The Williams Companies, Inc. (WMB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I am Danilo Juvane, Vice President of Investor Relations, and I thank you for joining us and for your interest in The Williams Companies. We appreciate you joining us for our first-ever ESG-focused investor event. As you'll hear today from our leadership team, Williams has been on a progressive journey on all things related to ESG over the past several years, and we plan to use this event to share some of the highlights of these efforts and discuss in greater detail our climate commitment and forward-looking strategies around emerging technologies. Joining me today are our President and CEO, Alan Armstrong; our Chief Operating Officer, Micheal Dunn; our Chief Financial Officer, John Chandler; Lane Wilson, our General Counsel; Debbie Cowan, our Chief HR Officer; and Chad Zamarin, our Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategic Development. We will, of course, at the end, take your ESG-related questions. And please note that we will have a brief break prior to the Q&A portion of this event. Finally, in our presentation materials, you'll find a disclaimer related to forward-looking statements. This disclaimer is important and integral to our remarks and you should review it. So with that, I'll turn it over to Alan.

Great. Thank you, Danilo, and thank you to everyone for joining us virtually for this morning for today's event. I'm going to start here on Slide 2 and with a footprint map that shows our critical infrastructure that we operate across the United States. Williams connects the best supplies with the world's growing demand for clean energy, and our fully contracted take-or-pay gas transmission systems have strong competitive positions and access to growing demand markets. Northwest pipeline is the only high-pressure gas transmission system that is on the west side of the Cascade mountain range, and it serves some of the key markets such as Portland, Seattle and the intermountain areas in all of the Northwest. On -- the Gulfstream system serves the South Florida markets, which is a growing market, and it's one of the most best positioned pipes in that area. And of course, Transco has the benefit of being in some of the world's largest population centers, densest population centers and some of the great growth areas because of the transition from coal on the power generation side, the res and commercial moving off of heavier hydrocarbons like heating oil. And certainly, we're very well positioned on the LNG front, serving most of the LNG facilities in the Gulf Coast as well as Cove Point in Maryland. We also are very fortunate to serve a growing industrial demand that really continues to take advantage of very low-cost natural gas and as a primary energy source in those industrial loads. And we've really seen renaissance here in the U.S. with the benefit of low cost and clean natural gas as a power source for those markets. We also have a leading gathering footprint in the very best acreage here in domestically and very competitive around the world. Very large-scale positions in the Marcellus, in the Utica and in the Haynesville, plus 13 other basins that provide diversity and predictability to our free cash flows from our legacy gathering business. We have an unmatched competitive position in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. And through all of these systems, we handle about 30% of the nation's natural gas on a daily basis. And so because natural gas is such a clean and competitive fuel, we really have been able to do our part these days in terms of reducing emissions around the country. And so we're really excited about the way we're positioned to continue to deliver on a clean energy economy. If we move on to Slide 3 here, certainly, at Williams, sustainability comes very natural to us. We've always focused on the long-term shareholder and the value that we can create. Initially, most of our ESG effort was centered around documenting and communicating what we were already doing to be sustainable. And then after setting very real goals that established clear expectations for our organization, so there wasn't anything fuzzy about what we were trying to accomplish, we realized that there is both the need and the opportunity for Williams to step up and be a leader in the industry and particularly within the midstream industry. And so we really have set our sights to not just do our best here, but as well be an industry across -- be a leader across the industry, and we really are pleased with our efforts in that result -- in that regard. So we do have a lot to offer against these goals, and these goals are very well aligned with our mission to be the leader in providing infrastructure that safely delivers natural gas products to reliably fuel the clean energy economy. Key to our mission are our core values, which are very real to how we think about our organization. We are authentic. Our integrity cannot be compromised. For more than a century, we've remained true to ourselves and always striving to do the right thing. We are safety-driven. Safeguarding our people and our neighbors is ingrained in our culture and fundamental to everything that we do. We are reliable performers. We stand behind our reputation as a dependable and trustworthy business that delivers on our promises, not just to our customers but to the communities and the people that are engaged with us around our assets. And we are responsible stewards. We are dedicated to strengthening our people and the communities and to protecting the environment, and we want to always make sure that people can trust us to do that. Moving on to Slide 4. Natural gas does remain a global fuel for the future. Williams will be a key long-term participant in energy transition no matter the renewables growth scenario. At Williams, we believe renewables will continue to grow at a rapid pace, and we're fully aligned in the desire for a sustainable, clean energy future. However, as a nation, we have become polarized in determining the best way to achieve this goal. It is time to get on with reducing emissions with the knowledge that we have and the sound economics that can be delivered today. Natural gas provides a right-here, right-now emissions reduction solution that is economically viable and can keep industry and manufacturing here at home. Focus should be on taking advantage of today's opportunities, not on stopping fossil fuels altogether, which we all know is not a practical solution. Our earth's atmosphere only knows greenhouse gas reduction. It doesn't know or care where that reduction came from or how it is labeled. So here are some key facts to consider as we think about the challenge that we have