Good day. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the first quarter 2022 National Fuel Gas Company earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to Brandon Haspett, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead. Thank you, Lou, and good morning. We appreciate you joining us on today's conference call for a discussion of last evening's earnings release. With us on the call from National Fuel Gas Company are David P. Bauer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Karen M. Camiolo, Treasurer and Principal Financial Officer, and Justin Loweth, President of Seneca Resources. At the end of the prepared remarks, we will open the discussion to questions. The first quarter fiscal 2022 earnings release and February Investor presentation have been posted on our Investor Relations website. We may refer to these materials during today's call. We'd like to remind you that today's teleconference will contain forward-looking statements. While National Fuel's expectations, beliefs, and projections are made in good faith and are believed to have a reasonable basis, actual results may differ materially. These statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and you may refer to last evening's earnings release for a listing of certain specific risk factors. With that, I'll turn it over to David P. Bauer. Thank you, Brandon. Good morning, everyone. National Fuel had an excellent start to the fiscal year with adjusted operating results of $1.48 per share, an increase of 40% from last year. Higher commodity prices and an increase in Appalachian natural gas production drove the strong results. On the production side, we leveraged our integrated upstream and gathering operations to bring several wells online a few weeks earlier than our initial expectations, which allowed us to take advantage of the strong pricing at the start of the winter. This is largely a matter of timing. Moving the pads forward in the schedule does not have a material impact on our overall production expectations for the year. However, capturing higher prices at peak initial production rates obviously enhances the return profile for those wells. As noted in last night's press release, at the midpoint, we're increasing Seneca's fiscal 2022 capital spending guidance by about $38 million or 9%. Roughly half of that increase is driven by incremental cost inflation beyond what was included in our initial guidance range. This should come as no surprise given the persistent supply chain issues across the economy. The other half is incremental capital designed to further optimize the production from our 2-rig program, which we think is a good use of capital given the strength of natural gas prices and the depth of our drilling inventory. In particular, we plan to more frequently incorporate a top hole rig in our operations, which allows us to reduce drilling time and complete a few more wells each year. We also plan to use tighter stage spacing on a number of wells throughout the year. Obviously, this isn't a step change in activity level, but it should improve our growth rate going forward. We've previously talked about maintenance to low growth at Seneca, but with these tweaks to our development approach, we now expect a growth trajectory in the mid- to high-single-digits area on average over the next few years, which should enhance our cash flow generation at not just Seneca, but also our gathering business. Justin will provide more details on Seneca's updated production and capital plans later in the call. Turning to our pipeline and storage business, in December, we placed our FM100 project in service on time and substantially under budget. Total project costs are expected to be $230 million, more than 15% under our initial cost estimate of $280 million. As I've said in the past, this project, in conjunction with Transco's companion Leidy South project, provides a great outlet for 330 million a day of Seneca's production and is the perfect example of the benefit of our integrated business model. FM100 was the largest project in our company's history and wouldn't have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the many employees and contractors who worked on it. I'd like to say thank you to everyone who made it a reality. Looking to the remainder of fiscal 2022 and into fiscal 2023, our focus on our regulated pipeline business will be on system maintenance and modernization. On an annual basis, we expect to spend about $50 million on maintenance and another $25 million-$50 million per year on average on modernization efforts, including our emission reduction initiatives. At this level, I expect rate base will grow modestly, say in the low single digit area. However, at this level of spending, we do expect significant free cash flow from this business, in the $100 million per year area on average. We will continue to pursue expansions of our system, though in the near term, those will likely be of the smaller variety on our Line N and Empire systems. The anti-natural gas sentiment of the current administrations in Albany, D.C., and elsewhere is certainly making larger scale expansion projects challenging. I firmly believe new pipeline infrastructure will be needed if the country is serious about achieving its emission reduction goals. All too often, policy makers pass up actionable projects that can make a real difference today. There are dozens of electric plants in the Midwest that use coal and millions of homes and buildings in the Northeast that heat with fuel oil, all of which could be easily converted to natural gas. Doing so would not just lower emissions by 30%-50%, but would also reduce energy bills. Investing in natural gas infrastructure would also improve electric reliability. Many believe we ought to electrify everything. Adding electric demand while underinvesting in baseload generation and hoping intermittent renewables will be there to save the day is slowly eroding the reliability of the electric grid. The European Union, which is several years ahead of the U.S. in its efforts to decarbonize its economy, clearly recognizes the importance of natural gas. Much so that it's committing to new pipelines and even proposing to add natural gas to its taxonomy of, quote, "green energy." I'm optimistic the U.S. will one day reach that same conclusion, and when it does, National Fuel and the rest of the pipeline industry will be there to build the much-needed infrastructure. Moving on to our utility business. The weather in the first quarter was warmer than it's been in quite a while, 24% warmer than normal. January has been a different story, with weather that's been significantly colder than normal. Nevertheless, despite the recent bout of cold weather, on balance, we expect the full year will be warmer than normal, which will cause our utility margin in Pennsylvania to be a little lower than was reflected in our prior guidance. On the cost side of things, like many companies and industries, we are seeing some general inflationary pressures. Costs for materials and services, including contractors, are all contributing to higher than anticipated costs at our utility and pipeline businesses. We now expect O&M costs at those operations will be about 4%-5% higher compared to last year. We expect to see similar increases in the cost of our capital projects. Labor shortages have plagued the broader economy, but our team has done a great job lining up contractors, and as such, we don't have any concerns with our planned construction schedules. Switching gears, most of you know that New York State has enacted significant climate legislation with its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that was passed in 2019. This past December, the Climate Action Council published for comments a draft scoping plan that describes how the state will go about achieving its aggressive emission reduction goals. The full document, including exhibits, totals about 800 pages. The message can be summed up rather succinctly: electrify everything at any cost. Transportation, heating, cooking, commercial and industrial processes, all of it. Putting aside the cost to consumers, which is an incredibly important consideration that the draft scoping plan largely ignores, what's particularly concerning is the recommendation to begin phasing out affordable, reliable fuels like natural gas almost immediately. Well before the grid itself is green, and more importantly, well before it's clear that the electric grid can actually support the added electric demand that would result. The scoping plan readily acknowledges that even after an unprecedented build-out of renewable generation and battery storage, by 2040, there still remains a shortfall of 15-25 GW of peak day generation that cannot be met with existing renewable technology. That is a startling amount of generation. It's greater than the total amount of electricity that's being generated in the state as we speak today. If we electrify all of the state's heating load, the electric peak day will almost certainly shift to the winter. It's almost certain that the shortfall in generation would occur when we need it the most, on the coldest days of the winter. In a state where winters can be brutal, especially in our service territory, where peak day temperatures can be 50% colder than downstate New York, it makes little sense to put all our energy eggs in one basket, particularly if there are holes in that basket that need to be plugged in order to ensure reliability. Perhaps one day the holes will be filled, but in the meantime, an all-of-the-above emissions reduction strategy, like the one we proposed in our Pathways to a Low Carbon Future report, makes a lot more sense. Through a combination of energy efficiency, selective electrification, hybrid heating solution, and the deployment of low and no carbon fuels like green hydrogen and renewable natural gas, we can leverage existing utility infrastructure to achieve significant decarbonization that not only meets the state's emissions goals, but also preserves access to low cost, reliable, and resilient energy for consumers. In closing, the underlying fundamentals of National Fuel are very strong. Our deep inventory of economic wells, low cost operations, and strong outlook for natural gas prices position us to deliver continued growth at Seneca and Energy Midstream. At the same time, the completion of FM100 and ongoing modernization of our infrastructure will provide rate base and earnings growth in our regulated subsidiaries, all of which will lead to significant free cash flow generation in fiscal 2022 and beyond. With that, I'll turn the call over to Justin. Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. Seneca kicked off fiscal 2022 with a strong first quarter. The startup of our 330 million per day of capacity on the Leidy South project provides a valuable long-term outlet for our Appalachian production. With good visibility on project timing, we began ramping up completion activity last year, allowing us to turn in line 24 new wells during the quarter, nearly all of which came online earlier than projected. In addition, operational curtailments came in lower than forecasted as our team found innovative ways to keep our gas flowing. For example, we were able to avoid shut-ins during station maintenance using temporary compression and bypass loops. This truly coordinated effort between our upstream and gathering teams allowed us to maximize production and enhance returns during a time of very favorable pricing. These efforts drove production to 85 Bcfe for the quarter, a 7% increase sequentially, and allowed us to maximize the value of our Leidy South capacity from day one. With our growing base of production, we remain focused on reducing risk while retaining upside through optimization of our marketing and hedging portfolio. Our focus over the past few months has been on layering in financial hedges for the near term while adding firm sales, mostly fixed price, over the longer term. Given recent natural gas price volatility and favorable skew, our hedging strategy included adding 75 Bcf of costless collars with floors of $3.20, mostly targeting our fiscal 2023 and 2024 production. We've also added roughly 75 Bcf of long-term fixed price firm sales contracts for fiscal 2024 and well beyond, bolstering our existing firm transportation portfolio and locking in strong economics as we move towards modest growth. Regarding our overall activity levels, as Dave mentioned, we're maintaining our 2-rig program, but have increased our tophole rig work, allowing us to accelerate development within our Tioga acreage and further enhancing expected consolidated returns. Our tophole rig program will reduce drill times by 3-5 days per well, allowing us to drill and complete more wells per year, while also lowering our drilling costs on a per foot basis. We are also planning enhanced completion designs for some of our pads, tightening stage spacing from 200 ft to 150 ft. This incremental investment generates extremely attractive returns that pay back in a matter of months. Overall, these activities further optimize our development program, increasing our ability to generate long-term, sustainable free cash flow. The additional tophole rig activity and completion enhancements are expected to drive roughly half of our fiscal 2022 capital increase, and we expect to see the majority of the production benefit in fiscal 2023, with growth in the 10% area compared to this year's forecasted production. Also driving our capital guidance modestly higher is inflation. We talked previously about overall inflation in the context of mid- to high-single digits, which we expected to largely mitigate through operational efficiencies. While we are fully realizing those efficiencies, costs for certain services and materials have risen beyond our prior estimates and are a continuing headwind. We now expect our overall drilling and completion expenses to be up 10%-15% from the prior year, though our operational efficiencies reduce this impact to the mid- to high-single digits. While we've locked in our rigs for longer term contracts, costs for labor, trucking, completion spreads, and certain materials like tubulars are still rising. Despite these challenges, our procurement team has done a tremendous job tempering cost increases where possible and ensuring we have material and service availability to keep our operations on schedule. Putting these items together, we've increased the midpoint of our capital guidance by $37.5 million to a range of $425 million-$500 million. Moving to production cadence for the remainder of fiscal 2022, the bulk of our new wells coming online are scheduled for the spring. As a result, we expect our fiscal second quarter to be relatively flat to slightly up compared to the first quarter. From there, output is expected to ramp into the third quarter and then level out just shy of 1 Bcfe per day. We've modestly increased our production guidance to a range of 340 Bcfe-365 Bcfe to account for this revised cadence and incorporating the strong results of our first quarter. At the midpoint of our updated guidance, we have hedges and fixed price firm sales in place for nearly 80% of our expected remaining fiscal 2022 natural gas production. We have another 13% with basis protection that is not hedged, which leaves less than 10% of expected production exposed to in-basin pricing. We've been opportunistic with our marketing portfolio over the past few months when prices rally, locking in favorable basis differentials and creating price certainty at great prices. As I discussed last quarter, we've adjusted our development plans to increase activity within our Tioga County footprint. We recently brought online a 4-well Utica pad in Tract 007, which included laterals that extended into the acquired acreage. Our newly combined contiguous acreage position allowed us to optimize our well spacing and lateral length, and the results speak for themselves. This pad has been producing at almost $80 million a day since late November. We have two additional development pads in Tioga expected to come online this spring, a 5-well Utica pad in the northwest and a 6-well Marcellus pad in the southeast. Developing these pads, including modifications to existing gathering infrastructure less than 18 months after we closed the acquisition, is a testament to the outstanding job our upstream and gathering teams are doing. We have well over a decade of development running room on this prolific acreage. While our operations are moving along really well, we've also taken great strides in our sustainability initiatives. Starting with our California operations, our new South Midway Sunset Solar Plant is expected to go in service very soon and will offset 30% of the field's power needs. We are also