Venture Global Aktie

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Venture Global, Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ben, please go ahead.

Thank you, Trevor. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global, Inc.'s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sabel, Venture Global's CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder; Jack Thayer, our CFO; and other members of Venture Global's senior management team.

Before I begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from what is described in these statements. I encourage you to refer to the disclaimers in our earnings presentation, which is available on the Investors section of our website.

Additionally, we may include references to certain non-GAAP metrics such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA, which we may refer to simply as EBITDA during this call. A reconciliation of these metrics to the most relevant GAAP metrics, measures can be found in the appendix of the earnings presentation posted on our website.

Finally, the guidance in this presentation is only effective as of today. In general, we will not update guidance until the following quarter and will not update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated public disclosure.

I'll now turn the call over to Mike Sabel.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our second quarter 2026 results. I will begin the call with an overview of our key accomplishments in the quarter and an update on the business. I will then make some remarks on the LNG industry, before turning over the call to Jack, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results as well as updated guidance for 2026. Following all prepared remarks, we'll open the call to Q&A.

On Page 5, you can see some of the highlights for the quarter, including our largest ever quarterly EBITDA of $2.5 billion and significant growth in volumes, revenue, income from operations, net income and EBITDA year-over-year. We are increasing our 2026 EBITDA guidance to $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion, from $8.2 billion to $8.5 billion, based on current market outlook for the remainder of the year. Given outsized LNG price volatility related to events in the Middle East, we have maintained a broader-than-usual guidance range than in the past. As we contract the remainder of our expected volumes for the year, we expect to tighten this range following third quarter. Jack will discuss these numbers in greater detail in a moment.

Turning to Page 6. In the second quarter, we exported 127 cargoes, while maintaining our incredible record of safety. Commercial momentum continued in the second quarter where we executed over 2 MTPA of new or increased LNG offtake agreements with new and existing customers, including TotalEnergies, [ VTOL, BMW ] and Atlantic-SEE. The market has welcomed Venture Global's ability to offer customers optionality in uniquely contracting short, medium and long-term volumes.

I'm also proud to highlight that we exported our 1,000th cargo just 4 years after Venture Global's first cargo in the first week of March 2022. The team has worked tirelessly to make us the safest, most efficient and best-performing LNG company in the industry, and we now have the track record to prove it. These efforts, along with the investments, innovations and process improvements we have made to our machines, position Venture Global well to export our next 1,000 cargoes in a fraction of the time. And in just a few years, we should be exporting more than 1,000 cargoes every year.

With our continued operational and commercial execution, we are confident in the resiliency of our cash flows. On that basis, the Board has recently approved an increase in our quarterly common dividends to $0.04 per share, a 122% increase. We are pleased to show this dividend growth and reward our shareholders.

This quarter, we were very active in optimizing our capital structure and reducing our capital costs. We refinanced several tranches of term loans, bonds and even preferred equity, which totaled more than $5.3 billion of capital cumulatively and should reduce our annual interest and coupon obligations by more than $100 million. We added a new $1.5 billion term loan against our 9 LNG carriers, which have previously been funded by cash. We appreciate our capital partners and the team who has worked tirelessly to bring all these transactions together. Venture Global has now raised or refinanced more than $103 billion of capital.

Moving to Page 7. Our contracted position for 2026 has increased markedly to over 91% of the portfolio from the 84% previously reported on our first quarter earnings call in May. The 127 cargoes produced in the second quarter were at the high end of our expected production range and we are tightening and raising the midpoint of the cargo range for the full year.

While normal seasonality does impact production during warmer months, I do think it is worth noting that we have made operational and capital investments to reduce the adverse impact of summer temperatures, which you can see is demonstrated in our relatively stable production profile. Rather than artificially increasing LNG production by deferring maintenance to capitalize on stronger market demand, our solid production performance during the summer months reflects our ongoing focus on innovation and operational improvement. In fact, instead of postponing maintenance, we completed significant planned work during the quarter, including hot gas [ path ] inspections on the gas turbines at Calcasieu Pass, activities that would typically require substantial production downtime at most LNG facilities.

Given our modular configuration and built-in redundancies, the impact of maintenance on our LNG production was inconsequential. Importantly, we are still early in our optimization journey and expect to debottleneck and deliver further enhancements to our output and operational performance over the coming years.

Turning to Page 8. Our in-house engineering, procurement and construction team is working hard to safely keep CP2 on time and on budget. Now just over a year from FID, which was July of last year, July 28, the project [ has roots raised ] on all 4 LNG storage tanks, 16 fabricated liquefaction modules on site and 5 with the gas and steam turbines that made up the power plant on foundations. For those power plants, we are assembling our heat recovery steam generators, the [ Herzigs ], off-site at our Morgan City facility in Louisiana. We have now built and transported 5 Herzigs to CP2. You can see one of them arriving and on the barge at CP2 in the picture here, which is no small task as they are 9 stories tall and each weighing more than 1,500 tons. This is the first time we have built our own [ Herzigs ], which are some of the largest modular Herzigs ever built.

By taking this scope in-house and managed by our internal EPC team, we have removed one of the major bottlenecks in our construction schedule, which should streamline our time line to first LNG.

On Page 9, we have our bolt-on expansions at CP2 and Plaquemines. In May, we filed an application with FERC for the expansion of CP2, which would be entirely within the existing CP2 footprint. We were pleased to receive a prefiling waiver from FERC and have already ordered long-lead equipment such as power modules and liquefaction trains from our long-standing partners at Baker Hughes. We expect to make a final investment decision on the 10 MTPA expansions in early, with first LNG production at the CP2 expansion in late 2028.

For the Plaquemines expansion, you can see the first phase of our bolt-on expansion plans depicted on the slide. As previously disclosed, we expect the first phase to include 8 liquefaction trains producing 6.4 MTPA of LNG. We filed to permit the full 31 MTPA expansion of Plaquemines to be constructed in multiple phases late last year and are targeting FID in the first half of next year with production from Phase 1 in 2029.

To facilitate the expansion of Plaquemines, we expect to build a new pipeline to North Louisiana, called Cloud Connector. And once producing from Phase 1, our run rate production across all 3 projects is expected to be approximately 85 MTPA.

As you can see on Page 10, we currently have around 53 of this 85 MTPA committed under long and medium-term contracts. Notably, 100% of our nameplate capacity across our first 3 projects is contracted. The additional 32 MTPA available for marketing is comprised of excess capacity and the addition of the CP2 and Plaquemines Phase 1 bolt-on expansions. We continue to maintain a portfolio approach and anticipate contracting the majority of this capacity through both a mix of long-term agreements to support new financing and medium-term contracts designed to enhance returns and retain flexibility.

To help understand the portfolio approach I just described and the option value it creates for Venture Global, on Page 12 we show the frequency distribution of implied liquefaction fees between the emergence of shale gas into the U.S. market from 2010 to today. As you can see, after adjusting for the cost of gas as well as conservative shipping and logistics costs, the average liquefaction fee would be over $6 per MMBtu. While that does include several periods of significantly elevated prices, it also includes the COVID-related downturn of 2020. And even adjusting for those, the median fee would still be nearly twice that of a 20-year contract price. And inevitably, those periods of elevated pricing take place a few times a decade.

This substantial spread with asymmetric extrinsic option value highlights the premium available for short and intermediate-term contracts in the LNG market. We believe our contracting approach and balanced portfolio provide downside production, with the ability to monetize our available LNG capacity at long-term rates establishing a pricing floor. At the same time, our blended portfolio approach provides flexibility to capture materially better returns on medium-term contracts and remain in a position to harvest outsized returns on shorter dated contracting during periods of cyclical strength. These consistently higher blended returns influence our capital allocation decisions as we believe retaining and monetizing the additional upside option value from a balanced portfolio dramatically enhances the cash flow and absolute value of our LNG assets.

Turning to Page 13. While LNG supply has, of course, been impacted by the events in the Middle East, demand has been resilient. As you can see, most of the substantial Asian markets have experienced a meaningful rebound in imports following the initial impact of elevated prices for the recent months higher on a year-over-year basis. High temperatures in both Asia and Europe have driven greater power demand and industrial demand from sectors like the fertilizer market has also proven to be inelastic.

Importantly, as you can see here, European gas inventories remain well below normal levels, which will likely drive higher winter demand and pricing. In fact, Europe is increasingly approaching a point at which it is exposed to severe winter weather, dangerously exposed, both physically and economically.

Now I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Jack Thayer, who will review the quarterly performance, provide an overview of our project performance and discuss our updated financial guidance.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning to those of you on the line. I'll be referring to the Venture Global, Incorporated Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. The 10-Q is available on our website and some of the key results are summarized on Page 15 of the presentation. During this call, I will highlight results I believe are salient to this audience, and I encourage you to review the entirety of our financial statements in detail.

Beginning with revenue. Our top line was $4.6 billion for the second quarter of 2026, a $1.5 billion or 48% increase from the $3.1 billion during the equivalent period in 2025. This increase in revenue was driven by $1.3 billion from higher sales volumes, 466 TBtu in the second quarter of 2026 compared with 329 TBtu in the second quarter of 2025, and $102 million from higher net LNG sales prices.

Our income from operations was $2.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, a $1.2 billion or 111% increase from $1.0 billion in the second quarter of 2025. This shift was primarily driven by the higher sales volumes I previously mentioned, augmented by higher LNG sales prices net of the cost of feed gas.

Our operating and maintenance costs were $118 million higher, respectively, year-over-year due to the increased commissioning work at Plaquemines and from more Venture Global owned ships being in operation. G&A expenses were largely unchanged year-over-year despite a larger headcount. Our development costs were lower than the same period last year as we were able to capitalize more costs associated with CP2 and our pipeline and bolt-on expansions.

Our net income attributable to common stockholders, which we refer to as net income, was $1.3 billion for the second quarter of 2026, a $979 million or 266% increase from the $368 million in the second quarter of 2025. Higher interest expense was offset by favorable changes in interest rate swaps, and income taxes were higher due to an increase in net income.

Shifting to consolidated adjusted EBITDA, we earned $2.5 billion during the second quarter of 2026, a $1.1 billion or 79% increase from $1.4 billion in the second quarter of 2025. This increase in consolidated adjusted EBITDA was driven chiefly by higher sales volumes as well as higher LNG sales prices net of the cost to feed gas. Our EBITDA margin was 54% for the quarter as higher volumes and better pricing was not accompanied by commensurate increases in costs.

Once again, this quarter, our treasury team was busy, refinancing $5.3 billion since our last earnings call. In June, we refinanced $2.25 billion of Venture Global, Inc. senior secured notes, and we raised $1.5 billion in vessel financing. In July, together with our partners at [ WhiteWater ], we repriced the $1.07 billion senior secured Term Loan B. As Mike mentioned earlier, we are expecting our refinancing efforts thus far in 2026 to have saved more than $100 million in annual interest costs and preferred dividend coupons.

As you see on Page 16, we are providing a consolidated adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion for 2026, which is up from $8.2 billion to $8.5 billion when we reported in May, and conservatively reflects the current market volatility. This range contemplates a current market liquefaction fee of $12.50 to $13.50 per MMBtu for cargoes remaining to be sold in 2026. This conservative range represents a modest discount to the current TTF and JKM forward price expectations. On average, if fixed liquefaction fees over the remainder of 2026 increase or decrease by $1 per MMBtu, we expect our consolidated adjusted EBITDA range to adjust accordingly by $180 million to $210 million, reflecting our accelerated pace of contracting and our 91% contracted position.

Lastly, before turning it back to Mike, on Page 17 we walk through the capital allocation priorities we laid out last quarter: funding expansion, strategic deleveraging and balance sheet optimization and return of capital. First, as we discussed, we're making excellent progress, not only in the construction of CP2 but increasingly on the bolt-on additions at both CP2 and Plaquemines, having already made material equity contributions to both expansions.

Second, with respect to the balance sheet, I just walked through some of the refinancing measures we have taken. And through July of this year, we have repaid $1.4 billion of debt, including about $1.3 billion of the bridge loan at CP2 and reduced our annual interest and coupon obligations by more than $100 million. With COD of Plaquemines in Q4 and with the start of production of CP2 next year, we anticipate positive developments with respect to our credit ratings.

Lastly, this morning, we announced a 122% increase in our dividend to $0.04 per quarter. Over the longer term, we believe our portfolio of high-return bolt-on opportunities will remain an attractive avenue for future investments. However, the relative scale of the incremental capital investment is expected to decline compared to our growing cash flows, creating more opportunities for other capital allocation priorities.

Specifically, we plan to continue to retire and refinance higher-cost capital as bonds mature or are callable. We are confident in the resiliency of our cash flows and expect to grow our dividend over time. Additionally, we may also pursue share repurchases as other incremental means of enhancing shareholder value and returns as our capital program matures.

I'll now turn the call back over to Mike.

Thank you, Jack. At this point, we would like to open up the call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Manav Gupta with UBS.

Congrats on a good quarter. I just wanted to talk a little bit -- also congratulations on raising the dividend. Those things matter, and your comments on potential share buybacks, so they're all very positive. I wanted to talk a little bit about your guidance raise. Can you help us understand some of the drivers of the guidance raise? Because the way we are thinking about it, sir, is you started the year at a guidance and now this guidance is almost 60% higher than your original guidance. So if you can help us understand drivers of the new guidance raise here.

Sure, Manav. The basis, obviously, of all of it is our -- the execution by the team and the production at our facilities. And so we continue to be confident of the quality of the continued production that we expect for the balance of the year. I made a few comments about how we are able, through significant maintenance activity, continue to produce well. And we highlighted those comments because it really is pure operational demonstration of the uniqueness of the configuration of our facilities where we have multiple gas turbines not embedded directly in large liquefaction trains but in multiple power plants that provide electricity for electrically driven compressors in our liquefaction trains. So it gives us maximum redundancy and availability even through maintenance. So we're pleased to see a demonstration of that execution.

We obviously have had a lot of volatility this year in the macro markets for LNG pricing. And the combination of just confidence in production and what we are anticipating conservatively, as Jack said, the market to look like for the remaining of the year, feel good about increasing the absolute level of the cash EBITDA generated for the year, which, on the upper end, moving past $9 billion is something that we're very proud of.

My second follow-up here is, obviously, the global markets are disrupted. You are one of the few people who's ramping the projects absolutely at the right time, so you can supply more next year. I'm just trying to understand, you have quantified on Slide 16, the impact of $1 liquefaction on 2026 EBITDA, $180 million to $210 million. I'm not looking for exact number, but how should we think about this number as things stand? How much would the liquefaction fees $1 movement change 2027 EBITDA? If you could give us some puts and takes on that, that will be very good.

I think, Manav, on Page 23 in the presentation, we actually answer that question for not just 27 but '28 and '29. And do we go to 2030 as well?

No.

Yes. And so it...

650 to 700 for '27?

Yes. that's a great chart because it shows the magnitude of the growth that's coming just from executing on CP2 and the brownfield expansion at CP2 and the first small expansion at Plaquemines.

And importantly, Mike, it contemplates the COD at Plaquemines phases 1 and 2 as well. So with a greater contracted position, we're still maintaining significant optionality and exposure to the prevailing markets in a positive fashion.

Correct. As of now, we remain on schedule for and expect to be for Plaquemines CODs, Phase 1 and Phase 2.

Our next question comes from the line of John Mackay with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to pick up on some of the macro comments. Look, I think the disruption in Middle East has gone on longer than we all would have anticipated. I'd be curious to hear from you just how your customer conversations have changed over the past, let's say, couple of months and how that is playing into your view around forward selling cargoes, either on a kind of prompt basis or maybe out to some of these 5-year contracts.

So it's a really interesting question. We obviously are thinking about it every day. If you go back to right before the recent conflict started in the Strait of Hormuz, and if you recall, the net spreads in the market that we are realizing were $5 to $6, closer to $6 net spreads [indiscernible] at that point, we are very busy on 20-year contracting activity and discussions. And we have continued to be very busy and are active, and actually a significant number of negotiations on 20-year contract basis.

You've seen us do several billion dollars of 5-year deals and we continue to have -- and are active in those discussions as well, and expect to have multiple deals completed between now and the end of the year. Obviously, that's a forward-looking statement.

So it's busy. I would say there has been an uptick in interest on the 5-year term and less in the last 90 days. So as this conflict has become more difficult to predict, I think there's been a, I was going to say slight, but maybe a little more than slight uptick in shorter-term contracting interest.

I appreciate the thoughts there. Second quick one for me, going back to that kind of forward look on the volume outlook and the margin impact. The volume impact is up relative to how you framed it up last quarter. Can you just walk us through that? Is that FID timing? Is that CP2 service timing? What are the puts and takes?

For the increase in the number of cargoes, is that...

Correct.

Yes. I think it's really just as we continue to progress through the later stages of Phase 1 of Plaquemines, our confidence as we continue to operate there gets better. And obviously, we continuously generate massive amounts of process data as well, that supports a lot of our analytics about production -- forward production. And as we described in, I think, in July, we passed our 1,000th cargo. So it's just there's a huge increase every month in our operational knowledge that allows us to make those refinements.

And that includes having these obviously on planned maintenance that we perform frequently. And as we get through that activity, that also gives us more clarity on what forward production can be.

We mentioned a little bit in the comments about increased confidence in warm weather production at Plaquemines, and that's something we're very pleased with. And that's a part of it as well.

Our next question comes from the line of Jean Ann Salisbury with Bank of America.