before us. First of all, here at home, the U.S. power sector has seen a 33% reduction in CO2 emissions and natural gas accounted for 40% of this reduction, with renewables holding 30% of that reduction. We see this as one of the prime examples of how renewables and natural gas can be one of the most economical and powerful solutions that we have today. And the opportunity on the grid remains meaningful because the EIA projects that in 2040 global use of gas for power generation will still be flat to today at 23% of that capacity. But that coal will still also have 23% of the generation capacity, and so -- around the globe. And so if you really think about how big that opportunity, in our view, this is incongruent with the world's emission productions objectives, especially with the abundance of affordable natural gas as a much cleaner fuel. So you really think about it, stopping or adding cost to U.S. infrastructure that can help get LNG to our coast is really not very sensible when you think about the fact that really effectively what we're doing is we're adding cost and we're prohibiting our ability to help the world use a low-cost fuel to reduce our emissions around the world. So we've got a lot of levers that we need to pull around the globe. And certainly, the U.S. doing its part to let the world utilize low-cost LNG is one of the most powerful things that we can do in the here and now environment. We'd also note that while renewables will continue to make inroads in power generation, it is important to understand that only about 17% of the world's end-use energy is consumed in the form of electricity. The IEA (sic) [ EIA ] projects that even with tremendous investment and growth in renewables, still 70% of the global primary energy consumption will be met by fossil fuels in 2040. And by the way, today, that's about 81%, a little over 80%, was in 2019. The efficiency of direct-fired equipment within the industrial sector is very difficult to replace with electric power. Natural gas is the fuel that can most feasibly reduce the emissions from this remaining 81%. So in summary, natural gas will remain an important component of today's fuel mix and should be prioritized as one of the most important tools to aggressively displace more carbon-intensive fuels around the world. In a post-pandemic world, the world leaders are going to turn their attention to rebuilding economies and showing progress on emissions reduction. Natural gas is one of the most powerful tools in accomplishing these goals, both domestically and internationally. Our assets are very well positioned for both the short term and for the long term as we get focused on the realities of a clean energy transition. And we think that our natural gas-focused strategy should position Williams as a core investment in any green portfolio. Now if we move on to Slide 5, we see here the strong performance that we've seen across the ESG rankings. But let me give you a little history on how we got here. First of all, our Board considered the growing interest in ESG measures at its annual strategy meeting in 2018. We came away from that meeting with really 2 distinct goals. First was to better document and communicate our existing efforts, which were fundamentally well aligned with a sustainable approach to investing already. As to the second goal, we looked at the wide variety of metrics being applied by the large number of ESG raters, and we set out to provide some leadership towards gaining consensus amongst investors and our industry about which metrics would be most important to pursue so that we could align our business model around a set of meaningful and durable measures of ESG performance. So really, if you think about it, we saw all these measures, we saw all these different things that people were measuring, but we said we really want to run our business in a way that executes, and we don't want to be chasing things that we don't think are durable. So as the slide highlights, the progress that we've made in reaching our first goal of communicating and documenting our efforts, and this shows our ESG scores from 4 of the most relevant and influential ESG raters, which CDP, Dow Jones, Sustainalytics and [ MCSI ]. But we are especially proud of the fact that last month, Williams was recognized by CDP with a B score for its commitment to transparency and governance around climate change, ranking above the sector average of C and exceeding the North American regional average of a D rating. CDP's annual disclosure and scoring process is a widely recognized measure of strong corporate environmental transparency and performance, and this score recognizes our coordinated action on climate change. This is the first year Williams participated in the full disclosure and scoring process through the CDP, and we are very happy with CDP's recognition of our significant efforts in these important areas. So Williams also ranked in the top 7% of our peer group by DJSI, and importantly, was added to the Dow Jones North American Sustainable Index for the first time. Similarly, Sustainalytics ranked Williams in the top 3% in our peer group, reflecting strong management of material ESG issues. Now back on our second goal of providing leadership and guidance on ESG performance metrics. Last year, Williams helped lead an effort with the Energy Infrastructure Council, you often hear referred to as EIC, to produce a midstream industry-wide reporting template for ESG measures. This important development will allow all midstream energy infrastructure companies involved to present the sustainability metrics that matter most to investors in a transparent and comparable way. We look forward to widespread adoption by both the midstream industry and the investment community around these important metrics. And we are really excited to see the GPA midstream group, which we're a big part of, also come in and support and coalesce around these important metrics. And we continue to take a leading stance on critical topics within our industry. As a member of the INGAA Board, we recently helped the organization outline its initial climate commitment. And we recently led the formation of an industry group called Natural Allies to promote the benefit of clean and affordable natural gas. So our leadership efforts to advocate for a clean energy economy, that includes natural gas, are strong and ongoing. As we roll to Slide 6 here, this is kind of a picture of our journey and the momentum that we've been building, and we've always been focused on sustainable performance. But over the last 2 years, we've made a concerted effort to tell our ESG story, as I just mentioned. And as shown on the last slide, we're now reaping the benefits of these efforts with