Venture Global Inc (VG) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and welcome to the Venture Global fourth quarter and full-year 2024 earnings call. At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to Michael Pasquarello, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Venture Global's fourth quarter and full year 2024 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 we begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from what is described in the 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 effective as of today only. It is our policy to generally not update guidance until the following quarter and not to update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated public disclosure.

I will now turn the call over to Mike Sabel.

Thank you, Michael. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. This call is an important milestone for Venture Global as this is our inaugural earnings report as a public company. We are excited to share our fourth quarter and full-year 2024 results, along with our guidance for 2025, which we believe will be an exceptional year for the company.

I will begin the call with an overview of our fourth quarter and full-year 2024 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 guidance for fiscal-year 2025. Following all prepared remarks, we will open the call to Q&A.

Turning to Page 6 of the presentation. I'm happy to report that Venture Global performed well during the fourth quarter of 2024, generating $1.5 billion of revenue, $871 million of net income attributable to common stockholders, which we will refer to as net income, and $688 million of consolidated adjusted EBITDA, bringing our full-year 2024 revenue, net income and consolidated adjusted EBITDA totals to $5 billion, $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively. Additionally, we finished 2024 with over $43 billion of assets on our balance sheet and realized a return on equity of 41.3%.

We achieved these results as we continue to commission and perform rectification work on our Calcasieu Pass project, commenced commissioning at our Plaquemines project and progressed our subsequent LNG and ancillary projects, including CP2.

At Calcasieu Pass, we exported 32 commissioning cargoes during the fourth quarter, resulting in 140 commissioning cargoes in total for 2024, and we recently gave notice to our long-term SPA customers that the commercial operations date, or COD for the project will occur on April 15, 2025.

At Plaquemines, we achieved first production of LNG on December 13, 2024, and exported our first cargo on December 26, 2024, just 13 days later. This remarkable performance showcases the hard work and dedication of our team at Plaquemines and our innovative approach to constructing LNG facilities.

I will provide further details on Plaquemines momentarily, but I'd like to highlight upfront that every liquefaction train we have activated thus far at Plaquemines has consistently demonstrated pro rata production levels equivalent to approximately 140% of the nameplate capacity of the facility based on the aggregate outflow from [regas] 140%.

This gives us confidence that following completion of our construction, Plaquemines will be able to perform at a recently FERC-authorized upgraded capacity of 27.2 MTPA. Looking ahead to 2025, we expect that our consolidated adjusted EBITDA will be between $6.8 billion and $7.4 billion.

This reflects a $7 per MMBtu to $8 per MMBtu fixed liquefaction fee range for available commissioning cargoes, which is consistent with recently executed transactions. We believe the next four quarters will constitute a period of meaningful growth for our company, and we are focused on delivering a consolidated adjusted EBITDA in this range for our shareholders.

We will also evaluate opportunities to deploy our surplus capital, including through potential share repurchases. Turning to Page 7 of the presentation. I would like to touch on our compelling growth in hard machine assets over the last two years and give a preview of how we aim to continue to expand in 2025.

As many of you know, our liquefaction trains are factory-built and arrive ready for installation into our facilities by the thousands of men and women we employ across a growing list of projects here in the United States. We are proud that the contractors and subcontractors supporting our projects employ people in over 30 states across the country.

Through our commissioning programs, we currently have 18 trains producing at Calcasieu Pass and another 16 trains producing during construction at Plaquemines. Additionally, we have installed 16 more trains on their foundations at Plaquemines, accepted delivery of two more trains this week and have our final two trains currently in transit. We expect that these trains will be incrementally commissioned and will increase the production from our second facility.

Through our investment in our third project, CP2, we have executed purchase orders for another 36 trains, of which 12 are already being fabricated and will arrive on a rolling basis at storage sites on the Gulf Coast beginning at the end of the second quarter in 2025.

In all, by the end of 2025, we expect to have 54 trains either commissioned at Calcasieu Pass or producing during construction at Plaquemines with another 16 trains fabricated and ready for installation at CP2 subject to FERC authorization, capping off a rapid expansion from 18 trains to 70 trains in aggregate over the course of just 29 months.

Combined with the extraordinary production performance of our new trains at Plaquemines, which I discussed a moment ago, we believe this asset base will serve as ballast for our growth in the coming years, providing cash flow to help fund our future projects and expansions for decades.

Shifting gears a bit, I would now like to focus on Calcasieu Pass, which is covered by Page 9 of the presentation. As mentioned, during the fourth quarter of 2024, we were able to successfully export 32 commissioning cargoes, including four cargoes utilizing Venture Global owned or chartered ships, bringing our full-year 2024 export total to 140 commissioning cargoes.