Thanks for the new slide around historical distribution of the liquefaction fee and the discussion around the balanced portfolio approach. What is kind of your latest thinking around your ideal steady-state mix of long-term contracts, medium-term contracts and uncontracted in your book? And how far away is it from what your mix looks like today?

So our plan and our target is to largely contract, and which we've already done on the nameplate capacity, largely contract all of the excess capacity production on a multiyear basis. And we have several years of commissioning cargoes, both from CP2 and from the bolt-ons that are coming. And those for several years will give us nice exposure to that upside option value that that slide refers to.

And so ideally, and we expect to be able to do it, the excess capacity will be largely all contracted on a multiyear basis. Where when you look at the total portfolio, we are overweighted in 20-year contracts. So while we are going to do more 20-year contracts, our emphasis is going to shift more to much shorter contracts for the balance of that portfolio to drive the much higher price.

And as the -- that data in that slide, we think, is really fascinating in that it shows -- it really explains a lot of the portion of the market that's occupied by the trading companies that contract and buy from producers and on sell to the market. And when you look at over the course of that time, many of those traders started out as primarily building and producing their own facilities and volumes, and since then have grown bigger businesses and contracting from other producers that are taking the balance sheet risk to build that capacity.

And it's exactly for the map that's shown over the last 16 years here that there's more than double the value over the last 16 years, for having shorter-term contracts than the 20-year contracts. And we think 16 years is a great data set. And we think that that -- some version of that, going forward, is going to continue and be reflected in pricing.

So the combination of us contracting all of our nameplate capacity, which supports investment-grade credit ratings treatment at our projects, but retaining more of the extra production capacity that we have on a shorter than 20-year capacity, captures that higher option value and is the right combination of portfolio mix that will maximize the return over time. And it's been the case for the last years and we think it will continue. And I think the behavior and activity of the very large trading market demonstrates that the market thinks that's the case too.

That makes sense. And did the Plaquemines Phase 1 bolt-on timing FID move up from just like 2027 to now first half of 2027? And what drove that? Was it customer demand?

We've been, for a while, we've been looking at -- we've been -- we've had our eyes focused on the first half of 2027. We think the customer demand can comfortably support that. And the constraint is not going to be the timing of the offtake contracts.

Our next question comes from the line of Elvira Scotto with RBC Capital Markets.

I just wanted to follow up on a couple of the questions. I guess the first one, on the expansion projects that you are going to do on CP2 and Plaquemines, what is your targeted contracting strategy there? Is that -- are those expansion projects going to be long-term contracts or mixed?

There'll be -- that's a great question. It will be a mix. When you look at the timing that we just described, you'll notice that they come online fairly quickly, because they're true brownfield that benefit significantly from the existing installed facilities, the time from FID to production is much shorter, even faster than what we've been able to achieve to date and may in fact set new records on timing.

It gives us extra flexibility on the mix of term that we need for the contracts and doesn't require as many of those to be 20-year contracts. So we will do some 20-year contracts, but it'll have more midterm contracts than projects have been able to execute successfully in the past.

Generically, the project finance in the LNG business is designed around needing $10 billion to construct facilities and you don't get any revenue or profits for 6, 7, 8 years on average. And that -- securitizing 20-year contracts and amortizing construction loan bank debt over 20 years is a requirement to make the math work.

When you are 18 to 20 months, between FID and production, it's a much different formula and gives you more flexibility in financing and also creates an opportunity to drive much, much more significant returns on capital.

Great. And then I know you talked about this a little bit, but maybe go into a little bit more detail. You increased your dividend 122% to $0.04 a share. What was the rationale for that increase at this time? And then you talked about your broader capital allocation strategy, but given this increase, how should we think about the dividend going forward?

A lot of it was largely just we were significantly below the rest of the group on an absolute and a percentage yield basis. And even after this increase, that's the case. And that's obviously just because we only recently started a dividend. And so it's just part of the catch-up. And our plan is to continue to grow the dividend over time.

It's a reflection also of our maturity of our growth in our businesses. As we passed $60 billion in assets and we feel good about the progress of turning on CP2 and the -- and a giant increase in the execution of all the 20-year contracts that are associated with CP2, that we can -- we feel very comfortable in absorbing that. As Jack described in his comments, in the future too, that could be combined with not just dividend increases, but also potential share buybacks that obviously will be part of the discussion, as Jack described.

Our next call comes from the line of Zack Van Everen with TPH Research.

Maybe the first one, we saw Williams sanction a project, the Delta access project. It does appear to be heading the direction of Plaquemines. I was curious if that is going to help feed current or future feed gas, or if your own Cloud Connector pipeline is enough on the pipeline side?

Jack, do you want to take that question?

Sure. So as you surmised, that's headed directly towards our Plaquemines facility, and we would expect that pipeline to connect into our Cloud Connector pipe, and we have capacity on that pipe.

Got it. Makes sense. And then maybe around that same theme, we've seen a significant increase in power demand and power projects around Texas and Louisiana. How do you guys think about supply contracts with producers, maybe with longer terms, just to make sure you have that, not only the [ FTE ], but also the supply secured for your contracts into the future?

I'll make some comments. And Jack, if you want to -- if I miss some things, jump in. We're always in the market negotiating and contracting a mixed blend of gas supply, and we do it opportunistically. And so, yes, we keep a careful watch on that. Our view is that there's plenty of gas to support the domestic demand, both for LNG domestic production and also incremental demand that will layer on in years to come from data centers. And we're more focused on the interconnect and transportation and pipeline capacity to access the plentiful gas.

And so you've seen us make significant and meaningful investments in this area, and we'll continue to do some of that. And that was part of the long-range planning that you saw play out for us with the significant investment in our nitrogen removal unit at CP2. Several of those large units are sitting on foundations. Last Saturday, I saw the second rolling on the foundations down at CP2. And in addition, the longer CPX lateral, which approaches 100 miles down to [ Silsbee ], and our beautiful Blackfin Pipeline that we partnered with WhiteWater that heads to [ Cadie ] and our transportation agreements that take us all the way to the Waha.

And so it's -- we've been focused on this, I think, a few years ahead of the rest of the market, and feel in a very strong position and continue to -- on a -- spend a significant amount of our time and kind of medium and long-term planning on that front. Jack, do you have some adds?

Just 2 quick points, Mike. That was a comprehensive answer. First of all, power plants relative to LNG facilities are relatively small consumers of natural gas. I would say roughly less than 10%, relative to an LNG facility for -- is consumed at a power plant.

I think the other comment I'd make is the majority of our pipes are intrastate, which allows us to control 100% of the capacity on those pipes, whether it's our own pipes or whether we're contracting for significant capacity on laterals that connect into our facilities. So the amount of dedicated supply and dedicated delivery that's coming to our facilities, we think, gives us a significant competitive advantage relative to others who are not spending the money to build that dedicated connectivity and are looking to contract on it on a relatively short-term basis, and we'll be more exposed to competing for access to gas over time. We think it's a real strength of our portfolio.

Our next question comes from the line of Craig Shere with Tuohy Brothers Investment Research.

I want to pick up on John's contracting question a bit. I want to confirm that the multiple more deals anticipated by year-end '26 are indeed 3 to 5 years. And given that kind of increased hedging through decade-end, could that position you for more of a multiyear guidance and capital allocation outlook by first half '27?

So we're uniquely in the market now able to talk to customers about almost any term that customers have need for. Because as we are bringing on Plaquemines to COD, we still retain a large volume of capacity that's not contracted on a 20-year basis. And as CP2 comes online, that's going to increase dramatically. And as you will note from our comments in the presentation today, we have what we think are very attractive schedules for the CP2 and Plaquemines bolt-ons to come on online in '28 and '29 as well. And so it gives us tremendous availability that we think is having material positive impacts on the price of LNG globally and gas.

And so yes, we're expecting multiple deals of varied terms this year and next year and the year after, of course. So it's -- we've been waiting and watching progress on our projects to get to this point in our growth that would enable us to have that advantage.

And the slide that shows the option value, what numbers -- what page number is the -- I love that. So that's my favorite slide in the deck.

It's Slide 12.

Slide 12 that shows the data for the last 16 years on what pricing has looked at on an average and a median basis over that period. it shows that there's tremendous option value in our configuration and execution, which, frankly, I don't think is captured in our value at all. Because we, like the rest of the market, have contracted the nameplate capacity of our production. But because of our configuration and our ability to convert the massive amount of data we generate into process engineering that produces significant extra volumes, gives us that upside option value that over time, long periods of time, have proven extremely valuable and well above the long-term contract prices.

And as you include just construction cost inflation in projected periods, you have additional floor price support that's still coming. And that -- we think that that, as I described earlier in my answer, shows up in the behavior of all the trading companies that continue to grow their contracted portfolios. Rather than deploying their balance sheet capacity and capital in building mostly new production capacity, they continue to allocate more of their business and contracting from other producers and on selling it at higher -- much higher prices than the long-term contract prices. And there's a lot of data -- really all the data shows that that, at least in the last 16 years, has been the correct strategy. I answered a lot, more than you asked there. Sorry, Craig, but, in your media training, they tell you to do that. But [indiscernible] your question.

We agree with the upside not captured in market value, but believe the 3 to 5-year contracting does start to capture that. And to the degree the post Iran conflict medium-term contracting increases relative to what had been open cargoes relative to what was a shorter-term contracted before, we just felt that that opens up the opportunity to start thinking about a more clarified multiyear outlook that could help unleash some of that side we're just talking about.

Maybe you could kind of provide thoughts on that. But to finish off my second question, some of these figures, I think, are starting to bleed together a bit. You mentioned 6 MTPA medium-term guided contracting. But I think that includes the 1.5 MTPA foundation Calcasieu Pass contracts that includes 1 MTTA rolling off in April '28. So you could be legging into some nice medium-term margin uplift on a variety of levels here.

No. We agree, and we think about it every day as we plan and schedule our investments in growth. I think the first stop in thinking about the -- your comments on the multiyear projection is really what the actual physical production capacity curve looks like. We load roughly, what are we doing, 43 cargoes a month or so today. That's going to more than double as we turn on CP2 and add these bolt-ons in 2, 2.5 years. So that's a massive increase on already a very large LNG production business in a short amount of time to have a doubling in scale.

And you can layer on multiple pricing scenarios on top of that. And on Page 23, we're trying to show what that looks like. And we're coming upon, as we turn on the facilities, tremendous increase in production capacity. And we think the way the market, meaning the commercial contracting customer market, is executing their portfolio strategies shows that there's a more bullish view than a pessimistic view on expected prices that we believe will drive very nice returns -- very, very nice returns on our investments and produce a lot of increases in cash generation in the next few years.

Our next question comes from the line of Wade Suki with Capital One.

Just kind of curious if you maybe could discuss what might be kind of holding you guys back from maybe narrowing the time line on CP2 startup or moving it forward, what those toggles might be?

We're -- I mean, these are very large complex construction projects and have tens of thousands of scopes. And so we're just being disciplined and being conservative. The market, you've seen how we've executed on a timing basis, it's the first LNG for Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines, was 29 and 30 months, respectively. And so we've done it before, the first LNG train, as you've heard us say and know, that CP2 is going to be the 55th train that we've done. So the teams have executed these configurations a lot now, and it's going extremely well from an execution standpoint.

We're just being disciplined and conservative at this point on how we're providing guidance. Obviously, we're very careful when we say the second half of next year. In our definition, the second half of next year starts July 1 and goes to December 31 of next year. That's a pretty broad range. But we're being precise in kind of the language.

But we're also sprinkling in, and you saw it in the commentary here, the data points about the progress at the site. July 28, just a few days ago, a little less than 2 weeks ago, was the 1-year anniversary at CP2. And most projects after 12 months may still be doing finishing engineering and doing test piles. And we have complete modules sitting on foundations being integrated and having cables pulled. And so CP2, knock on wood, in addition to our focus on safety, is progressing as well as an LNG facility has ever progressed. So we're being disciplined.

We obviously know as the market investors contemplate the next couple of years, the significance of the timing of when CP2 turns on. And so it's certainly tempting for us to provide more detail on it. But for the moment, we're being conservative. But it is going very well.

Mike, that makes sense. So there's some upside to Slide 23, is what you're telling me. Switching gears a little bit, if you don't mind, just to dovetail on some of the prior questions on contracting. And I'm speaking maybe more industry-wide, not taking you guys specifically. But seems to be sort of a lack of fewer longer-term 20-year contracts signed this year just industry-wide, at least from what I've seen.

Yes.

I'm just wondering if you could maybe give us a little bit more granularity on what your kind of commercial conversations are like, and to the extent you can sort of parse that out by customer type, region, developed world, developing world, that would be helpful.

There definitely is a rhythm to the conversations with customers, not just for us, but the whole market. When you do multibillion-dollar 20-year contracts, they typically happen after years of conversations. And so they very often are -- the timing of concluding those contracts are not being driven by current macro environment, but just the byproduct of multiyear conversations and contract roll-off by utility customers that are doing very long-range planning. And so you -- sometimes you can't, and you shouldn't read too much into the macro relationship with contract announcements.

For us, the contracting activity has remained very steady all the way from last year to today. And we feel really good about the cadence of those conversations and matching up with how we want to continue to contract our portfolio. It's pretty broadly distributed between Europe and Asia. Europe was running a little bit ahead, I think, last year of the pace of Asian contracting. And I think today, the Asian contracting is -- this is very general, has caught up with kind of the number of and level of interest from Europe.

On the demand side, it remains very, very positive. You continue to see periodically new announcements on regas terminals and power plants. China continues to make very, very significant progress in construction of regas terminal capacity that's a very, very significant percentage of the global -- the total global LNG market. And you're starting to see a lot more global announcements of very large-scale data center demand that a large portion of which will be gas-fired electricity.

And so there's still a lot of growth coming internationally in our view on top of the very strong trend being driven by growing global middle class that has the same typical demands that we've seen over decades as the rest of the world that as you start with a lot of coal production capacity and layer more gas on top of it, and we see that strong trend continuing. And new demand on top of it that will be significant in certain markets for data center demand.

We have time for one more question. Our final question comes from the line of Sunil Sibal with Seaport Global.

So I wanted to understand a little bit about the longer-term capital allocation strategy. Obviously, you've raised dividends and I think you also talked about share buybacks. And then you've talked about investment grade at the full consolidated level also in the past. So I was curious, and especially when you look at stock buybacks versus investment-grade ratings, how do you prioritize those 2?

And then maybe in the context of that, you obviously have the capital structure, some junior debt also. So how do you think about that also in that context?

So as Jack mentioned in his comments, the growth of our LNG production and how that translates in coming years to increase cash generation, as I described a moment ago, in the next couple of years or so, we'll double from our current production capacity. Even in a pretty broad range of sale contract pricing, we generate a lot of cumulative cash, tens of billions of dollars of cumulative cash, in the next few years. And so it gives us the cash generation that supports continued growth that we've been describing. But it also continue -- it supports investment-grade path at the project level. And at the parent level, it supports dividend growth and support stock buybacks in the future. It's just the incremental scale of the production, the new production that we've described, is just getting smaller on a relative basis to the scale of our earning assets.

We're passing $61 billion, $62 billion of assets. And if you look at -- I think we've added $8 billion plus this year and, year-on-year basis, around $15 billion, and that general path is going to continue for a few years. So we just start building a big earning asset base that generates a lot of cash.

If you look at our absolute levels, we're -- our first -- the first target we loaded was the first week of March 2022. And here we are in 2026 projecting $9 billion of cash EBITDA this year. That's material. So it's just a -- it's a big, big amount of LNG volume.

Understood. And then on the arbitration on Calcasieu Pass, any update there? Obviously, you can't comment on ongoing arbitrations, but I was curious with what we are seeing in the market. Does that help or does that change your view in any way in the last few months with regard to settling of some of those ongoing arbitrations?

So we don't control the schedule of the arbitration processes. Those are controlled away from us. And so we expect resolution of the next one, we thought it would be in the first half of the year -- we still expect it before the end of the year. And then we have -- the next one after that, we have a hearing that begins at the end of November and will extend into next year, again, if we don't settle. You've seen us obviously settle several of them successfully. And we remain open and constructive on settling what remains outstanding. And we remain optimistic on being successful in working through them.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Mike Sabel, CEO, for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone. We appreciate your time this morning and look forward to answering follow-up questions and look forward to seeing many of you in person in coming months.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and welcome to the Venture Global, Inc.'s First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations.

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global, Inc.'s First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sable, Venture Global's CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder; Jack Thayer, our CFO; and other members of Venture Global's senior management team.

Before I begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions may contain forward-looking statements and actual results could differ materially from what is described in these statements. I encourage you to refer to the disclaimers on our earnings presentation, which is available on the Investors section of our website. Additionally, we may include references to certain non-GAAP metrics such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA, which we may refer to simply as EBITDA during this call. A reconciliation of these matrix to the most relevant GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of the earnings presentation posted on our website.

Finally, the guidance in this presentation is effective as of today. Generally, we will not update guidance until the following quarter and will not update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated pick disclosure.

I'll now turn the call over to Mike Sable.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our first quarter 2026 results. I'll begin the call with an overview of our key accomplishments and future plans. I will then make some remarks on the LNG industry before turning over the call to Jack, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results as well as updated guidance for 2026. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call to Q&A.

