Cheniere Energy, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the third quarter 2025 Chenier Energy Earnings Call and Webcast. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Randy Batia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Chenier's third 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, 2025 guidance, and initial outlook for 2026. After prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. I'll now turn the call over to Jack Fusco, Cheniere's President and CEO.

Thank you, Randy. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today as we review our results from the third quarter of 2025. I think we can all agree that this year has been one of the more challenging, with geopolitical unrest, rising costs and insufficient supply chains, tariffs, and now a government shutdown. My focus has been to lead Cheniere by putting our heads down, driving our growth strategy forward, continuing to deliver on operational excellence, executing on construction management, and implementing our capital allocation program. The third quarter of 2025 was once again marked by many key successes across our entire business. We made significant progress on the expansion of Corpus Christi Stage 3, We progressed our development plans for engineering and commercialization of our expansion at Sabine Pass, all while continuing to achieve operational milestones, solidifying our reputation as a reliable supplier and partner to our global customer portfolio. The third quarter also gave us an opportunity to invest meaningfully back into ourselves with our share repurchase program for the benefit of all Chenier stakeholders. In the LNG market, events and data points on both the supply side and demand side of the equation continue to fuel noise and volatility. But Cheniere's disciplined approach and our highly contracted business profile enable us to reliably deliver visible, predictable results in line with our previously issued forecast. We're very pleased to announce this morning that substantial completion of the third train of Corpus Christi stage three has been achieved, an acceleration of our forecasted timeline from only a few months ago. I have more to say on stage three in a few minutes, including on a recently improved timeline on train four. Please turn now to slide five, where I'll highlight our key results and accomplishments for the third quarter of 2025. In the third quarter, we generated consolidated adjusted EBITDA of approximately $1.6 billion, distributable cash flow of approximately $1.6 billion, and net income of approximately $1 billion. Today, we are reconfirming our full-year 2025 guidance range of $6.6 to $7 billion in consolidated adjusted EBITDA, and we are raising our distributable cash flow guidance range from $4.4 to $4.8 billion, to $4.8 to $5.2 billion. Zach will provide more detail later on this call on our financial results, but the guidance increase related to our DCF outlook is being driven by a discrete IRS rule change related to the corporate alternative minimum tax. Our guidance continues to be supported by the high degree of visibility and certainty our highly contracted platform affords. and we remain on track to deliver financial results within these ranges. During the third quarter, we produced and exported 163 cargoes of LNG from our facilities, which included the 3,000th LNG cargo produced at Sabine Pass. I'd like to recognize and congratulate our production and shipping teams at Sabine Pass on this milestone achievement, an incredible accomplishment less than 10 years since the first cargo was produced and exported from our facility. Across both facilities, we achieved production levels this year that are within our financial forecast, while successfully navigating some operational challenges primarily driven by external factors such as variability in natural gas quality. Structural shifts in the basin mix of domestic gas production attributed to new gas transportation infrastructure have made slight but noticeable changes in the composition of some feed gas we receive at our terminals. This requires our operating staff to make real-time adjustments to our liquefaction processes, like solvent injections or defrost to clean heat exchangers, or adjusting our operating modes and maintenance activities to adapt to those changes. I'm extremely proud of the teams at both facilities for working safely and collaboratively to address these variables, develop long-term solutions to address feed gas composition in order to maximize sustainable, reliable production and enable us to deliver LNG volumes and financial results within our guided ranges. Looking ahead, the preliminary production forecast for 2026 has recently been completed and aided by the startup of the remaining trains at Corpus Christi Stage 3. We expect 2026 to be another record year for LNG production. Our production forecast for 2026 accounts for the impact of strategically planned maintenance, including certain downtimes designed to deploy engineering solutions at both facilities to bolster long-term production reliability and build additional resilience to those external forces, which can create production variability. With that said, with three mid-scale trains now commercially operable, and together with the remaining four Stage 3 trains and no prolonged major maintenance planned, we're looking forward to 2026 being our first year of producing over 50 million tons. During the third quarter, we continue to make excellent progress on our comprehensive capital allocation plan, deploying approximately $1.8 billion across the pillars of our program. We funded approximately $600 million in growth capex, primarily across Corpus Christi Stage 3 and mid-scale trains 8 and 9. We paid approximately $110 million in dividends, and we repaid approximately $50 million in long-term debt. The balance of the capital deployed was under a share repurchase plan, which was able to take further advantage of the value present in the shares during the quarter and bought back approximately 4.4 million shares for just over $1 billion. the second highest quarterly amount we have deployed, repurchasing shares to date. Please turn to slide six, where I'll update you on the progress of Corpus Christi Stage 3. I'm very proud of the progress we have made and continue to make, executing in all phases of this project, as total project completion on Stage 3 reached over 90% last month. Execution remains on accelerated schedule, and as I mentioned earlier, we reached substantial completion on Train 3 ahead of our previous forecasts. Together with Bechtel, we are achieving construction and commissioning milestones with the benefit of lessons learned on the first trains of the project. In fact, we reached a single-day LNG production record last week of approximately 7.5 TBTU of LNG with Train 3 now operating. Similar to the commissioning timeline improvement we saw on Train 2, Train 3 went from first LNG to substantial completion in just 38 days. This is in contrast to the 77 days on the first train and evidence of the acceleration resulting from experience and knowledge transfer across trains and, of course, our long-term partnership with Bechtel. Train 4 is benefiting as well, and those that follow us closely have surely seen the regulatory approvals we've been receiving relating to the startup of that train. On our previous call, my expectation was that we would have Train 4 in commissioning by the end of the year. However, we're bringing forward our timeline by over a month, with Train 4 now expected to produce first LNG very soon and is on track for substantial completion by the end of this year. We continue to forecast substantial completion of Trains 5 through 7 next year. Current key activities across those trains include the last few percentage points of concrete and structural steel and the installation of above-ground piping. As for the cadence of substantial completion for Trains 5, 6, and 7 next year, we expect those to occur in the spring, summer, and fall, respectively, after Train 4 becomes commercially operable this winter. On the mid-scale Trains 8 and 9 and de-bottlenecking project, full notice to proceed was issued to Bechtel in June, and it has hit the ground running, quite literally, as the first ground pile was installed during the quarter. The bulk of the activity thus far has been on engineering and procurement, as well as mobilization and site preparation. We're extremely excited about this project economics and timeline, benefiting from all the work that's been done on Stage 3, and I look forward to updating you all on the safe execution and achievement of the milestones as we move into construction. In the highly competitive market that we're in, continued demonstration of construction execution and timely delivery on customer commitments is a meaningful differentiator and significant competitive advantage, especially as we seek to further expand our footprint with more creative brownfield growth at both sites that never compromises on our contracted return targets for investments. I'm extremely proud of these elements that have come to exemplify the Chenier standard which we are all committed to upholding across all aspects of our business for the benefit of all Chenier shareholders. With that, I'll now hand it over to Anatole to discuss the LNG market. Thank you all again for your continued support of Chenier.