improved scores. What this slide shows is the momentum we're starting to see with our efforts, starting with the publication of our 2018 sustainability report last year, which by the way is not a new concept for us, but something that we've reinitiated. And we've highlighted some milestones as well in our ongoing focus to sustainable operations, including renewable natural gas interconnections and our solar initiatives, topics we'll cover in greater detail later in the presentation. And what you'll also see here is the leadership role we've played in the midstream market, being the first North American midstream company to establish a climate commitment last summer, and as I shared a moment ago, our work in establishing consistent sustainability reporting metrics for the industry. And finally, I'll tease you something that Chad will cover in greater detail during his presentation, and that is a strategic agreement we've entered with Microsoft that will help both Williams and Microsoft achieve net zero goals. So truly, a lot of exciting things happening here at Williams on the sustainability front, and we look forward to highlighting many of those efforts as well as taking your questions at the end of the program.

Thank you, Alan. So as we thought about our agenda for this meeting, we felt it appropriate to start by highlighting key elements of our ESG strategy. So let me just give you a brief intro to the speakers that you'll be hearing from next. First, there's Debbie Cowan, our Chief HR Officer, who'll provide some metrics and updates related to our social efforts, most notably around diversity and inclusion, which is reflected in our core value of authenticity. So here at Williams, we believe that building a culture of authenticity leads to a collective mindset that transcends differences, allowing for inclusion, acceptance and, ultimately, belonging. Next, you'll hear from Lane Wilson, our General Counsel, who will cover our corporate governance performance. And when we talk about our core value of being reliable performers, that means standing behind our reputation as a dependable and trustworthy business that delivers on our promises. As well, we believe that our reputation hinges strongly on corporate governance. Finally, our Chief Operating Officer, Micheal Dunn, will talk about safety performance, in particular on ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past year, our employees have truly demonstrated our value of being safety driven by taking care to protect themselves and others. This commitment to community is further reflected in our value of being reliable stewards -- or responsible stewards, rather, which Micheal Dunn will address a little bit later when he shares our efforts around stakeholder outreach and responsible environmental operations. So with that, I'll kick it off to Debbie to kick us off.

Thank you, Danilo. Like many companies today, Williams has been on a journey to build a culture based in our core values, rooted in authenticity. I want to walk you through just a few of these efforts and highlight some key metrics that we have increased our focus on diversity and inclusion. Last year, Alan pledged his support for the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion Coalition. The CEO pledge outlines a specific set of actions that the signatory CEOs will take to cultivate a trusting environment where all ideas are welcomed and employees feel comfortable and empowered to have conversations about diversity and inclusion. Alan is supportive of all of our initiatives. However, he and I are very focused on leadership diversity. The goal is to provide leadership development to our ethnic minority employees to ensure that they are prepared when promotional opportunities arise. In addition, we formed a D&I Inclusion Council made up of our entire executive officer team as well as passionate, high-performing employees at various levels in the organization. Our D&I Council is built on the belief that William should be a company where we treat others with fairness, mutual respect, honesty and transparency. The council is charged with identifying opportunities as well as implementing initiatives throughout our entire organization. Last year, we also developed our metrics dashboard. We discuss this at each D&I Council as well as we'll be sharing a summary year-end report with all employees in Q1. Although we are not quota driven at Williams, we do place importance on understanding our organizational makeup and trends that can help us identify gaps. We track progress, prioritize improvements in our diverse hiring and retention efforts, and closely review equity in our talent development programs. In 2020, 29% of our leadership team was female or ethnic minority. Year-over-year from 2019 to 2020, our female leadership representation increased from 16% to 19%, and our ethnic minority leadership representation stayed relatively flat at about 10%. 19% of our office or professional staff is ethnic minority and 34% is female. Our field workforce is much less diverse in terms of gender and ethnic representation than our office workforce. This variance is due in large part to the historical trends and the context of fieldwork in our industry, in that positions are typically help by white men and few other than white men apply for these positions, but this is one of the gaps that we are trying to address. However, we have seen success in our early career program, which encompasses our intern program as well as our rotational program with recent college grads. On average, 27% of our early career program hires were ethnic minority and 40% were female over the past 5 years. Our early career program is one avenue to begin to fill the gap by bringing in new diverse talent. Also in 2020, we began offering unconscious bias training to leaders to -- and as well as offered a curated extensive tools and resources site for all of our employees and leaders. And we will continue to build in this space to include inclusivity in 2021. Additionally, we uphold our human rights policy and statement, which outlines our commitment to respect human rights within our operations as well as within our supply chain. And finally, last year, we also launched what we call Candid Conversations, which is a panel event where employees can openly discuss issues and raise awareness to encourage a more open 2-way dialogue. We hosted 3 events last year and these will continue to be ongoing this year. Our executive leadership team understands that they must lead by example by supporting the efforts of the D&I Council as well as discussing topics with employees during various forums as we continue our D&I journey. And with that, I'll turn it over to our General Counsel, Lane Wilson.

