Venture Global, Inc. Class A common stock

Good morning, and welcome to the Venture Global Inc.' 's first quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global Inc.' 's first quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sable, Venture Global's CEO and executive co-chairman and founder, Jack Thayer, our CFO, and other members of Venture Global's senior management team. Before I begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from what is described in these statements. I encourage you to refer to the disclaimers on our earnings presentation, which is available on the investor section of our website. Additionally, we may include references to certain non-GAAP metrics, such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA, which we may refer to simply as EBITDA during this call. A reconciliation of these metrics to the most relevant GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of the earnings presentation posted on our website. Finally, the guidance in this presentation is effective as of today. Generally, we will not update guidance until the following quarter and will not update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated public disclosure. I'll now turn the call over to Mike Sable.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our first quarter 2026 results. I will begin the call with an overview of our key accomplishments and future plans. I will then make some remarks on the LNG industry before turning over the call to Jack, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results, as well as updated guidance for 2026. Following all prepared remarks, we will open the call to Q&A. Turning to page five of the presentation, the unstoppable energy demonstrated since the founding of Venture Global has gained further momentum thus far in 2026. With the FID of CP2 phase two, we are on track to be the largest LNG producer in North America by the end of 2027, with line of sight to over 100 million tons of annual production by 2030. Total assets were up by over $11 billion year over year to $56 billion at the end of the first quarter. We continue to be active in contracting our available capacity And now I have more than 52 MTPA of long and medium-term contracts, totaling approximately $137 billion of revenue backlog. The business is running extremely well, and we remain on track for COD of Plaquemines Phase 1 in the fourth quarter of this year. We are developing highly accretive bolt-on expansions, which we believe should come online in a fraction of the time LNG projects traditionally take. while maintaining the highest safety standards in the industry, as we've demonstrated at our current projects. On page six, I'll highlight our performance in the first quarter. As you can see, despite the impact of winter storm fern and some spillover from market disruptions in late 2025, we were still able to grow revenue, income from operations, net income, and EBITDA year over year. We are also increasing our 2026 EBITDA guidance to $8.2 to $8.5 billion from $5.2 to $5.8 billion, which assumes liquefaction fees for the remainder of the year in line with the current four occurs. Jack will discuss these numbers in greater detail. Turning to page seven, as you know, we completed the FID of phase two of CP2 with an $8.6 billion project financing. Thus far in Q2, our focus has been on simplifying our capital structure through the refinancing of a $1.6 billion redeemable preferred security at Calcasieu Pass Funding LLC held by Stone Peak with a more tax efficient and lower interest rate term loan B facility. We also raised $750 million of new Calcasieu Pass bonds to term out and repay the remaining balance of its construction loan. These two transactions are particularly gratifying as they represent the repayment of all the original debt capital that enabled Venture Global to launch its first project. Operationally, we safely exported a new record of 130 cargoes in the first quarter. Commercial momentum has continued in 2026 with five-year offtake agreements with Trafigura and VTOL and a 20-year offtake agreement with Hanwha Aerospace finalized in the first quarter. Furthermore, today, We are pleased to announce that the five-year agreement with VTOL has been upsized from 1.5 MTPA to approximately 1.7 MTPA, and we have also finalized a new agreement with Total Energies for 0.85 MTPA for approximately five years. Moving to page eight. As you can see, we expect production from our operational and commissioning facilities to be relatively stable over the course of 2026 with normal seasonality and potential variability from Plaquemines commissioning process. Our contracted position for 2026 has increased markedly to 84% of the portfolio from the 69% reported on our fourth quarter 2025 earnings call in March. In addition, April 15th marked the one-year anniversary of COD at Kalkshu Pass, and I'm pleased to say that we have now exported more than 150 contracted cargoes to our customers without missing a single scheduled cargo. Turning to page nine, you can see the evolution and speed at which we are executing CP2 construction. We are now just under 10 months from FID, and the progress being made is astonishing. CP2 is our largest project to date, and we are increasingly confident it will be the fastest to progress from FID to first LNG, not only for Venture Global, but in the history of the LNG industry. That speed translates into returns, as we expect we should be able to earn back nearly all of our equity in the project with pre-COD cargoes, with