We realized a weighted average fixed liquefaction fee of $8.79 per MMBtu for cargoes in the fourth quarter, and $7.28 per MMBtu across the entire year. Although Calcasieu Pass is yet to produce above its 10 MTPA nameplate capacity on an aggregate basis for an extended period due to ongoing power plant retreatment and other rectification work, the trains at Calcasieu Pass have performed well beyond nameplate capacity on an individual discrete basis.

While we continue to produce substantial quantities of LNG at Calcasieu Pass, we are simultaneously navigating the remaining work related to commissioning, carryover, completions, rectification work, reliability testing and other unfinished items.

We have given notice to our long-term SPA customers that COD will occur on April 15, 2025, and are focused on completing final performance test before this milestone, which we should achieve just 68 months after FID. We look forward to servicing our offtake contracts for the full duration of their largely 20-year tenders.

For 2025, based on liquefaction fees achieved via cargoes sold on a forward basis today, we anticipate capturing a fully weighted average liquefaction fee of $3.85 per MMBtu across all forward-sold Calcasieu Pass production.

I will sum up my remarks on Calcasieu Pass with a brief note on safety, which is our top priority here at Venture Global. To date, approximately 25 million work hours have been completed at Calcasieu Pass with only 13 recordable incidents sustained.

This performance has produced a total recordable incident rate, TRIR, of 0.10, far outperforming the national industry average of 1.9. We are very proud of our outstanding team for achieving and maintaining the safety record, especially while performing significant equipment rectification work and construction.

Moving on to Plaquemines and flipping to Page 10 in the presentation, I will focus on the remarkable progress we are achieving at our 20 MTPA nameplate project south of New Orleans. The incredible focus, diligence and craftsmanship of our team allowed us to implement a complicated reverse cooldown process, which enabled the production of first LNG on December 13, 2024. By December '26, we had successfully exported our first cargo from the facility only 31 months after our Phase I FID.

We have delivered 34 liquefaction trains to the site and produced LNG from 16 trains during construction to date, maintaining an unparalleled pace of execution for a greenfield project of this scale, underpinned by our commitment to safety.

So far, each of our 16 trains has regularly demonstrated pro rata production levels that equate to approximately 140% of the nameplate capacity of the facility based on aggregate outflow from regas. This performance is enabled by the engineering and design improvements we implemented at Plaquemines, which were informed by the significant operational data collected and lessons learned from Calcasieu Pass. These exciting results were only possible through our innovative approach and the relentless execution of our team.

At Plaquemines, we have permitted and incorporated, for example, 400 megawatts of temporary power at the facility, which has allowed us to mitigate contractor delays, especially from the power island. This approach allows us to progress commissioning efforts and recoup project costs through the sale of commissioning cargoes while we complete the construction of our combined cycle power plants, commission and test our pretreatment systems, booster compressors and other balance of plant work streams in parallel.

Although we are very encouraged by our commissioning success thus far, we recognize the challenging and highly variable process laying ahead. I want to note that achieving this considerable progress and our construction speed has been an active strategy and has come at an increased cost, by investing capital and enabling increased construction staffing levels on site, we have pulled forward the production of LNG by months against the original baseline despite substantial delays in portions of the facilities construction, in particular, with the power island.

Over the course of construction, we have invested approximately $2.8 billion of incremental equity to fund these expanded work fronts and mitigate delays. We believe this is a differentiated approach from the rest of the industry, enabled by our modular design, early investment in module fabrication and engaged on-site construction management.

It is also emblematic of the creative problem-solving and tenacity as a bedrock of our unique corporate culture, which despite setbacks, positions Plaquemines to achieve Phase I COD approximately 54 months post-FID.

For 2025, we anticipate exporting 219 to 239 cargoes from Plaquemines and have contracted 78 of these cargoes thus far, capturing a weighted average fixed liquefaction fee of $7.94 per MMBtu. Again, I want to highlight our leading safety performance at Plaquemines. To date, over 50 million work hours have been completed at the project with a TRIR of only 0.20, roughly [1/10] of the national average TRIR of 1.9.

And I want to turn to our next project, CP2, which is covered on Page 11. CP2 is a 20 million tonne per annum nameplate capacity facility consisting of 36 of our factory-built liquefaction trains. Based on the performance of these trains at Calcasieu Pass, the design improvements implemented at Plaquemines and the performance of those trains to date, we believe CP2 will produce at least 28 MTPA.

Further, we currently estimate approximately 550 cargoes will be exported during the construction of the facility across the commissioning programs of the project's two phases due to the company's innovative phased commissioning and start-up approach.

We have deployed over $4 billion thus far with our key equipment suppliers and contractors for CP2, supporting thousands of jobs in dozens of states across our country and are ready to commence on-site construction as soon as we receive all necessary approvals.

As widely reported, the Department of Energy's pause on issuing LNG export approvals to countries that do not have a free trade agreement in the United States, commonly known as non-FTA nations, has been reversed by the Trump administration. While there can be no assurance as to the timing of regulatory approvals, we believe we may receive our non-FTA export approval from the DOE in the near term.

We are also pleased that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's supplemental environmental impact statement issued last month reiterated that CP2 would have no significant emissions impacts, and we are awaiting a notice to proceed from FERC.

The current regulatory environment is supportive of the US LNG industry and we have been thrilled with the backing we have received from President Trump and the current administration, members of Congress, governors, including Governor Landry, Louisiana state legislators from both sides of the aisle, and government and industry representatives from allied nations.

Taking advantage of these permitting tailwinds, we have commenced the FID process for Phase 1 of the CP2 project with our well-established banking syndicate. Our bold investments in the project to date will position CP2 as potentially the most advanced project in the history of the LNG industry by the time we officially break ground in Cameron Parish.

We currently aim to begin receiving major power island equipment and liquefaction trains number 55 and 56 in the first half of 2025, and are targeting first production of LNG in mid-2027. We believe CP2 has the potential to be a key source of LNG for critical United States allies such as Germany and Japan and others, and we look forward to our role in providing their citizens clean, affordable American LNG and bolstering their energy security.

Continuing with this discussion of an advantageous regulatory environment, we are pleased to announce today our plans to expand the Plaquemines project, which is detailed on Page 12. We have begun the prefiling process at FERC for a brownfield expansion, Phase III expansion configuration consisting of 24 liquefaction trains and related infrastructure, which we expect to provide 18.6 MTPA of export capacity.

We believe this expansion will be highly accretive as the new liquefaction trains would leverage existing infrastructure developed during Plaquemines Phase I and Phase II, including, but not limited to, LNG tanks, marine jetties, pipe racks and marine offloading facilities. We are targeting FID for this expansion project in mid-'27 after achieving first production at CP2 and believe this flexible incremental capacity would position us to respond rapidly to market growth signals.

In a capital-intensive commodity industry, capital will always flow to the most competitive projects, and we believe that an expansion of Plaquemines is one of the most economically efficient opportunities available to quickly meet growing LNG demand.

Simply stated, we believe our Plaquemines expansion, along with projects we pursue in the future, has the potential to displace more expensive development projects with longer construction durations, enabling us to offer lower long-term LNG prices to the global markets, while also delivering very attractive returns to our shareholders.

Turning to Page 14. We have noticed a misconception among some investors and analysts that our production outside of our 20-year contracts is fully exposed to spot or merchant prices and that our contracted revenue profile is insubstantial, neither of which is the case. 100% of the nameplate production capacity of Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines is contracted including CP2, 39.25 of 50 MTPA of the nameplate capacity of our first three projects is contracted at an average tenor of slightly under 20 years, representing over $100 billion of illustrative total contracted revenue.

For our commissioning cargoes, we are continuously seeking to lock in advantageous fixed liquefaction fees and anticipate contracting forward sales of strips of cargoes on an ongoing basis. We plan on contracting our currently uncontracted capacity at CP2 as well as our expansion capacity at Plaquemines under a blend of 3 to 20 year contract tenors.

In the coming years, long-term contracts representing hundreds of MTPA of demand are set to expire, offering a significant opportunity for Venture Global to secure incremental pricing certainty and build a balanced portfolio of contract tenors.

Throughout the history of our company, incumbent industry participants, including LNG producers and global super majors have questioned our disruptive approach. Despite this skepticism, we have continued to execute and prove our critics wrong.

Our core business is building and operating machines that produce a valuable commodity, and we are focused on delivering our product faster, more safely and at a lower cost than the rest of the market. We believe this is a winning formula in our commodity market and look forward to proving it with our earnings and returns in the years to come.

I'll now turn it over to our CFO, Jack Thayer, to walk through our fourth quarter and full-year 2024 financials as well as our guidance for 2025.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning to those on the line. I will be referring to the Venture Global Inc. Form 10-K as of and for the year ended December 31, 2024. The 10-K 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 that, 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 revenue was $1.5 billion for the fourth quarter of 2024 and $5 billion for the full year, a $108 million and a $2.9 billion decrease or a 7% and 37% decline, respectively, from $1.6 billion and $7.9 billion during the equivalent periods in 2023.

This decrease in revenue year over year was driven by: one, lower weighted average fixed liquefaction fees of $7.28 per MMBtu versus $12.23 per MMBtu and lower natural gas commodity fees of $2.61 per MMBtu versus $3.20 per MMBtu, resulting in a decrease of $2.8 billion; and two, lower LNG sales volumes of 501 TBtus versus 510 TBtus, resulting in an additional decrease of $139 million.

Our net income attributable to common stockholders was $871 million for the fourth quarter of 2024 and $1.5 billion for the full year, a $921 million increase and a $1.2 billion decrease from a loss of $50 million and net income of $2.7 billion during the fourth quarter and full year of 2023, respectively.

