Cheniere Energy, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Good day and welcome to the First Quarter 2026 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 Bhatia, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Chenier's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. The slide presentation and access to the webcast for today's call are available at chenier.com. 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, a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measure can be found in the presentation appendix. The call agenda is shown on slide three. After prepared remarks from Jack, Anatole, and Zach, we will open the call for Q&A. I'll now turn the call over to Jack Fusco, Schneer's President and CEO.

Thank you, Randy, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today as we review our results from the first quarter of 2026 and our improved outlook for the full year. Certainly, a lot has changed since our last earnings call. which took place just before the start of the war in Iran. What has unfolded in the wake of that operation is another major shock in the global energy system, the second such shock in just over four years. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the weaponization of energy, including the damage to a portion of Qatar Energy's LNG facility at Ras Al Fahan, are tragic consequences. the effects of which are being felt all over the world. The sudden cessation of reliable supply of Middle Eastern oil, natural gas, and the many other products that normally transit the strait every day on their way to dependent markets around the globe shine a bright light on the criticality of supply security and a diversified portfolio. What we sell at Cheniere is access to a secure, reliable, an affordable product that provides the energy to power homes, businesses, and economies. Prior to the war, the LNG market already demanded more production than the market could supply, as evidenced by the elevated spot market margin we had in the first two months of the year. The disruption of Middle Eastern volumes only exacerbates that supply shortage, increasing prices and restricting availability of supply to the wealthiest buyers at the expense of fast-growing, energy-hungry emerging markets. At Cheniere, we look forward to the resolution of this conflict that will enable the renormalization of commerce to one of the world's most important trade gateways so that prosperity through energy affordability and availability can benefit all. Please turn to slide five, where I'll highlight our key results and accomplishments for the first quarter of 2026 and introduce our upwardly revised guidance for the year. Our performance in the first quarter has gotten off to an excellent start to 2026. We generated consolidated adjusted EBITDA of over $2.3 billion in distributable cash flow of approximately $1.7 billion. On the production side, we picked up where we left off at the end of 2025 and produced and exported a record amount of LNG in the first quarter. The 187 cargoes we exported through March topped the previous record set in the fourth quarter of last year. I'm extremely proud of our operations team whose tireless efforts to engineer and deploy solutions to address the feed gas composition related challenges we experienced last year continue to bear fruit and drove enhanced operational reliability during the quarter. Today, we are increasing our full year 2026 financial guidance to $7.25 to $7.75 billion of consolidated adjusted EBITDA and $4.75 to $5.25 billion of DCF. This significantly improved outlook The previous high end of the EBITDA guidance is a new low end, is driven primarily by an improvement in our production forecast of approximately 1 million tons, higher marketing margins, as well as higher contributions from optimization activities achieved year to date, both upstream and downstream of our facilities. Jack will cover guidance in more detail in a few minutes, but we look forward to delivering financial results within these upwardly revised ranges for the year. During the first quarter, we continue to execute on our comprehensive capital allocation plan. We repurchased approximately 2.7 million shares for approximately $535 million, funded approximately a billion dollars worth of growth CapEx with equity and debt. We paid down over a quarter of a billion dollars in debt, and we declared a dividend of 55.5 cents. Moving to our growth projects, we continue to make excellent and safe progress on our growth and expansion during the first quarter. Our CCL Stage 3 project now stands at approximately 97% complete. Substantial completion was achieved on Train 5 in March, and Trains 6 and 7 remain on track for substantial completion in the summer and fall, respectively. with each now tracking a few weeks ahead of schedule that had informed our initial 2026 production forecast in October of last year. First LNG at train 6 is expected within a few days. On our mid-scale trains 8, 9, and D bottlenecking project, we have safely progressed to approximately 37% complete, and while it's still early, are tracking ahead of schedule a number of execution fronts. Piling is nearly complete with approximately 8,000 piles having been driven. The first structural still has been erected, and the next major construction milestone is the first above-ground piping, which is scheduled to be installed this month. With regard to our future growth, our line of sight on the Phase I expansions at both Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi continues to improve. As we disclosed on our last earnings call, we are budgeting for limited notices to proceed this year on the first phase of the Sabine Pass expansion, Train 7. We are working closely with Bechtel to finalize the EPC contract and would expect to begin issuing LNTPs shortly thereafter, which should be seen by the market as a clear signal that we are on track to reach FID. At Corpus Christi, We're making excellent progress in our development of the CCL expansion project. We were pleased to receive our scheduling notice from FERC last week, supporting our expectation of FERC's approval on that project in the first half of this year. We are extremely excited about these phase one projects, which we believe represent the most compelling risk adjusted infrastructure investment opportunities on the Gulf Coast or maybe all of North America, and are expected to accretively grow the Cheniere production platform by approximately 10% each. Turn now to slide six, where I'll discuss my key strategic priorities for 2026. My priorities for 2026 are simple. Execution, growth, and capital allocation. And I'll drill down briefly into each. on execution. My priority is to maintain our track record of delivering top tier safety metrics while furthering our operational excellence program and being a trusted and reliable supplier to our customers. In dealing with some operational challenges last year, the team has responded with determination and resolve, and its efforts are paying significant dividends. The team has increased the utilization across both sites by identifying root causes and innovating solutions to address the issues impacting reliability, not just the symptoms. In addition, the team has increased production through identifying and executing on debottlenecking opportunities while seamlessly executing on our planned maintenance activities. And we are focused on managing our platform in a market with elevated volatility. Despite the volatility, our coordinated teams across the globe have done an excellent job managing our positions and assets, ensuring we deliver on our obligations to our customers while optimizing the portfolio through volatile domestic gas markets, like we saw during the winter storm fern, as well as very volatile international gas and shipping markets that have prevailed since early March. Next on growth. With Trains 1 through 5 of Stage 3 substantially complete, our immediate priority is the safe completion of Trains 6 and 7. As I just mentioned, these trains have accelerated since last year, benefiting from lessons learned on the first trains as our partnership with Bechtel has not only resulted in early operations of the trains, but also shorter timelines on both commissioning and ramp-up to full production. I expect those learnings to continue in order to benefit mid-scale trains 8 and 9 as those trains move deeper into construction later this year. On our SBL expansion and CCL expansion, we are aggressively executing project development work streams across regulatory, financing, commercial, and EPC contracting as FIDs on those projects come into focus. Last week, we received our scheduling notice from FERC on the CCL expansion project, a critical step in the FERC process, and it is aligned with our expected timeline of FERC approval in the first half of 2027. And finally, on capital allocation, we had a major update on the last call with the achievement of the original 2020 vision plan, the new $9 billion authorization the Board approved during the quarter for share buyback, and our new share count and run rate DCF targets. We are in an enviable capital allocation position, enabled by our incredible long-term contract portfolio that provides decades of cash flow visibility, our brownfield growth opportunities, investment grade balance sheet, and opportunistic repurchase plan. In February, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of our first cargo. and next week will mark my 10th anniversary at Chenier. I'm extremely proud of the many incredible milestones we've accomplished together in that time. While these anniversaries offer the opportunity to look back, I prefer to look forward. And what we have in front of us are incredible opportunities. An opportunity to creatively grow Chenier in the near term and secure the next phase of growth beyond that. An opportunity to grow our platform by another 20% benefit engineer stakeholders while providing the world with more of the secure and reliable energy it needs to improve lives, grow businesses, and help emerging markets emerge. I'm incredibly excited about these opportunities, and we are laser focused on turning them into achievements in the coming years. With that, I'll now hand it over to Anatole to discuss the LNG market. Thank you again for your continued support of Chennair.