a return on invested capital over 30%. All 21,842 linear feet of the perimeter wall is now complete, making the facility watertight, which is extremely important as we accept delivery of valuable modules. We now have 12 liquefaction trains and three gas turbines for the power plant delivered to the site and on foundations, and many more on their way. First LNG is still tracking well for the second half of next year. On page 10, we thought it would be helpful to present our production profile and EBITDA sensitivity for the next several years. As you can see, Our production profile is growing quickly with CP2 coming online and continues to grow as we begin adding the bolt-on expansions at CP2 and Plaquemines. In the past two years, we grew the number of cargoes exported by 166%. By 2028, we expect exported cargoes to grow by another 130% from current levels. While our portfolio of 52 MTPA of medium or long-term contracts is more than our nameplate capacity, it is just over 60% of the 85 MTPA we expect to have online by the end of 2029, providing an opportunity for further intermediate and long-term contracting. The cadence of new project startup and the subsequent commissioning cargoes also means our near-term available for sale capacity is elevated over the next several years as we move each project towards COD, matching well with the near-term global supply and demand market dynamic. As you can see on page 11, while we continue to contract available cargoes on a short, medium, and long-term basis, we have over 33 MTPA of available capacity to contract over the next several years with the addition of our first two bolt-ons. not including commissioning cargoes we expect to contract the majority of this capacity over the next several years on a blend of long-term contracts to support new project financing and medium-term contracts to optimize returns and flexibility on page 12 we depict the first two bolt-on expansions we expect to develop after cp2 phase 2. we are updating our near-term development plan to include the full expansion of CP2, which is 12 trains or 10 MTPA. The Plaquemines expansion bolt-on plans remain unchanged at around 6.4 MTPA with optionality that additional trains as market conditions dictate. We are working with regulators to expedite the permitting of both facilities and are actively negotiating commercial agreements. We have already begun to order long lead equipment and will look to move forward with the first CP2 and then Plaquemines expansions by early and mid next year, respectively. On page 14, we address pertinent industry trends. Since we last reported, approximately 20% of global energy capacity has been offline in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, as you know. Roughly 13 million tons, or 3% of global production, is likely to remain offline for several years, and the construction schedule of the planned expansion of Qatar's Ras Al Fahm remains to be updated. As reflected by healthy LNG forward curves in January and February, we believe the LNG market was already well balanced prior to the March supply disruptions. So unsurprisingly, LNG prices have subsequently been higher, and the forward curve is lifted for several years into the future. Interestingly, U.S. LNG infrastructure, which only started production 10 years ago, has now grown to 19 BCF, of feed gas per day. Despite this unprecedented growth, domestic natural gas prices are almost exactly where they were 10 years ago. The U.S. has decades of low-cost natural gas reserves positioning the country and venture global to continue to provide affordable and reliable LNG to the global market. I also think the current environment highlights the value of Henry Hublink prices versus oil link prices that are common in most other markets. Not only has Henry Hub not moved higher, with rising oil prices, but US natural gas prices have fallen as production of gas associated with oil production has increased. Examining current and future LNG production in the Middle East. While we do not know how long the Strait of Hormuz closure will last, clearly there is an immediate impact, and we believe it is likely to take some time for even the equipment that has not been damaged to return to full operational capacity. Lower production levels are only compounding the already historically low EU gas inventory levels, which were already near multi-year lows following cold winter temperatures. Depleted inventories will need to be rebuilt before next winter, likely increasing exposure to the forthcoming winter and compounding the challenge of constrained LNG production. Also, many traditionally price elastic markets like China, India, and Pakistan have already made near-term demand adjustments, and residual demand is increasingly inelastic. As a result, we believe the current backwardation in TTF and JKM forwards is unsustainable. Storage must be replenished, and winter markets are likely to rally, absent a near-term cessation of hostilities as market fundamentals take hold. Beyond the immediate impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the two damaged Qatari liquefaction trains, The 49 million ton Northfield expansion is already delayed and we expect could be delayed further by factors like supply chain disruptions and the availability of skilled labor as Qatar works to bring that facility back on schedule. Now I'll turn it over to CFO Jack Thayer, who will review the quarterly performance, provide an overview of our project performance, and discuss our updated financial guidance.