Williams Companies, Inc. (The)

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Williams First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Danilo Giovanni, Vice President of Investor Relations, ESG, and Investment Analysis. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Andrea, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in the Williams Company. Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings and price repeats in the presentation that our President and CEO, Alan Armstrong, and our Chief Financial Officer, John Porter, will speak to this morning. Also joining us on the call are Michael Dunn, our Chief Operating Officer, Lane Wilson, our General Counsel, and Chad Zemrin, our Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategic Development. In our presentation materials, you'll find a disclaimer related to forward-looking savings. 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 with generally expected counter-principles, and these reconciliation schedules appear at the back of the day's presentation materials. And with that, I'll turn it over to Alan Armstrong.

Okay, well, thanks, Danilo, and thank you all for joining us today. Well, another first quarter and another strong start for Williams. So let me begin here on slide two by calling out a few operational, financial, and strategic achievements we saw this first quarter. Starting here on the left of this slide, yet again, we've set a record for contracted transmission capacity. led by Transco, the largest and fastest growing natural gas pipeline. And in January, we closed on our acquisition of a portfolio of natural gas storage assets from an affiliate of Partree Partners for approximately $1.9 billion. The transaction included six underground natural gas storage facilities located in Louisiana and Mississippi, making us the largest owner of storage on the Gulf Coast. Demand for natural gas has greatly outpaced natural gas storage capacity since 2010, and our thesis of this underinvestment is now being realized as this newly acquired storage is being recontracted at rates above our acquisition expectations. In fact, storage rates have reached the point of supporting brownfield expansions, and we are gauging interest from customers willing to underwrite the potential expansion of these facilities in the form of long-term contracts. Also in the first quarter, we announced the expansion of the Southeast Supply Enhancement Project to roughly 1.6 BCF a day of capacity, and we pre-filed this project with the FERC on February 1st. We expect to make the official FERC filing later this year, and I'll remind you that this project will serve both the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast markets. These markets are experiencing increasing gas demand from power generation and the reshoring of industrial loads. Since the time of our open season, the large utilities that we serve in this area have come back and provided dramatic increases to their generation needs based on data centers to be built in the region, as well as reshoring of industrial markets. So we believe that we are in the early innings for expansions in these Mid-Atlantic and Southeast markets. Our project execution teams also delivered an impressive list of accomplishments this quarter, In total, we have 20 high-return projects in execution across our business, including approximately 3.1 BCF per day of expansion on Transco, which equates to a 15% increase in fully contracted long-term capacity that will be coming online over the next few years. Within these Transco opportunities, a few noteworthy accomplishments to hit. First, we placed the Carolina Market Link in service and now began receiving the full revenues in this quarter. Next, we commenced construction for the Southside Reliability Enhancement and the Southeast Energy Connector projects. And we received a FERC order for the Alabama-Georgia Connector and the Texas to Louisiana Energy Pathway projects. And finally, we're advancing a number of modest but high return expansion projects on our Mountain West transmission system. You know, this is a period where we have a tremendous amount of large projects and sometimes it's easy to overlook things as large as even the Whale Deepwater project, but happy to report to you that great execution by our teams there in some pretty difficult environments has that project coming in quite a bit below our original capital Estimate on that project and we do expect now this project to start up towards the end of this year so congratulations to our deepwater team that have been working on that project for about four years now and pretty remarkable accomplishments to Get that project in on budget and actually below budget and then finally our teams are well on their way to replacing 112 mainline compressor units with state-of-the-art low-emission turbines and electric drive units on Transco and Northwest Pipe. As a reminder, these projects will generate an incremental regulated return realized through a rate case or a tracking mechanism that will begin in 2025. So again, a huge body of work there to go in and replace this compression that is well past its useful life, but the team's doing a great job. You can imagine the efforts that go into replacing that scale of operations. But we have so much going on, it's kind of easy to miss, and we're excited to see the earnings from that show up in 25. So now turning to the highlights of our first quarter financial performance, we delivered quarterly EBITDA of $1.934 billion, which was 8% higher than last year, an impressive feat given the tough comp we were up against, and a 25% year-over-year decline in natural gas prices, and the lack of severe winter weather in most of our markets. An important takeaway from the quarter is that our outperformance occurred despite year-over-year lower earnings in the marketing and upstream segments, which reaffirms the strength and resilience of our underlying business, no matter the commodity price environment. To this end, we expect to deliver our EBITDA in the top half of our earlier guidance. And to be clear, we think we can accomplish this with continued soft gas prices and without any further earnings contributions from our marketing segment. Due to the ongoing steady growth and resilience of our business, we recently raised the 2024 dividend by 6.1%, underscoring our confidence in our ability to continue this strong record of per share growth through even extreme low commodity price environments, and with the slate of high return growth projects under execution right now and in development, Williams remains well positioned to grow at this rate for many years to come. And with that, I'll turn it over to John to walk through the quarter and year-to-date financials. John? All right.