Turning to Page 5 of the presentation. The unstoppable energy demonstrated since the founding of Venture Global has gained further momentum thus far in 2026, with the FID of CP2 Phase II. We are on track to be the largest LNG producer in North America by the end of 2027 with line of sight to over 100 million tonnes of annual production by 2030. And Total assets were up by over $11 billion year-over-year to $56 billion at the end of the first quarter.

We continue to be active in contracting our available capacity and now have more than 52 MTPA of long- and medium-term contracts totaling approximately $137 billion of revenue backlog. The business is running extremely well. and we remain on track for COD of [indiscernible] Phase 1 in the fourth quarter of this year. We are developing highly accretive bolt-on expansions, which we believe should come online in a fraction of the time LNG projects traditionally take while maintaining the highest safety standards in the industry as we've demonstrated at our current projects. On Page 6, I'll highlight our performance in the first quarter.

As you can see, despite the impact of winter storm burn and some spillover from market disruptions in late 2025, we were still able to grow revenue, income from operations, net income and EBITDA year-over-year. We are also increasing our 2026 EBITDA guidance to $8.2 billion to $8.5 billion from $5.2 billion to $5.8 billion. which assumes liquefaction fees for the remainder of the year in line with the current forward curve. Jack will discuss these numbers in greater detail.

Turning to Page 7. As you know, we completed the FID of Phase 2 of CP2 with an $8.6 billion project financing. Thus far, in Q2, our focus has been on simplifying our capital structure due to refinancing of a $1.6 billion redeemable preferred security at Calcasieu Pass Funding LLC held by Stonepeak with a more tax efficient and lower interest rate term loan B facility. We also raised $750 million of new Cache pass bonds to term out and repay the remaining balance of its construction loan. These 2 transactions are particularly gratifying as they represent the repayment of all the original debt capital that enabled Venture Global to launch its first project. Operationally, we safely exported a new record of 130 cargoes in the first quarter. Commercial momentum has continued in 2026 with 5-year offtake agreements with [indiscernible] and Vitol and a 20-year offtake agreement with Hanwha Aerospace finalized in the first quarter. Furthermore, today, we are pleased to announce that the 5-year agreement with Vitol has been upsized from 1.5 MTPA to approximately 1.7 MTPA.

And we have also finalized a new agreement with Total Energy's for 0.85 MTPA for approximately 5 years. Moving to Page 8. As you can see, we expect production from our operational and commissioning facilities to be relatively stable over the course of 2026 with normal seasonality and potential variability from [indiscernible] commissioning process. Our contracted position for 2026 has increased markedly to 84% of the portfolio from the 69% reported on our fourth quarter 2021 earnings call in March. In addition, April 15 marked the 1-year anniversary of COD at Calcasieu Pass, and I'm pleased to say that we have now exported more than 150 contracted cargoes to our customers without missing a single scheduled cargo. Turning to Page 9. You can see the evolution and speed at which we are executing CP2 construction. We are now just under 10 months from FID and the progress being made is astonishing.

CP2 is our largest project to date, and we are increasingly confident it will be the fastest to progress from FID to first LNG, not only for Venture Global, but in the history of the LNG industry. that speed translates into returns as we expect, we should be able to earn back nearly all of our equity in the project with pre-COD cargoes with a return on invested capital over 30%.

All 21,842 linear feet of the perimeter wall is now complete, making the facility water tight, which is extremely important as we accept delivery of valuable modules. We now have 12 liquefaction trains and 3 gas turbines for the power plant delivered to the site and on foundations and many more on their way. First, LNG is still tracking well for the second half of next year. On Page 10, we thought it would be helpful to present our production profile and EBITDA sensitivity for the next several years. As you can see, our production profile is growing quickly with CPT coming online and continues to grow as we begin adding the bolt-on expansions at CP2 and Placements. In the past 2 years, we grew the number of cargoes exported by 166%.

By 2028, we expect exported cargoes to grow by another 130% from current levels. While our portfolio of 52 MTPA of medium or long-term contracts is more than our nameplate capacity, it is just over 60% of the 85 MTPA we expect to have online by the end of 2029, providing an opportunity for further intermediate and long-term contracting. The cadence of new project start-up and the subsequent commissioning cargoes also means our near-term available for sale capacity is elevated over the next several years as we move each project towards COD matching well with the near-term global supply and demand market dynamics. As you can see on Page 11, while we continue to contract available cargoes on a short-, medium- and long-term basis, we have over 33 MTPA of available capacity to contract over the next several years with the addition of our first 2 bolt-ons, not including commissioning cargoes.

We expect to contract the majority of this capacity over the next several years on a blend of long-term contracts to support new project financing and medium-term contracts to optimize returns and flexibility. On Page 12, we depict the first 2 bolt-on expansions we expect to develop after CP2 Phase 2. We are updating our near-term development plan to include the full expansion of CP2, which is 12 trains or 10 MTPA. The Plaquemines expansion plans remain unchanged at around 6.4% MTPA with optionality that additional trains as market conditions dictate. We are working with regulators expedite the permitting of both facilities and are actively negotiating commercial agreements. We have already begun to order long lead equipment and we'll look to move forward with the first CP2 and then Pokemon's expansions by early and mid next year, respectively.

On Page 14, we address pertinent industry trends in we last reported approximately 20% of global LNG capacity has been offline in Qatar and Abu Dhabi as you. Roughly 13 million tons or 3% of global production is likely to remain offline for several years in the construction schedule of the planned advent of Qatar's Ross [indiscernible] remains to be updated. As reflected by healthy LNG forward curves in January and February, we believe the LNG market was already well balanced prior to the March supply disruptions.

So unsurprisingly, LNG prices have subsequently been higher, and the forward curve is lifted for several years into the future. Interestingly, U.S. LNG infrastructure, which only started production 10 years ago, has now grown to 19 Bcf feed gas per day. Despite this unprecedented growth, domestic natural gas prices are almost exactly where they were 10 years ago. The U.S. has decades low cost natural gas reserves position in the country and Venture Global to continue to provide affordable and reliable LNG to the global market. I also think the current environment highlights the value of Henry Hub link prices versus oil link prices that are common in most other markets. not only as Henry Hub not moved higher with the rise of oil prices, but U.S. natural gas prices have fallen as production of gas associated with oil production has increased, examining current and future LNG production in the Middle East. While we do not know how long the straight-out closure will last, clearly, there is an immediate impact.

And we believe it is likely to take some time for even the equipment that has not been damaged to return to full operational capacity. Lower production levels are only compounding the already historically low EU gas inventory levels, which were already near multiyear lows following cold winter temperatures. Depleted inventories will need to be rebuilt before next winter, likely increasing exposure to the forthcoming winter in compounding the challenge of constrained LNG production. Also, many traditionally price elastic markets like China, India and Pakistan have already made near-term demand adjustments and residual demand is increasingly inelastic. As a result, we believe the current backwardation in TTF and JKM Ford's is unsustainable. Storage must be replenished and when our markets are likely to rally absent a near-term cessation of hostilities as market fundamentals take hold.

Beyond the immediate impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the 2 damaged Qatari liquefaction trains, the 49 million-ton Northfield expansion is already delayed and we expect could be delayed further by factors like supply chain disruptions and the availability of skilled labor as Qatar works to bring that facility back on schedule. Now I'll turn it over to CFO, Jack Thayer, who will review the quarterly performance provide an overview of our project performance and discuss our updated financial guidance.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning to those on the line. I'll be referring to the Venture Global, Inc. Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, and 2026. The 10-Q is available on our website, and some of the key results are summarized on Page 16 of the presentation. During this call, I will highlight results I believe are salient to this audience. and I encourage you to review the entirety of our financial statements in detail. Beginning with revenue. Our top line was $4.6 billion for the first quarter of 2026, a $1.7 billion increase from the $2.9 billion during the equivalent period in 2025. This increase in revenue was driven by $3.1 billion from higher sales volumes, 48 TBtu in the first quarter of 2026 compared with 228 TBtu in the first quarter of 2025, which was partially offset by $1.4 billion from lower net LNG sales prices at our Plaquemines project and at Calasieu Pass due to the commencement of LNG sales under its post-COD SPAs.

Our income from operations was $1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2026, a $71 million increase from $1.1 billion in the first quarter of 2025. The shift was primarily driven by the higher sales volumes I previously mentioned, offset by lower LNG prices, net of the cost of feed gas. Our operating costs and G&A were largely changed year-over-year despite increased sales volumes and more venture global owned ships in operation. Our development costs were lower than the same period last year as we were able to capitalize more costs associated with CP2 and our pipeline and bolt-on expansions. Our net income attributable to common stockholders, which we will refer to as net income was $488 million for the first quarter of 2026, a $92 million increase from the $396 million in Q1 2025.

Higher interest expense was offset by favorable changes in interest rate swaps and lower taxes due to higher stock option tax benefits. Shifting to consolidated adjusted EBITDA, we earned $1.4 billion during the first quarter of 2026, a $26 million or 2% increase from $1.3 billion in Q1 2021. This increase in consolidated adjusted EBITDA was driven chiefly by higher sales volumes, largely offset by lower LNG sales prices, net of the cost to feed gas. Our EBITDA margin was 30% for the quarter despite challenging market conditions and is indicative of our substantial operating efficiencies and competitive operating advantage. I would also like to call out several additional financial updates. As Mike mentioned, we closed an $8.6 billion project financing as part of the final investment decision of the second phase of CPI which, in combination with the first phase, brings total project financing at CP2 to $20.7 billion, the largest stand-alone project financing ever completed.

Subsequent to the end of the quarter, Capture Pass Funding LLC raised $1.75 billion in the Term Loan B market to fully redeem the per equity interest of Stonepeak Bayou Holdings which should reduce our cost of anaesthesia expense by approximately $100 million per year and allow capital to flow more fluidly to the parent Aasiaat at month we issued $750 million of Calcasieu Pass notes which we used to fully repay the remaining balance of the Calcasieu Pass construction loan. Already in 2026, we've raised over $11 billion in support of our development and to refinance existing debt. As you see on Page 17, based on this cargo count, we are providing a consolidated adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $8.2 billion to $8.5 billion for 2026.

This range assumes a liquefaction fee of $9.50 to $10.50 per MBtu for cargoes remaining to be sold in 2026 and is consistent with current TTF and JKM for price expectations. On average, a fixed liquefaction fees over the remainder of 2026, increase or decrease by $1 per MMBtu. We expect our consolidated adjusted EBITDA range to adjust accordingly $300 million to $350 million, reflecting our accelerated pace of contracting and our 84% contracted position. As a reminder, our exposure stated on our 2025 year-end call was $575 million to $625 million for every dollar move in TTF prices. and our updated forecast reflects a material reduction in EBITDA sensitivity since our last call. Lastly, before turning the call back to Mike to take your questions.

On Page 18, we walk through our capital allocation priorities. With respect to our near-term objectives, the numbers speak for themselves, and our model clearly generates the highest returns in the LNG industry. As such, we believe the best use of our capital is continuing to invest in future growth. through our bolt-on expansions and adjacent infrastructure. As cash flows from CP2 begin to materialize in a meaningful way next year, we also expect to begin reducing leverage and hope to see our debt across the capital structure shift to investment grade. We've already begun making progress on debt repayment as total debt outstanding at Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines have been reduced by more than $900 million. And since January, we have repaid over $500 million of the bridge loan at CP2.

The last of our short-term objectives is to continue to simplify our capital structure, which we have already made progress towards in Q2 through the redemption of our Stonepeak preferred security and the repayment of the Cactus Pass construction loan. Longer term, we expect our portfolio of high-return bolt-on opportunities to continue to be a compelling home for future investment. Although the scale of incremental investment is likely to shrink relative to our escalating cash flows.

Thus, leaving more capital available for other uses. In particular, we expect to retire and refinance higher capital, higher cost capital, advance mature or are [indiscernible]. Additionally, we anticipate growing our dividend and potentially repurchasing shares as other means of driving shareholder value and returns. I'll now turn the call back over to Mike.

Thank you, Jack. At this point, we'd like to open up the call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Manav Gupta with UBS.

Firstly, congrats on a guidance raise, excellent execution. I wanted to get a little more understanding on the new 2 contracts that you have signed both with Vital and Total Energies, Help us understand how those things came together. And given that you are such a low-cost producer, do we expect that you will continue to get more orders given cost advantage you have versus your global peers?

Starting with the second half first. We are very active in both the long medium and short-term contracting conversations and expect to progress on all 3 and have very, very good line of sight on the contracting that we want to do in -- to support the bolt-on expansion and also to continue to term out our future portfolio. We're super excited about our 5-year deals. Those are a length in the term that we planned on and I talked about, as you know, for several years. But we -- as we talked about in earlier calls, reached the -- finally reached the point, the transition point between placements progressing and CP2 progressing and comfort in the production capacity of both, in particular, Plaquemines first that allows us to do the 5-year deals now. Those initially will be serviced primarily by Plaquemines. And then as CP2 comes online next year, initially with commissioning cargoes will shift over to start selling commissioning cargoes out of CP2 ramp-up.

This is particularly important because it allows us to, in today's market blend out, term out those -- that future production has a big impact on kind of blending the risk with much higher pricing than 20-year pricing. We're achieving roughly double our long-term contract prices a little bit better.

Perfect. My quick follow-up here is, you mentioned in the opening comments, global gas prices are rising. U.S. gas prices are actually under pressure, which is what we call the VG advantage. And the way we look at it, there are like 8 Bcf of pipes connecting the Permian to the Gulf Coast. There's a lot of gas which we have moved from the Permian towards the Gulf Coast? And do you think this further widens the VG advantage where you are already low cost, but you've become even lower cost as this gas starts to land on the Gulf Coast?

We hope so. We hope so, Manav. The -- I think I'd focus you particularly on the physical infrastructure and interconnects that we put in place are interconnecting. The Permian gas has particularly high nitrogen content, which is not good for liquefaction facilities and LNG tankers. And to accommodate for that, we designed, configured have built, and it's now arriving at our site at CP2, very, very large-scale nitrogen removal units, among the biggest in the country that allow us to extract the full gas stream that we can draw from the Waha. And the combination of our 90-mile CPX lateral for CP2, our interconnects with the completed pipe Black Fin that takes us to Katy and then the transportation agreements that physically connect us direct with Waha. We can uniquely absorb a massive amount of gas all the way from Waha to CP2 and extract the nitrogen and use it directly into our facility. So we're excited when CPT turns on next year to begin enjoying the flows of Waha gas.

Congrats on all the positive developments.

Your next question comes from the line of John Mackay with Goldman Sachs.

I want to [ send ] the macro. Mike, you made a couple of comments suggesting effectively, you'd expect global gas prices to be higher than they are right now on the back of this disruption. I'd be curious just to hear a little bit more on your view of maybe why they aren't higher. Is it -- are we seeing demand destruction? Is it a view in the market that resolution is coming sooner than it will be. Maybe just walk us through a little bit of that and what you're hearing from your customers?

No, I mean, it's a great question and obviously, the markets are very complex because it's a combination of all the different markets and participants in the markets that create it, and they all have different levels of storage, different requirements to be gas into their customers, different regulatory restrictions and how they pass along cost and price. Obviously, different politics, different exposure to the Middle East Gas. So I think one of the things that might surprise people in this market or maybe not, is that when it's volatile like this and particularly around uncertainty of when conflicts that impact price might suddenly end or escalate. You see a lot of pause in purchasing decisions for -- in the short and medium term. And that means you're not getting the purchasing activity that could drive prices up and the psychology is the customer hoping that suddenly, it will end and prices will drop. And so they don't want to precipitously in their opinion, move to make purchases.

However, a lot of the markets are pressured by very, very historically low storage levels, and so they will have to buy to fill up those storage levels. And so there's pent-up buying that has to happen to build those storage levels that will probably be spread out well into next year. And so there's really an uplift that's going to last going to last for a while. And this fundamentally is not an LNG issue. This is just a geography and portfolio exposure issue. Notwithstanding that, as you can see from our deal announcements of the 5-year deals and the progress that we made contracting short term that lifted our portfolio sales to 84% for this year.

We were able to do a good job. Our teams did a great job methodically marketing into this environment. There's still quite a bit to go for the market to really normalize.

I appreciate all the thoughts there. Second quick one for me. you guys pulled forward slightly the formal time line for CP2 still screens a little conservative versus some of the progress you've talked about on kind of site work. So maybe just walk us through any level of conservatism in there? And maybe what milestones you're watching on your side to be able to tighten up or maybe even pull forward that time line a little bit?

So things are going extremely well knocking wood at CP2. We still are -- we're $12 billion plus into construction activity at CP2, but we're still only 10 months from FID. And so we want to wait a little while and get a little further along before we refine what our CP2 projections are for first LNG, but it's going stream well, we are extremely pleased with progress. The -- in terms of milestones that we look for, we have a -- because of the standardization of our projects, we have pretty good views of how far we are away from certain milestones, in particular, first LNG production based on the status of what's on foundations. And as we described, we have 12 LNG trains currently on foundations. It's a great achievement of the team even to have foundations at this point, by the way. And we have a few blocks of LNG trains are coming over every other week. So it's progressing well. the power plant. We already have some turbines foundations.

Our [indiscernible] are progressing very well at our Morgan City facility. Those are coming over nicely. I think we're waiting to see some more of the large components of pretreatment and power to arrive. So that the integration teams can get in there and start doing the interconnects for those. We feel good about the tanks, the jetty is moving along super well as well. So we feel good. We just want a little bit more time before we refine it.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Tonet with JPMorgan Securities.