Thank you, Debbie. It's such a pleasure to be here and address a subject on which we have so many great things to talk about. Williams has a long history of strong corporate governance. Let's begin with our PAC. The CPA–Zicklin Index of corporate political accountability and disclosure ranks Williams as a trendsetter company. That means we earned a 90% or higher on its comprehensive ratings index. The index measures political disclosure and accountability policies and practices for election-related spending by S&P 500 companies, including political spending policies and Board oversight. Our bipartisan employee-funded PAC contributes to candidates who support policies that enable the delivery of all forms of clean energy to millions of Americans across the country. That is our sole focus. But let me take a moment to address the violence that occurred in the Capitol the week before last. As a retired federal judge, it was appalling to me to see a group claim the Capitol somehow as its own and to engage in behavior that resulted in injury and death. I can assure you that Williams views this exactly the same way. We roundly condemn what occurred. And as we always do, we will be evaluating our giving criteria for every person we donate to at the time we make that decision. For anyone who knows how we operate, let me be clear, it goes without saying that a candidate's commitment to the rule of law and ethical behavior will always be a criteria before we make a donation. So let's talk about our Board of Directors. Our shareholders are increasingly asking for more ESG information and about our focus on diversity at the Board and management levels. Williams has long been a leader in Board diversity. It is a part of our culture. Let me call out just a few who have contributed to that culture. Jan Stoney, who joined the Board in 1999 and did not retire until 2018; Joe Cleveland; and Juanita Hinshaw; Kathleen Cooper, who retired just last year and served a portion of her tenure as our Chairman. Then there are those who are currently serving as William's directors, Nancy Buese, Vicki Fuller, Rose Robeson and Stacey Doré. A diverse Board is who we are, and it is who we have been. How have we been so successful in this area? As Debbie mentioned, we take a non-quota but proactive approach to our efforts. We cast a wide net and always look for the best athlete. And nothing changed last month when Rose Robeson was elected to the Board or this month when Stacey Doré was elected. Ms. Robeson is a CPA and former CFO. She brings significant energy industry experience and financial acumen to Williams, having been previously recognized as one of the top women in energy. She is a former CFO at DCP Midstream, and before that held positions at Total Petroleum, Kinder Morgan and Ernst & Young. She serves on the Antero Midstream, Newpark Resources and SM Energy Boards, where she chairs two Audit Committees and serves on a third. Notably, she also serves on an Environmental, Social and Governance Committee. So her addition to the Board bolsters our ability to continue our path in achieving sustainable best practices, while also benefiting from her deep financial and industry expertise. Ms. Doré is a current CEO and former General Counsel. She brings 23 years of experience in the energy industry and the law field. She is the President and CEO of Sharyland Utilities LLC, a regulated Texas-based transmission utility, and she is the former Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Co-Chief Restructuring Officer at Energy Future Holdings, a privately held company with a portfolio of regulated energy companies. And before her entry into the energy industry, Ms. Doré practiced law for more than a decade, after earning her degree from Harvard Law School. Our Board is highly talented and effective, but it is also independent. 12 of our 13 Board members are classified as independent. Our Board committees are entirely composed of independent directors. And during 2020, no fewer than 5 independent directors served on each committee. The offices of the Chairman of the Board and the CEO are held by separate persons. And the Williams Board seeks to continually improve. The Board and each of its committees conduct annual evaluations and self-assessments to evaluate and improve their functioning. We've also enhanced our ESG engagement. Beginning in 2019, we intentionally increased our shareholder outreach and engagement concerning ESG matters. Last year, we created a new position within the company, ESG Director. That position is held by James Yardley, who is charged with developing and executing our ESG integration strategy. Employees also have skin in the ESG game. Our Annual Incentive Program, or AIP, applies to all employees, including our executive officers. 10% of our AIP is comprised of environmental and safety targets. Half of this 10% in 2020 was aimed at reducing carbon equivalent emissions through a reduction in Loss of Primary Containment events, what we refer to as LOPCs. In 2021, Williams will again establish an environmental AIP goal to reduce LOPCs even further and build on the momentum and best practices we established in 2020. The other half of the 10% target is Williams' safety AIP metric, which is set using a leading indicator that engages all employees in advancing our Williams safety culture and performance. For 2020, the safety AIP metric was high potential near-missed incident ratio, with a focus on employees identifying high potential near-misses. A high potential near-miss occurs when an employee identifies a potentially unsafe condition that might cause serious injury or property damage. We are learning before we have incidents, not after. Identifying high potential near-misses is key to reducing high potential incidents. In 2020, we exceeded our safety AIP target performance. Let me point out that even the legal team has near-miss reporting goals. That's how embedded safety is in our culture. Finally, let me end on a congratulatory note. Debbie suggested that this is something we could leave out of today's presentation. The rest of the team disagreed. Debbie was recognized in 2020 as one of the 50 most powerful women in oil and gas by the National Diversity Council. This came as no surprise to us at Williams. Congratulations, Debbie. Now let me turn it over to our Chief Operating Officer, Micheal Dunn. Thank you.