These shifts were driven by the stabilization of international LNG prices, resulting in lower total margin for LNG sold and higher cost to remediate and commission the Calcasieu project, personnel expenses reflecting higher headcounts and cost to develop the CP2 project. These declines were partially offset by the reduction of third-party ownership interest in a consolidated subsidiary in 2023, favorable changes in the fair value of our interest rate swaps and lower income tax expense.

Shifting to consolidated adjusted EBITDA. We realized $688 million during the fourth quarter of 2024 and $2.1 billion for the full year, a $125 million and $3.1 billion decrease or a 15% and 59% decline, respectively, from $813 million and $5.2 billion during the equivalent period in 2023.

This decrease in consolidated adjusted EBITDA year over year was driven chiefly by the stabilization of international LNG prices, resulting in lower total margin for LNG sold and higher O&M, G&A and development expenses, including costs to remediate and commission Calcasieu Pass, costs associated with personnel growth to support our growing business and design and development costs for CP2, among other development projects.

As Mike discussed, we exported a total of 33 commissioning cargoes in Q4 and 141 commissioning cargoes over the entire year, which declined from 40 and 143, respectively, compared with the same periods in 2023. Of these cargoes, 128 TBtu of volumes are reflected in our results for Q4 and 501 TBtu of volumes are reflected in the full-year 2024 figures.

Advancing to Page 17, we are guiding to a consolidated adjusted EBITDA range of $6.8 billion to $7.4 billion for 2025, incorporating in a forecasted 140 to 148 cargoes from Calcasieu Pass and 219 to 239 cargoes from Plaquemines.

This EBITDA range was determined assuming a fixed liquefaction fee of between $7 and $8 per MMBtu being contracted for cargoes remaining to be sold over 2025, consistent with current TTF and JKM forward price expectations.

This consolidated adjusted EBITDA forecast also assumes over $500 million of expense development spending relating primarily to CP2 and regulatory and engineering design spend on our other developmental projects as well as the conclusion of onetime rectification O&M spent at Calcasieu Pass to ready the plant for an April 15 COD. On average, if fixed liquefaction fees over 2025 increased or decreased by $1 per MMBtu, we expect our consolidated adjusted EBITDA range to adjust accordingly by between $625 million and $675 million.

I will now turn the call back over to Mike.

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

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions)

John Mackay, Goldman Sachs.

Hey, good morning all. Thank you for the time. I just wanted to start -- a lot of moving pieces, but I want to start on the '25 guide. Maybe you could just walk us through again a little bit some of the moving pieces on kind of your assumptions on the margin?

And then also how much of this continued quick ramp at Plaquemines is baked in there? I think it's relative to the range you guys have given for the plus or minus $1 in spread, it's ultimately a narrow EBITDA range for the year. So maybe just unpacking a few more of the moving pieces would be helpful? Thank you.

Good morning, John. Thank you. Thank you for the question. We -- obviously, the largest moving piece is just the forward curve for the remaining of the year. And so since the IPO, the forward curve is compressed on the -- if you're looking at TTF in particular, but we also sell in Asia, too.

But the European markets come in approximately 20% and Henry Hub has come up a little bit. And so we factored in a conservative view on what we're anticipating for the rest of the year, blended in with, of course, what we've already contracted. I'll let Jack give you a little bit more detail on what's -- on some of the pieces beyond that.

Great. Thanks, Mike. So I think it might be instructive to walk you through how we're forecasting the EBITDA for the year and maybe an illustrative example would be helpful. A number of investors have looked at net spreads. And here, we provide guidance in the form of a fixed liquefaction fee.

So I think it might be helpful if we kind of walk from net spread to that fixed liquefaction fee. So starting with the net spread, this is an entirely market-based measure. So it's visible to all participants using the available market data. And for simplicity, I'll provide some example numbers that reflect the current market. So to calculate a net spread, you start with TTF.

In this example, I'll use a $14 per MMBtu net spread, which is roughly where the market is right now. And then from this, we subtract shipping at approximately $0.70 per MMBtu and then regasification costs of $0.50 per MMBtu.

Those two values can vary, but generally, there's some correlation between them. And then we subtract 115% of Henry Hub, which for simplicity here, I'll just assume to be $4. So when you gross that up to 115%, that's $4.60 in this instance.

So the math is $14 for TTF, minus the $0.70 for shipping, minus $0.50 for regas, minus the $4.60 for Henry Hub grossed up, and that yields a net spread of $8.20 per MMBtu. Now let me compare this measure to how we calculate fixed liquefaction fees.

So when we're contracting with offtakers, we negotiate -- and our contracts reflect a fixed liquefaction fee plus 115% at Henry Hub. These contracts for cargoes are negotiated between the buyer and seller and generally capture the net spread as well as provide a margin for the buyer. For context, recently, TTF has generally been trading at an approximately $1.20 per MMBtu premium to Gulf Coast market forwards.

