NET Power Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the NetPower third quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Bryce Mendez, Director, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning. Good morning. And welcome to NetPower's third 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. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release for the third 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.

Good morning, everybody. And thanks for joining us. The team has some positive updates for you today. And as we've done on previous calls, I'll provide some overview comments before passing it over to Brian and Akash for the operational and financial updates. We continue to focus our efforts on developing, improving our technology at the utility scale, which starts with Baker Hughes' validation testing at our Laporte facility. We recently kicked off phase one of our equipment validation program with Baker at Laporte. which will result in the down selection of the oxy fuel burner. I'd like to extend a big thanks to our site team and operational partners for their hard work in getting us to this point. We celebrate this milestone as it marks a critical step towards developing, improving our technology at the utility scale. And we look forward to progressing through our outlined four phase testing program at La Porte with Baker Hughes now through 2026. We're excited to announce the selection of Air Liquide as our air separation supplier for Project Permian Feed, marking another significant milestone for the team. The air separation unit represents one of the major equipment components of a net power plant. We look forward to working alongside the Air Liquide team on Project Permian in future opportunities as we continue to build out our standardized net power plant design. Shifting gears, we held an investor day in early September where we outlined a recent market study conducted in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group. In summary, the opportunity set for 24-7 low carbon energy is immense. And our targeted North American competitive markets of MISO, ERCOT, PJM, KISO, and ASO, we view the serviceable opportunities as high as 2000 net power plants, focusing on the areas with sufficient CO2 storage and infrastructure in place. And again, this opportunity set is before moving into regulated markets with utilities. In our view, by leveraging clean, cheap and abundant natural gas, NetPower presents as the lowest cost, quickest to market option to provide clean, affordable and reliable power. And we're focused on executing against our strategic pillars to ensure we can realize this massive opportunity set here in North America. On the market front, we continue to believe the world will be short clean baseload power and NetPower will be well positioned to be the first to market with a proven and scalable clean power solution. We've seen a handful of announcements lately from tech firms with early stage nuclear companies, but load growth will not wait a decade for new generation solutions to be proven out. With Project Permian coming online in 2027 slash 2028, we'll be in excellent position to capture a meaningful portion of this demand nearly a decade ahead of other potential solutions. And it's not just getting to market sooner, but it's doing so with solutions without compromise. One of the dual challenges the grid is facing is filling large baseload growth with new clean power while also supplying flexible peaking power to the grid. There's no solution today that can do both at the same time, but our oxycombustion cycle inherently can do this. One of the features we've been advancing more thoroughly is the application of our oxygen-based storage, which acts as a battery for our ASU auxiliary load. Our oxycombustion process utilizes oxygen to generate clean power, and storing excess oxygen on site enables us to utilize this oxygen in lieu of the air separation unit, which increases our net electric output. On slide six, we have illustrated this configuration, which we think is an entirely practical and economic way to provide power to co-located assets like data centers, while simultaneously providing peaking power to the grid. So the data center complex always receives its 24-7 power, and the grid receives the peaking power of our oxygen-based storage. And in terms of storage and dispatch capacity, a day's worth of oxygen stored equates to 1.2 gigawatt hours. And dispatch can be anywhere from 15 to 80 megawatts. So we're talking extremely large energy storage potential, which we think can be far more economical than traditional battery storage. In commercial conversations, the earlier response to this hybrid application has been extremely positive, and it's something we're looking to incorporate into many of our originated projects. Additionally, we'll have a small oxygen storage at Project Permian to help validate this application. While the future clean energy mix will certainly require multiple technologies, it's a good time to reiterate what NetPower is focusing on today. We are actively progressing the financing and supply offtake discussions for our first commercial scale plant, Project Permian, based on current market pricing conditions. Getting our first utility scale plant financed and operational with safe, reliable operations will change the world and catalyze our future fleet deployments. Meanwhile, we continue to push forward on the origination front. Our origination approach gives us total creative latitude of how we commercialize our technology and how we structure the financial and operational terms around future net power clean energy hubs. We're developing an extensive shadow backlog of projects by tackling the low-dollar early development work now, such that when our first utility-scale project is up and running, we have that visibility into where the next 10-plus originated hubs can go, with each hub with the ability to support 2 to 20 net power plants. At our first originated project in Northern MISO, OP1, we continue to support the MISO interconnect process and are progressing through the site and permitting phase. Our interconnect there is sized for 300 megawatts. So our plan here is power from the first plant or two goes to the grid to bring reliable clean power to MISO. And any future plants can be connected to the grid for peaking while baseload is servicing co-located load from data centers. We're in a region that we believe could have total CO2 storage capacity for a dozen or more net power plants. Up in Alberta, we recently signed an MOU with a local partner and are jointly progressing through the project feasibility phase. And Alberta is quickly becoming a focus area for data center growth because of favorable ambient temperatures for data center cooling, proximity to low-cost natural gas for energy, and favorable industry and regulatory environments that support economic growth. Back in the US, we're pursuing several MOUs in the western part of the country to establish net power hubs. Again, a combination of providing clean power to the grid to restore reliability, plus providing co-located power for data centers. This is the right technology for what the world needs for the coming decades, and we look forward to sharing more information on these opportunities when appropriate. Quick reaction to the election, to the US election. We're on the doorstep of commercializing a breakthrough solution that both sides can get behind, one that the power sector wants to succeed and one that the tech industry needs in order to meet their clean energy needs. We look forward to working with the new administration to facilitate broad commercialization of our clean, affordable, reliable power solution. So with that, I'll hand it over to Brian for the operational updates.