moving full speed ahead with a new plant at South Lost Hills and targeting in-service later this year. Our team has adjusted and refocused our steaming operations, resulting in approximately 15% less steam fuel consumption with dual benefits of lower LOE and reduced CO₂ emissions with minimal impact to production. A true win-win. Moving to our Pennsylvania sustainability efforts, earlier this month, we achieved certification of 100% of our Appalachian production under Equitable Origin's EO100 Standard for Responsible Energy Development. As a reminder, this framework has a series of rigorous environmental, social, and governance performance targets. Achieving certification is a validation of our long-standing culture of environmental stewardship and community engagement and allows us to differentiate our responsibly sourced gas in the marketplace. Additionally, we are working with Project Canary to certify 121 wells, which produce approximately $300 million per day under the TrustWell certification. In November, we deployed Project Canary continuous monitoring devices on three producing pads, and we expect to complete this certification process in the next few weeks. These efforts with Equitable Origin and Project Canary are not only important to us from a sustainability perspective, but we believe they will also benefit our long-term marketing efforts. In the near term, we think our responsibly sourced gas designation will give us a competitive advantage and allow us to create value by selling some of our production at a modest premium. Longer term, we think that many buyers, be it utilities or otherwise, will require this certification from producers to meet their own sustainability initiatives. Finally, we've completed our comprehensive emissions study on emissions associated with various types of completion equipment. This study, done in conjunction with NexTier and U.S. Well Services, has two key takeaways. First, it confirmed that increasing utilization of natural gas in place of diesel fuel significantly lowers GHG emissions intensity, with 100% natural gas reciprocating engines being the clear winner of the equipment tested. Second, as we displace more and more diesel consumption with natural gas, the fuel costs of our completions are expected to be substantially lower. For example, moving from 100% diesel to 100% natural gas-fueled completions would reduce annual fuel costs by more than 60% for each frack spread. This emission study, along with our assessment of equipment reliability and cost, will guide our decision-making going forward. On the heels of this study, we are redoubling our efforts to increase the use of natural gas to fuel our drilling and completion operations. National Fuel is uniquely positioned to do this more efficiently than many of our peers, given our focus on consolidated upstream and gathering development. Our teams have worked in lockstep to accelerate the development of key gathering infrastructure to ensure we can utilize field gas in nearly all of our operations. We will continue seeing the benefit of increased diesel substitution in our overall emissions intensity in the years to come. This is just one of the many examples of the National Fuel team collaborating to stay on the leading edge of emissions reduction initiatives. In closing, as we look out over the next few years, Seneca is in a great position. The completion of Leidy South and execution of additional long-term firm sales contracts supports the next leg of growth for Seneca and Gathering. With a strong natural gas price backdrop and additional takeaway capacity, we are moving forward to take advantage of our deep inventory of high-quality acreage by modestly toggling up activity. This added growth, now expected to be in the mid to high single digits over the next several years, enhances our capital efficiency and long-term free cash flow generation. That, coupled with our laser focus on sustainability, positions Seneca for continued success. With that, I'll turn it over to Karen. Thanks, Justin, and good morning, everyone. As Dave mentioned, National Fuel's adjusted operating results for the quarter were $1.48 per share, an increase of 40% from the prior year. The increase was primarily in our E&P and Gathering segments, driven by both higher commodity price realizations and increased Appalachian production. As it relates to the former, tightening supply-demand fundamentals have strengthened commodity prices. As a result, our natural gas price realizations were up 18% from last year, while crude oil realizations were up over 25%. Combining this with a 7% increase in total production, which has a corresponding benefit to our Gathering throughput, earnings between these two segments were up $0.43 per share. In our Regulated segments, earnings were flat compared to last year. As FM100 commenced service in December, we started to see the benefit of the project show up in our results, recognizing just under $3 million of revenue during the quarter. As a reminder, the expansion portion of this project is expected to generate annualized revenues of $35 million. In addition, we have a $15 million per year of revenues commencing in April related to the modernization component of the project. At the Utility, we continue to see the growing benefits of our system modernization tracker in New York, adding about $1 million to margin during the quarter. Going the other direction was the approximately $2 million impact of warmer weather in our utility's Pennsylvania jurisdiction, where we do not have the benefit of a weather normalization clause. Temperatures on average