi, CCL Stage 4. Similar to the SBL expansion project, CCL Stage 4 is designed to take full advantage of the existing site and in-place infrastructure we built in order to enable the most efficient and cost-effective incremental capacity possible. CCL Stage 4 is being developed with four large-scale ConocoPhillips trains using the optimized cascade design, two full containment LNG storage tanks, one new marine berth, and other infrastructure. In addition, in second quarter, we updated our FERC application on the SPL expansion project, reflecting three large-scale trains along with supporting and deep bottlenecking infrastructure. As I previously discussed, we plan to pursue these projects in a phased approach with an initial phase at each site, presenting a visible path for what we believe to be the most accretive brownfield growth of prevailing economics in the market today. We are full speed ahead on all key facets of development on these projects. With that, I'll now hand it over to Anatole to discuss the LNG market. Thank you again for your continued support of Cheniere.