WMB - Williams Companies Inc. (WMB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-07 14:06:16 ET
Williams Companies, Inc. (WMB)
Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call
May 07, 2024, 09:30 ET
Company Participants
Danilo Juvane - VP, IR
Alan Armstrong - President, CEO & Director
John Porter - SVP & CFO
Micheal Dunn - EVP & COO
Chad Zamarin - EVP, Corporate Strategic Development
Conference Call Participants
Spiro Dounis - Citigroup
Jeremy Tonet - JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Manav Gupta - UBS
John Mackay - Goldman Sachs Group
Praneeth Satish - Wells Fargo Securities
Tristan Richardson - Scotiabank
Theresa Chen - Barclays Bank
Gabriel Moreen - Mizuho Securities
Sunil Sibal - Seaport Research Partners
Indraneel Mitra - Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Presentation
Operator
Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to The Williams First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. 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 Juvane, Vice President of Investor Relations, ESG and Investment Analysis. Please go ahead.
Danilo Juvane
Thanks, Andrea, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in The Williams Companies. Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings and press release and the presentation that our President and CEO, Alan Armstrong; and our Chief Financial Officer, John Porter, who will speak to this morning. Also joining us on the call are Micheal Dunn, our Chief Operating Officer; Lane Wilson, our General Counsel; and Chad Zamarin, our Executive 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 with generally accepted accounting principles. And these reconciliation schedules appear at the back of the day's presentation material. And with that, I'll turn it over to Alan Armstrong.
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 2 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 Hartree partners for approximately $1.9 billion. The transaction included 6 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 re-contracted 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 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 prefiled this project with the FERC on February 1. 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. ...
Williams Companies, Inc. (WMB) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript