Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. We're very excited to have Excelerate Energy with us, President CEO Steve Kobos. And, yeah, we're excited to be here for our 22nd annual. So Steve, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. I thought, you know, I'll just kick it off, and if anyone out there has questions, just raise your hand and don't be shy. It's an intimate audience. Yeah, I guess, you know, you recently announced two new commercial deals. Maybe you can just give us an overview of the new charter for the FSRU Sequoia in Brazil and the long-term sales and purchase agreement you re-signed with the Bangladesh government. That'd be great. Sure. Thanks, Michael, and thank you all for being here. If you don't mind, Michael, I might just start a few minutes with- Please. who we are Absolutely. what we do, and why we are indispensable to the global energy security and energy transition. So I think most folks at this conference are well familiar with what LNG is and the impact it has on the global economy and on energy security. I would say what you may not be as familiar with is what happens downstream in that value chain, where the rubber meets the road, where the LNG goes from minus 158 degrees Celsius as a liquid and gets regasified and goes into a market that's hungry for gas. So we have a class of assets called FSRUs or floating storage and regasification units. I don't like jargon or acronyms. It's really just floating terminals. These are basically look like large LNG carriers, which, you know, these are big, big assets, big tanks, size of a U.S. nuclear carrier without the deck on it. So they are large, they can deliver a lot of gas into a market, and they can make a difference quickly and be deployed quickly. We have 10 of the 50 assets in the global market by count. Many of ours have higher send-out, the ability to deliver more gas, so we actually have something closer to 27% of the global fleet's regasification capacity. How do we use that? We use it for folks that care about three things. One, people who have an incredible baseline need and demand to get natural gas into their system. Great proof point of that is Pakistan. Our asset in Karachi gets a new cargo delivered to it every 4.5 days. It is pushing north of 1.25% of global LNG production through a single asset. So that gives you an idea of the throw weight that some of these have. What's another way that folks use these? Energy security. Proof point there is Finland. We signed a deal with Gasgrid Finland the day before Gazprom cut off or announced cutting pipeline gas off to Finland. You may have seen, although it got lost in the shuffle of some other global issues, the Balticconnector pipeline between Finland and Estonia was cut when a container ship dragged an anchor for 180 kilometers. Not saying whether that was intentional or not, the Finnish government said they thought a sea captain might notice he was dragging an anchor for 180 kilometers. If we weren't there with our asset, Finland would not have gas. Now, they only need about 5% of their mix for gas, but when you need natural gas to run your steel plants, to run your industry, you need it, and they wouldn't have it, but for our energy security. And then the third one is the energy transition. And with that, I think I'll, I'll turn to Michael's question because the proof point for the energy transition is Brazil. Brazil is remarkable. They get something like 65% of their power from hydropower. Some years it's over 70%. But what is hydropower? Hydropower means rain, rain means drought, and drought is the original intermittent renewable. When they have drought, they need LNG, and they've just signed up a ten-year deal with Excelerate for a second asset into Brazil to ensure their energy security. Michael asked about that contract. Very excited about that one, Michael. It's for 10 years with Petrobras. We have been in Brazil since 2011. We have another asset we've had with Petrobras since 2014. They respect our operational excellence, and they also respect our tradition of good American governance. So they were pleased to add a second asset. All this global market for LNG, you know, it ain't a pipe, it can go anywhere. So there's one LNG market, and Petrobras knew who they wanted, and they frankly paid at a rate that we think is as good or better than anything in Europe. It's gonna provide $60 million of EBITDA uplift per annum. It's got a CPI index, both for the CapEx and for the OpEx component on that. So we think it's really great for our investors and shareholders. Let's see. You also asked about a sale and purchase agreement into Bangladesh, SPA. That's we've been in Bangladesh again, since 2018. We flow something like 25% of the natural gas needed by a country of 170 million people, let's call it half the United States, across our two assets that we have in the Bay of Bengal. The Bangladesh government and people have come to rely on us and find us predictable and good corporate citizens, and they've just agreed that we will supply them in 2026 and 2027 with 0.85 million tons per year of LNG. Then starting in 2028 through 2040, we will supply 1 million tons per annum of LNG. This is gonna be predictable. It's gonna be indexed in a way that we will have predictable earnings and results, and we're looking for it to contribute as a further infrastructure uplift, you know, call it $15 to 18 million. So excited about both of those. Great. Thanks for that. So, you know, I want to ask about strategy. You know, when you went public last year, you know, the strategy I think was to go push downstream, beyond the FSRU into these