Jeremy. Just wanted to circle on capital allocation, if I could. Clearly, a lot of -- a lot more cash coming through the door today expected than recently. And just wondering I guess, as you think about capital allocation and leverage, in particular, just Wondering about the thoughts about maybe at some point in the future, hitting investment grade across all the OpCos? Or would that make sense at some point down the road for the holdco? Just want to get a sense for how leverage fits into the picture relative to other capital allocation priorities?

Sure. We -- our expectation and our plan is to be investment grade at all levels. And we think we have a nice path to get there in not too long. Our view is we approach in a few months COD of Placements first phase that given the scale of production there and the earnings coverage that comes from the total production that Plaquemines should be, it's up to the rating agency, obviously, but Plaquemines should be investment grade when we take COD of Phase 1, which is on schedule, Phase is on schedule as well for spring of next year. And so if we don't get there by this winter, we would hope and expect by spring to be investment-grade at Blackman. And we think that the increase in earnings that we're achieving this year and next year, relative to the scale of our parent debt, which is $11 billion of high yield there should accelerate us getting to investment grade. The earnings coverage the speed at which we're growing earning assets on our balance sheet.

We're passing $56 billion in the first quarter of assets. And when turns online next year. We activate another 17 million, 18-plus million tons of long-term contracts. So we think we're on a very good path and our objective is to be investment-grade at at all levels. And we currently amortize a significant amount of our debt, which is scheduled at a project level. And as we have maturities beginning in '28 and '29, our current thinking is that we'll begin to retire some of that debt. So on the back of our balance sheet and earning assets dramatically increasing and our earnings increasing, we also expect to begin to retire the debt. We can fund all the growth that we've described. We can reduce debt. And as Jack described, we will have capital available if we want you to buy back stock as well.

Got it. That's very helpful. And just want to pivot here, I guess, to customer conversations and maybe at a different angle. Just wondering how that has changed with maybe the types of counterparties over time. When we saw the Total agreement this morning that wouldn't necessarily have been the first counterparty we would have thought of there. So just wondering, I guess, how conversations or relationships with various customers have evolved over time?

Well, we've been in the last year plus, we've signed the most long-term contracts in the world, I think. And our contracting conversations continue to increase. We're unique in the market as a producer to be able to offer short-and long-term contracts and that improves that improves our commercial progress, being able to offer a middle term contract in a long-term contract or some 2-year strips of cargoes along with a 20-year contract.

That's something that's unique to us in the market, and that's going to be the case for the next 5 years. I think we're probably going to be the largest available chunk of liquefaction capacity in the next few years. And as we continue to reliably execute and reliably deliver. As we pointed out, we didn't miss a single scheduled cargo since COD of Calcasieu Pass, and we're viewed as a very reliable, high-quality executor of our businesses, and that has expanded the conversations.

We've -- in the contracts we've been signing with very, very conservative experienced offtakers like Tokyo Gas, for example, in Japan.

Your next question comes from the line of Jean Salisbury with Bank of America.

I think as you correctly forecasted on your last call and talked about in earlier remarks, Waha gas price in the Permian has blown out pretty spectacularly in the last few months. Can you remind us of BG's exposure to that spread now like this year and whether that played any part in the increased guidance for the year?

It really doesn't show up for us until we turn on CP2 and then than our transportation and pipes and Nitrogen movie unit come into play, that's really the material exposure we have. there's gas that comes over now, but the big impact is when we turn on.

That's very clear. And then the CP2 bolt-on extension, it looks like it's now scoped at 10 MTA. I think it used to be 6.4 MTA. What were the drivers of the bigger size? And I guess, more broadly, the scoping of the bolt-ons plan has moved around a little bit over the last few quarters. Can you talk about the drivers of that? And once you make the regulatory filing, does that lock in the size and scope of the bolt-ons?

So the change that made the bolt-on for CP2. And if you look at that page, I can't remember what page number it is. It has a schematic of it. The only change we made there is we shifted from trains to 12 trains and it's inside the wall. And I think it's Slide 12 in the deck. As you can see, we increased that in a pretreatment plant and a little -- and a few extra turbines in the power plant. That's the decision to increase the size is just our demand is so strong in our team success in selling 3 million tons and growing of our 5-year deals really makes that growth much more comfortable for us. and we expect more middle and long-term deals as well.

The Plaquemines bolt-on and there's a schematic on the right side of that same Page 12 as well for Plaquemines for now is staying the same with 8 trains. And that's a simple fast expansion for us. The -- and we're very comfortable that we'll have the contracts that we want to rightsize the construction loans. Keep in mind that those bolt-ons will turn on much faster than what we build today. which is massively accretive for us and also makes the financing more attractive. We are permitting. We filed, as you know, for the Plaquemines expansion. We filed for multiple bolt-ons at Plaquemines. And what we're showing here is the first phase of the bolt-ons. If if the market demand and contracting picks up more, then we have the ability to very comfortably just drop in a few more trains next to the 8 that you see there. and really fully take advantage of the incremental modular approach that we have that is going to lower the overall construction costs and our ownership point of the liquefaction capacity and is super accretive to margins.

Our OpEx per ton will continue to go down as we add this expansion. So we get operational leverage that's material as well on top of it. So we continue to have a very attractive permitting environment. And our 2 focus is here on these brownfield sites.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Robertson with Deutsche Bank.

Mike, in the past, you guys have talked about lessons learned in terms of the construction and commissioning process and about applying those lessons to the future facilities. But I just want to focus more on the operational side here because it's pretty clear that things are going extremely well from an operational perspective at Plaquemine. Can you talk about any operational lessons learned here? Anything gleaned from the data collection efforts that you then apply at CP2 or of future facilities?

Jack, do you want to talk to that one?

Sure. So Chris, I think what we've spoken to and assumed for some time is that our unique design has a high fixed, low variable cost model. And as we've increased the capacity from our facilities, we've been the beneficiary of lowering that cost per unit or cost per MMBtu, whereby at Calcasieu Pass, we see that leverage taking production per MMBtu from, call it, $0.45 to $0.50 at full capacity, that will be south of $0.40 per MMBtu. And where we particularly see the leverage is at Plaquemines, where on a nameplate basis, we're at roughly $0.44 per MMBtu and at full capacity, we're in below $0.30 per MMBtu area. The benefit of these bolt-on expansions that we're doing as well as we increase the scale of CP2 and build out plaque wins further is, there is even further incremental leverage not just on per seat basis just because of the volumes created but also you're running the same fleet across all of our facilities, there are significant benefits in operating leverage that we get from a fleet-wide approach that's really in its nascency.

And we continue to use our continuous improvement programs to drive that even further. So we're very excited about our operational excellence. You see it in the safety record that we have, but you're also seeing our competitive advantage really show up in our cost of production from MMBtu.

On the data side of your question, we are super -- remain super excited about it. We -- as you've heard us describe before, we're somewhere between 800,000 plus and 1 million data collection points between our 2 facilities. We use AI tools, both to optimize production. But we actually have -- we were able to acquire so much data we use tools to identify the most valuable data to stream and so we can manage our data storage cost. But I think that our data acquisition is likely as valuable or more valuable than the rest of the business. because it's what's enabled us to grow our production capacity from Calcasieu pass where we're for the moment a little bit above nameplate capacity to where we are with Plaquemines and where we're excited to be for CP2, the value of that extra 40-plus percent production capacity because it's largely funded by the contracts that we signed for the nameplate capacity has higher margins and higher value for us. So it's all driven by our data science team, process engineers on that team and was integrated into our control rooms and to our design changes and execution not CP2 and the bolt-ons.

It's incredible, incredible value for us. And the value is increasing from that data. With the -- we're -- I think we're over 900 total cargoes now. And the value of the -- or the magnitude of the data that we stream every 10 seconds on our facilities is immense and it allows us to run very sophisticated models and simulations and experiments on operational improvements and optimizations that have resulted in the output that you're seeing today.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Blum with Wells Fargo.

I wanted to go to your comments around Slide 11, which was your contracting strategy. I'll just kind of ask all my questions at once. Has your approach to contracting changed here at all in light of the Middle East conflict in conversations for long-term and medium-term capacity agreements have the conflict or just a higher forward curve had any impact on pricing discussions for long and medium-term contracts? And if not, do you think they will as the full impact of the closure kind of gets reflected in forward curves.

So it's a very interesting question. So I would say our contracting strategy hasn't changed because of it. But I think the customers' views are changing and will continue to change. I think that the long-term contract price is available in the market, not just from us, but the market in general, are so attractive relative to the middle and short-term contract pricing that over time, you're going to see more of a pivot to the long-term contracts. In our opinion, the long-term contract prices in the market away from us, many of them are below replacement cost for in construction. And I think that the customers have a sense of that and know how attractive those prices are. And just to remind $2 handle liquefaction fee as a supply of fuel in Europe coming out of the power plant is it's, give or take, $0.06 per watt of electricity.

So it's incredibly attractive pricing. And you're never going to get fired for delivering $0.06 [indiscernible] electricity. And so I think we're seeing more of that. That's also showing up in the demand for 5-year deals, 5-year contracts that I think is the market adjusting from what maybe before would have been more 1- and 2-year deals. We're seeing more 5-year deals. We love the blend and price between the 20-year contract and the short-term contracts that contract price right in the middle is, we think, a great value.

It's double the long-term contract basis and is a nice blend to the, give or take, 50 million tons, 49.5 million tons of 20-year contract haven't. So we're going to continue to blend in those middle terms just because we led with all our 20-year deals blending in those middle term, higher prices, we think is is really a really attractive combination with all the commissioning cargoes we produce it by physical requirement or to [indiscernible] term contracts.

Your next question comes from the line of Brandon Bingham with Scotiabank.

Just one quick one from me. The production profile slides, I think, are very helpful. I was just kind of curious if you could unpack kind of what's baked into the ranges there as we move forward through 2029. Obviously, CP2 timing is a big factor. But just curious, things like excess capacity or other performance-driven factors, just what's in there beyond project timing. From a total production capacity standpoint, we're really matching on a projected basis, the performance levels of Plaquemines that we've been achieving. Well, we haven't turned it on yet, but I'm hopeful we do better than that at CP2 because we engineered in some fairly significant improvements in throughput capacities into CP2 compared to Plaquemine and from lessons learned and from our data that we were just talking about. And but we're really extrapolating from placements. The schedules also that we're layering that production capacity in matching what we did at Plaquemines as well. And so we're just layering on the ramp-up in production based on what we've already achieved or already executed with the same people. So we feel good about achieving that outside really mostly of just FM-type events of achieving these levels. And it's -- we're proud as a team that we're on a path to double to double where we are today. We're roughly loading 43 ships a month today.

And by 2029, early we think that will be in the 90s per month. And on top of the -- and I referenced it in my comments on top of the significant growth we've achieved in the last 2 years. In the next 2 years, we're going to double again. And that's really just based on what's in construction and development with our bolt-ons.

Your next question comes from the line of Sunil Sibal with Seaport Global.

So on the CapEx front, obviously, you reiterated 2026 CapEx of $12 billion to $13 billion. And you talked about expanding FID in 2027. So I was curious, how should we think about the cadence on the CapEx, especially considering your IG plans for the -- of the complex?

So the CapEx is just the drawdown of the financings that are already in place for CP2. So it's not incremental is not already in the financing. And again, just remind financing that's covered by our long-term contracts. And so as you know, the long-term offtake contracts that we have give us the coverage ratios that the rating agencies required to reach investment grade on those projects. And so those long-term offtake agreements amortize the debt, provide the interest coverage on the debt. operating expense and some profit on the -- just on the long-term contracts. And then, of course, we have significant additional capacity above it that -- and I'm doing quotes the almost free capacity because it's -- the cost of the facility are funded by that construction capital. So that CapEx is covered as part of the financings.

Understood. And then there's been some discussion on the call about long-term SPAs and the market expectations. So I was curious and based on the discussions you're having with customers. When do you think we see a significant improvement in the long-term SPA pricing considering all that is happening on the macro front?

So construction cost for the market in general mostly away from us, but in general, continue to go up. And so there is a lot of pressure on construction costs in the market. We manage it the ways we've talked about before, we order, obviously very early and manufacture a lot and are repeating what we've done before. Our strategy has been to maintain our prices as we see improvements, we pass those on to customers in our long-term pricing. We have very, very significant room for expansion. And so our plan is to continue to maintain the lowest long-term contract prices in the market and continue to grow market there. and to continue to pass the reliable low price execution to the market that creates demand improves demand over time.

And so we our strategy is not to go raise prices on the long-term contracts.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Mike Sabel for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everybody, for your time this morning. We really appreciate. We really appreciate it, and we look forward to speaking with many of you in coming days and weeks, and hope everyone has a great day. Thank you. Bye.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us, and welcome to the Venture Global Inc. Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, John. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global Inc.'s Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sabel, Venture Global CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder; Jack Thayer, our CFO, and other members of Venture Global's senior management team.

Before we begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from what is described in these statements. I encourage you to refer to the disclaimers in our earnings presentation, which is available on the Investors section of our website. Additionally, we may include certain non-GAAP metrics such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA, which we may refer to simply as EBITDA during this call. A reconciliation of these metrics to the most relevant GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of the earnings presentation posted on our website.

Finally, the guidance in this presentation is only effective as of today. In general, we will not update guidance until the following quarter and will not update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated public disclosure.

I'll now turn the call over to Mike Sabel.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results and provide guidance for 2026. I'll begin the call with an overview of our key accomplishments and future plans before shifting to our LNG projects individually. I will then make some remarks on the LNG industry in the current events.

Before turning over the call to Jack, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results and guidance for 2026. Following all prepared remarks, we will open the line to Q&A.

Turning to Page 5 of the presentation. 2025 was a landmark year for Venture Global. In January, we went public. We reached commercial operations at our first project, Calcasieu Pass in April, at Plaquemines after producing our first cargo at the end of December 2024, we have ramped up commissioning activities and are now generating more than one commissioning cargo per day. And as CP2, our largest project to date, we launched construction and raised financing for the first phase in July. This means we are simultaneously constructing 57 MTPA plus of capacity across 2 facilities. Phase 1 of Plaquemines is on track for COD this year and construction of the first phase of CP2 is running well and is on schedule and on budget.

Total assets grew by approximately $10 billion to $53 billion and EBITDA and income from operations nearly tripled. Venture Global is on track to be the largest LNG producer in North America, supported by more than $134 billion of total contracted third-party revenue, which we expect to continue to grow as we add to our existing base of 49 MTPA of long and intermediate term offtake agreements.

For 2026, it is worth noting that we now have 69% of expected production capacity contracted a percentage that should rise quickly as we anticipate signing additional short to intermediate and long-term contracts in the near term. Venture Global equity has been publicly listed for just over a year now, and our priority has been to control what we can control and deliver on what we promised.

As you see on Page 6, we have accomplished a great deal this year. The number of cargoes we produced in 2025 was at the high end of the guidance range set out at the IPO. We reached FID at CP2 Phase 1. We secured 7.75 MTPA of additional 20-year SPAs. We leverage data generation and analysis, lessons learned from Calcasieu Pass to further increase production capacity at Plaquemines and we identified low-cost bolt-on production opportunities at our first 3 facilities in excess of what we had originally anticipated. In addition, as you can see in the column to the right, we believe there should be further upside to each of these areas in 2026, and we are working diligently to deliver growth and return for our shareholders and customers. the constant pursuit of excellence is core to our culture of Venture Global, as we have highlighted on Page 7.

The combination of structural benefits from our modular approach, massive data capture and analysis and our unrelenting focus on continuous learning and improvement translates into superior LNG production and project level operating and maintenance costs that are currently about 30% below industry averages and we see room for further improvements. We have continued the process of bringing most of the typical EPC functions in-house, which has enabled us to construct our facilities in less than half the time many other LNG projects take which combined with our faster production ramp translates into lower costs and better returns. While efficiency and speed are important objectives, our first priority remains the safety of our employees, contractors and communities as reflected in our best-in-class safety record.

Finally, we are working to monetize the key components of the LNG value chain and augment our LNG portfolio with complementary midstream shipping regasification and in the case of CP2, nitrogen removal assets, all of which we expect should give us better access to attractively priced gas, protect and enhance margins and improve our customer connectivity. We view our LNG infrastructure as technology assets that we are constantly optimizing to be safer, faster and more efficient.

You can see on Page 8 our near-term outlook for the buildup of production from our facilities. We anticipate Calcasieu Pass, Plaquemines and CP2 Phases 1 and 2 when complete, will generate approximately 68 million tonnes per annum plus on an annual run rate basis with room for upside from optimization efforts and peak production opportunities. Of this 68 MTPA, we have contracted approximately 72% already on a long-term basis. Beyond that, we have included what we anticipate will be our next additions following CP2 Phase 2. As I'll discuss in more detail shortly, we expect to be able to add approximately 13 MTPA of bolt-on capacity at CP2 and Plaquemines at costs well below even our own industry low construction pricing and even faster than our industry-leading construction time lines. This tremendous growth in the number of trains and related infrastructure translates into a more than doubling of monthly ship loadings growing from approximately 43 per month today to approximately 90 per month in 2029.