So in the same example, $14 per MMBtu for TTF minus the $1.20 discount for Gulf Coast marker, which not surprisingly generally reflects the shipping and regas, minus the 115% of Henry Hub, so $4.60 in the $4 Henry Hub example I provided, that yields a fixed liquefaction fee of $8.20 per MMBtu, less buyer margin, which varies depending on the market.

So in the guidance, we provided a range of effectively $7 to $8 of fixed liquefaction fee in our EBITDA forecast. And then you need to think about our contribution margin from that. So from that, the 115% of Henry Hub generally covers the LNG feedstock, transportation of pipeline gas to the facility and our internal gas burn at our power Islands. We received the liquefaction fee as gross margin, deduct other cost of liquefaction, including O&M, which is generally $0.50 to $0.70 per MMBtu depending on the facility.

So fixed liquefaction fee in this example of $8.20, minus the $0.50 to $0.70 per MMBtu of O&M costs yields contribution margin between $7.50 to $7.70. And that's ultimately what is factored into our EBITDA guidance. Hopefully, that walk was helpful.

John, the back half of your question about the incorporation of the ramp-up on Plaquemines. We are incredibly pleased, as I described in our earlier comments, with the rapid ramp-up that the team has been able to achieve at Plaquemines is really an unprecedented ramp-up for a greenfield project of this scale.

And we are excited about what we think we're going to be able to achieve for the balance of this year and for both Plaquemines and CP2 as well. The biggest news that we're excited about related to the trains is the performance of the trains in our view has been spectacular so far, and something that hasn't been seen before relative to nameplate capacity.

And since we're in the business of manufacturing, installing sequentially our liquefaction trains to be able to achieve the performance out of the trains that we've been demonstrating now for the first 16 of the trains that have produced LNG at Plaquemines is incredibly exciting for us.

And we have -- in addition to view this year, we're really looking at the medium to long term to be able to install as many of these trains as possible and produce in ultimate term for 50 years from our liquefaction trains.

There's a ramp-up for Plaquemines trains for the balance of this year that incorporates our views of the performance of the trains and the sequence of the trains coming on, and it's incorporated into the cargo count that we described before.

That's really clear. Appreciate all that color. Second question, maybe just on the Plaquemines expansion between signing longer-term contracts there. You mentioned also potentially adding some more contracts for CP3.

Can you maybe just talk about where you're seeing your appetite -- sorry, where you're seeing appetite in the market for signing these long-term contracts right now? Kind of when could we expect those in general and maybe just broadly the competitive market versus other Gulf Coast facilities?

Sure. No. So of the -- if you include CP2, we have 50 million tons of nameplate capacity, 39.25 of that 50 are contracted on largely a 20-year basis. And so of CP2, we're 9.25 of the 20. And we are going to contract the balance of roughly half of the nameplate capacity of CP2 on a blended basis.

I'd say 3 to 20 years is probably going to be the range of tenors that we're going to target for the balance of the nameplate capacity of CP2. And then for the expected capacity production above nameplate capacity, we also are going to layer on blended contract terms that will be multiyear tenors on those contracts.

For the bolt-on that we just announced this morning that we moved into pre-FERC the 24 trains that we're developing as a Phase III at Plaquemines, that is larger than what we were expecting to be able to layer on. But on more expensive engineering, we were able to really leverage existing infrastructure like tanks and pipe racks and jetties and other systems and that enabled us to layer on more potential trains there than we originally participated. But what that means then is we have more capacity there that we're able to contract on a long-term basis.

And so our plan is to contract on a 10- and 20-year basis, more of that bolt-on Phase III capacity at Plaquemines and at levels that we view are material discounts relative to the rest of the market because of what we view are very sustainable cost advantages relative to the rest of the market. And so our plan there, and we're going to endeavor to demonstrate here is to do more long-term contracts for this capacity.

We think there's very, very good demand in the market for long-term contracts and at prices that are very attractive to us. And again, as I described, at points that we think are substantial discounts to where other projects are economic.

And so we think that we're in a position to displace other companies' plans for their growth because of our advantages. And our plan is to use these substantial expansions to do just that to grab additional market share to grow earnings, but also to do it with more long-term contracts to continue to build a balanced portfolio.

So over time, as we incrementally add our liquefaction trains, we will be blending in layers of more multiyear contracts that we think is an attractive way to capture more of the upside earnings of these large facilities than you realize if you did it with all 20-year contracts. But by plugging in shorter terms into that, we'll be able to, in a balanced way, achieve substantially more earnings is the goal.

All right, that's clear, appreciate it, Mike, appreciate the time.

Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you. Jeremy Tonet, JPMorgan Securities.

Hi, good morning (multiple speakers) --

Good morning.

