Spire Inc.

Good day and welcome to the SPIRE, Inc. Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one, on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please know this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Scott Dudley, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to SPIRE's fiscal 2022 third quarter earnings call. We issued an earnings news release this morning and you may access it on our website at spireenergy.com under newsroom. There's a slide presentation that accompanies our webcast and you may download it either from the webcast site or from our website under investors, and then events and presentations. Before we begin, let me cover our safe harbor statement and use of non-GAAP earnings measures. Today's call, including responses to questions, may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although our forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, there are various uncertainties and risk factors that may cause future performance or results to be different than those anticipated. These risks and uncertainties are outlined in our quarterly and annual filings with the SEC. In our comments, we will be discussing the economic earnings, which is a non-GAAP measure used by management when evaluating our performance and results of operations. An explanation and reconciliation of this measure to its GAAP counterpart is contained in both our news release and slide presentation. On our call today is Suzanne Sutherwood, President and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Lindsey, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, and Steve Rasche, Executive Vice President and CFO. Also in the room with us is Scott Carter, President of Spire Missouri, and Adam Woodard, Vice President and Treasurer and CFO of Gas Utilities. With that, I will turn the call over to Suzanne.

Thank you, Scott, and good afternoon, everyone. As we all know, the U.S. energy industry is changing. As customer expectations and the energy technologies that serve them continue to evolve, there are differing philosophies on the future of our industry. Our philosophy is whatever path the energy transition ultimately takes, natural gas is vital to a sustainable energy future. In that spirit, our mission has guided us to build a strong, resilient natural gas company that's grounded in serving people through changing time, answer every challenge, advance every community, and enrich every life through the strength of our energy. That strength showed up in a big way over the last 10 years as we built a solid foundation and successfully executed on our strategy to grow and transform our company. We did it through acquisitions and organic growth, as well as infrastructure investment and innovation that has enabled us to continually raise the bar for how we serve our customers and communities. The next 10 years calls upon the strength of our energy to continue that growth while balancing the needs of those people and the planet. So, we are increasingly focused on environmental sustainability and elevated customer experience for millions of people and 1.7 million homes and businesses. In addition, the next 10 years requires our industry as a whole to think differently about service. As you know, I've been in the natural gas business more than 40 years, and if there's something I'm committed to above all else, it's changing the paradigm around the concept of a rate payer. Rate payer is a word and a mindset that's a relic of an industry that believed it was in the regulated utility business. We are not. We are in the business of providing essential energy to people. And while the businesses we operate work inside a regulated structure, the service we provide to people is not meant to be encumbered with broad and restrictive customer classes, like residential or commercial and industrial. We don't serve rate payers. We enrich the lives of people, people who have different needs, interests, and means. That's why we're focused on leveraging technology and innovation to create more personalized services and experiences for our customers, and to rethink and differentiate how people pay for those services. Technology has provided a good starting point for the changes we envision. We've already enhanced our billing and overall customer experience while deploying ultrasonic meters that will provide real-time information that's beneficial to both buyers and, more importantly, our customers. We'll have more to say about all of this in the months and years ahead, but I'm excited for what the future holds as we work to advance energy solutions and deliver on our promise of being energy that champions people. Because our natural gas businesses are a vital part of America's energy future, we remain squarely focused on our long-term strategic priorities and commitments as we address some near-term regulatory matters. We continue to invest significant amounts of capital to upgrade our system, drive new businesses, and advance our technology, all of which keeps us moving toward an innovative, resilient, and sustainable energy future. As we announced this morning, our operating results and capital deployment through the first three quarters of the year keep us on pace with the expectations we've set for the full year. I know you've been closely following our rate case in Missouri and the remand proceedings at BERT regarding SPIRE STL Pipeline Certificate. We continue to progress in each of these matters, as Steve Lindsay will discuss. In early June, we issued our 2021 Sustainability Report and held a conference call a few weeks later, which many of you attended. We described the significant progress we've made in measuring and reporting on our overall sustainability performance. Based on the questions we received, We know you are especially interested in our environmental sustainability, particularly reducing methane emissions, and how renewable and alternative energy can support our long-term carbon neutral commitment. So, let me take a moment to recap how we are advancing our environmental sustainability. Becoming a carbon neutral company by mid-century means that we have committed to reducing and offsetting greenhouse gas emissions from our operations to neutralize our impact on the planet we love. I'm happy to report that we're on target to reduce gas utility methane emissions 59% by 2025 and 73% by 2035, as compared to 2005. To make sure that we have very clear goals and measurements around this, we have a dedicated team leading our company-wide environmental efforts, including defining the strategy, and the roadmap. I'm pleased to note that the team has now established scope one and scope two emissions, setting a baseline on our overall carbon footprint, covering both direct and indirect emissions. To date, our efforts to reduce emissions have been focused on pipeline replacement to lower the methane emissions from gas utility operations. But we know over the longer term, it will take more than infrastructure upgrades to achieve our greenhouse gas targets. That's why we're evaluating renewable energy resources, including renewable natural gas, or RNG, as well as alternative resources like hydrogen. In considering RNG opportunities, we're exploring methane capture from a variety of sources, including landfills and animal waste from agricultural operations. However, in the near term, we are primarily focused on wastewater treatment plants where we see the most promise. As we noted previously, we supported the passage of legislative bills in Missouri to allow the recovery of RNG procurement and investment costs, and are working with the Missouri Commission on Rulemaking to implement the RNG Enabling Law. As fire marketing, we recently announced that we completed a multi-year agreement to purchase Responsibly Sourced Gas, or RSG, from Ascent Resources, one of the largest private producers of natural gas with operations located in the Utica Shell. The agreement allows buyer marketing to meet the demands from customers seeking gas that's certified for low-emission attributes and is produced in an environmentally responsible manner. Now, I'll pass the call to Steve Lindsay.