Summit Midstream Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the first quarter 2023 Summit Midstream Partners LP earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising you your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Randall Burton, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Operator, and good morning, everyone. If you don't already have a copy of our earnings release, please visit our website at www.summitmidstream.com, where you'll find it on the homepage, events and presentations section, or quarterly results section. With me today to discuss our first quarter of 2023 financial and operating results, is Heath Denneke, our President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman, Bill Malt, our Chief Financial Officer, along with other members of our senior management team. Before we start, I'd like to remind you that our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements. These statements may include, but are not limited to, our estimates of future volumes, operating expenses, and capital expenditures. They may also include statements concerning anticipated cash flow, liquidity, business strategy, and other plans and objectives for future operations. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, we can provide no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Please see our 2022 Annual Report on Form 10-K, which was filed with the SEC on March 1, 2023, as well as our other SEC filings for listing the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Please also note that on this call we used terms EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, distributable cash flow, and free cash flow. These are non-GAAP financial measures, and we have provided reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our most recent earnings release. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Heath.

Great. Hey, thanks. Thanks, Randall. Good morning, everyone. So Summit this morning reported first quarter adjusted EBITDA of $60.4 million, which was in line with our internal expectations. As expected, we had a very active quarter operationally with over 60 new wells added to our systems, over half of which were in the Rockies region. Despite experiencing some timing slippage and longer than anticipated Fract Protect shut-ins during the quarter, these new well additions resulted in 17% liquids volume growth quarter over quarter and 14% gas volumes growth in the DJ basin relative to December of 2022. Shifting to the full-year picture, customer activity levels remain healthy across most of our operating segments. There are currently nine rigs running behind our systems and over 225 drilled but uncompleted wells that we expect will continue to drive significant volume and EBITDA growth throughout the remainder of the year. Based on recent discussions with our customers in the Barnett and Pionts, we do expect that continued downward pressure on near-term gas prices likely result in some delays and pullbacks of plant activity in 2023 versus beginning of the year expectations however we believe those changes are largely accounted for in the lower end of our original segment guidance range in those particular regions in the williston dj and and utica shell basins we continue to see resiliency in our original customer plans for the year which we believe keeps us on track overall to achieve strong sequential quarterly growth in 2023 and deliver on our adjusted EBITDA guidance range of 290 to 320 million for the year. Our focus this year is on operational execution, given the significant number of wells that we're connecting behind our system this year. Over the last five months, we have successfully integrated and continued to optimize our recently acquired DJ basin assets, Our capital program in the Williston and DJ basins continues to progress on time and on budget. And additionally, in the Delaware basin, we achieved an important milestone on EE during the quarter by receiving FERC authorization to construct a new lateral to the Red Hills processing facility in Eddy County, New Mexico. At over 1.25 BCF per day of processing capacity, the Red Hills plant is the largest processing complex in the state of New Mexico. We will be ramping up marketing activities this summer to solicit interest from new and existing customers to hopefully provide firm transportation services from the Red Hills complex and other plants in the area across the whole EE pipeline system to downstream delivery points in the Waha, Texas area. So in summary, we're off to a good start with our Q1 financial and operating results. We're excited about the cadence and level of customer activity we continue to see across our systems. and we remain on track to achieve the significant year-over-year EBITDA growth that we guided towards at the beginning of the year. So with that, let me hand the call over to Bill to provide additional detail on our segment financial results.