Williams Companies, Inc. (The)

Welcome to the Williams Second Quarter Earnings 2024 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 would 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, Rivka, 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 a 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 today 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 four Lincoln statements. This disclaimer is important and integral to our remarks, and you should review it. Also included in our presentation materials are non-GAAP measures that we reconcile to generally accepted accounting principles. And these reconciliation schedules appear at the back of today's presentation material. So with that, I'll turn it over to Alan Armstrong.

Great. Well, thanks, Danilo, and thank you all for joining us today. The story that John and I get to lay out for you this morning is one of consecutive growth as Williams continues to deliver on a long-term trend of per share growth and resilience regardless of the macro environment. In fact, we delivered record second quarter results driven by the strong performance of our transmission and storage business this quarter. Even our gathering and processing business held up very well despite challenging natural gas prices. The good news is that a meaningful increase in natural gas demand that continues to exceed our expectations will take advantage of these abundant supplies driving growth for years to come. And the supply side is poised to respond with over one VCF a day of volumes from delayed tills and temporary shut-ins to return to our gathering systems. And before we get deeper into the financial metrics, I want to hit on a few key themes from the quarter, namely our crisp execution of key projects that are positioning us for continued earnings growth and the ongoing focus we have on optimizing our portfolio and ensuring sustainable operations. So starting here on slide two, our teams have executed on an extraordinary amount of strategic priorities, including placing projects into service in the Northeast, the West, and the Deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Just to run down the list quickly here, last week we placed Transco's regional energy access into full service ahead of schedule and under budget once again, ensuring clean and reliable natural gas is available to serve the Northeast region for the upcoming winter heating season. And while the D.C. Circuit Court did issue a decision last week to vacate the FERC certificate for REA, we believe the Court's concerns about the FERC's process is once again flawed and will be fairly easy for the FERC to resolve. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary legal and regulatory steps to address the Court's concerns and ensure that this much-needed firm transportation capacity continues to be available to serve the needs of our customers without interruptions. I'll remind you that our industry has seen similar court rulings in the past with projects such as Sable Trails as well as Spires Expansion. With both of these projects operating today, we see limited risk to major interruptions to REA operations and are prepared to help the FERC in reaffirming the merits of this important project. Other notable expansions we've recently completed include the Marcellus Gathering expansion that serves Southwestern's rich gas zone in the Marcellus and the fully contracted Mountain West Uintah Basin transmission expansion. And in the deep water, there are two new fields that will increase EBITDA in the third quarter on our discovery system, which we now fully own. So we're excited about the acquisition of the additional interest in discovery, and we're really excited about the kind of growth that we're seeing both here in the near term and the long term. So first of all, Chevron's large anchor development and Beacon's Winterfell five-well program are both fully connected and will drive a large increase in EBITDA for 2025 as well as for the balance of this year. Additionally, Hess brought on their pickerel prospect on June 25th that will grow EBITDA on our eastern gulf assets. We were also active on advancing construction for several key projects. We initiated construction activities on the Louisiana Energy Gateway Gathering, Treating, and Carbon Capture Project, as well as Transco's Texas to Louisiana Energy Pathway Project, which we call TLEP. TLEP project provides our anchor shipper EOG resources with access to the LNG corridor and higher price markets on the Transco pipeline, and specifically all the way into the Louisiana market. So we're excited about getting started on that fairly significant project for us. And then recently, we also signed a precedent agreement on Transco's Gillis West expansion. This will bring new, reliable, and low-cost supplies to Centerpoint Energy's Houston area markets from Louisiana. So this is effectively a backhaul on Transco, helping Centerpoint to reduce their dependence on the Texas intrastate gas pipeline systems. Importantly, this quick-turn project will add meaningful EBITDA with very little capital required on our part to place that into service. I also want to call out the significant emissions reductions and cost savings accomplished this quarter as part of our system-wide modernization and emission reduction program. Thus far, we have replaced 57 transmission compressor units and are on track to meet our goal of 112 units to be replaced by the end of this year so that we can begin recovering on these investments in our latest rates. And on that note, we will file our new rates on Transco at the end of this month, and the new rates will go into effect in March of 25. So incredible amount of work going on by teams to replace a lot of these very old units with modern low emission equipment on the system and a lot of times that those kind of projects kind of get overlooked but tremendous amount of effort and great execution going on by the teams on that front as well. Looking at the second column, we continue to take steps to optimize our asset portfolio. We sold our stake in the Oxable joint venture at an attractive gain and consolidate our ownership interest in the Gulf of Mexico discovery system at an attractive value in given both the very near and long-term growth on this asset. From a financial perspective, we remain on track to achieve the top half of 24 EBITDA guidance, and we also reaffirm our expectations for 2025, which translate into a five-year EBITDA CAGR of 8%. More importantly, the growth in our per share metrics will be just as strong over this five-year period with AFFO per share CAGR of 7% and our EPS CAGR of 12% over this five-year period. Of note, the fundamentals to sustain and even improve on this industry-leading earnings and cash flow growth beyond 25 actually continue to improve. Our Southeast, our SESI project is just the first of a few projects we expect from the secular trend of increased demand for power generation and we remain in the best position to secure additional infrastructure solutions in and around our Transco pipeline footprint. And finally, we continue to prioritize being a responsible operator in all that we do. And this is clearly outlined in our 2023 sustainability report that we published last week. This report is really a deep dive on how we focus on doing business the right way, And one area I'll call out is our efforts in progressing on our decarbonization goals. We are focused on proving up that the natural gas industry can play an even more important role in providing affordable and reliable energy while also continuing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions here at home and around the world. And so with that, I'll turn it over to John to walk through the second quarter financials. John? Thanks, Alex.