This, in turn, could transform our cash flows. For example, assuming just a $3 per MMBtu liquefaction fee for our uncontracted volumes. We estimate by 2029, our EBITDA to be about $11 billion, assuming a $5 MMBtu on uncontracted volumes. That estimated EBITDA number could rise to $17 billion, reflecting the straightforward impact of installation of more trains producing more LNG commodity product. Our new production ramp is expected to be staggered with the COD dates of our existing projects, such that as we complete commissioning at one project and move to long-term fixed rate contracts, the new production capacity should begin to ramp, creating a balanced portfolio of long, intermediate and short-dated sales agreements. This should improve cash flow visibility and provide an optimal balance of margin and predictable cash flow while importantly retaining very valuable upside earning optionality.

As we advance on schedule this year and next year to COD of Phases 1 and 2 of Plaquemines and following CP2 we activate an increasing portion of our $134 billion of long-term contracted third-party revenue, now blended with a growing portfolio of intermediate term tender sales contracts. We are actively working to add to both the 20-year and intermediate term contract portfolios and anticipate more deals in the coming quarters. Importantly, we target -- currently target funding all of our project CapEx and the incremental growth with our existing construction loans, retained earnings and incremental project-level borrowing with no parent level equity, preferred or debt anticipated at this time. Notably, we have executed our Plaquemines and CP2 construction financings while retaining 100% ownership of those projects and therefore, of course, 100% of future earnings.

Turning to Page 9. Since we reentered the contracting market in April of last year, Venture Global has signed 9.25 MTPA of new 20-year SPAs with a fantastic portfolio of customers. This is more volume than any other LNG company in the market, demonstrating that the world's top buyers trust our execution and reliability. Today, we are pleased to announce our first 5-year contract at Venture Global Commodities for approximately 0.5 MTPA with [ Trafigura ]. Additionally, last week, we signed a new 1.5 MTPA 20-year SPA with [ Howell Aerospace ], marking our first long-term contract with the South Korean customer. These 2 new binding agreements add to the 4 we signed in the fourth quarter of 2025 with Naturgy, Atlantic-SEE, [ Mitsui and Tokyo Gas ].

On Page 10, I'll highlight our performance in Q4 and the exceptional year-over-year increase in our results. As you can see, we nearly tripled revenue, income from operations and EBITDA through the gradual ramp of commissioning. Jack will discuss these numbers in greater detail later but the main takeaway is our company's ability in the fourth quarter to generate over $2 billion of EBITDA and $1 billion of net income during a period of disruptive market dynamics, including swings in commodity prices, in a period of challenging ship availability, underscoring the resiliency of our business model and resourcefulness of our team.

Turning to Page 11. Thanks to our innovative temporary power solution, all 36 liquefaction trains at Plaquemines have undergone initial startup. We also recently filed a request with FERC to increase the authorized peak liquefaction capacity at both Plaquemines and CP2 to 35 MTPA and as well as filing with FERC in the U.S. Department of Energy for up to 31 MTPA of bolt-on expansion at Plaquemines. Our construction success is predicated on our mission to be the safest LNG developer in the industry as reflected by our 0.16 total recordable incident rate compared to the national average of 2.2. I mentioned on a commercial success, our commercial success in 2025 earlier and now early '26. But our finance team is also very busy as we issued $3 billion of Plaquemines notes to repay construction financing, and we are currently hard at work to finalize the construction loan for Phase 2 to fully fund the construction of that phase of CP2.

Turning to Page 13. We show a summary of the projects we are planning to bring online by the end of the decade, as I just discussed. As you know, there are further low-cost bolt-on and growth opportunities available to us, but we thought it would be helpful to outline our near-term development plans.

Moving to Page 14. It was business as usual at Calcasieu Pass during Q4 as we exported 38 cargoes, which is down slightly from our prior expectations as ship availability and Atlantic storm delays late in the quarter did impact several anticipated cargoes. I wanted to provide some update commentary on the Calcasieu Pass arbitrations. In January, we received a favorable no liability decision in the [ Repsol ] arbitration proceedings. Going forward, the noncash reserve, which reflects our best estimate of award outcomes from BP and the other 3 remaining arbitrations is currently estimated to be $13 million per quarter reduction to revenue at Calcasieu Pass due to 20-year duration of the SPA contract terms. While the impact to EBITDA will be less due to adjustments for noncontrolling interest in Texas. Importantly, this is an estimate, and there is no cash impact to our fourth quarter financial statements. We will update these estimates in our financials quarterly as we receive arbitration results and incorporate any final financial awards or settlements going forward.

Also, while BP has raised the quantum of their damages claim, our position as to our exposure there is unchanged as the clear language of the contract events recovery of the categories and magnitude of damages sought by BP.

Turning to Page 15. Plaquemines continues to progress construction, commissioning and the performance, reliability and assurance testing required in advance of Phase 1 COD in Q4 of this year and Phase 2 COD in mid-2027. Although we continue to utilize and rely on a significant amount of temporary power, in the second quarter, we expect Phase 1 will transition to its permanent power plant configuration. We are yet to achieve substantial completion, but we are on schedule in targeting substantial completion under the scope of the EPC by late summer, so coming soon.

Turning to Page 16. CP2 is now just over 7 months from Phase 1 FID announced on July 28. Despite the short period, I'm pleased to announce construction of Phase 1 is proceeding well on schedule and budget. And over the weekend, we raised the roof on our first LNG tank making it the fastest time to a roof phrase of this size in the history of the LNG industry. Furthermore, we now have 6 of the 26 liquefaction trains delivered to the site and on foundations and expect delivery of the first pretreatment module in the coming months. With respect to Phase 2, as I mentioned, we have now signed 5 MTPA of 20-year SPAs to support the financing for the project. We continue to have constructive conversations with off-takers and expect to announce additional SPAs in coming quarters. With $1.7 billion of equity already invested in Phase 2, we expect project financing and FID to be complete in coming weeks. We anticipate funding the entire CP2 project with retained earnings and a construction loan from a group of leading banks, enabling Venture Global to again maintain 100% ownership in one of the world's largest LNG projects.

On Page 17, we depict the first 2 bolt-on expansions we expect to develop after FID of CP2 Phase 2, subject to additional contracting and regulatory approval. The bolt-ons at CP2 and Plaquemines are straightforward liquefaction train and gas turbine additions that should add around 6.4 MTPA each. The additions leverage the benefits of our modular approach resulting in what we expect to be a much lower cost and much shorter construction time lines. These developments exemplify the advantages of our mid-scale modular approach as well as the power to leverage existing redundancies built into the original designs.

Turning to Page 19. The past few months and recent events have demonstrated the impact of seasonality, the inherent tightness of LNG supply and demand and, of course, the impact of geopolitics on our market. While LNG spreads compress in late 2025, cold weather in January and February has exhausted gas inventories in Europe to low levels, lifting LNG forward curves. Of course, this is all impacted by current events over the weekend. Furthermore, a number of LNG projects under construction have announced delays of their planned start dates.

As you can see on the left, the forward curves reflect the market expectation for LNG prices in both Asia and Europe to remain at considerable spreads over Henry Hub through 2028, even during periods of expected cold weather and higher U.S. gas prices. Of course, these are the forward curves reflected on Friday. As we approach production at CP2, our pipeline infrastructure, which enables us to access Permian gas at Waha and [ Katy ] is likely to become increasingly supportive of expanded margins. Importantly, Waha Gas is expected to remain at a significant discount to Henry Hub, creating an opportunity for positive basis impact at CP2 highlighting the value of our investment in nitrogen moving units to address high nitrogen levels found in that basin.

Flipping to Page 20. Based on our bottom-up view of the global LNG market on the left, we expect demand to meet or exceed supply through the end of the decade that quickly move to undersupplied early next decade unless additional liquefaction capacity is added. This positively supports contracting demand for our growing portfolio. Importantly, these assumptions are conservatively based on demand growth of 4.7% to 2035, which is below the historical 5.3% from 2015 to 2025. Demand for clean baseload electricity continues to grow and new LNG markets are being developed throughout the world. Historically, demand for energy and certainly gas increases as price declines provided to the physical -- provided the physical infrastructure exists to support it, which we see on Page 21, where we see some of the expansion of regasification infrastructure, which is further positioned to grow by approximately 40% from 2024 to 2030 with upside as new projects are announced.

China alone is positioned to add more than 100 MTPA of regasification capacity by 2030. India is committed to taking natural gas from just 6% of primary energy mix to 15% by 2030 as well. There's also been a sharp increase in developments from new markets like Iraq, Vietnam, Philippines, South Africa, New Zealand and others. [ PC ] countries around the world increasingly require reliable, consistent sources of energy, seek alternatives to cross-border pipelines and make investments to meet rising power demand. Furthermore, we estimate regasification utilization would only need to reach 40% of capacity in order to offset all of the new liquefaction infrastructure currently under construction, which again has seen slippage in FIDs and projected start-up timing.

Page 22 reflects the growth in gas power generation in both Europe and China. Not only are investments being made in regasification infrastructure but also in gas power generation which we expect to experience heavy utilization, particularly at attractive LNG prices. In 2025, a high-priced global LNG market, less than 3% of Chinese power was produced from natural gas or more than 55% came from coal as existing installed gas generation capacity operates at higher capacity factors and new gas-fired power generation is added we expect LNG imports to follow as delivered if LNG prices moderate. Domestic gas production is flattening in China and new pipeline additions are limited. Furthermore, we estimate that every 1% share gain by LNG relative to coal would translate into 34 MTPA of LNG demand.

At $10 per MMBtu LNG prices, for example, the cost of electricity in China is about $0.07 to $0.08 a kilowatt hour, converging on the cost of coal-fired power generation and history has proven that people consume affordably priced electricity. In the event, the LNG prices were to fall below $10 per MMBtu and gas and coal power generation approach parity we would expect a sharp demand response, creating an LNG price floor at levels supporting liquefaction margins well in excess of those reflected by current long-term SPA prices. Of course, we're moments of price volatility. But we expect those, of course, as we move beyond current events for them to smooth out.

Consequently, we are confident that the market is building the infrastructure to easily absorb new LNG supply and demand elasticity should mean every drop of LNG, the market would be able to produce over the next several years should be consumed at reasonable prices, as evidenced by the forward curve historical precedent and contracting activity, our customers feel the same.

Now I'll turn it over to Jack, our CFO, who will review the financials and our updated guidance.

Thank you, Mike. And good morning to those on the line. I'll be referring to the Venture Global, Inc. Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025. The 10-K is available on our website, and some of the key results are summarized on Page 24 of the presentation. During this call, I will highlight results, I believe, are salient to this audience, and I encourage you to review the entirety of our financial statements in detail.

Beginning with revenue, our top line was $4.4 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025, a $2.9 billion increase from $1.5 billion during the equivalent period in 2024. This increase in revenue was driven by $3.8 billion from higher sales volumes, 478 TBtu in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with 128 TBtu in the fourth quarter of 2024 which was partially offset by [ $945 ] million from lower net rates, primarily at MTPA due to the commencement of LNG sales under its post-COD SPAs.

For the full year 2025, revenue was $13.8 billion, up $8.8 billion from $5 billion in 2024, primarily due to increased sales volumes partially offset by lower rates. Our income from operations was $1.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, a $1.1 billion increase from $594 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. This shift was primarily driven by the higher sales volumes I mentioned previously, which resulted in a greater total margin for LNG sold. These increases were partially offset by $50 million of higher operating costs in support of the ramp-up of LNG production at the Plaquemines project and operating our tankers as well as $32 million and $147 million of higher G&A and depreciation expenses, respectively. We experienced a reduction in our development expenses of $72 million quarter-over-quarter as many of the costs associated with our 3-phase CP2 project were capitalized.

For the full year 2025, income from operations was $5.2 billion, up $3.4 billion from $1.8 billion in 2024. Our net income attributable to common stockholders, which we will refer to as net income was $1.1 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025, a $196 million increase from the $871 million in Q4 2024. Higher interest expense and changes in interest rate swaps negatively impacted Q4 results year-over-year, by $330 million and $476 million, respectively. For full year 2025, net income was $2.3 billion, up $0.8 billion from $1.5 billion in 2024.

Shifting to consolidated adjusted EBITDA. We earned $2.0 billion during the fourth quarter of 2025, a $1.3 billion or 191% increase from $688 million in Q4 2024. This increase in consolidated adjusted EBITDA was driven chiefly by higher sales volumes, partially offset by lower prices. For the full year 2025, consolidated adjusted EBITDA, we earned $6.3 billion, a $4.2 billion or 198% increase from $2.1 billion in 2024. The increase in consolidated adjusted EBITDA was again driven chiefly by higher sales volumes, partially offset by lower prices. Our projects exported a total of 128 cargoes in Q4, which increased by 95 cargoes compared with the same period in 2024. Of these cargoes 478 TBtu of volumes are reflected in our results for Q4 2025, more than tripling production compared with 128 TBtu in Q4 2024.

I would also like to call out several additional financial updates. The company issued $3 billion of Plaquemines notes in the quarter, which in combination with the proceeds from interest rate swap breakages, we used to repay $3.2 billion of the Plaquemines construction loan. For the year, we raised $33 billion in support of our development and to refinance existing debt. Also during the quarter, we secured a new $2 billion corporate revolving credit facility which was undrawn at year-end. For the full year 2025, we reduced total leverage at Calcasieu Pass by $190 million and at Plaquemines, we reduced total leverage by [ $919 ] million.

Moving to project performance and forward guidance. On Page 25, we are looking to produce between 486 to 527 cargoes from both facilities in 2026. And including volumes sold under our long-term SPAs, we have now contracted 69% of potential 2026 cargoes. In the fourth quarter, at Calcasieu Pass on the 38 cargoes exported we realized an implied weighted average liquefaction fee of $2.01 per MMBtu, which incorporates arbitration-related reserves. For 2026 based on average liquefaction fees achieved from SPAs and excess cargoes sold on a forward basis to date. We expect an implied weighted average liquefaction fee of $1.98 per MMBtu at Calcasieu Pass, including an adjustment for arbitration reserves. For the full year 2026, we expect to export 145 to 156 cargoes.

At Plaquemines, the facility exported 90 cargoes at a realized weighted average liquefaction fee of $6.02 per MMBtu on our commissioning cargoes during the fourth quarter which was negatively impacted by a brief period of margin compression in December as Henry Hub prices escalated, shipping day rates increased and TTF remain largely static. The shipping impact was partially mitigated by our owned and chartered fleet, demonstrating the advantages of maintaining a fleet of controlled vessels. In total, [ Flackman's ] exported 234 cargoes in 2025 which we expect to rise to 341 to 371 cargoes in 2026. This wider-than-normal range of potential production is driven by the inherent variability in the commissioning process, as we prioritize the completion of construction and commissioning and address any remediation items through the start-up process, which may cause brief periods of interruption. Thus far, including Phase 1 COD in Q4, Plaquemines has contracted 59% of potential cargoes for the year, capturing a weighted average liquefaction fee of $4.05 on those contracted commissioning cargoes and fourth quarter SPA cargoes.

As you see on Page 26, based on this cargo count, we are providing consolidated EBITDA guidance for a range of $5.2 billion to $5.8 billion for 2026. This range assumes a liquefaction fee of $5 to $6 per MMBtu for cargoes remaining to be sold over 2026, consistent with current TTF and JKM forward price expectations as of Friday. On average, if fixed liquefaction fees over the remainder of 2026 increase or decrease by $1 per MMBtu, we expect our consolidated adjusted EBITDA range to adjust accordingly by $575 million to $625 million.

While we do not typically provide quarterly consolidated adjusted guidance and do not intend to do so in future quarters, as you'll see on Page 27, we did want to provide some color with respect to the impact of winter storm firm as well as the residual impact of margin compression in late Q4 2025. Relative to a $5.50 per MMBtu liquefaction fee on our available capacity, we estimate higher Henry Hub prices, the absence of several foregone cargoes and basis impact at Plaquemines will have had approximately a $500 million impact on Q1 2026 consolidated adjusted EBITDA which we now expect to range from $1.15 billion to $1.25 billion.

I will now turn the call back over to Mike.

Thanks, Jack. Before I turn to questions, I want to address the concerning situation unfolding in the Middle East. We are monitoring developments closely and hoping for the safety and security of all Americans and everyone else in the region. The events over the weekend have had a strong impact on global energy markets. With the largest available incremental LNG capacity in the world, the United States will play a critical role during this historic disruption in the market. Venture Global stands ready to help keep the market stabilized and supply.

I'll now stand by for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will be coming from the line of John Mackay from Goldman Sachs, John your line is now open.

Mike, can we start on the macro? I know you just touched on it right here. Maybe just any perspective on what you guys are seeing in the market right now? What are you watching for a read on what's going on? How long the Qatar disruptions could last, et cetera? And then kind of connected to all of this, just walk us through a little bit of what your ability to transact against these current prices could look like?

Yes. No. Obviously, it's a sad situation in the Middle East and we're hoping for a fast recovery. We have a very long-term view on the market, which is that low and stable LNG prices increased demand over time and our business model is designed to deliver low-cost LNG into the market.

In the short term, the higher prices are helpful for our spreads, obviously. We probably have the largest number of available cargoes in the market. On Friday it was us and Qatar that had the largest available volumes. And so with Qatar for the moment turned off, and potentially damage the market's waiting to see if there can be an estimate on when it can turn back on and the ships can start to flow through. Obviously, the price in the market with physical commodities is based upon the price of the last available physical cargo and the market is going to take a few days, I think, to digest what that looks like.