several different developing markets that you had talked about at the time. You know, then, you know, things happened, Russia, Ukraine happened. And so you, I think, logically pivoted to Europe, which made perfect sense. But now it seems like Europe has kind of stabilized to some degree, at least maybe for this winter, and I'd be curious for your thoughts on that. But I guess my question is: Where does the growth strategy go now? Yeah, maybe I'll leave it there. Yeah. We touched on war, global strategy. I mean, these are a couple of nice points, Michael. Again, it's all connected. That war and the drive for Europe was connected with demands in the Global South, everywhere else. Obviously, the need in Finland and Germany for energy security was high. At this point, since the IPO, we have redeployed 40% of our fleet. That's significant uplift to EBITDA contribution. And going to Europe, you know, we increased our TAM. We added a couple of, you know, double-A and triple-A-rated counterparty, fit that into our portfolio, so it's made perfect sense. As I mentioned, it all exerts an impact on everything else. The reason Petrobras is paying a very solid rate in Brazil is they know that they need that asset, they know that the asset class is going to remain tight for intermediate term. I think when we were talking here last December, I said, "Hey, Michael, these assets are gonna stay in Europe for the long haul because this is cheap insurance." You know, you look at Germany, and for their five, they're probably paying something like $250 million a year. But it's incredibly cheap insurance when you think about what it does and the negotiating power it will ultimately give them if they resume sourcing in another way. So we think it's interconnected. We think Europe was helpful. The big impact from the war, though, driving the strategy, is all these US FIDs. I mean, if you go back before the war, we thought, okay, Qatar is gonna go from 77 million tons to 127. Who knows what else will happen? And then, now we're at the point we're gonna get 200. Who knows? If, if some of these other off takes lead to more FIDs, some would say that number could get as high as 270. That would come online by 2030. What's it gonna do? The Global South already knows that it's going to make LNG far more affordable, which is great because they can be planning on that, planning on that for their long-term needs, getting ahead of that. But also, they know they still can't really compete with Europe for spot volumes. And so, that's the sentiment that drove the Bangladeshis to enter into a long-term procurement agreement with us. They, they know they can't afford that. They can't afford good forward slopes of Brent. They can't afford to leave everything to chance to competing with Europe. So we're gonna—we are a global company. We have operations in Europe, LatAm, MENA, South Asia, and we're going to keep pushing in those environments. But all in all, we believe the long-term impact of the war and the FIDs it drove are great for us in terms of, you know, macro tailwinds, TAM, and overall affordability for the rest of the world. Great. I appreciate that. Maybe you've talked about pursuing investment opportunities in Africa, India, Vietnam, some other markets. So I'm wondering if you could just, you know, maybe expand a little bit on the strategy there. Kind of, I would say much as I was suggesting before, I do think the asset class is tight in Europe. I think it's gonna stay tight for some time. I also think, as the people that follow the sector know, the LNG C class is gonna stay pretty tight just because of the shipbuilding needs, Qatari building program, all those things that tie up yards for a while. You take all of that together, it means the FSRU class is going to remain tight for some time. So we know we need to build that. We also know that, as I said, the price point is gonna be coming down, which is an entry point for South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Far East, and that will certainly not be our sole focus, but it's going to be an important focus. Maybe it'd be worthwhile to just talk through, in general, the strategy of moving downstream. And just, you know, beyond just offering the FSRU, but all the downstream activities that you're sort of trying to push into, just maybe strategically and just economically, how those contracts work. You know, for us, it's been an evolution. We started with only chartering ships, and then some years back in Bangladesh, we realized, let's wrap the infrastructure together with the vessel, and the tugs and everything else, and let's make it easier for the customer. I think it, I think it helps development, the easier you can make it for these customers. But at the same time, when you open a market, and we've opened many markets. We opened Argentina, we opened Pakistan, where I mentioned our vessel imports over 1% of global LNG production. We opened Bangladesh. We opened Israel when they were an importer and not an exporter. When you make the effort to do that from a regulatory tax development perspective, what you wanna do is expand upon it. So if there are existing markets where we believe we have certain advantages, might even say a moat in some of these, then you wanna take advantage of that hard work that you've expended for many years and scale it. At the same time, you know that if you're going to spend the time and effort to open a market, it would be nice to enhance that infrastructure return. So we're always gonna be looking for ways to enhance it, and we think going downstream is the right way. Maybe, so another way to kind of get at