Hey, Just wanted to come back to the guide, if I could. And we've seen assets running above nameplate here, pretty encouraging numbers. And so we just want to see, I guess, for Calc, maybe there wasn't as much potential excess cargoes that outlined there.

I'm just wondering for the potential -- could this number be higher? Could volumes surprise the upside for the year? I mean we're looking potential for EBITDA numbers, $10 billion or more. I just wanted to see if we get higher volumes here, could we start moving upside to the guide as you described?

So there is a ramp-up of the production capacity at Plaquemines as we layer on more trains. And we are -- as we say, we're incredibly excited about the performance of the trains after years of incorporating our data and our process engineering and data science to see it play out with the performance of the trains has been incredibly exciting for us and the whole team.

We are trying to be reasonable and conservative and balanced about our EBITDA projections and give ourselves appropriate kind of variance for the performance in order to achieve the EBITDA projections. The $10 billion number that you're referencing is obviously sensitive to the -- what the forward curve is. That's realized a little bit more so this year.

And so as we continue to contract forward strips of our production for Plaquemines this year and next year, then the relative sensitivity of our earnings goes down as we do that. And it's the TTF price or the JKM price relative to the Henry Hub price, it generates that spread that Jack went around and described earlier.

And all of it is going to be sensitive to the demand side as Europe fills up its storage because it's low in storage. And we watch what the demand looks like coming out of the rest of the market, obviously including Asia. I will remind -- we will remind everybody though, that we are manufacturing, installing, turning on, operating liquefaction trains for decades.

Ultimately, we think we'll be operating these machines for 50 years or more. And we have a very bullish view that 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years from now, the world will be using more and more electricity and a large portion of that is going to be supplied by gas and being a low-cost producer of liquefaction capacity is enormously valuable, and that's what we're layering in.

So as we layer in these trains, and I spent some time in my comments, a couple of paragraphs really trying to describe the scale of the trains that we're layering in that will compound the earnings that we're able to achieve in the market in the future.

And to go from 18 trains to 70 trains that are either producing, sitting on pads, on ships, arriving, being manufactured to go from 18 trains to 70 trains in 29 months and then to have those trains outperform expectations the way we're demonstrating right now is something incredibly exciting to us. And we're very focused on continuing to do that as safely as possible and methodically as possible. I answered more than you asked, Jeremy. (multiple speakers) Okay, that was the next question, yeah.

That's helpful. Thank you for that. And just wondering -- with future LNG development, just wondering if you could provide some backdrop how you see the regulatory environment now. It's a bit choppy under the prior administration. Just wondering how you see things currently. And did that kind of feed into your thought, I guess, with potential -- with Plaq here in this time frame that's very quick to get something new going here?

No, we think -- our view is that the permitting environment that we're in and going into now is likely the best in decades. And the -- it makes us very bullish on the ability to permit our expansion plans and puts us in a position to be responsive to market demand.

And we think as, in our view, the low-cost liquefier and the fastest to ramp up in the market that it positions us to be able to be responsive to demand and as we were describing a few minutes ago, puts us in a position because of that -- those two factors to offer prices to customers that are extremely attractive on a long-term and medium-term contract tenor, that it's going to be extremely difficult for other boards to compete with or justify FID decisions for prospective projects. So we think we are, and which has been our plan, in a position to displace those growth plans for global competitors.

That's helpful. And just to be clear, quote, the lines of communication to Trump at this point and moving forward, just wondering if you could talk a bit more, I guess, on the contrast today versus before?

Well, there is -- obviously, there is an LNG pause, and we're waiting for our non-FTA export authorization for CP2. And we can't -- as I said in my comments, we can't predict an exact date, but we feel pretty good based on what's been said publicly and privately that people are going to get the non-FTA permits from the Department of Energy.

The FERC Chairman -- new Chairman has been designated by Trump, happens with the change in administration. And we feel that the direction is to move projects forward as they satisfy the FERC requirements. And then ultimately, what's left is businesses follow the rules, get their permits and then they have to compete commercially to sell their product into the market.

And in the commodity market that we're in, price and timing are going to determine market share. And so we -- our view is that permits will go faster than they have in the past, the permitting process and that people will get their permits.

So that's something that has really been our primary constraint from a timing standpoint because we're in a position where we're repeating from our supply chain in the factories that produces our trains really repetitively systematically successfully as we described in what's already going on in our supply chain.

We've dramatically grown our team that has executed the exact same trains that we've installed now at Calcasieu Pass and are installing at Plaquemines and about to receive for CP2, and we'll do the same thing for our bolt-on expansions at Plaquemines and others in the future. So we think we're in a very, very positive environment.

Got it. Thank you for that. I'll leave it there.

Thanks, Jeremy.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Jean Ann Salisbury, Bank of America.

Hi, good morning (multiple speakers) --

Good morning , Jean (multiple speakers) --

I just had a question about Page 10 and the weighted average fixed liquefaction fee, the $7.94 at Plaquemines that you've had already. And thank you so much for walking us through the math of how you define that.

