Fortis Inc. (NYSE:FTS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Susan Gray: Sure. Yeah. Thank you for the question, Rob. So I think your question was, do we have any concerns based on what staff filed? And I think that, we think that with a file was largely in line with our initial filing. And so we think that there’s pretty small gap between their testimony and ours. We’re still in the rebuttal phase, so the rebuttal testimony is due next week. And we’re optimistic that we can reach some stipulations through this process and go into the hearings, which start March 29 in a pretty good position in terms of agreements with staff and other major interveners. We have not had significant conversations with the other interveners at this time. So I think there was a precedent set with the stipulations that were agreed to by staff and Southwest Gas, in the Southwest Gas rate case that recently was settled. So we’re hopeful that we can also work with staff to get to some stipulations prior to the hearing.

Rob Hope: All right. Appreciate the color. Moving north, can you give us some updated thoughts on the build out of LNG at Tilbury, you were able to get some First Nations agreements there recently. However, the regulatory framework is still, slow and ongoing?

David Hutchens: Yeah, Rob. That’s great. I’m going to — actually, I’m going to kick this right over to Roger Dall’Antonia. He’s been working on some of these agreements as recent as last week, so he’s got the most recent updates. Roger?

Roger Dall’Antonia: Thanks, Dave. Good morning, Rob. So on Tilbury, there’s two primary regulatory processes. One is the environmental assessment on the jetty, which is the infrastructure to allow for filling a bunkering barges to fuel marine vessels. The second is the environmental assessment for the build out of the Tilbury site, including a storage tank and additional liquefaction. In both instances, the environmental assessment office, there’s obviously significant focus on indigenous support for those projects. The deals that we’ve been announcing recently primarily focus on the jetty process. That’s currently now with both the provincial and federal environmental assessment offices for referral. We’re hoping to see a decision on the jetty sometime in the next few months.

And the environmental assessment process for the Tilbury build out tank and the further liquefaction is in the stage of preparing the detailed application, working with environmental assessment process in scoping out the application as well as considering how to engage indigenous communities to have indigenous environmental estimates as part of the process.

Rob Hope: Appreciate it.

David Hutchens: Thanks. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Linda Ezergailis from TD Securities. Please go ahead.

Linda Ezergailis: Thank you. I’m wondering, if you could give us a sense of how you view the relative attractiveness of different financing options with the filing of your short-form based shelf prospectus, wondering where prep (ph) shares sit in terms of your levers to finance either your current capital plan or if you choose to maybe accelerate some of the decarbonization initiatives and add to the current plan? Can you talk about also your capacity to add new projects to the current plan before considering other levers like discrete common equity?