that question, I think, is when I think about this business, I think you've got this, you know, kind of base of contracted cash flows. You sometimes have marketing opportunities, those kind of come and go. And then you've got some periodic, like, dry docking expenses, which, which- Mm-hmm. -hit the P&L. So I wonder if you just kinda walk through those different cash flow streams you have today, and then also, well, maybe talk a little bit, if you can, about 2024 in terms of upcoming cadence of expenses there, but also how the, the downstream kind of efforts would fit into that cash flow profile. Sure. Look, we're very proud of this portfolio. We've got 10 assets. Our fleet on hire right now, it's gonna be 95%+ of our earnings for next year. You can model that. We think it's a very solid, predictable. We've got over $4 billion of contracted future cash flows. We—what else can I say about it? It's pretty impressive. The Brazilian one that we mentioned, that moved a cyclical, weather-driven, hard-to-model revenue and converted it to this mid-60s EBITDA position that we think investors will like. So that side is gonna be fairly easy to model. We talked about some of these add-ons that are coming, but they're coming down the road a little bit. And you start looking at expenses, the maintenance CapEx for the dry dock's significant. It's more significant on the maintenance side. So what do we have coming in 2024? We've spoken the fact that the Summit LNG, one of our assets, will go to dry dock. I don't wanna get into the weeds, but because it's on a build-own, operate, transfer model, which you see a lot in South Asia, that's going to those dry dock expenses in 2024 will be hitting our income statement as expenses. So a little bit different approach there, but you can look at. And then if I think further on 2024, you should start to see some of this development expense increase second half of the year. And then just to go back to marketing. So like, in the past, you've had some marketing opportunities. Is that... Are all of your—I guess, do you have available capacity of any vessels where you could take advantage of marketing, or is that kind of off the table now because you're more contracted? You know, never say never to anything because, you know, one of the main reasons we've got this opportunity in Bangladesh is we agreed to take that asset to dry dock, increase the guaranteed send-out for the government by 100 million standard cubic feet a day. But we said, "Hey, if we wanna do that, if we're gonna do that, we wanna sell you the LNG." So if you'd asked me last December, "Can you guys sell LNG through Bangladesh?" I'd say, "Well, I don't know." But, but we kept pushing, and we can. So I don't want to suggest we can't do the same thing on other markets, because we're always trying to offer further products and, and see where we can. I will say, though, that the bulk of those gas sales from last year were going through Brazil, and we talked to Petrobras and figured out what this Petrobras wanted, and what we want to sell them is what they want to buy. And it was a long-term deal on this asset at a, you know, at a rate that's very attractive. So we moved forward with that, and I think that's going to make us far more predictable in 2024, at least. Got it. Great. Maybe, you know, you've had some changes to senior management team recently- Mm. at the company. Maybe you could just talk about, you know, the—what, what drove that, and how this affects the execution of your growth strategy. Yeah, we considered that we're at an interesting inflection point with the 10 assets deployed, moving closer to execution on some not insubstantial scale projects. So we've taken what was a role of Chief Commercial Officer and broken it into two executive officer positions, reporting to me, a Chief Development Officer and a Chief Commercial Officer. Chief Development Officer is going to be focused on our regas infrastructure portfolio, driving that pipeline of infrastructure projects and driving execution. Chief Commercial Officer will focus on, you know, getting more out of existing-- or presenting existing customers with greater opportunity, sourcing and selling LNG when we have opportunities to get uplift, like we did in Bangladesh, chartering the existing assets, you know, entering into those contracts. So the only thing you should really take from it is, we know we have a lot of opportunity in front of us. As I said, whatever number you want to assign, let's say it's only 200 million tons coming online by 2030, it has to go somewhere. We're one of the only people focused on where that is going to go. And that's going to lead for the need to execute some more projects. So we're excited about it. Got it. I can just jump in with a question here. I think on the last earnings call, maybe it was Dana that mentioned that you guys are looking at a second new build FSRU. So I guess the question is, when you look at the economics there, in terms of maybe going down that route, getting a new FSRU versus maybe acquiring an FSRU, how do you think about those two and the best outcome for you? Thanks for that. Well, there's no perfect outcome, but I will tell you right now, as we look at what we would want to convert, you know, and as we certainly know which are the best conversion candidates among the DFDE vessels. You know, that's roughly you'd be looking at something built 2012-2020, I would say. But when we look at those costs, and you look at the opportunity costs for not being able to deploy that, and you factor in some of the execution risk with that, yeah, additional new building does look attractive