Venture Global, Inc. Class A common stock

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Venture Global, Inc. second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ben, please go ahead.

Thank you, Trevor. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global, Inc.'s second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sabel, Venture Global's CEO, 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 may differ materially from what is described in these statements. Thank you for joining us. Finally, the guidance in this presentation is only effective as of today. In general, 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 Sabel.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our second quarter 2026 results. I'll begin the call with an overview of our key accomplishments in the quarter and an update on the business. 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'll open the call to Q&A. On page five, you can see some of the highlights for the quarter, including our largest ever quarterly EBITDA of $2.5 billion and significant growth in volumes, revenue, income from operations, net income, and EBITDA year over year. We are increasing our 2026 EBITDA guidance to $8.7 to $9.1 billion from $8.2 to $8.5 billion based on current market outlook for the remainder of the year. Given outsized LNG price volatility related to events in the Middle East, we have maintained a broader than usual guidance range than in the past. As we contract the remainder of our expected volumes for the year, we expect to tighten this range following the third quarter. Jack will discuss these numbers in greater detail in a moment. Turning to page six, in the second quarter, we exported 127 cargoes while maintaining our incredible record of safety. Commercial momentum continued in the second quarter where we executed over two MTPA of new or increased LNG offtake agreements with new and existing customers, including Total Energies, VTOL, EMBW, and Atlantic Sea. The market has welcomed Venture Global's ability to offer customers optionality in uniquely contracting short, medium, and long-term volumes. I'm also proud to highlight that we exported our 1,000th cargo just four years after Venture Global's first cargo in the first week of March 2022. The team has worked tirelessly to make us the safest, most efficient, and best-performing LNG company in the industry, and we now have the track record to prove it. These efforts, along with the investments, innovations, and process improvements we have made to our machines, position Venture Global well to export our next 1,000 cargoes in a fraction of the time. And in just a few years, we should be exporting more than 1,000 cargoes every year. With our continued operational and commercial execution, we are confident in the resiliency of our cash flows. On that basis, the board has recently improved an increase in our quarterly common dividends to $0.04 per share, a 122% increase. We are pleased to show this dividend growth and reward our shareholders. This quarter, we were very active in optimizing our capital structure and reducing our capital costs. We refinanced several tranches of term loans, bonds, and even preferred equity. which totaled more than $5.3 billion of capital cumulatively and should reduce our annual interest and coupon obligations by more than $100 million. We added a new $1.5 billion term loan against our nine LNG carriers which had previously been funded by cash. We appreciate our capital partners and the team who has worked tirelessly to bring all these transactions together. Venture Global has now raised or refinanced more than $103 billion of capital. Moving to page seven, our contracted position for 2026 has increased markedly to over 91% of the portfolio from the 84% previously reported on our first quarter earnings call in May. The 127 cargoes produced in the second quarter were at the high end of our expected production range, and we are tightening and raising the midpoint of the cargo range for the full year. While normal seasonality does impact production during warmer months, I do think it is worth noting that we have made operational and capital investments to reduce the adverse impact of summer temperatures, which you can see is demonstrated in our relatively stable production profile. Rather than artificially increasing LNG production by deferring maintenance to capitalize on stronger market demand, our solid production performance during the summer months reflects our ongoing focus on innovation and operational improvement. In fact, instead of postponing maintenance, we completed significant planned work during the quarter, including hot gas path inspections on the gas turbines at Kakashi Pass, activities that would typically require substantial production downtime at most LNG facilities. Given our modular configuration and built-in redundancies, the impact of maintenance on our LNG production was inconsequential. Importantly, we are still early in our optimization journey and expect to de-bottleneck and deliver further enhancements to our output and operational performance over the coming years. Turning to page 8, our in-house engineering, procurement, and construction team is working hard to safely keep CP2 on time and on budget. Now, just over a year from FID, which was July of last year, July 28th, the project has roofs raised on all four LNG storage tanks, 16 fabricated liquefaction modules on site, and five of the gas and steam turbines that made up the power plant on foundations. For those power plants, we are assembling our heat recovery steam generators, the Herzigs, offsite at our Morgan City facility in Louisiana. We have now built and transported five Herzigs to CP2. You can see one of them arriving and on the barge at CP2 in the picture here, which is no small task as they are nine stories tall and each weigh more than 1,500 tons. This is the first time we have built our own Herzigs, which are some of the largest modular Herzigs ever built. By taking this scope in-house and managed by our internal EPC team, We've removed one of the major bottlenecks in our construction schedule, which should streamline our timeline to first LNG. On page nine, we have our bolt-on expansions at CP2 and Plaquemines. In May, we filed an application with FERC for the expansion of CP2, which would be entirely within the existing CP2 footprint. We were pleased to receive a pre-filing waiver from FERC and have already ordered long lead equipment, such as power modules and liquefaction trains, from our long-standing partners at Baker Hughes. We expect to make a final investment decision on the 10 MTPA expansion in early 2027, with first LNG production at the CP2 expansion in late 2028. For the Plaquemines expansion, you can see the first phase of our bolt-on expansion plans depicted on the slide. As previously disclosed, we expect the first phase to include eight liquefaction trains producing 6.4 MTPA of LNG. We filed to permit the full 31 MTPA expansion of Plaquemines to be constructed in multiple phases late last year and are targeting FID in the first half of next year with production from phase one in 2029. To facilitate the expansion of Plaquemines, we expect to build a new pipeline to North Louisiana Cloud Connector, and once producing from Phase 1, our runway production across all three projects is expected to be approximately 85 MTPA. As you can see on page 10, we currently have around 53 of this 85 MTPA committed under long and medium-term contracts. Notably, 100% of our nameplate capacity across our first three projects is contracted. The additional 32 MTPA available for marketing is comprised of excess capacity in the addition of the CP2 and Plaquemines Phase 1 bolt-on expansions. We continue to maintain a portfolio approach and anticipate contracting the majority of this capacity through both the mix of long-term agreements to support new financing and medium-term contracts designed to enhance returns and retain flexibility. To help understand the portfolio approach I just described and the option value it creates for Venture Global, on page 12 we show the frequency distribution of implied liquefaction fees between the emergence of shale gas into the U.S. market from 2010 to today. As you can see, after adjusting for the cost of gas, as well as conservative shipping and logistics costs, the average liquefaction fee would be over $6 per MMBTU. and many more. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for joining us. as we believe retaining and monetizing the additional upside option value from a balanced portfolio dramatically enhances the cash flow and absolute value of our LNG assets. Turning to page 13, while LNG supply has of course been impacted by the events in the Middle East, demand has been resilient. As you can see, most of the substantial Asian markets have experienced a meaningful rebound in imports following the initial impact of elevated prices or the recent months higher on a year-over-year basis. High temperatures in both Asia and Europe have driven greater power demand, and industrial demand from sectors like the fertilizer market has also proven to be inelastic. Importantly, as you can see here, European gas inventories remain well below normal levels, which will likely drive higher winter demand and pricing. In fact, Europe is increasingly approaching a point at which it is exposed to severe winter weather, dangerously exposed, both physically and economically. Now I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Jack Thayer, who will review the quarterly performance, provide an overview of our project performance, and discuss our updated financial guidance.