Williams Companies, Inc. (The)

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Williams fourth quarter and full year 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 of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Lindsay, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in the Williams companies. Yesterday afternoon, We released our earnings press release and a 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 Zamarin, 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 we reconcile to generally accepted accounting principles. These reconciliation schedules appear at the back of today's presentation materials. So with that, I'll turn it over to Alan Armstrong.

Great, and thanks, Danilo, and thank you all for joining us today. We're pleased to share the results of a very strong fourth quarter, rounding out a year of record business performance for Williams that yet again illustrates the stability and predictability of our business. So starting here with slide one. First of all, I'm thrilled to announce that our EBITDA once again exceeded the midpoint of our original guidance range for the fourth consecutive year and resulted in a 4% CAGR for this same four-year period. And that also, during the same period, we dramatically improved our credit metrics through our asset sale program. So really a nice, steady period here of very predictable growth and balance sheet improvements. This unmatched predictability is important to our value proposition and is further reinforced by this being the 20th consecutive quarter of meeting or exceeding street expectations. We also met or exceeded all of our other key financial metrics, allowing us to once again produce positive free cash flow, even after buying the outstanding interest in Cayman 2 that controls Blue Racer Midstream in the fourth quarter. Our focus on continuously improving our project execution, our operating margin ratio, reliability metrics, and safety performance delivered strong financial performance again in 2020 and allowed us to yet again achieve record gas gathering volumes and contracted gas transmission capacity. And all of these steady improvements and accomplishments build off of a clear foundational strategy that allows us to stay focused and aligned across the organization. We've demonstrated incredible business resiliency in a year of unprecedented challenges for our industry and our country. Our strong results in 2020 show just how durable this business can be against several headwinds, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and associated oil price collapse, major customer bankruptcies, and an active hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico that exceeded anything from an outage standpoint that we had on record. This tumultuous 2020 market environment allowed us to truly distinguish ourselves. In fact, we were one of the few midstream companies to maintain and, in fact, deliver on our pre-COVID guidance ranges that we provided to you in 2019. And I'm excited to see what this organization can produce without the large number of headwinds that we navigated through this past year in 2021. Moving on here, in addition to executing on our business in 2020, we accelerated our ESG performance. Last summer, Williams became the first U.S. midstream company to announce a climate commitment, setting an emissions reduction goal for 2030 that is based on real, achievable targets and that imposes accountability on the management team that's setting these goals. we believe that focusing on the right here and right now opportunity sets us on a positive trajectory to achieving net zero target by 2050. In addition, we co-led an industry effort to standardize ESG metrics with the Energy Infrastructure Council And in January, we hosted the industry's first ever ESG event, specifically devoted to sharing the company's direction, goals, aspirations, and tangible accomplishments related to ESG performance. In summary, In 2020, we once again demonstrated the stability and predictability of our business, and importantly, we've also shown the ability to focus and execute our plan without being distracted by the challenging macro backdrop. And with that, I'll turn it over to John to go through the details.