to us. We're going to look at other ways of doing that, but we are actively evaluating a second new building, and we'll also look at M&A as a means of getting after it. As I said, this asset class is going to remain tight. Those in Europe are cheap insurance. We know how that insurance works. You only have to look at the benefit Lithuania had for years when they had an FSRU. They didn't use it much, but they still negotiated, you know what? A 25% to 30% discount from Gazprom. It is important to have insurance. It's important not to be embarrassed again if you are a European government. So those are gonna stay sticky. And if you look around, just from the tightness in the overall shipping market, to satisfy the need to carry those 200-250 million tons, that will continue to choke the shipyards. And for us, we see all this coming down the pike, and we want to get ahead of it. And we'll evaluate... I mean, we do have a detailed conversion plan, but, but my CFO didn't speak to that, so I'll just talk about what she did. Maybe just to follow up on that. So as you said, like, there's a, whatever the number is, there's a large supply of LNG that's coming in the next decade. And it sounds like you think the shipyards won't be able to satisfy- No, they're certainly going to get ahead of the need, but it's tight. You know, the order book, the lead time is longer than it used to be before this building rush. But Michael, we've seen this before. When the Qatari initial fleet was being built in the second half of the first decade of the century, it exerted the same phenomenon on the yards. It just has to work through it. I guess, how do you balance the risk of making that investment for a new build versus where that's gonna get deployed, and will—do you have that contracted in advance? So- No. I would think you can't. So you, you're- Yeah ... in some way, you're making some- I mean, we- kind of educated guess about the market. We have a philosophical view on that. Yeah. We want the best possible optionality. You know, some of our assets are in challenging environments. We have two in the Bay of Bengal. We had two category four cyclone strikes this year. One of those, we kept flowing gas all during it. One, we disconnected for five days and then resumed flowing gas immediately. We like challenging weather environments. So we'll want things that have suitable reinforcement for that. At the same time, we will leave some optionality to make sure it's suitable for cold weather, so we can plug and play if Europe goes beyond an insurance market long term to a primary market. So we're gonna make sure we can go both ways. I can tell you, when you look at the M&A landscape around the world and the terminals you could put together, the limiting factor is the FSRUs. So we already know that, and all we want is the greatest possible optionality for location and assets that we could also, if we need to, plug in with existing customers and recycle their assets. Got it. Maybe I'll ask another one here. I guess one of the, you know, criticisms we get from investors is on the disclosures around free cash flow, and wondering if there's kind of a desire there to provide more clarity around that. I know there's, you know, there are some moving pieces, but I guess if we look at it from a high level, it's really just the Payra project that is potentially gonna meaningfully change your CapEx spending. Is A, is that correct? And B, do you think you'll be in a position to provide more information on the free cash flow outlook? I take those suggestions seriously every time we go to a conference like Wells Fargo, and I'll evaluate it. Payra's gonna be is going to have significant CapEx, but so do new buildings. We're obviously in a good position right now in terms of the capital we have at hand to deploy, and we are focused on deploying that in the best way possible. And we think there are accretive opportunities for the investors. I think I mentioned on the third quarter earnings calls, we are looking at other ways to deploy that sooner. So I don't want to take anything off the table and say that it would simply be the organic projects. That draws a lot of attention just because of the impact it could have on that market, how many people could benefit from it, how much LNG they're taking already, all those things. But, at the same time, we're not going to... I said on the earnings call, and Michael just repeated, we're looking sub-Saharan Africa, we're looking South Asia, we're looking East Asia, and I haven't closed the regional offices in, in, Latam or, or the Middle East. So, we're continuing to kick tires in all of those and work on a high-graded target list that we've refined. Maybe just since you mentioned the Payra project, maybe you just talk a little bit about scope of the project, how should we think about that, and milestones that we should be looking for as this project continues to develop? It's a big question, so take a drink of water. Sure, please. Of course, timing, though that's probably the hardest one to answer. Yeah. You know, it's the scope. I'll just start with that. Scope's an offshore terminal. We've already got two assets operating in the Bay of Bengal. This would be further to the west. There's a large part of that country that is not adequately served with gas. They have six combined cycle power plants that have no gas, for example. It's not a good situation, and they need to remedy that as soon as possible. That would, you know, that alone would drive 460-480 million standard cubic feet a day that they would need just to service that. So intense need. Offshore terminal, 270-kilometer