were 8% warmer than last year and 24% warmer than normal in Pennsylvania. As we look to the remainder of the year, we are increasing our earnings guidance to a range of $5.20-$5.50 per share, an increase of 10 cents per share at the midpoint. There are a couple key drivers worth noting. First, we are truing up our commodity price assumptions to better align with the current forward strip. Our NYMEX natural gas price has been revised to $4.50 per MMBTU. We previously were guiding to $5.50 from January to March and $3.75 for the last six months of the fiscal year. Pricing has had a healthy dose of volatility as of late. For reference, our earnings will move up by 6 cents for every 25-cent change in pricing for the remainder of the year. We've also moved our WTI price assumption to $80 per barrel, up $5 from our previous guidance. A $5 change in oil impacts earnings by $0.02. The other two notable changes are on the cost side of things. First, at Seneca, we are reducing our LOE guidance by $0.02 per MCFE, now projecting a range of $0.81-$0.84. This is largely a function of lower steam fuel costs in California that Justin referenced earlier. On the regulated businesses, Dave discussed some of the inflationary headwinds we are facing. We now expect O&M costs to be up approximately 4%-5% versus last year. Just to remind everyone, we had a one-time favorable benefit of about $4 million to pipeline and storage O&M in FY 2021 that will not recur this year. Outside of this dynamic, as well as the costs to operate FM100, underlying O&M costs are expected to be up approximately 3.5%. Moving to capital, given the dynamics Dave and Justin discussed earlier, we have revised our consolidated capital expenditure guidance to a range of $665 million-$810 million, an increase of $37.5 million or 5% at the midpoint. Bringing this all together, the balance sheet is in great shape and our cash flow projections remain strong. We previously discussed funds from operations exceeding capital spending by $300 million-$350 million. In spite of the increase in our capital guidance, we still anticipate being in that range, generating free cash flow well in excess of our dividend. This level of free cash flow will continue to improve our leverage metrics. For the 12 months ended December 2021, we were approximately 2.5x levered from a debt to EBITDA perspective. As our EBITDA grows and we continue to generate free cash flow, we expect this to trend closer to 2.25x over the next 12 months. While there are no hard and fast rules with the rating agencies, we are well positioned to work our way toward mid triple B metrics over the course of the next year or so, depending on how commodity prices play out. In closing, despite the inflationary and weather headwinds, the first quarter was a strong one. National Fuel is projecting to generate meaningful free cash flow, which will further strengthen our investment grade balance sheet and positions us well for the future. With that, I'll ask the operator to open the line for questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Again, that is star one to ask a question. To withdraw your question, just press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Zach Parham with JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Hey, thanks for taking my question. First off, you know, we've seen a delay on a new pipe out of Appalachia, and production numbers for the basin seem to climb into year-end. Seneca is part of that. You know, I know y'all mostly locked in near-term volumes, but just curious on your view on local basis. You know, it looks like you're assuming $0.85 off NYMEX in your guidance for Appalachia spot, but just any worries on that lagging out further or even the industry potentially getting into a situation where some producers have to shut in volumes similar to what we saw a couple years ago? Just general thoughts on basis, really. Sure, Zach. You know, we have pretty much locked in at least as much of our in-basin exposure as we feel comfortable with. We're less than 10% exposed to any sort of you know, massive blowout in-basin. That's in part with our new Leidy South capacity, and it's in part due to some of our efforts along marketing to protect that. You know, it's hard to say exactly what will happen with basis this summer. You know, it depends where we end, of course, the winter and what storage levels look like, and some of it will depend, frankly, on what other producers are doing. In terms of our overall activity levels, you know, we're really anticipating production that's pretty similar to where we were before, at least through this year. Longer term, I think the story's the same. It's gonna depend on how our peers in Appalachia handle their overall production levels, if they stick to kind of more the maintenance or if they decide to grow. What we've done As we've insulated that risk well beyond 2022. With our existing firm transport and firm sales portfolio, that gives us a minimal amount of exposure to that in basin long term. Because I think we, you know, we view it as a risk we're not really willing to take. As we said consistently, we're not gonna grow just to grow. We wanna grow knowing we have a good home for our gas, and that is not in basin. Got it. Thanks for that color. I guess maybe just one follow-up. You mentioned in your prepared remarks the RSG certification and potentially getting a premium on some of that gas. Can you talk a little bit about what the market for RSG looks like and what kind of premium you could potentially get for that gas? Sure. I'd say it's the market's developing, and we