That is kind of where it is at now, I suppose, for the rest of the year, but it seems a little bit lower than what I would have thought it had been year-to-date. Can you kind of just kind of talk about, I guess, the buyer margin and if that's a bit more material maybe than I had calculated?

Sure. I'll say a couple of comments, and then I'll let Jack provide some additional detail. The -- we have sold contracts historically forward for some of that Plaquemines contract, which is what we strive to do is to run multi-tenor strips of forward sales.

And so some of those cargoes were sold into this year historically, and they are just lower prices than what the forward curve was during the winter. And so that's just blended into higher-priced contracts from the current forward curve.

Jean, this is Jack. I'd also maybe just suppose what we experienced at Calcasieu Pass where we're able to capture higher market prices and higher margins because of the maturity of that facility. For 2025, thus far there, we've achieved $8.97 per MMBtu margins with the initiation of first LNG and then the ramp-up, that is always the most challenging period of a plant's evolution when you're getting those trains up and running and you're going through all your teething issues and identifying the challenges that are complicit in or a part of the whole construction and commissioning process.

And so there, we were, I would say, contracting on a much more real-time basis, extensively using our own shipping fleet as well to load the LNG that was being produced, that allowed us the flexibility to ramp but also go through those teething issues. And that's why you're seeing a pretty market differential, more than $1 between the contracting thus far for Plaquemines and the contracting year-to-date at Calcasieu Pass.

Okay. Got it. So basically, longer term, the sort of Calcasieu Pass versus where prices are is a better indicator to use of where buyer margin would be?

I would say our range currently as provided in guidance is highly reflective of where we've been contracting many of our cargoes and certainly is consistent with the cargoes we've sold in the last number of days, given the pace of production that we have and our marketing team is constantly in the market, managing the production that we have and finding buyers for that. And we're very comfortable with the range we provided as reflective of where the market is currently transacting.

Jean, we've been going through this inflection point just in our growth where we're transitioning from just having one facility with 18 trains, and we're turning on another facility that will take us from 18 trains to 54 trains. And so as we just turned that project on, we're now layering in more strips of forward contracts.

And so if we have been adding less trains or growing slower, obviously, our future earnings will be lower. But the percentage of trains that we're turning on that have been contracted in multiyear forward periods will be lower. And so then when we layer on CP2, we'll be layering on those 36 trains on top of 54 trains.

And so the impact will be different. And we don't try and make guesses on what the LNG prices are going to be. We just systematically cut our cost average layering on our contracts incrementally over time. And so we're layering on more tenor as we -- as time passes and we grow.

That makes sense. Thank you. And then as a kind of higher-level follow-up, there's obviously a lot of concern that potential Russia-Ukraine peace could lead to Russian pipeline flows returning to Europe in the near and medium term, which could sort of materially bring down global LNG prices. How would your future development plans for CP2 and Plaquemines change if that environment came to be, if at all?

Well, we obviously watch that and think about that a lot. We think that the short-term impacts that might or will happen as more gas comes online will be temporary. And so it's a question of duration. A long-term contract price today delivered from the US and Europe at a power plant is a very, very low kilowatt hour electricity price that we think that there's a lot of demand for $0.05, $0.06, $0.07 kilowatt hour equivalent electricity at the power plant.

And so we think that really low price power electricity gets hoovered up pretty quickly and with demand expanding to utilize it. And we think that's the case in the medium and long term for sure, but also we think in the relatively short term.

The prices before the Ukraine-Russia war are also instructive when you had all the gas flows going. That pricing was also higher than I think people remember and very attractive prices. For us, we can continue to build and get very attractive returns, $3 net spread prices over the long term still give us very attractive IRRs for building our projects in the high teens to low 20s if that happened forever.

So, we can build extremely competitively. We think that's way below replacement cost for projects. And we also think that there is tremendous global demand for electricity that can be produced at that price point over time. So we will -- are in a position to modulate, if we have to, our growth, the bolt-ons at Plaquemines, the Phase III there.

We're beginning the pre-FERC process now, which we think will go pretty quickly. But it will still take a year to 18 months. And so during that time, we'll be watching how the market pricing is behaving, and we'll be responsive to that, of course.

Great. Thank you. That's all for me.

Yeah.

Thank you. Chris Robertson, Deutsche Bank.

Hey, good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking my questions. Hi Mike.

Good morning, Chris.

This is just a broader market question. I guess as you're going out into the market seeking additional contracting for CP2, can you talk about what types of customers you're currently engaged with, if they're in the more traditional markets like Northeast Asia and Northwest Europe?

Or are you seeing increasing engagement from places like South or Southeast Asia and emerging markets? And of these customers, which ones are leaning more towards shorter-term duration like three to five years versus leaning more towards the 20-year tenor?

