Cheniere Energy, Inc. (AMEX:LNG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeremy Tonet: Good morning. I just want to start off here on Sabine Pass. At the risk of putting the cart ahead of the horse here, just wondering if we could get any more color about how this commercialization process could look down the road. And specifically, if you’re looking for gas sourcing, would this likely come from the Permian new pipe there? We think about financing, would CQP be issuing equity? What type of timeline for contract commercialization will be thinking just any bits of information you could provide as far as thoughts on what this could look like would be super helpful.

Jack Fusco : Thanks, Jeremy. As you can tell from our prepared remarks, we are so excited about the Sabine Pass expansion. If you look at trying to see what slide number it was, Randy 7 of ours, you can see the rendition from Bechtel of what it would look like. That property is currently being utilized right now as lay down area. So it’s primed and ready to go, which is one of the advantages that we have as a brownfield site. The infrastructure is there at the facility and there’s a huge push and pull from the customer base worldwide. So you all remember back in 2016 when I started. We had 13 foundation customers; we now have over 33. Those are customers that take at least a cargo a month and have a tenure of over 20 years. And that customer diversity has grown dramatically as our contract structures have grown between FOB, DS, IPMS, et cetera, and who knows what’s next but that Anatol and Ramzi have in their back pocket.

But I will turn it over to Jack to talk about some of the more specific details.

Zach Davis: Sure. And then I’ll hand it off to Anatol, can give you a little update on how he’s thinking about contracting the project going forward. But basically we’re just starting that permitting process and engineering work with Bechtel, and it’s going to be quite some time before we spend even more than $100 million as we develop that over the coming year or so. But obviously, since it’s brownfield, it should be cost advantage, but it is 20 million tons. So you can imagine we’ll approach it like we’ve approached everything, likely even in stages, as we’ve done on previous projects, just to be more efficient with the bank debt, capital raises and spreading out the equity over time. But the key component for us as we think about financing it is the fact that we now have this base plus variable distribution policy at CQP.

So we can go through a major expansion at Sabine, maintain the base distribution, which is over $3.10 and live within our cash flows and stick to the same amount of 50% give or take of leverage and make it work which is a pretty neat place to be. So CQP works as is, and obviously it goes without saying that we’ll hold to our investment parameters, make sure that it’s accretive not just on a value basis, but a credit basis, too. And have all the other bells and whistles that you’re accustomed to having with us when we FID a project, Anatol?

Anatol Feygin: Yes, just to dive in a little bit to your question, as you know, the integration of upstream infrastructure solutions and gas supply has been a key success factor of ours and be one of our main kind of structural advantages. So we take that extremely seriously and we’ll have robust solutions for that. And the customer mix, the crystal ball is fairly similar to what we have experienced over the last three to four years in a very healthy, credit worthy mix that does include producer customers, which partially includes not only the liquefaction fee but also the gas supply component and the opportunities to optimize those volumes flexibly downstream. So you are going to see from the commercial side producers, you are going to see European and Asian buyers and I think everyone is excited about this opportunity to continue to serve the market with this growth.