Summit Midstream Corporation

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Summit Midstream first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 1-1 again. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host of today's program, Randall Burton, Treasurer and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Operator, and good morning, everyone. If you don't already have a copy of our earnings release, please visit our website at summitmidstream.com, where you'll find it on the homepage, events and presentation section, or quarterly results section. With me today to discuss our first quarter of 2026 financial and operating results is Heath Deneke, our President, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Bill Malt, our chief financial officer, and Chris Tennant, our chief commercial 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 SMC's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, which the company filed with the SEC on March 16, 2026, as well as our other SEC filings for a listing of factors that cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Please also note that on this call, we use the terms EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, distributable cash flow, and free cash flow. These are non-GAAP financial measures, and we've provided reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our most recent earnings release. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Heath.

Thanks, Randall, and good morning, everyone. Summit reported first quarter 2026 adjusted EBITDA of $54.2 million, which was generally in line with expectations, despite lower volumes and realized residue gas prices in the Arcoma. The underperformance in the MidCon segment was partially offset by gains in the Rocky segment, driven by higher than budgeted crude oil pricing. So based on the current activity levels, the recent well performance and our visibility in the second half of the year volumes, We continue to expect results to trend towards the midpoint of our original 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $225 million to $265 million. Before I get into the operational highlights, I wanted to spend a moment on the macro picture, which we see becoming increasingly constructive for Summit. Crude oil prices are obviously much higher than the lows we saw earlier this year. And for a business like ours, where roughly 80% of our oil connects in 2026 are expected in crude oil-oriented basins, a more constructive crude environment translates directly into improved producer economics and an incentive to accelerate and increase activity levels. Several of our Rockies customers have communicated that they're actively working on plans to attempt to accelerate activity into 2026 and increase overall activity levels in 2027. We're also seeing benefits from higher crude oil pricing on our field condensate cells and our optimization activities in the rocky segment. At the same time, the natural gas outlook remains favorable as well. Henry Hub has remained constructive, LNG export demand continues to grow rapidly, and the long-term demand outlook from data center growth and electrification is increasingly supportive of the natural gas infrastructure we operate in our MidCon and Permian segments. For our mid-con segment, there's a great backdrop to see activity levels pick up in the coming years in both the Arcoma and the Barnett, as these assets are very well positioned on the natural gas pipeline grid to feed LNG and power markets along the Gulf Coast. The macro outlook is also very supportive of increasing demand for our EE gas pipeline in the Permian that transports residue gas from multiple processing facilities throughout the core of the Delaware Basin to the Waha hub which then connects to more than 20 BCF a day of Eastern bound gas infrastructure that serves the East Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast markets. Turning to operations, we connected 37 wells during the quarter, including the first four Williston wells under the new 10 year crude gathering agreement that we announced last quarter in Divide County. Early production results from those wells had been encouraging. In Aricoma, while we did experience lower than expected well performance from two pads during the quarter, which was the primary driver of the volume underperformance in that segment, but both of these pads were drilled in the outer edges of our dedicated acreage footprint in an attempt to further extend the boundaries of proven but undeveloped locations in the Caney and Woodford formations. Recently, though, we have brought on a new three-well pad in the dry gas area of our coma system, and we're seeing these wells significantly outperform our internal expectations. These three wells continue to ramp up, but have already averaged approximately 50 million a day combined over the past couple of days since being turned in line, which is a very encouraging early read, and it really gets us excited about future growth in the mid-con segment. We currently have five rigs running behind the system with approximately 80 drilled but incomplete wells, and we expect approximately 40 new well connects in the second quarter, including 20 in the mid-con segment. That second quarter activity and well results from some of the wells already connected in the second quarter sets up a very meaningful volume increase as we move into the back half of the year. On the EE front, subsequent to the quarter end, we executed another 10-year take-or-pay proceeding agreement for 100 million a day of firm capacity, which is slated to start in the first half of 27. That brings our total contracted volumes on EE to just over 1.7 BCF a day. And we continue to build momentum in our ongoing open season to secure additional commitments to support the previously announced 800 million a day midpoint compressor expansion project. Given the market interest that we've seen thus far, we remain very optimistic about securing additional contracts that are necessary to help us make a final investment decision on the project this summer. We also made meaningful progress to further simplify and improve the balance sheet this quarter. We repaid all $45 million of accrued Series A preferred stock dividends, which clears a key milestone on the path to reinstate a common dividend. We completed a $42 million private placement of common stock to an affiliate of Tailwater Capital, our largest shareholder, which will help us fund high return organic growth projects across our operating footprint. And finally, we closed the Summit Permian Transmission Term Loan refinancing, which provides the financial flexibility to fund EE capital growth while we continue to delever Summit's corporate balance sheet. So with that update, let me turn it over to Bill to walk through the details on the financials.