Good morning. A component of being a reliable and dependable operator is being safety-driven. Within Williams, we have a strong commitment to continuous improvement. And to open my discussion about safety, I wanted to talk about our response to the pandemic and the COVID-19 situation. We had a very robust business continuity plan in place prior to the pandemic. Certainly had to modify it in conjunction with our understanding from the CDC and local health department as to what we were experiencing. But we quickly set up a team that was comprised of some of our safety professionals, some of our operations leaders to really understand what we were dealing with and quickly pivoted to using our emergency operations center as a communications hub for our employees to call in and talk about any exposures they may have had either inside or outside of the workplace. And so we could quickly do contact tracing amongst our employee groups to make sure that we knew where exposures were occurring. This was done very quickly. And we also realized that we needed to establish some accommodations for our employees, either high-risk employees or employees that were dealing with family members that were at high risk or employees that had childcare issues due to the closures of schools. We also implemented a voluntary work-from-home program throughout the course of this pandemic, where our employees have done a great job keeping the business running, while also keeping themselves safe. So I'm pleased to say that we had really no operational issues in conjunction with the pandemic. The business was really operating business as usual and a great effort by our employees to be able to accomplish that. And also wanted to recognize our contractors and our project execution employees for really keeping our projects on schedule as well. They developed a bubble concept in the field, where the inspectors and the construction workers worked in their own small bubble to limit potential exposure to the virus. And we were able to keep the majority of our projects either on time or ahead of schedule in 2020. So just a great outcome for our customers to keep business running, while also keeping our employees safe. As I said earlier, Williams is an organization that's committed to continuous improvement. Our safety culture and our safety metrics are one component of that continuous improvement journey. We utilize leading indicators across our business in the safety front to understand and predict potentially where we're going to have issues. We have been doing that for a number of years now. And our lagging indicators are certainly indicating that, that is accomplishing our goals of continually setting the bar higher and therefore reducing our incidents within our workforce. We have robust safety management systems in place that help us accomplish this. And as Lane indicated, a very keen focus on high potential near-misses within our workforce, identifying those, communicating those across our enterprise and then ultimately taking action on those is reducing our incidents. As you can see on the graphics, we've made substantial improvement in our safety performance for our total recordable incident rate over the last several years as well as our process safety incidents. These are incidents that could hurt our assets and therefore, put our employees at harm as well as the public. This is typically a metric you would see in the petrochemical or refinery industries and we've adapted this to the midstream space and are utilizing this to reduce incidents within our organization, keeping our assets safe and ultimately therefore, keeping our employees safe and business running smoothly. So safety is a critical component of our business. We take this incredibly seriously. And it's a great representation in these 2 metrics here as to how our employees are responding to this. Another component within our business is our focus on public safety. It really drives our reputation as being a reliable operator. We've sent over 1 million mailings out to landowners, first responders, farmers that may be working on our right-of-ways, to inform them of what to expect if there is something that's not quite right in our pipeline systems. We do this to ensure that they understand how to contact us, first and foremost, and then what to do in the event of an incident. We also have a very robust first responder program, where we talk about emergency preparedness with them. We do drills, tabletop exercises with the first responders to make sure that we both understand what positions we will take and what responses we need to do in the event of an unlikely incident on our pipeline systems. This is just another component of our ability and our desire to keep the public safe in conjunction with the operation of our assets. Another component of being a responsible steward is our stakeholder outreach program. We think we're industry-leading in this regard. It comes with the operation of our assets. We have more than 100,000 landowners that we deal with in the operation of our assets, but this is also a component of building our new projects. We conduct meetings with Native American tribes