NET Power Inc.

Hello, and welcome to the NetPower, Inc. first quarter 2024 earnings call. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may be placed into question queue at any time by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Bryce Mendez. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to NetPower's first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me on the call today, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Danny Rice, our President and Chief Operating Officer, Brian Allen, and our Chief Financial Officer, Akash Patel. Today, we issued our earnings release for the first quarter of 2024, which can be found on our investor relations website, along with this presentation at ir.netpower.com. During this call, our remarks and responses to questions may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied by forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business. These risks and uncertainties are discussed in our SEC filings. Please note that we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. With that, I'll now pass it over to Danny Rice, NetPower's Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks all for joining us. We're going to reference several slides in the investment presentation we posted to our website, and I'd encourage you to have those handy. To summarize where we are today, development remains on track for our utility scale product. Development remains on track for our first project. Our total addressable market is expanding faster than we expected, and government policy is evolving in our favor. Brian will provide an update on product and project development, but first let me share some thoughts on the macro. Society's paramount need for the next century is to implement scalable energy solutions that can provide clean, affordable, and reliable power, a trifecta that remains elusive in current offerings. Despite the enormity of the prize at hand, only a handful of emerging solutions hold the promise on delivering on these fronts, and net power really stands out among them. Diving into the US in particular, the expected deficit between future power supply and future power demand continues to widen as load growth, primarily from data centers in the electrification of everything, is outrunning supply growth, which we think will move forward power prices significantly higher. In a free market, higher prices would induce new supply, primarily from coal and gas power plants. But what makes this situation really interesting is that the EPA recently finalized its Section 111B and D emission rules for coal and gas power plants. To summarize the rules, all coal plants must capture the equivalent of 95% of its CO2 emissions by 2032, and all new baseload gas plants operating more than 40% of the time must begin capturing 90% of its emissions by 2032, while existing gas plants will be addressed down the line as EPA gathers more inputs. These emissions rules raise the bar for the industry. We think it's one that our power plants will handily meet. As we think about positioning versus post-combustion carbon capture solutions, our oxy-combustion based plant will be likely the best way to comply in load following mode. That is, we're capturing over 97% of CO2, whether we're at partial or full output. When we pair the EPA rules with the IRA incentives, It positions net power to become the lowest cost form of marginal baseload power in markets with access to CS2 storage. And as a reminder, approximately 80% of US thermal power generation today is above or near world-class carbon sinks. And I think Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best, if you build the perfect mousetrap, the world will build a beaten path to your door. And for that reason, we need to be ready for future demand and it's why we're preparing our supply chain for significant manufacturing scale-up by the early 2030s. Turning to the origination side of the business, we submitted our MISO interconnection application for OP1, our first net power originated project. This marks a critical first step in improving reliability in the grid system, and we look forward to working through the interconnect process with MISO. So while OP1 continues to advance as we intended, We're in active dialogue with prospective partners on additional origination opportunities across other competitive power markets, including PJM, ERCOT, CAISO, and the Alberta system. We continue to have active dialogue with a cross-section of companies across the oil and gas, power, data center, and industrial sectors, along with infrastructure capital providers that are interested in financing our regional origination hub programs. And last but not least, I'd like to thank our team for their hard work. NetPower is approximately 60 full-time employees, plus another approximately 200 full-time resources across our various investor and supply chain partners are doing everything they can to make NetPower a commercial success. I'd like to commend this team and our partners for a great job maintaining an aggressive schedule to develop and deploy our technology. It's not easy, but they're finding ways to get it done, and I think it's important for our shareholders to see this. I'll now hand it over to Brian to give an operational update.