Williams Companies, Inc. (The)

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Williams Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Danilo Giovanni, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Cheryl, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in the Williams Company. Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings press release and the presentation that our president and CEO, Alan Armstrong, and our chief financial officer, John Chandler, will speak to this morning. Also joining us on the call today are Michael Dunn, our chief operating officer, Lane Wilson, our general counsel, and Chad Dameron, our senior vice president of corporate strategic development. In our presentation materials, you'll find a disclaimer related to forward-looking statements. This disclaimer is important and integral to our remarks, and you should review it. Also included in the presentation materials are non-GAAP measures that were reconciled to generally accepted accounting principles. And these reconciliation schedules appear at the back of today's presentation materials. So with that, I'll turn it over to Alan.

Great. Well, thanks, Danilo, and thank you all for joining us today. We are pleased to share the results of another strong third quarter. Williams once again exceeded its internal plans and investor expectations and showed just how durable this business can be against several headwinds, including a very active hurricane season in the Gulf. As you know, Louisiana bore the brunt of two significant hurricanes. in Laura and Delta, and our operating teams in the area did a great job of staying safe while minimizing the impact of our operations. As always, I'm impressed but not surprised by the response effort to the region, as Williams volunteers have donated supplies and manned staging areas in critically hit areas and really helped out those in need. Despite the hurricane impact, record northeast gathering and processing growth allowed us to more than offset the financial impact of those multiple interruptions in the Gulf and produce the 19th consecutive quarter where we met or exceeded street expectations. Our 2020 results year-to-date illustrate the stability and predictability of our business across a wide range of external factors, Everybody's gotten used to us being able to continue to produce on a normal basis, but this environment has really allowed us to distinguish ourselves in this more difficult market. Additionally, during this busy quarter, Williams announced its commitment and highlighted its ability to help in the reduction of emissions in a right here and right now way by becoming the first U.S. midstream company to set both near-term and long-term emission reduction goals. I'll talk a bit more about our climate goals later, but first I want to highlight record performance in our Northeast GMP segment, and then I'll turn it over to John to walk through our Q2 results. So looking here on slide one, we show that our Northeast gathering and processing segment handled record volumes in the third quarter of 20, where our gathering volumes averaged over 9.4 BCF per day across our operated assets in the Northeast. This was an 8.4% growth versus the 3Q of 19 comparison and a 7% sequential growth over the second quarter of 2020. Strong growth in the rich gas areas drove even more impressive growth in our processing volumes and our NGL production. And you can see here the processing for the southwest Marcellus and Utica areas was up over 17%, and NGL production was up nearly 24%. Each of these was record performance for our northeast gathering and processing segment. This strong performance is evidence of the attractive position of our Northeast business as gas market fundamentals begin to call on U.S. dry gas supplies. We are the largest gatherer in the most important and prolific gas-producing area, the Appalachian Basin, and within the Appalachian Basin, our dedications include the most attractive acreage operated by resilient producers that continue to demonstrate their ability to continuously improve on their cost structure. You can see this playing out as our northeast gathering volumes grew faster than the total northeast supply. So overall, if you looked at the information from point logic, you would see that the northeast wellhead natural gas production for all of the area, even including outside of Williams, was up by 2.2% on a 3Q20 to 3Q19 comparison, and ours, as we've shown, was up by 8.4% in gathered volume. So we really are not only in the right basin, but we're also in the right parts of the basin in the Appalachian area. We expect this trend to continue in response to very favorable Ford Strip pricing for 21 and a very well-positioned group of customers in both the Marcellus and the Utica. We'll talk more about our GMP business when we get to our investor focus area segment. But for now, let me turn it over to John to highlight our Q3 results.