absolutely think we'll be successful at selling some of our gas, you know, at a modest premium. You know, the premium is not going to be nickels, dimes, and quarters. It's more likely pennies. I think we're kinda settling in on what the right number is. Just for commercial purposes, I'd rather not speak specifically to that, but at least order of magnitude that should help guide you on what we're expecting. We're definitely seeing a lot of interest. Interestingly, a lot of our gas, we can get it to Canada. In Canada, they in particular are very interested in the Equitable Origin certified gas. We think there's a great opportunity for us there, as well as into other markets. We think it will keep developing, particularly at the utility level as public utility commissions get on board with not just asking their utilities to reduce their emissions intensity and move towards sustainability, but will allow them to recover the cost of buying RSG from a producer like Seneca. Our hope is that discussion will continue and we'll ultimately get there in the months and years to come. Thanks for the color. That's all for me. Your next question comes from the line of Holly Stewart from Scotia Howard Weil. Your line is now open. Good morning, gentlemen, Karen. Morning [crosstalk]. Dave, maybe I'll start off on a bigger picture question 'cause you talked a lot about electrification and the reliability of the overall grid. It looks like a few weeks ago, a Pennsylvania senator invited NFG to relocate its headquarters to the state of Pennsylvania versus New York. It's actually a very interesting move given that New York has made a lot of, let's just say, anti-fossil fuels claims over the last few years. Maybe just curious as to your thoughts around this and sort of how the company and you are thinking about this offer. Yeah, sure. We've been getting the question a fair amount. You know, I'm not ready to give up on New York just yet. You know, I think we're solidly in the political phase of climate legislation. The next phase is gonna be the more practical implementation. I think when you start bringing things like costs into play and electric reliability into play, you know, the state may come to its senses and decide that it's not all that smart to move at the pace that is currently being contemplated. You know, we're not ready to give up on New York just yet, and plan to keep our headquarters here. Great. Just thought it was an interesting move out of that senator. Maybe just moving on. You highlighted a lot of free cash flow generation in this year and beyond. I thought maybe we could get your updated thoughts on that capital allocation. It looks like maybe there's a, you know, a small maturity that's at a little bit of a higher rate that you could take out. But other than that, doesn't appear to be a lot to do on the balance sheet side of things. So just maybe any updated thoughts you can give us. Yeah. Our as we talked in the past, the first priority is gonna be to delever a bit. And delevering not just in a lower debt to EBITDA number, you know, that's driven by higher EBITDA, but also reducing absolute leverage on our balance sheet. Because as you know, our capital structure plays into our rate setting process. Lowering absolute debt makes a lot of sense if rate cases are on the horizon. We've got our next maturity in February of 2023, I think it is. That's in the $500 million range. We'll likely use some of our excess free cash flow to pay down that maturity and, you know, do a smaller issuance. Longer term, certainly free cash flow will grow in 2023, as we have all the revenues from FM100, and we have lower capital. Really no change in our thinking. We'd really like to continue growing the company and find opportunities either organically or through acquisitions. If those don't arise, return capital shareholders in some way. Okay. That's great. Maybe flipping to Justin. Yeah, Justin, pardon me if I missed the comment. I know you're talking about, you know, a few more pads and kind of enhancing, you know, enhancing that, I guess that completion design and just some of your spacing and whatnot. Can you just give us maybe what you had planned for wells for 2022, and then that updated number, now today, with the new capital, in terms of those wells for 2022? Sure, Holly. We brought on 24 wells in the first quarter. Our drills for the balance of the year don't really change. The incremental kind of completion and top hole that I spoke about. On the completion side, it's more about a more enhanced design where we're doing tighter stage spacing. We've got a lot of data and a lot of history through our kind of development over time and optimization. At where prices are today and what we see out there, the returns on investing that incremental capital over the balance of the fiscal year pay out. I mean, we're talking, you know, for the most part, these are 100%+ IRRs on that incremental capital and payouts that are just, you know, you can count the months on your hand. So that's more of a, you know, call it an optimization enhancement of our plan. We might see a little bit of that benefit towards the very tail end of the year. There's one pad in particular, but most of that will spill into fiscal 2023. Similarly, in the top hole, we're just going to employ our top hole rig more frequently and likely top hole really all of our pads. What that does is that has kind of the impact of accelerating how quickly we can bring wells on in the sense that you drill incrementally three, four, five, six, maybe four to seven ncremental wells per year with our two larger rigs. It just