Europe, as you know, has been and is at fairly low historic levels of storage and so this is not helpful timing though spring is around the corner in a few weeks here. So that should help there. There are markets in Asia that are also heavily reliant on Qatar supply and every day that ships can't flow through that creates a lot of backup and incremental demand. We are unique also in that we have our own fleet of ships with owned and lease were 10 ships. And we -- excuse me, 9 ships, we take delivery of 2 more here in coming months. We're uniquely able to move cargoes with our own vessels in this market, while TTF and JKM have spiked so have shipping rates. And so shipping is going to play a very critical role in kind of support of the market and having impact on the ability to move the cargoes.

I want to look a little longer or more medium term through the back of the decade, you guys are laying out a pretty large construction plan, a fair amount of CapEx, of course, associated with that. Can you again walk us through kind of what your funding plans look like right now? And how much of that plan to get to mid-80s or somewhere into the 80s on capacity is based on an assumption of higher prices in the market?

Yes. The -- none of it is based on higher prices. We -- with -- we can comfortably execute it with attractive returns at the long-term contracts that we have and the ones that we're working on in that price on the commissioning cargoes as well. We're working, as we said, to hopefully finish up the second phase FID for CP2. And as we guided to, we currently don't expect to use any parent debt preferred or common equity just at the project level construction loans and retained earnings.

And for the bolt-ons, which after the second phase of CP2 is incremental kind of 13-plus MTPA, we expect again to be able to use retained earnings and construction loans, leveraging incremental contracts as well. And so from a capital standpoint, our plan today and our expectation is that we'll be able to finance that incremental CapEx without tapping parent capital materially again and retaining 100% ownership of that growth. And that, as I said in the opening statement, with those 2 bolt-on transactions would get us -- will get us to that 90 cargoes a month in 2029.

Your next question comes from Manav Gupta from UBS.

My first question is we recently saw a filing by you, which you basically indicated that you would be in a position to run black even at 35 MTPA and maybe CP2 at 35. And I'm trying to understand how are you able to find these incremental volumes in your system? Is it the engineering, it's the design? Is it operational efficiency or the massive data operations that you have set up? Help us understand how are these incremental volumes available in the system?

We really designed the facilities to physically and safely be able to operate at that capacity of 35 MTPA if conditions support it which means during the cold months, we're able to operate at that level. On an annual level, that would work out to around 31 MTPA for the year. And so the facility from a safety standpoint and a throughput capacity could operate at 35 for the whole year if it were cold for the whole year. But when you average it out at that level, it would operate 31 MTPA.

The way we achieved it is a combination of lots of adjustments we've made from CP1 to Plaquemines and CP2, and it's a combination of how we're managing pressure and our modularity and our controls I would say it is almost all driven by the massive amount of data collection that we process. I think we're now we're now capturing over 500,000 data collection points every 10 seconds between Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines. And we have a large data science team and AI programmers that consume that data and incorporate it into our operations and our process design. And it's -- we've achieved extraordinary dividends from it.

So it's we're extremely pleased. We are able to -- particularly because we have so many trains and that we operate now that we're able to experiment with changes in conditions and configuration that allow us to fine-tune production.

Perfect. My next question, Mike, is more on your vision. We will see a big buildout of LNG, how do you see Venture Global position in it? You are the low-cost provider. We also see you as somewhat of an industry disruptor, which is basically going out and asking a question that why should it take 6 years to develop an LNG project when it can be done in 2 or 3 years? And then the reason I'm also asking is there were some competing LNG projects, which are basically saying, okay, we don't actually want to do this anymore. Maybe that's a function of they really cannot compete against people like you. So help us understand your vision for the company in the massive LNG build-out that we'll see in the next 4 or 5 years?

Thanks, Manav. I think our space is the same as many other spaces when there are new business models and disruption in different categories, the incumbents and existing parts of the market react to it. And so we, obviously, in our industry, all produce the identical product, the same liquid methane commodity, and it's largely differentiated on price, and we do have a significant price and speed advantage and we are bringing on large volumes of the cheapest liquefaction in the market, we believe. And that will inevitably have an impact on people making decisions to invest capital to expand production capacity that, in some cases, would be multiples more expensive than what we're bringing on.

And so we do expect it to have a deterrent impact as we come into the market. And we will, in the future, because we're bringing on volumes at scale will have a positive impact on lowering the price which I -- as I mentioned a few minutes ago, we like because we -- part of our mission and part of the satisfaction we get out of what we're doing and working so hard is to lower global energy prices. And over time, that fundamentally increases demand for us. And since we're able to add so much more volume, we make money for shareholders with the volume even if prices compress.

Your next question comes from Elvira Scotto from RBC Capital Markets.

I know you talked a little bit about the macro, but maybe a little bit more here, especially as there are concerns around supply -- I mean obviously, current events, notwithstanding. But you talk about lower prices driving demand and coal to gas switching, can you talk a little bit more about that? And prior to the events of this weekend, were you actually seeing incremental demand as TTF for global prices move lower?

Yes. No, thanks for that question because that is actually one of the important things that we wanted to talk about on this call is when we look at the market in the next 4, 5, 6 years. We see when you map out the new projects that are projected to come online, and demand that's the same or slightly below what it's tracked for the last 10, 15 years, which is over 5% annual growth that the market is in balance, to a little bit short in the next few years. But then in the early 2030s is very short. And of course, if projects are delayed, then the short gets more significant and even with the current balance, which the market, I can see the projects that are coming, the market net spread today as of Friday was between $5 and $6.

And as we announced this morning, we just did a very attractive 5-year deal at [ VGC ], and we're working on more of them now that really belies the argument that there's terrible spread compression coming. And so we think that based on what we see in the market and demand that, in fact, the markets look really steady. Over time, the -- over time, the replacement cost of liquefaction capacity is going to set what the floor price is. And we think the global cost of new liquefaction capacity is more north of $2,000 a ton when you take global costs into account. And at that price, you really need 350 to 450 minimum for long-term contract prices to support returns.

Now on the question of downside protection, it's -- I think it's obviously empirical that when energy prices go down, demand goes up. It's been the case in human history other than pandemics. And so then the question is, is there a physical infrastructure in place that allows for increased demand as prices go down? And the answer is absolutely, yes. The market today has a lot more regas capacity than it utilizes. I think in the next couple of years, the market will approach over 1,500 million tons of regas capacity globally and a good estimate for 2030 market supplies around 620 MTPA. And so the market's almost triple regas capacity relative to supply. So there's plenty of capacity for prices that have an impact on demand as they go down.

And we also always like to point out what's the converted price of the delivered fuel to a market into electricity. And at a $10 MMBtu price into China, for example, or Asia markets, that's $0.06, $0.07 or so, $0.08, depending on the market, kilowatt hour electricity that's extremely attractive, similar for Europe. And historically, electricity prices and by like corollary fuel prices at that level are bought at full production capacity. So we're very optimistic on what the prices are going to be in the next few years, and we're seeing it in our contracting activity. We don't need it to be there, but we just believe that it will average there and average higher.

And as I said in the script, I just read, because we're adding so much volume of liquefaction trains, even low prices at $3 per MMBtu in the next few years that could equate to $11 billion of EBITDA in '29 with the extra trains. And at $5, which we think is very possible, too, that would be $17 billion, which is a reflection of just the massive scale of trains that we keep adding. I know, is that -- that was a [indiscernible]. Hopefully, that was helpful.

Yes. No, that was very helpful. And then just -- and you touched on it a little bit, but on the contracting side. So you announced these 2 new contracts in the past few days, [indiscernible] with [ Hana ] and the 5-year contract with [ Taegro ], can you talk a little bit about pricing around those contracts. And then how do you see the appetite for long-term SPAs. And then just finally, remind us the mix that you target between long-term, medium-term and short-term contracts?

The [ Hunlock ] contract, we haven't disclosed any specific prices on it, but it's consistent with what we've been doing recently in our contracting. And our both our 20-year and our midterm contracting activity is very busy, and we expect more deals in coming quarters. on both 20 years and in the midterm. The midterm contract is -- I'm not going to give you exact price, but it's north of a $3 net spread over 5 years. And so relative to the 20-year contract price very attractive for us. And again, just illustrates the demand and pricing in the market relative to what some people view as significant compression coming, which we disagree with.

And -- but we're very, very busy on both midterm and long-term contract. Long-term contracts, and we expect that to continue. We are approaching -- we're almost a 50 million tons of 20-year contracts and which is right about the -- and you can't see me but I'm doing air quotes is right around the nameplate capacity of CP1, Plaquemines and CP2. So on a traditional nameplate capacity, which doesn't apply to us anymore. We're almost fully contracted on a 20-year basis, which allows us to rightsize the construction loans that we use to support those projects at coverage levels that give us the same debt coverage that the rating agencies want to see that will allow us to be investment grade around COD for the projects.

And so from a debt coverage, both debt amortization and interest coverage were the same as the rest of the market. But of course, we produce a lot more than that, that gives us an enormous upside optionality and I'm doing air quotes again, very free to cheap capacity. And so that will begin to pay us dividends. And I mentioned it briefly in the script, but in the case of CP2, we invested heavily and foresaw the opportunity almost 3 years ago now to access gas directly from the Permian from Waha all the way to CP2. And we've invested massively in large-scale nitrogen removing units. I think it will end up being over $1 billion that's been invested. And and pipelines, long lateral CPX and a Blackfin pipeline, the interconnects that takes us all the way to [ Katy ] and then transportation agreements that physically connect this to Waha.

And that, combined with the nitrogen removal unit, make us unique as the only facility that can take massive direct volumes from Waha to our facility and handle the large amounts of nitrogen efficiently. So we're feeling good about it. That was 3 years of engineering and design work and execution.

Your next question comes from Chris Robertson from Deutsche Bank.

Just going back to the long-term SPA agreement signed this year and last. I know you're not commenting directly on pricing directly. But can you comment around the directionality, let's say, of the liquefaction fee over time? Has that been fairly range bound over the past few quarters? Or has that moved up kind of due to a rising tide to lift all ships type of market environment here?

We've been holding it steady deliberately because we were able to we're able to provide attractive returns at that price, and we're able to execute the volume of contracts that we want. But that's -- we're at a significant discount to where we think the rest of the market is getting priced. And we're going to maintain our levels because we have a lot of volume that we can build very attractively at those price points. And this is a culmination of 12, 13 years of work for us to build out the team and the supply chain and the sites to be able to continue to do this. And so we're going to continue to add the 20-year deals at prices that are very nice returns for us and allow us to continue to grab market share.

We're excited to add liquefaction trains very cost effectively that give us the higher volumes of production capacity that regardless of kind of the price volatility generate enormous amounts of free cash for us.

Yes, following up on a few of the points there. Just looking at the expansionary nature of the CP2 and Plaquemines bolt-ons, kind of how are you thinking about is there a change in calculus a bit on the amount of long-term contracted coverage or nameplate capacity and long-term contract required by the lenders. I guess if so, what are you targeting in terms of total contracting nameplate on those expansion projects? And how should we think about expected CapEx on a dollar per MT basis just given their nature of not being new build assets, but expansions?

So our -- thanks for that question. Our primary focus after the second phase here of CP2 are the 2 discrete bolt-ons, 1 at CP2 and 1 at Plaquemines and they're 4 -- 8 trains, 4 block, 8 train additions that marry up really well with the existing balance of plant. And as you said, allows us to do it very cost effectively. So we expect it to be a significant discount to the already good price or cost that we're able to achieve. And also we're a little faster because there's a lot less that goes with it. And they're each around 6.5 million tonnes each. And after those we'll watch the contracting progress of our 20-year deals and our 5-year deals to see to see what the expansions are after that. But we're focused primarily on those 2 discrete projects because they are so much less expensive and so much faster, and we design Phases 1 and 2 for CP2 and Plaquemines to anticipate them.

And in particular, for CP2, it's inside the existing wall and the pipe racket connections are very short. It's very -- it will go in very quickly and very efficiently. But that those bolt-ons will allow us to get to that kind of 81 to 85 MTPA in early '29. Again, we need to keep pace with the permitting, but -- which is very strong in this environment. But with our existing supply chain and our teams and our sites, we can layer that in very quickly and start to produce from them later in '28 and '29, that will get us to that roughly [ 90 ] cargoes loading a month in 2029.

Your next question now comes from [ Gregg Brody ] from the Bank of America.

I think you just as you -- you laid out very nicely that you don't have capital expectations at the holding company between equity and debt. Just talk a little bit if sort of at the project level if things have changed a little bit. Are you still planning on funding 50-50? And just talk about the appetite for banks to support that.

The appetite of the banks on the contractual loan side is extremely strong. The quality of the execution by the teams and the projects is appreciated by the banks. And since we're largely building identical things and process systems at all our facilities and projects, the bank capital market can understand it well and has great visibility into kind of tracking progress, and that supported us in having very efficient access to the bank capital markets, and we expect that to continue to be the case. We have already invested a lot of equity just from retained earnings into the second phase of CP2. And when we finance that second phase, it will become one financing and so we don't expect to have to add at this point, capital from the parent to support it. So it will be construction loans, existing capital invested and retained earnings.

After this coming Phase 2, the bolt-ons are unique because they're less expensive and they turn on even faster. Don't hold me to this or don't invest based on this because it's a forward-looking statement, but it's roughly 20 months or so to turn on the bolt-ons because there's so much less kit that is required to do those bolt-ons. And so when you produce revenues so quickly and earnings so quickly on those bolt-ons, it gives you a lot of flexibility in how you can finance at the project level of those sites. So the combination of speed and lower cost gives us lots of really attractive options about how to add it and how to contract it in the market.

Got it. And then maybe just last one for me. Obviously, you had some success with the arbitrations as of late. Just how are you thinking about that as part of your funding plan and just to the extent you settle anything and just a reminder on timing for when you think we'll actually get some numbers from the BP process.

The -- there is no hearing expected to be set for BP this year. So that process will play into next year, probably later next year before there's any further developments there. And we expect the next results on the arbitration front, we can't predict them because we're not in control of the deadlines, but in coming quarters and on the back of the very successful as result on the [ Repsol ] win, we remain positive on outlooks for the remaining arbitrations. And so we're hoping to largely have resolution in the next few quarters and have it all behind us.

Thank you very much for your questions. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Mike Sabel, CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder, for closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody. We appreciate the time this morning, and we look forward to conversations in coming days with all or many of you. And we're going to be working hard for everybody through these challenging and volatile markets in parallel with all the construction activity that continues. So thanks again for the support, and look forward to seeing and speaking with you soon.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and welcome to the Venture Global Inc. Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Joanna. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global Inc.'s Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sabel, Venture Global's CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder; Jack Thayer, our CFO; and other members of Venture Global management team.

Before I begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from what is described in these statements. I encourage you to refer to the disclaimers in our earnings presentation, which is available on the Investors section of our website. Additionally, we may include references to certain non-GAAP metrics such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA. A reconciliation of these metrics to the most relevant GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of the earnings presentation posted on our website.

Finally, the guidance in this presentation is only effective as of today. In general, we will not update guidance until the following quarter and will not update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated public disclosure.

I'll now turn the call over to Mike Sabel.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our third quarter 2025 results and update our guidance for 2025, which we believe is proving to be a year of strong project advancement, financial growth and operating performance for Venture Global.

I'll begin the call with an overview of our considerable third quarter 2025 key accomplishments and results before shifting to our LNG projects individually. I will then make some remarks on the LNG industry broadly before turning over the call to Jack, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results and updated guidance for fiscal year 2025. Following all prepared remarks, we will open the call to Q&A.

Turning to Page 5 of the presentation. I'm incredibly proud of what we are building at Venture Global. Despite only shipping our first cargo in March of 2022, about 3.5 years ago, Venture Global is positioned to be one of the largest LNG producers in the world with expected production capacity of approximately 67 MTPA in operation or under construction today before additional brownfield expansions take us over 100 MTPA. The volume of achievements in our third quarter was nothing short of extraordinary by the team. The coordinated efforts and oversight required at every step of the journey have not been easy, but the team has worked incredibly hard to deliver affordable energy security to our partners throughout the world.

We are applying that same level of relentless effort and rigorous execution to grow the business, harness the industry's lowest cost LNG production strategy and pass that value on to our global customers and trade partners in the market. Executing and operating at this scale and pace requires significant stakeholder engagement and support, regulatory advocacy, capital access, and most importantly, employee grit. Ours is a company with broad geopolitical impact that is playing a material part in the U.S. efforts to promote energy security and achieve better balance of trade globally. In fact, I just returned from Eastern Europe, where Venture Global executed a geopolitically important agreement to support energy security in the region, which I'll comment on more in a moment.

Moving to Page 6. The past several months demonstrate operational excellence at Calcasieu Pass, the swift ramp-up of production at Plaquemines while navigating complex construction and commissioning activities, and the deployment of significant resources at CP2 as we work to execute for our customers. These efforts enabled Venture Global to generate $3.3 billion of revenue, $1.3 billion in income from operations, $429 million of net income attributable to common shareholders and $1.5 billion of consolidated adjusted EBITDA. These results represent increases of 260% for revenue, 598% for income from operations and 439% for consolidated adjusted EBITDA compared with the third quarter of 2024. It was an exceptional quarter for our company and the team.

Considering our success year-to-date -- successful year-to-date, our market outlook for the fourth quarter and the inclusion of certain noncash accounting charges for recent potential arbitration awards, we are marginally reducing and tightening the range of our EBITDA guidance for the year. This update reflects further operating visibility into the number of commissioning cargos we expect to produce at Plaquemines and the current fixed liquefaction fees we are contracting on those cargos for the remainder of the year. Presently, we are seeing pricing for winter cargos which reflects static TTF prices and higher Henry Hub forwards, implying a compression of winter liquefaction spreads.