to understand their concerns and their issues with our potential projects. We host community engagements to seek feedback and input in regard to the locations of our proposed projects. And then what I'm most proud of on this slide is reaching mutual agreement with 93% of our new landowners in our easement negotiations. This is 30% higher than the industry peers that are also in the midstream space. It's certainly not our desire to have to go to court and acquire right-of-ways. It's our desire to reach mutual agreement with these landowners, and this is a great indication that we're able to do that the majority of the time. Finally, on the environmental reporting front, we think it's really important to set metrics and continually raise the bar when it comes to our goals on the environmental front. As you can see here on this slide, we've had a 60% reduction in environmental notices of noncompliance since 2017. We've seen a 39% decrease in reportable spills to soil and water. We had a 52% reduction in reportable air releases since the 2018 time frame. It's really important for us to track these metrics and set goals, like we did in 2020, to reduce our reportable air releases by 10%. Every year, we're establishing goals that are continually improving on the previous year's performance. I'm proud to say that we did exceed our performance expectations on that goal in 2020. And that's how we run the business. We set goals every year that raise the bar, and then we have that expectation with our employees when they establish their own personal goals. Just a component of how we run the business and the expectations that we set, not only for our employees but with our stakeholders that govern us on the environmental front. So with that, I would like to turn my time back over to Danilo, who will introduce our climate commitment.

Thank you, Micheal. In August 2020, Williams became the first North American midstream company to announce a comprehensive climate commitment that not only included a long-term goal but also a short-term one. We've obviously received a lot of interest related to our climate efforts. So I want to welcome Alan back to the podium so he can share key drivers we considered as we developed these goals. And then Micheal Dunn will dig a little bit deeper into steps that we're taking to get to our 2030 objectives as well. Thereafter, you'll hear from Chad Zamarin, who will walk through our forward-looking strategy and steps that we're taking to achieve our longer-term goal of net zero emissions by 2050. And then finally, John Chandler, our CFO, will wrap up by discussing how we incorporate ESG within our financial strategy. So with that, I'll pass it to Alan.

Great. Thanks, Danilo. And we're here on Slide 20. And there certainly has been a lot of interest in our climate commitment since we announced it in August. There's also been recognition that our commitment is based on achievable opportunities and we really wanted something that we could take on and we could effect in the near term. In fact, when this goal was first brought forward to the team, it was the typical very long-range goal looking way out there, and really consistent with what you just heard from Micheal. A real focus that I would give a lot of credit to Micheal bringing to this organization with a real focus on execution of whatever goals we have out there. And so we backed up and said, 2050 is a long ways away, and we really want something we can be held accountable for and we can lay out execution plans for the organization today. So there's really been a lot of focus as we've taken this on to not just have a very aspirational goal out for the future that will take a lot of new technologies, but as well the right-here and right-now. So I'm going to walk through a few of the principles that were important to us as we thought about setting our climate goals. So first of all, climate change has to be addressed globally. Climate change does not know borders and cannot be effectively addressed by penalizing some nations while allowing others to continue to emit carbon with no attention to it. And so from January -- and I'm just going to lay out an example here, I think that's really telling of the challenge that we're up against and why this principle is so important. From January of '18 to June of '19, so this is just a period of record for this, the non-China countries reduced net coal-fired generation by 8 gigawatts. So a lot to be proud of there, a lot of accomplishment. But during the same time, China grew their coal-fired generation by 43 gigawatts, and with another 121 gigawatts under construction. So continuing to just focus within our borders and not thinking about what the U.S. can do to be a leader around the globe really is not going to be -- is not going to get us where we need to be. Secondly, climate change solutions have to be economically sustainable. Pushing the economy or industries off to other areas without considering global climate change concerns will not solve the issue. And again, just an example of the challenge that we're up against, and why this principle is so important. The emerging economy emissions, so this is the emissions from the emerging countries, was up 3% annually since 2007. The developed countries during that same period reduced emissions by 0.7% annually. So this tilt will keep getting worse if the energy solutions we pick are not economic for businesses in heavy industry because all we're going to do is push those to areas that will tolerate that. And so we really have to make sure that the solutions are economic and just not ruled out by regulation. Third principle, total life cycle impacts must be considered on promoting emissions reduction solutions. There's always a lot of changes that come