pipeline to Khulna. Khulna is the third largest city in Bangladesh and is not served well by gas for... So we aim to fix that. In terms of cost, you're looking, excluding the FSRU, at something like $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion. We have a very significant mandate letter in place with IFC. IFC was both our equity partner and our lead debt arranger on our existing terminal in Bangladesh, and they have agreed to go in with us again on this one. So those discussions continue, but that mandate letter is in effect, and we continue to look at suitable equity partners. So we'll want to scale it down a little. Okay. Any sense of timing? Well, you know, you asked for what the milestones would be after this. Yeah. We signed a term sheet in October. I would probably look. We'll probably have some announcements on some near-term actions we'll take in support of it, in terms of some technical spend, and then you should likely look for some intermediate contracts, more binding nature and start moving towards the financing through our lead arranger. HSBC is our financial advisor as well, so those discussions are ongoing and the JV discussions and the EPC. I think some of those intermediate contracts would be chief among the milestones. ... I guess last question for me on this, on this project. Sorry to beat it to death, but I guess when would you anticipate—if everything goes according to your plan, when do you think you'd start deploying capital for this project to get it going? Yeah, well, there will definitely be some spend. I mean, I expect spend in 2024. Now, whether they'll be expensed or capitalized, I don't know, but you should look for that sometime in 2024. Okay. I just had one more quick one for me. You know, you had some dry docking expenses in Q4, and you have the Summit in 2024 in terms of what hits the PNL. Just from our own modeling perspective, I guess, are there any other that we need to look out for over the coming years that are- You know, just weird circumstance that both the Excellence that's currently in the yard in Singapore before returning to Bangladesh, in Bay of Bengal. When she returns, the Summit LNG will go to dry dock. Those are both, again, this build own operate transfer structure BOOT, which means they, you know, they have hit the income statement as expenses. What I would say is you're unlikely to see that phenomenon again. The rest of it should be treated as maintenance CapEx. And, you know, it's just lumpy once you start getting fleets. I think what we've typically told people is, you know, try to give as much line aside as we can. Sometimes they shift across years. Should be thinking about, you know, $10 to 40 million, just depending upon how many you've got, that sort of thing. Great. And then, you know, I just want... You know, you're a, you're a global company. You've, you've named a number of geographies that you're, you're pursuing. You, you haven't closed any offices. So I guess, as you, as you look across all of, all those kind of—you have a lot of irons in the fires, kind of the way I, I think about it. Where do you, where do you see the, the most promising opportunities? And also, how do you risk adjust those opportunities? And, and I guess, and along the same lines, what is a reasonable timeline for another one of these significant opportunities to develop? On timeline, I'd just say it's going to depend if it's organic or inorganic, you know, and we're looking at both. Risk-adjusted? Yeah, there's a reason we were never in Europe. We didn't participate in tenders for Europe in the past because we thought, the risk-return calculation there was, you know, it's great. There wasn't a high risk in Europe, but there also wasn't a very good return in Europe. So we do evaluate that all the time. Had that risk return, for Europe not changed, to our favor, we wouldn't be in Europe now. So we do look at it all the time in terms of assessing things. I don't want to rule out any regions, 'cause I do think there's some opportunities in LatAm and MENA, but there's a reason, I guess I should say, MEA, because I'm not excluding sub-Saharan Africa. There is a reason that we keep talking about Asia-Pacific or Indo-Asia-Pacific, and I do think that's going to be the focus. Got it. I guess my last question is just, you know, more just a question about, you know, to the extent you can share, you know, the stock price has come down quite a bit. Curious, like, what the conversation is at the board or just internally in terms of what you can do to improve that situation? Anything, any actions you're thinking about taking? Yeah, for sure. And look, everybody's got a different opinion about the value of the stock. You've got a different opinion, Michael. I've got a different opinion. I do think our multiple is too low. I do think we're trading at, you know, sub 6, and we've got this reliable earnings that we've been paid every penny since 2008 from every corner of the globe, and we've shown how reliable it is, and it's now going to be over 95%. And I do think we need a more realistic multiple in the 8 to 9 range. So yeah, I do, I do think there is some opportunity there. But I think we'll just keep advancing on what we're doing. We've already, as I've said, redeployed 40% of the fleet for significant uplift, and now we move on from that. I think as we see further growth, and we consolidate our best-in-class position, I look for us to be rewarded. Great. Well, we've reached the end of our time, so it's been a really thoughtful and I appreciate the discussion. No. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. It's always a pleasure.