As you will recall, last quarter, we had set a $1 per MMBtu change in price translated into a $230 million to $240 million change in our anticipated consolidated adjusted EBITDA. As we have contracted additional projected output since the end of our prior quarter, this market sensitivity has declined. However, this compression of margins on future unsold cargos during the fourth quarter, plus the timing of 2 DES loadings, where we load them and deliver them after the quarter, results in us marginally reducing our 2025 guidance range to $6.35 billion to $6.5 billion of consolidated adjusted EBITDA for 2025.

This range reflects a forecasted $4.50 per MMBtu to $5.50 per MMBtu fixed liquefaction fee range for available cargos remaining in the quarter, which is consistent with current TTF and JKM forward price expectations. Additionally, our projected results also incorporate reserve adjustments, which account for our best estimate of the financial impact of the Calcasieu Pass arbitration process. We anticipate updating the market with full year 2026 guidance next quarter.

Please turn to Page 7. In my mind, the extraordinary list of accomplishments achieved in the past few months tells the story of Venture Global's unwavering commitment to streamline high-impact execution in its growth to date. We were able to hit several major milestones, including 100 cargos exported in a single quarter. And just a few days ago, we shipped our 500th cargo from Calcasieu Pass. Those achievements are remarkable, particularly given the relatively short operating history of the company.

While these are significant operating achievements, everything starts with safety. I'm thankful to say that despite the speed at which we are constructing and developing our projects, the total reportable incident rate is still 10x better than the industry average. In addition to these operational successes, we also made incremental strides in sourcing capital to fund our growth. Specifically, the Blackfin joint venture raised $1.575 billion of financing, which enabled an almost $900 million return of capital to Venture Global. And last Friday, we finalized a new $2 billion revolving credit facility with a dozen banks which we expect will enhance our corporate liquidity and capital flexibility.

These financings build upon the $15.1 billion FID project financing for CP2 Phase 1 and the $4 billion of Plaquemines senior secured notes we completed early in the quarter. Year-to-date, we have now raised approximately $30 billion and closed 8 separate billion-dollar-plus transactions to further grow our business and optimize our capital structure. It has been a truly remarkable year of financing activity for us.

I'm also pleased to announce the signing of 2 new 20-year SPAs, sales and purchase agreements. On Friday, we signed a 1 MTPA agreement with Naturgy of Spain for Phase 2 of CP2. Venture Global is honored to expand our long-term partnership with Spain through this new agreement with Naturgy, a leading global LNG company. This contract will positively impact the U.S. balance of trade with Spain.

Our unmatched speed and execution have made Venture Global a trusted, reliable supplier to the global market. The signing of this agreement, along with a strong commercial momentum we've achieved over the past 6 months, reflects the continued customer confidence in our company and the robust demand for LNG globally. Venture Global remains committed to meeting that demand with flexible, fast, affordable and dependable long-term supply.

Additionally, last Thursday, we signed a 20-year SPA for a minimum of 0.5 MTPA with Atlantic-SEE LNG, which is a newly formed joint venture between Greek companies AKTOR and DEPA, making Greece's first-ever long-term LNG supply agreement with a U.S. exporter. In combination with our capacity at the Alexandroupolis LNG regasification receiving terminal, this agreement should substantially enhance Central and Eastern European energy security, bringing affordable and reliable U.S. natural gas to the region.

Including the 3 offtake commitments we previously announced and signed in July, Venture Global has now added 5.25 MTPA of new 20-year SPAs in the second half of 2025, which I think might be the most in the market globally. And I expect more to follow. We continue to build momentum towards the FID for CP2 Phase 2.

Turning to Page 9. We'll take a look at our projects, starting with CP2. As you know, on June 3, our team fully mobilized and started site work at CP2 following final approval and notice to proceed from FERC, with FID of Phase 1 announced on July 28. Additionally, on October 22, the final non-FDA export authorization from the U.S. Department of Energy was received.

Phase 1 engineering is 99% complete, allowing for over 98% of all Phase 1 permanent plant equipment to now be procured. FERC has reviewed and approved 97% of all underground and foundation scopes, enabling continuous Phase 1 field execution. The speed and productivity of the team's mobilization to site has been nothing short of extraordinary.

There are over 3,500 people and more than 1,700 major pieces of construction equipment on site. Construction progress is on schedule at 98% of all civil site prep and soil improvement work completed across 700 acres. This work includes moving 2 million cubic yards of soil and cement, stabilizing over 6 million cubic yards of soil, utilizing over 580,000 tons of cement.

Piling work has commenced, with over 10,000 piles installed to date, representing already 1/3 of the 32,000 total piles required. To create roads and access support along for the start of the foundation work, over 1.2 million tons of aggregate base has been installed. Foundation work is now underway in all major process areas of the facility. The most notable accomplishments include pouring the first LNG tank foundation, the first liquefaction module foundation and the power island switchgear building foundation.

Marine terminal work also continues to progress, with nearly 2 million cubic yards of dredging completed. Additionally, nearly 5,000 feet of the 22,000-foot perimeter wall has been installed, nearly a mile completed. Offsite, all Phase 1 equipment module erection has commenced, both domestically and abroad. Specifically, I'd like to highlight the notable progress on our pretreatment systems, pipe rack modules and electrical buildings, all of which we are building in the U.S. Gulf Coast.

I'm also pleased to recognize that Baker Hughes has completed the first 8 liquefaction trains, which are currently being stored at its fabrication facility in Italy. The team has incorporated our learnings from the construction of Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines, which is aiding the progress of construction.

Some of the modifications include: one, utilizing 10 marine offloading facilities near the CP2 project site versus just 3 when we built Calcasieu Pass, which translates into a much greater speed of deployment and less traffic on the roads; two, further modularization in new scopes of the project, particularly with respect to the power island, a critical path item; and three, internalizing additional construction scope in more targeted use of subcontractors to improve quality, efficiency and pace of construction.

With respect to Phase 2, I mentioned the 2 SPAs we signed in the past few days, and we continue to have constructive conversations with offtakers and aim to sign additional SPAs before the end of the year. As I've said before, given the lower cost per ton of brownfield expansion and our significant equity already invested in Phase 2 of the project, which is now over $1 billion, we do not anticipate needing many more 20-year SPAs to reach FID for either Phase 2 or even beyond the Phase 3 bolt-on. This contract strategy is supportive of VG maintaining a balanced portfolio of intermediate short- and long-term contracts. The targeted FID time frame for Phase 2 remains the first half of 2026.

On Page 10 and 11, we thought it would be helpful to walk through the value proposition of CP2 and all our future projects. On Page 10, we have listed some of the attributes that we believe support the company's growth outlook. In short, engineering and construction optimization, access to legacy construction and operation data and an internal team of experienced personnel from construction speed and production excellence. This, in turn, generates financial returns faster and allows us to pass this capital efficiency on to our customers through industry-leading pricing. In sum, it's on support of realizing our corporate mission of innovating to provide low-cost LNG to the world.

On Page 11, we outline how that speed and efficiency correlate to strong annual returns, even while passing on much of those lower costs to our SPA customers and the market in a variety of LNG pricing environments. The key to success in any commodity business is being the low-cost producer which for CP2 Phases 1 and 2, should be just above $1,000 a ton all in, including our inside the fence power plants, the pipelines, owners' costs and all other construction costs.

Additionally, we generate considerable cash flow during construction and commissioning, which reviews an offset to project cost. In this case, based on the forward Henry Hub and TTF curves, for CP2, we estimate these construction and commissioning pre-COD cargo sale EBITDA proceeds would yield an estimated $8 billion of cash flow during construction, reducing CP2's net cost down to approximately $21 billion. Following COD, cash flows will come from a combination of fixed liquefaction charges under our long-term SPAs and contracted pricing on available capacity in excess of that sold under our 20-year long-term contracts.

In the case of CP2 Phases 1 and 2, we expect this available excess production to be 9 million to 11 million tons, which we anticipate selling on a medium and short-term basis or a non 20-year basis. As you can see on the slide, we are showing 2 fixed liquefaction fee cases, one at $4 per MMBtu and one at $6 for these non-20-year SPA cargos. Assuming a $4 fixed liquefaction fee, the combination of fixed long-term contribution and that from the available capacity would translate into an estimated $4 billion contribution to annual consolidated adjusted EBITDA, whereas assuming $6 per MMBtu for the available cargos, which I believe will be closer to the case over 20 years, the estimated annual consolidated adjusted EBITDA would rise to $5.2 billion.

Collectively, under these scenarios, relative to the $21 billion of net project cost, after assuming 50% leverage or we carry extra equity, these illustrative results imply a return at the project level on equity of greater than 30% while still providing the lowest price SPAs in the market to our customers, which you're now seeing reflected in the high number of 20-year contracts we continue to execute.

Moving to Page 12. Plaquemines construction and commissioning continues to progress on schedule for Phases 1 and 2, while still relying on temporary power, as we are not in our combined 5 on 2 configuration for the power plant for Phase 1 yet. Construction continues at our power island units, and the Venture Global team has now safely started up 34 of the 36 liquefaction trains.

Despite these challenges, our continued construction and commissioning progress enabled Plaquemines to export 64 commissioning cargos during Q3, hitting the high end of our previously projected range. This represents a 25% increase in exported cargos relative to the previous quarter, reflecting the remarkable pace at which we are integrating and commissioning liquefaction trains.

The facility realized a weighted average fixed liquefaction fee of $6.79 per MMBtu on these commissioning cargos during the quarter. As we recently communicated to our Phase 1 off-takers, we maintain our expected COD schedule of Q4 2026. Important work remains, but we are making great progress at Plaquemines. For example, the project's required combined cycle power generation equipment for Phase 1 is expected to commence commissioning in its 5 on 2 configuration in Q1 2026. This power island schedule and other work allows us to have sufficient time to complete commissioning, reach substantial completion under our EPC contract, complete lender reliability testing and declare COD on schedule.

Importantly, over the past several years, we've made incremental project investments in areas like temporary power, which we continue to use today, and a number of other scopes, including power island to address EPC delays, for which we have injected approximately $3.3 billion of additional equity capital in order to hold our COD schedule. That's not new. That's previously reported. These are incremental costs relative to our FID budgets that we've incurred and absorbed as project sponsor to deliver low-cost LNG to our customers years faster than our peers.

I'm pleased to affirm that because of this spend, we are on track for COD in Q4 2026 for Phase 1 and mid '27 for Phase 2, reflecting a 54-month construction time line, which is among the industry's best and will be ever achieved. Including the 144 cargos exported from Plaquemines in the first 3 quarters of the year, we now anticipate the facility exporting between 234 and 238 cargos by year-end.

This puts us in the high end of our previous estimates and represents a 7 cargo increase to the low end and a 2 cargo decrease from the high end of our previously reported range. For Q4, Plaquemines has contracted 79 cargos or 84% of potential cargos for the quarter, capturing a weighted average fixed liquefaction fee of $6.41 per MMBtu on those contracted cargos.

On Page 13, you see the monthly ramp of Plaquemines cargos exported since the beginning of 2025. Plaquemines accounts for 82% of the incremental LNG production capacity added to the global LNG supply this year, lifting worldwide LNG production by more than 4%. That growth almost single-handedly helped to mitigate the impact of a more than 33% rise in European LNG demand through the first 10 months of the year as the continent seeks to move away from the consumption of Russian gas.

I'm grateful for the hard work, ingenuity and tenacity of our VG construction team, which enabled the ramping of Plaquemines production despite power and other construction challenges. With production excellence such as this at Plaquemines, we are playing an industry-leading role in keeping LNG prices affordable throughout the world.

Next, I'd like to focus on Calcasieu Pass, which is covered on Page 14 of the presentation. During the third quarter of 2025, Calcasieu Pass exported 36 cargos, which is in line with our previous expectations but down slightly from the second quarter. The reduction compared to Q2 is due to a longer than scheduled routine power island maintenance on the facility. This does give us an opportunity to highlight one of the competitive advantages of our mid-scale modular approach.

Specifically, because of the performance capacity of our trains and equipment redundancy across our process system and our configuration, we can undertake significant maintenance at our facilities with only very modest impacts on production. This translates into smoother production profiles and lowers operating cost per MMBtu of production.

At Calcasieu Pass, we realized a weighted average fixed liquefaction fee of $1.76 per MMBtu in the third quarter. This is lower than the $1.97 per MMBtu we had published in our October 6 8-K, as we have incorporated a noncash $27 million arbitration-related reserve relative to the 5.5 months of production since COD in our Q3 results at Calcasieu Pass.

For the fourth quarter of 2025, based on liquefaction fees achieved from SPA and excess cargos sold on a forward basis to date, we anticipate capturing a weighted average liquefaction fee of $2.14 per MMBtu across all forward sold Calcasieu Pass production, which reflects contracted sales under our long-term SPAs, plus an excess cargo that has been sold. That figure includes a Q4 adjustment for arbitration reserves. Incorporating the 108 cargos exported from this facility in the first half, we now anticipate exporting 148 cargos by the end of the year.

Collectively, across Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines, we have contracted 59 more cargos for export in Q4 2025 since our prior report and have contracted 119 of a potential 134 cargos or roughly 89% of our total Q4 2025 production.

I want to spend a few minutes updating you all on the Calcasieu Pass arbitration proceedings. While confidentiality agreements do restrict our ability to provide all the details we would like, to the extent we are able, we thought we would provide answers to a number of the common questions we have received. You can see the most frequent of these on Page 15.

Let me address several. First, there have now been full or partial resolutions in 3 of the proceedings. As you know, the Shell arbitration was decided in our favor. We settled the second for an amount which we did not have a material impact on Venture Global's results. And the arbitration panel reached a partial final decision against Calcasieu Pass and the BP arbitration. There are 4 separate outstanding proceedings now, which we expect should be determined over the course of the next few years in the absence of settlements.

Secondly, no damages have been determined or awarded in the BP arbitration, and the date for the hearing and damages has not been set as of the date of this presentation. Financially, including BP, the remedies sought by our customers against Venture Global Calcasieu Pass, including BP, have been materially reduced to $4.8 billion to $5.5 billion from $6.7 billion to $7.4 billion.

Venture Global Calcasieu Pass' aggregate liability cap under the post-COD SPAs for the 4 remaining arbitration proceedings, excluding BP, is now $765 million. Importantly, while we ardently disagree with the BP award, the result does not impact our strategy for growth and providing low-cost LNG to our customers throughout the world. Jack will address the accounting treatment for estimating the financial impact in the form of noncash reserves of BP and these remaining arbitrations shortly.

Turning to Page 17. While there has been modest softening of winter 2026 LNG spreads, demand remains healthy, and the margins are robust. Even as new LNG supply enters the market over the next several years, we expect prices to remain supportive as energy demand responds to affordable prices. As you can see on the left, the forward curve reflects the market's expectation for LNG prices in both Asia and Europe to remain at considerable spreads above Henry Hub for the next 12 months. Beyond this time frame, we continue to see upward revisions to demand that reinforce our belief that margins will reflect insufficient LNG supply through 2028 and beyond.

Flipping to Page 18. For years, industry pundits have been predicting a plateau in LNG demand, and time and time again, those predictions have not materialized, and demand has continued to grow at record levels. Historically, LNG consumption has grown about 5% to 6% per year. Even assuming a more conservative 3% growth rate, the current slate of new projects would not be sufficient to meet global demand by the middle of the next decade. And in a 5% compound growth rate, which is the historical number, global LNG infrastructure would need to nearly triple to meet global demand.

There certainly may be fluctuations in LNG prices over time, but we remain confident in underlying fundamental demand growth because of the increasing consumption of electricity around the world. Lately, powering AI and data centers globally has been at the front of everyone's minds. While we certainly view that as a major source of global power demand, factors like a rising middle class, which uses air conditioning, among lots of other demand, growing industrialization, the continued migration from coal and moderating growth expectations for renewables and even more -- are even more core to what we perceive will drive strong LNG demand growth for decades to come. This demand growth also reinforces the importance of our mission to deliver increased volumes of affordable LNG to support this global growth.

Now I'll turn it over to our CFO, Jack Thayer, who will review the financials and our updated guidance.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning to those of you on the line. I will be referring to the Venture Global, Inc. Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended September 30, 2025. The 10-Q is available on our website, and some of the key results are summarized on Page 20 of the presentation. During this call, I will highlight results I believe are salient to this audience, and I encourage you to review the entirety of our financial statements in detail.

Beginning with revenue. Our top line was $3.3 billion for the third quarter of 2025, a $2.4 billion increase from $0.9 billion during the equivalent period in 2024. This increase in revenue was driven by $2.9 billion from higher sales volumes, 373 TBtu in third quarter of 2025 compared with 100 TBtu in the third quarter of 2024, primarily at the Plaquemines project, which was partially offset by $517 million from lower net rates at Calcasieu Pass due to the commencement of LNG sales under its post-COD SPAs with weighted average fixed facility fees of $1.76 per MMBtu in the third quarter of 2025 versus $6.67 per MMBtu in the third quarter of 2024, and offset by a weighted average commodity fees of $3.53 per MMBtu in the third quarter of 2025 versus $2.51 per MMBtu in the third quarter of 2024.

