NET Power Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the NetPower, Inc. First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Bryce Mendez, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning and welcome to NetPower's First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. With me on the call today, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Danny Rice, and our Chief Operating Officer, Mark Horstman. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release for the first quarter of 2025, which can be found on our investor relations website at ir.netpower.com. During this call, our remarks 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, Bryce. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining NetPower's first quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to share an update on our progress to deliver clean, reliable power with our proprietary NetPower cycle. Before diving into our updates, I'd like to welcome Mark Horstman, our new chief operating officer, who recently stepped into this role. Mark brings over 20 years of experience in the power sector, and his expertise in product development and operational execution is already proving invaluable as we sharpen our focus on cost optimization and commercial success. As we outlined on our last call, we've established a few focus areas for 2025. First, we're working to improve the project economics for our first utility scale plant, mainly by reducing the total installed cost. Second, we're working to determine a viable commercial pathway to a highly competitive levelized cost of energy, or LCOE for short, mainly through a combination of realizing improvements in cycle thermal efficiencies and reductions in per-unit capital costs. We expect to realize fairly meaningful cost reductions with multi-unit deployments, particularly in locations with coastal access. And this year, we're working to quantify these savings with greater accuracy. And our third focus area is moving the ball down the field with our report testing, which will meaningfully prove up performance expectations for our commercial scale clean power plants. We're in a unique position where we possess the capital needed to achieve these three goals in a very cost effective manner. We have no debt and we exited the first quarter with approximately $500 million of cash and cash equivalents earning roughly 5% interest per year. For the full year, we're budgeting to spend approximately $190 million net of interest income, comprised of $45 million for G&A, $50 million for Laporte and other R&D activities to further prove out the technology, and $100 million for SN1 development and Baker turbine development for commercial deployment. We expect to exit 2025 with two stages of Laporte testing completed, a more competitive cost estimate for SN1, a better, more appropriate pathway to get to a competitive long-term LCOE in nearly $350 million of cash on hand. Before turning to Mark for operational updates, I want to briefly address our share price and capital allocation strategy. NetPower's current trading price is near our cash value, implying the market is assigning little value to our technology. This stands in stark contrast to other clean power technology companies, many of whom have less liquidity longer commercialization timelines, lower technology readiness levels, and higher LCOEs, yet trading at valuations in the billions. This discrepancy really underscores a significant dislocation in how the market values our clean, firm power solution and gas solutions more broadly versus these others. There's such a large cost gap between most clean, firm power solutions and natural gas. Just last week, Canada announced 1.2 gigawatts of new nukes costing over 15 billion US dollars, which is nearly six times the cost of new gas-based power. And it really begs the question, can net power get its cost lower than new nuclear? Our first plant, Project Permian, which is very likely to be the most expensive and least efficient one we ever deploy, we expect it to be much lower cost than the aforementioned nuclear plants. Data points like this continue to reaffirm our original thesis, which is that in regions with access to low-cost natural gas and places to safely store the CO2, the lowest cost way to deliver clean, reliable power can and should come from natural gas-based solutions. And load growth should go to those markets that can generate the lowest cost, most reliable power. So we're constantly assessing ways to best unlock the potential of our unique technology, a commitment we owe to our shareholders including our major strategic investors, Oxy, Constellation, Baker Hughes, SK Group, and the Rice family, who collectively own approximately 85% of our company's equity. Our investment decisions are made with this focus in mind, and I believe our 2025 investments represent the best use of our capital to do just that. So with that, I'll now turn the call over to Mark to walk through our focus areas for this year.