speeds those up and has the benefit of lowering our costs. Again, that mostly will spill into fiscal 2023 benefits from a production perspective. Okay. Sorry, I don't have that number at my fingertips in terms of just the total wells expected for the year. I don't have that number right off. Okay. The top of my head- I can follow up. We can follow up. on that. Okay. Perfect. Great. And then Justin, sorry, I'll stop here. Last one and a little bit maybe more in the weeds. It looks like from a midstream perspective, the ratio of sort of gathered volume to Seneca volume has been rising, and particularly the last two quarters, and maybe the fee is subsiding a bit. I'm sure that's just based on mix or gross versus net, or I'm not sure how to think about it. I guess that's my question is, what's driving that? And then should we, you know, think about that trend here going forward in the forecast? Sure. It's a couple things driving it, and you're kinda dialing in on them. One is just simply the difference between the gross and the net of Seneca for the throughput. The other one is you know, exciting in the sense that we you know, we now have added meaningful volume, third party volumes and third party revenues through our gathering systems. You know, that's something we've been working on for a long time. This quarter was the first quarter where some of that started to show up, and you should absolutely anticipate those benefits continuing through the balance of the year and into the future. Okay. Great. Thank you all. Yep. Your next question comes from the line of John Abbott from Bank of America. Your line's now open. Good morning. Thank you for taking our questions. Yeah. For our first question is on maintenance CapEx. I mean, David, you addressed some of this in your opening remarks, but you are seeing cost inflation. Granted, you are gonna grow, you know, over the next several years, it sounds like. When you think over a multi-year period of time, what are your latest thoughts on maintenance CapEx across your various segments? Yeah. On the pipeline side, like I said, it was in the $50 million range, and that would take into account the cost inflation that we've seen, you know, at least to date. On the utility side, I would say, let's say $60 million-$70 million range for true maintenance, right? Excluding modernization and replacement of you know, older pipe. On the gathering side, it's very, very small, given the age of the system. It's more preventative maintenance and the like, which falls into O&M. Justin, you wanna hit Seneca? Sure. In at Seneca, you know, our plans aren't quite maintenance, so I'll baseline you on what they look like. Going into next year, we'd expect capital to come down. It'll still be. It will come down, say, in the $400 million-$450 million, but then as we think about long term, if we just continue at that mid high single digits, it's probably closer to $400 million. If you think about just maintenance off of that, you'd subtract another $50 million-$75 million per year if we went to truly just flat production. That is very helpful. The second question, it was touched on earlier about basis differentials, but you've been adding marketing contracts. When you think about Appalachia post-2023, how are you thinking about your long-term differential in Appalachia? I mean, the majority of your gas is being sold out of basin, but how are you thinking about that long-term differential at this time? In terms of gas that would be exposed in basin pricing, it depends a lot on where NYMEX is, which will drive overall activity levels and gas supply. I would say it's in a range of kind of $0.70-$1. I know that's pretty wide, but it will be highly variable depending on how much production is growing or not growing within the basin. There's certainly, you know, other than MVP, which has had some setbacks recently. There are no large infrastructure projects with gas getting out of the basin. Unless you have a great firm transportation portfolio and, you know, augment it with some firm sales on top of that, I think people are gonna have to generally stay, keep their production in check, and that'll result in kind of that range I'm talking about long term, kind of $0.70-$1 off of NYMEX. That's for in basin, correct? Yes. When you layer in your marketing contracts, where do you see the differential sort of potentially shaking out for you long term? I guess what I would point you to is in our slide deck, we have, we show what our long-term basis looks like. It's slide 29 of our deck. If you take a look at fiscal 2023, where we just show an average, that would give you a pretty good assessment. If you look at our NYMEX contracts, our Dawn contracts, our other contracts that go through Transco and into some of the the northern New York off Empire markets, that gives you a really good flavor and some more specifics. I would expect us to be, you know, in those general ranges, and it'll just evolve over time. You know, what I'm describing there are realizations that are better than what we would see if we were in basin overall, and in some cases meaningfully better. That is very helpful. If I could squeeze one more in here. With inflationary pressures, you know, just for the regulated businesses, how does this influence the timing of potentially a rate case for those businesses? How does that sort of factor in the inflation and maybe how does that work? Yeah, I mean, it certainly is a driver of rate cases. On the pipeline side of things, we have a stay out in both pipes for at least another year. On the utility side of the business, we can file. I think we