Our income from operations was $1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2025, a $1.1 billion increase from $189 million in the third quarter of 2024. This shift was primarily driven by the higher sales volumes I mentioned previously, which resulted in a greater total margin for LNG sold. These increases were partially offset by $102 million of higher operating costs in support of the ramp-up of LNG production at the Plaquemines project and operating our LNG tankers, as well as $28 million and $129 million of higher G&A and depreciation expenses, respectively. We also experienced a reduction in our development expenses of $103 million quarter-over-quarter as many of the costs associated with our 3-phase CP2 projects were capitalized.

Our net income attributable to common stockholders, which we will refer to as net income, was $429 million for the third quarter of 2025, a $776 million increase from the loss of $347 million in Q3 2024. Changes in interest rate swaps negatively impacted Q3 results both this year and in 2024 by $144 million and $480 million, respectfully -- respectively.

And Q3 2025 net income was also unfavorably impacted by a $100 million accounting charge related to the partial voluntary prepayment of the Plaquemines term loan. Shifting to consolidated adjusted EBITDA. We earned $1.5 billion during the third quarter of 2025, a $1.2 billion or 439% increase from $283 million in Q3 2024. This increase in consolidated adjusted EBITDA was driven chiefly by higher sales volumes. As Mike mentioned earlier, our projects exported a total of 100 cargos in Q3, which increased from 31 cargos compared with the same period in 2024. Of these cargos, 372 TBtu of volumes are reflected in our results for Q3 2025, more than tripling production compared to the 110 TBtu in Q3 2024.

I also wanted to further provide information regarding the accounting treatment for the BP and our 4 remaining outstanding arbitrations impact. As mentioned, our consolidated financial statements incorporate a $27 million noncash reserve relative to the period from our April 15 COD until the end of Q3. Going forward, the noncash reserve, which reflects our best estimate of award outcomes from BP and the 4 remaining arbitrations, is currently estimated to be between $14 million and $15 million per quarter through the 20-year duration of the SPA contract terms. This amount will directly reduce Calcasieu Pass revenue and flow through EBITDA, although there will be no offsets to net income due to adjustments for noncontrolling interest and taxes.

Importantly, this is an estimate, and there is no cash impact to our third quarter financial statements. We will update these estimates in our financials quarterly as we finalize arbitration results and incorporate any financial awards or settlements going forward.

Finally, I would like to call out several additional financial updates. Following the $1.575 billion financing of the Blackfin Pipeline and an $889 million return of cash to Venture Global, our cash and restricted cash position at the end of the quarter was over $3.5 billion.

Also, subsequent to the end of the quarter, we secured a new $2 billion corporate revolver facility. We believe that with this combination of cash on hand, revolver capacity, substantial future cash flow and substantial future cash flow we expect to generate in coming quarters and billions of dollars of unencumbered assets, Venture Global is in an excellent liquidity position.

Advancing to Page 21 and 22. We are updating our guidance to a consolidated adjusted EBITDA range of $6.35 billion to $6.50 billion for 2025 as we reduced and tightened the range from our previous guidance range of $6.4 billion to $6.8 billion. We have improved the lower end of our cargo production forecast range by 7 cargos, as we're now incorporating a forecasted 148 cargos for Calcasieu Pass and 234 to 238 cargos from Plaquemines. The bottom and top end of the EBITDA range was adjusted to account for arbitration reserves, 3 cargos removed from the high end of the range, the anticipation that 2 DES cargos exported in 2025 will deliver in 2026 and a lower fixed liquefaction fee of $4.50 to $5.50 per MMBtu for cargos remaining to be sold over 2025, consistent with current TTF and JKM forward price expectations.

On average, if fixed liquefaction fees over the remainder of 2025 increased or decreased by $1 per MMBtu, we expect our consolidated adjusted EBITDA range to adjust accordingly by $50 million to $60 million, reduced from the $230 million to $240 million range provided in our previous guidance. This reduced sensitivity to market prices reflects the contracting we executed during the third quarter and thus far in the fourth quarter.

I will now turn the call back over to Mike.

Thank you, Jack. At this point, we'd like to open up our call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from John Mackay at Goldman Sachs.

I do want to start on the arbitration. I appreciate the color from both of you, Mike and Jack, on the kind of funding levers here. But maybe could you walk us through in just a little more detail about how you think about funding a kind of worst-case scenario on these?

And then on a related note, you lined up the $14 million to $15 million a quarter for 20 years, that gets to a number that's below the kind of total you guys talked about. So maybe just walk us through some of the math on getting to that one as well?

Sure. I'll take the first half of that, and Jack will probably take the second half.

We're in a very strong current cash position. The remaining arbitrations if we were to settle or they were to run its full course, I should say, if they run their full course, will take place over the next year or 2 or more. So they're spread over a considerable amount of time. And we remain confident that we're going to do well on those.

But just to answer your question, if they didn't all go well, the incurrence of potential damages there would be spread out over a number of years. So in addition to current cash and the earnings that we'll achieve over the next couple of years, plus the large amount of [ unencumbered ] assets that we have. We have plenty of liquidity and time to smoothly manage exposure to any future potential damages there.

We're over -- with this quarter, over $50 billion in assets. We own 100% of Venture Global. We own 100% of CP2. We own our ships for cash. And we own approximately 77% of CP1. So we're in a very strong ownership position of extremely valuable liquid assets.

Jack, did you want to address the...

Sure. So John, I think the important descriptor of how we're addressing for accounting purposes, the arbitration, is the term best estimate of award outcomes. And so as we worked with our accounting firm to analyze the remaining arbitrations, the outcome and the BP arbitration and align on what was our best estimate of the potential exposure associated with those, that's what allowed us to arrive at an estimate of the $14 million to $15 million per quarter impact.

As you noted, that is an amount below the maximum liability that we've articulated. But even that's come down rather dramatically given the Shell and the other settlement awards or outcomes. So we believe this captures the accounting guidance on how to address these potential outcomes, but by no means is it a cash charge at this point. We need to fully arbitrate out the BP process, and we need to let the other core processes go forward and result in outcomes or in any potential settlements that we might achieve similar to the one that we achieved with one counterparty already.

I appreciate the color. Maybe just turning to the contracts you signed recently. Can you maybe just give us an update? We've seen a lot of contracting activity across the U.S. projects so far this year. Do you think that activity continues?

And where have kind of rates come in, pricing on those come in relative to your expectations? And maybe the last piece of that, has the BP ruling at all kind of changed the tone of those contracting discussions?

No, not at all. It's -- the best measure of the market's trust in us to execute today and over coming decades is the pace at which we're signing 20-year contracts. I think since the beginning of July, where we've signed over 5, 5.25 MTPA, we've signed the most in the world of any project. So I think that's the best market data point on the trust that the market has for our execution.

We indicated in earlier calls earlier in the year that we've reentered the market after deliberately staying on the sidelines to watch market pricing. And we've reentered the market really coming after a Liberation Day tariff announcement and activities from the United States and have been extremely successful in executing the 20-year contracts that we wanted to. The market remains very active for us, and we still have a very active queue of live deals as we've talked about recently as well, and we expect that to continue for us.

Pricing is in line with where we started this and -- which we believe is the most attractive long-term price in the world. And as we described earlier in this call, we still achieve probably the best returns in the market -- in our market on those. And so we're able to offer a great price for the market that the market is responding to, drive great returns for shareholders and offer great pricing in the market globally to help keep prices low to support future growth everywhere in the world.

The next question comes from Jeremy Tonet at JPMorgan.

It's actually Vrathan Reddy on for Jeremy. I just want to follow up a little bit on the arbitration. And if you guys could talk a little bit about the confidence in that $765 million cap and maybe where that differed with the BP case versus the outstanding ones?

The $765 million cap is the aggregate of the remaining caps for the 4 remaining arbitrations. We obviously agree with the result from the Shell arbitration panel that closely followed the results of the contract and resulted in there being no awards. And so that's the result that we expect for the rest of them. We obviously were surprised and strongly disagree with the result of the BP panel. But if we were to lose all, the rest of them up to the cap, that aggregates now to $765 million.

In any case, as we've talked about, we're able to manage either case of outcomes, and it doesn't impact our growth and our ability to finance efficiently, the construction of our facilities on the pace we've been describing to generate the future earnings from a much number -- a larger number of installed trains with very conservative for pricing assumptions in a few years. When you guys model it out, you'll see we're -- we passed, not too long, double-digit billion dollar EBITDA numbers. And so we have a large ramp-up in growth in earnings coming in a few years.

As you see the phases of CP2 come online, we're building a 20 million-ton CP2 Phase 1 right now. And with the additional brownfields and bolt-ons coming for CP2 and Plaquemines, we have a tremendous growth in earnings coming in the next few years that result just from completion of what we have already in construction or the brownfields that give us plenty of capital firepower, cash firepower and earnings coming to manage through this.

Got it. That's very helpful. And then I think the prepared remarks hit on not needing many more 20-year SPAs to reach FID on CP2 Phase 2 and the bolt-on as well. So just curious if you could talk about your strategy with regards to the tenor and contracts moving forward from here?

It's similar to what we've been talking about for the last year, which is where we're going to contract 20-year SPAs sufficient to give us the coverage ratios -- the investment-grade coverage ratios on the debt of the projects. And then the additional volume above that, which is substantial, is essentially, in air quotes, "free extra capacity" above the long-term contracts required to fully service and amortize the debt and cover operating expenses and return. And that extra margin -- then production gives us a really, really attractive upside optionality on returns that we just described.

And those non-20-year deals, we expect and plan on contracting over time on an intermediate and short-term basis to have a blended portfolio. As we just reported, we have 45 MTPA of long-term contracts. And if you take what we're building today at CP2 plus the second phase, which we're -- as we said, we're over $1 billion invested in already, that's a total of 67 MTPA. So of that 67, we're 45 contracted on a long-term basis, and we'll do more 20 years. And so you see through the second phase of CP2 will be easily majority because we already here are today, 20-year contracted.

The next question comes from Manav Gupta at UBS.

Congrats on a good result and the new SPA. I also wanted to talk to you about the situation in Ukraine. There was the news on Reuters. I'm not sure it was true, but apparently, you met President Zelensky with President Trump. And I'm trying to understand what can Venture Global do to help the situation in Ukraine, which is massively short gas at this point of time?

So the -- as we provided the statistic in our comments just a few minutes ago, Plaquemines represented incrementally new volume for the year of over 82%. And so Plaquemines and Venture Global had a material impact on the global price and certainly the European price of LNG, which we're super proud of the team for and we think about every day, including the people in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe. So that's the most important part.

And as we also indicated, previously, we invested extra few billion dollars into Plaquemines to keep the schedule, without which, we probably would be a couple of years further behind the schedule we are today. So those investments that we made that a lot of came from Bob and I indirectly through our ownership, were critical to maintaining the pricing that we're seeing today in Europe, which is certainly moderate compared to where it's been in the last few years.

Because we're able to produce so much extra production capacity at Plaquemines and we expect to see it at CP2 as well, it gives us extra availability for LNG volumes in coming months and quarters in the next couple of years that is unique in the whole market. I think we probably have the most available capacity in the world that will allow us to support flows into the market either directly into storage or through intermediaries or both that we're working on to support. You certainly saw the agreement with Greece that the U.S. government was very supportive of for us to bring up extra supply through the Southern part of that Vertical Corridor of pipeline support in Eastern European countries there.

One thing which Venture Global sometimes, I believe, doesn't get enough credit for is the massive data science operations that you have set up. When you were at the Plaquemines trip, you explained some of those. Help us understand what differentiates your data science teams and the investment that your company has made in these data science operations?

No, we're very proud of it. And sometimes we don't get credit for it because we're not giving all our secret sauce out there. But if you keep it among us, Manav, I'll say that we've always viewed our facilities not as factories, but as complex machines that to us, always create opportunity for acquisition of data and analysis of that data.

So I think for Calcasieu Pass, we're streaming now around 222,000 data points every 10 seconds. So it's a massive amount of data. Plaquemines will exceed that amount -- that volume of data throughput. And we have a dedicated team of data scientists and process engineers and AI programmers that have been incorporating that data into our current operations, but also into design changes as we've learned some very surprising interactions of different parts of the facility that are -- facilities that are unanticipated that have contributed to our ability to achieve the remarkable performance results at Plaquemines. And that, we expect will carry over into CP2. So it's been an incredible effort for us, and we've been hugely rewarded in the volume of production that we've achieved and maintained.

We think -- just to add to that, we think that, that will allow us to push CP2 up to 30 MTPA. We'll have to go back and get the export authorization moved from 28 up to 30, but we think CP2 will be doing even better than Plaquemines, which is doing the best that any project has ever done.

The next question comes from Jean Ann Salisbury at Bank of America.

I wanted to talk about the CP1 volumes. As you mentioned in your prepared remarks, they have bounced around a bit the last couple of quarters, it sounds like due to the power maintenance. Can you discuss the power maintenance, I guess, and then the path to get to the sustained 12.4 MTA? And as my follow-up, are these power maintenance issues kind of unique to CP1? Or would you expect to see that maintenance eventually affecting Plaquemines as well?

The maintenance at CP1 took a little bit longer than we expected, as I described. No, I don't think it is something that will carry on for Plaquemines. Obviously, you're always going to have routine maintenance at all your facilities, including in the power plants. But it resulted in the 1 cargo.

We have been, this year, conservative in our guidance for Calcasieu Pass as we continue to finish up things that will get us to the higher volumes. We have a pretty good -- we have a pretty specific view on what we're going to do to get those volumes up. And we're just deciding when we're going to implement that relative to the return we get for deploying that much capital into CP2, for example, to increase output there. And so we look at it on a holistic basis. But we'll get it up to that number. And eventually, you'll see expansions, bolt-on expansions at CP1 as well.

The next question comes from Chris Robertson at Deutsche Bank.

I just wanted to follow up on the previous questions. When you guys talk about getting to that 24% above nameplate over the next few years, do you think that takes place kind of steadily over time? Or do you see that taking place with step changes in any particular year? And what the implications might be for any O&M expenses related to that process?

It will be a combination of step change and steady increase. We're not being more specific on it, just because we don't want to give away intellectual property. We obviously -- because of how we're operating the facility at Plaquemines, that's so much higher at the 140% level. We have a good view of what produces more. And so we'll -- we have a good path to how we're going to get there. We'll update people and update the market when we want to disclose what the timing of it is going to be.

But I just broke some news on our confidence level at CP2 of getting that to 30. And as I just said to Jean Ann, we look at it across all our facilities about where we're going to make the investments to add the extra volume.

From an operational expense side, it's -- adding those extra trains don't materially impact the operating expense at all. So we view that as almost entirely upside margin.

Okay. Just related to your point just now around thinking about it holistically across the varied facilities here. When you guys think about contracting, traditionally in the past, things have been tied to a specific phase or a specific project. But are you now considering structuring agreements where it's a flexible cargo across any of the facilities that are producing? Not necessarily just tied to 1, but just tied to the greater portfolio?

Yes. I mean, we are. We're -- with the bolt-ons for CP2 and Plaquemines, were heading towards in a few years, passing 100 million tons of annual production. So we'll have one of the largest annual portfolios in the world of produced LNG, and so it gives us immense flexibility. And particularly as you think about the combination of the extra margin of production across Plaquemines and CP2, which you'll see kind of comparably also in the bolt-ons, we think.

And so we have a big portfolio of -- I'm doing air quotes of "extra LNG production" because we will have contracted on a long-term basis what we need to cover all the construction debt and the returns. And so that gives us flexibility to provide portfolio -- more portfolio sale type structures with fixed delivery dates that allow us to assign production to particular phases that will be difficult for a lot of other people in the market to match. So when you add that on top of the cost and price advantage, that flexibility allows us to offer super attractive commodity prices for these contracts years sooner than almost everybody else in the market.

And it's showing up, right? I mean, it's -- the contracting market, the SPA market is a voting machine, right? And so in the last few months, Venture Global has gotten the most boats in the market from in terms of customer trust and confidence with these counterparties making multi-decade commitments to us and us to them.

The last question comes from Bob Brackett at Bernstein Research.

A bit of a -- bit of an angle on arbitration. If we go back to Calcasieu Pass, first cargo was March '22. Nine months later, someone announces -- or in December of '22, someone announces arbitration. Now here we are with Plaquemines, first cargo, very end of December of '24. You've ramped all through this year.

How is your relationship with the current set of counterparties? And are they all on board with this sort of pre-COD, post-COD world that you guys live in?

We have a great relationship with the customers, we believe. And as it relates to Calcasieu Pass, we performed successfully, all of those loading since we took COD for Calcasieu Pass. We are still and have just reconfirmed it, and we just provided those comments again, we reconfirmed all the customers at Plaquemines that were still on the original schedule for the first window period for Plaquemines, which is month 54.

And for a giant project like Plaquemines, 54 months is a remarkable achievement. We are still operating under around 400 megawatts of temporary power today, and that's going to continue like I described probably until the first quarter. And then we don't have substantial completion under the EPC contract until late in the summer.

And including a lender liability test, reliability test, we have a lot to get done, but feel really good about achieving the original schedule with our customers for Plaquemines. That, in combination with the many billions of dollars that we've already put in extra into the Plaquemines project in order to maintain the current record setting schedule, we think we're in a very solid position for Plaquemines.

Thank you. At this time, I will turn the call back over to Mike Sabel for closing comments.

Great. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate everybody's time this morning. Thank you for all the questions. And in coming days, we look forward to answering more questions for people and look forward to being together here in a few months to report on how we ended up for the fourth quarter, and look forward to 2026. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating, and we ask that you please disconnect your lines.