That's a great question. Our marketing is very broad. So we're speaking to all interested buyers. And what's new for us, though, is as our balance sheet has grown and our business has matured, we're in a position now where we don't have to primarily just offer 20-year contracts.

So we're able to offer a blend of shorter-term contracts, 12 years, 10 years, 8 years, 3 years, 5 years, that we can blend into our portfolios, taking advantage of not just our nameplate capacity growth, but the excess capacity growth in our commissioning cargoes. And so we see very strong demand still on the 20-year contracts because those long-term fuel prices are extremely attractive.

But I would say it's pretty -- the interest in tenor is pretty broad because the demand side are filling various buckets of their fuel portfolios. And if you're a utility and you run a blended portfolio of term, half of it traditionally can be longer term, a quarter, another quarter can be shorter 5 to 10 years, and then your final quarter can be less than five years. And so there's always contract roll-off of all those terms from customers that creates demand.

Okay, yeah, thanks for the detail on that. As it relates to the FID process for CP2, do you need to secure any additional long-term contracts there or renegotiate any previous contracts in order to satisfy any lender requirements to move forward with FID? Or is it all just regulatory and procedural at this point as it relates to that facility?

We're in a good position with our 9.25 million tonnes that we've contracted for CP2 already. And we're in a strong position from an offtake perspective. The remaining pieces are just finishing off the regulatory receiving.

The big one is receiving the non-FTA from the Department of Energy. FERC, as in their comments, a week or two ago, reiterated as it relates to the supplemental environmental impact statement that they ask for that we have no significant impacts, which are their kind of magic threshold words.

And so they reiterated that. Previously, they reiterated the overall FERC authorization. And so FERC is running through its remaining process. As it relates to the supplemental EIS. Is that according to their schedule? We'll run, of course, in the next few months. And we're running our FID process for CP2 in parallel to that.

Got it. That's very helpful. I'll turn it over. Thank you very much for the time.

Thank you.

Thank you. Shahriar Pourreza, Guggenheim Partners.

Hi, good morning team. This is Constantine Lednev on for Shahriar, and thanks for taking the questions. Congrats on the inaugural call. A lot of questions have been answered. I think maybe taking it to a little bit more to the broader kind of LNG market environment, especially as we look to Europe maintaining their gas storage quotas coming off of historically low storage levels in '25, and kind of more broadly looking at long-term LNG supply agreements, have you participated in any incremental discussions on that front?

Yeah. We're -- between Plaquemines and CP2, we have substantial new supply that's coming into the market that is going to be critical to supplying Europe's needs and Asia's needs. And so we do follow them closely. We do answer questions when we're asked about our views on it and also kind of our views on the timing of being able to execute and provide additional capacity. In our view, the markets are much tighter from a supply-demand standpoint globally than I know a lot of consultants guide to.

And we think that the demand in the market and the need even beyond just the need to resupply storage is more significant, and we think it's growing. And so we're going to watch that really carefully as we go through our permitting process for additional capacities beyond CP2 to be in a position to rapidly respond to those price signals.

Okay, thanks for that. And maybe just a quick follow-up on, again, CP2 and the expansion projects. Just where you're seeing -- and I think I heard this on the last question, too, where you're seeing the '26, '27 forwards and the contracted market signals, are those fully supportive of kind of going to FID on those projects? And just as we're thinking about the volatility, does it change anything on timing, hurdle rates or the need for longer-term subscription for those projects to support the project financing?

No, we're in a good spot on CP2 from a return standpoint, even at much lower prices than we have in the forward curve. So the returns that we have there are still very attractive and put us in a strong competitive position relative to where the bulk of the rest of the market needs to contract. And so we feel really good about where we stand from a CP2 standpoint even if demand is flatter than we think it's going to be.

Excellent. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Yeah. I think that's the -- go ahead.

Thank you. That ends our question-and-answer session. I would now hand the call back to Mr. Mike Sabel for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate all the time and the questions and look forward to answering more questions in the coming days. And we encourage you to please watch the gas flows going into our facilities because it is a great way to track, on a continuous basis, our performance. The teams are working safely as always, but very hard to layer in incremental trains and production capacity.

We are very happy, as I've mentioned a few times, about the performance of our trains. And as we continue to build our facilities, we think about the earnings that will be possible to produce from those facilities over many years to come and how -- as you layer on incremental trains, how that increases.

And we will be very prudent in taking a view on short-term changes in market prices and volatility as it relates to the timing of our growth. But we will also be looking to be opportunistic in earning or achieving market share because we, even at low market prices, still achieve very attractive returns.

Obviously, as prices go higher, we do better, but we still do well in these lower markets as well -- lower price markets as well. So thank you very much. We appreciate it and look forward to speaking to you in the near term and the years to come. Thanks, everybody. Thank you everybody.

Thank you. And this concludes today's call. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.