can file in both jurisdictions now. We're earning good returns, but obviously inflation eats into that, and I think we're likely approaching the point where you'll see us file a rate case in the next year or two. Very helpful. Thank you for taking our questions. You bet. Again, as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question comes from the line of Trafford Lamar with Raymond James. Your line's now open. Great. Thank you guys for taking my question. The first one has to do with, 2023 production growth and given the additional growth capital for CapEx this year. Should we expect, you know, kind of a proportionate increase in midstream spend in 2023? Is that a fair assumption to make? Not necessarily. We likely will have a few more wells that we're able to turn in line during fiscal 2023, which will likely result in a very modest move or an incremental piece of pipe we'll need to put in the ground, et cetera. You know, not a material step up. The other thing, just to make sure I was clear in stating earlier, is that you know, I would see capital, even with our revised plans to this kind of mid- to high-single-digit growth. I would see Seneca Capital and Gathering capital shifting down from this year to next year. by 2024, kind of, the Seneca side of that falling into an Appalachian E&P CapEx in the ballpark of $400 million with this growth that we're talking about. Okay, perfect. Thank you. Last question kind of revolves around the recent and current winter storms. Just want to know if y'all have experienced any, you know, production shut-ins or if it's had any effect on, you know, 2Q production and any, if any, effect on midstream as well. Yeah. Fortunately, at Seneca and Gathering, the team's done a fantastic job of keeping our production flowing. We've had very, very minimal freeze offs or other issues associated with the weather. On the regulated and pipeline side of the business, no issues. Okay. That's great news. Well, thank you, guys. Yep. Your next question comes from the line of Umang Choudhary from Goldman Sachs. Hi. Good. Thank you for taking my questions. I had this one. I wanted to circle back on the RSG certification. Are you seeing more engagement from policymakers to support future development as you get certified by independent auditors? And like you mentioned, the carbon intensity of natural gas is much lower than coal and fuel oil, and is much more reliable. Do you see potential to kind of increase that engagement in the coming quarters? Maybe you can also touch on the outlook on pipeline growth and pipeline demand across Appalachian Basin as well. Thank you. Certainly as it relates to what we're doing from a sustainability front, yeah, we're very engaged, you know, in speaking with policymakers in D.C. as well as at a state level. I think that, you know, just holistically I'll speak to that slightly to say whether it's the responsibly sourced gas or just overall the sustainability initiatives that the industry is taking. We're kind of in the catch-up education phase of how far we've come and just how quickly we've come to this place and where we're going. Seems to be good receptivity to that. How that ultimately finds its way into the state level, you know, public utility commissions and their ability to actually pass on an incremental cost of buying responsibly sourced gas to their consumers, I think just takes time, like anything else. That education process certainly from a producer perspective is ongoing. I think, you know, speaking for us and other companies, peer companies, we're very engaged in making sure we're kind of informing the key stakeholders on what we're doing and why it matters. I think you asked about pipeline expansion opportunities, right? Did I hear that part right? Sorry. Yeah. That's absolutely right. Yeah. Any expansion opportunities in Appalachia on your existing systems and the timing around it? Yeah. I think we will have the opportunity to continue to expand our system. You know, I don't think it's gonna be quite as large as, you know, say our FM100 project. But I think there are projects that can get done. You know? For example, our Empire line, we built our Empire North project in 2020 that was a compression-only project that boosted throughput. I think we've got the opportunity to do another expansion there, where we add another compressor station and boost volumes. Similarly on the Line N system, you know, there's a lot of petrochemical development that's going on there that can be served by our pipelines. I think it would be interesting for us to see if we could connect our system with the Rover system that isn't very far from our line end. I think those types of things will lead to further expansions. You know, in terms of timing, you know, we're pursuing these things. You know, I wouldn't expect anything to be built further in 2022. Our hope is that as we get into 2023 and 2024, some of these projects will come to fruition. That's great. Thank you. Yep. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over back to Brandon Haspett. Thank you, Lou. We'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to be with us today. A replay of this call will be available this afternoon on both our website and by telephone. It will run through the close of business on Friday, February 11th. To access the replay online, please visit our investor relations website at investor.nationalfuelgas.com. To access by telephone, call 1-800-585-8367 and enter conference ID number 8375065. This concludes our conference call for today. Thank you and goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.