about as we learn new technology, and we have to be thoughtful about the long-term effects of those solutions. So if you think about how many times we've come up with new technology, and we haven't really thought through the long-term impacts of that, so we really have to be thoughtful about the total life cycle impacts and the solutions. And so I -- on this one, I would just tell you, my example on this is, I still have my No Nukes album within my recordable vinyls. And I remember how demonized the nuclear industry, even though it is a powerful tool for emissions reduction, but eventually we decided that some of the long-term effects of those were more negative. So -- and that's not to say that that isn't a great solution, by the way. It is to say that there are a lot of side effects that we need to take into consideration. Fourth, emissions are cumulative and the present value of various greenhouse gas emissions should be part of the model. If there is something that is right here and right now that we can go after that is net positive to us, we have got to take advantage of it. We have to realize that emissions that we're putting up there are cumulative. And if we come up with better technology down the road, then great, let's use it. But let's not deprive ourselves of the immediate emission and economic benefits because we want to demonize a fossil fuel like natural gas. It has a lot of opportunity to reduce emissions in the near term, and we fully need to be taking advantage of that. And the fifth is that solutions need to be driven by science rather than politics. Now I know this sounds a little bit naive, but truly, there is so much opportunity to us right now if we continue to focus on solution that really do have the facts behind them and are not just popular. So if we let the popular notions and the fact that people spend money making their ideas the most popular, we really aren't going to take advantage of the very best solutions available to us. And in fact, I really think that this is one of the biggest challenges that we face as a civilization taking on climate change. So let's move on to Slide 21 now. And so Williams has a long history of providing the essential infrastructure that safely delivers natural gas while protecting the environment and working to reduce methane emissions from our operations as part of a sound business strategy. And in fact, in August of 2020, we announced that we would build on this progress by setting a near-term goal of a 56% absolute reduction from our 2005 levels in company-wide greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2030. Now this does put the company on a positive trajectory to be a net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and we are very committed to getting to the net zero by 2050, and we'll work hard to accomplish that. But we believe that waiting around till some of the technology exists to start accomplishing significant emissions reductions really doesn't make much sense when there's so much low-hanging fruit available to us in the natural gas industry right here and right now. By setting a near-term goal for 2030, Williams can leverage its natural gas-focused strategy and technology that is available today to focus on immediate opportunities to reduce emissions, scale renewables and build a clean energy economy, while looking forward and anticipating future innovations and technologies that we'll be able to be a part of as well with the great grid and energy grid that we have today. So let's move on to Slide 22 here. And really, this is just a really interesting picture that shows that we have grown the transmission business. We've doubled the transmission -- more than doubled the transmission business, and that's the firm capacity that we sell that's 100% sold out. And we also have tripled our gathering volumes during this period from '05 to 2019. However, we've been able to reduce our emissions from 22.6 million metric tons down to 12.7 million metric tons. Now that sounds pretty incredible. And -- but I would just tell you, there's a lot of things that we've done over this long period of time. And one of the important things that we've done is being able to utilize our systems and find ways to make sure that whatever customer solutions that we come up with are the most efficient. And so if you think about the Northeast gas supplies, it used to be that we had -- on the Transco system, we had to haul that gas and move that gas from the Gulf Coast area, as our major sources of supply, all the way into our major markets in places like New York City. Along came the Marcellus and the Utica, and I can tell you, from a Williams' strategy standpoint, we were very excited because this was going to allow us to be able to serve those markets and those customers with the network of our systems still being connected to the Gulf Coast supplies. And so those are the kind of things that we've continued to do. We've also dramatically changed our operating disciplines around making sure that we don't let gas be emitted any more than it absolutely has to be and that we're doing everything we can to continually reduce emissions on our system. And so again, great effort by our operating teams in continuing to find ways to modernize our equipment, reduce emissions on our systems, and it's really impressive how this has piled up to show up with this kind of emissions reduction. So I'm really proud of the organization on this. And this is one of the things that gives us great confidence in our ability to go after such an aggressive goal for 2050. So I would just say, as we think about this that we've provided a picture of what we've done in the past, and now Micheal is going to give us a walk-through of our near-term path through 2030. So Micheal?

Thank you, Alan. We thought it was important when we established this 2050 net zero objective to set some interim milestones, as Alan indicated, a 56% reduction by 2030 from our 2005 levels. And we chose 2005 because that aligned with many entities that are tracking emissions, including the Paris Climate Accord. So that's the benchmark that we've started from. We've already achieved a 44% reduction, and some of the measures that we are using and have used is optimizing our operations. And by that, I mean we recompress gas oftentimes when we have parallel pipelines from one pipeline into another before we do maintenance on the initial pipeline. And we've been doing that for a long time, and we were doing that before anybody was tracking these emissions because it just made sense from an environmental and economic standpoint. And we've been doing that for years, and we'll continue to do that. And it's just a great way for us to keep those emissions in the pipe where they belong. We've also taken advantage of our operational design aspects within our business by replacing valve operators, for example, that were driven by gas in the past from the pipeline. We've modified those to be ventless or operated by air within our stations to where we're not venting the natural gas while we're stroking those valves. So another important aspect within our pipeline systems where business as usual in the past was utilizing the gas in the pipe to move valves. And it's certainly an area where we can all do better, either in our current operations by retrofitting those or designing those out of our new systems. And then finally, our solar projects are a new and exciting opportunity for us. We have over 400 megawatts of electric utilization on a daily basis on our assets. We have a large swath of property, typically around our processing plants and our compressor stations, that we can utilize to place solar facilities and power our own operations, therefore, lowering our reliance on the grid. And we are evaluating a number of these sites, you'll hear Chad talk about that more in the coming presentation. So just some of the aspects that we're taking advantage of here on our interim objective to be at a 56% reduction by 2030 from our 2005 levels. Moving to the next slide, I'll talk a little bit more about what we're going to do between now and 2050, ultimately, to achieve that net zero objective. Obviously, close collaboration with our peers, our industry partners, and our customers to find some reduction strategies. One of those examples is our emissions reduction program that we're embarking on in our transmission assets. This has a methane reduction component to it, but it also has a health reduction or improvement component of it by reducing the NOx emissions from our reciprocating engines by replacing those engines with new state-of-the-art gas turbines and electric-driven compression. This has a twofold benefit by reducing some of the methane emissions that you see on reciprocating units, while also significantly improving our NOx emissions from our baseload transmission assets that we've had operating for dozens and dozens of years now. We've been able to pursue some renewable natural gas opportunities as well, where we're taking gas that's gathered out of landfills and dairy farms, for example, putting that and blending that into our existing infrastructure today and moving that downstream to where its burned in a more effective manner from a greenhouse gas aspect. And then finally, new technology has to be introduced and adopted, that's including carbon capture use and storage as well as hydrogen. We have a vast network of pipelines that we can utilize today to blend hydrogen into. And also, ultimately, a 100% hydrogen-dedicated pipelines to be used as a fuel source. So I'll turn my time over to Chad now so he can talk about some of these exciting emerging technologies we're considering.

Thanks, Micheal. As you can see, we are very focused on leveraging our business to deliver near-term tangible emissions reductions while also charting a path towards net zero by 2050. In order to do so, we are mobilizing the Williams organization. As an organization, we have an extremely rigorous but also efficient process we pursue to drive the company's strategy. We closely study and monitor market fundamentals and forecasted trends, and we constantly incorporate our own points of view in order to continuously chart and evolve the company's strategy. We focus on where our capabilities and our assets position us to be successful. From an ESG perspective, our compass is very clear. We have very specific and measurable goals for 2030 and 2050. We know where we're headed, and we're laser-focused on best positioning our company to get there. While the tactics will evolve over time, we are moving quickly, adapting the organization, anticipating where the puck is and building the muscle necessary to lift these emerging opportunities. Within our strategic development team, we have built a dedicated renewables organization comprised of many of our best and brightest talents. And while we've built a strong core team to facilitate these efforts, it's important to note that their primary goal is to mobilize the entire organization. ESG and growing our investments in emerging technologies is not a niche located within one part of the organization. We're focused on what we call operationalizing ESG across the Williams' footprint and weaving the integration of emerging technologies into the everyday business mindset of the organization. It's early days, but I'm really excited with how quickly our teams have adapted, incorporated these new areas into their collaborative work behaviors. Over the past several months, we've moved significant talent across the entire organization, including engineers, project managers, business developers, commercial leads, and those that we've picked are great leaders within the organization. We've also picked up great talent from outside the organization, with renewables leaders joining us from companies like BP, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Chart Industries. I'm really excited and look forward to all that this talented team will accomplish as we grow our leadership position in clean energy infrastructure and innovation. For the here and now, natural gas, as you've heard, has been the most significant contributor to reducing carbon emissions in the United States, driven in large part by conversion of coal power generation to natural gas. But there's still much more that we can do. The U.S. continues to burn coal, fuel oil, kerosene and diesel in applications that are ripe for displacement with natural gas. Emissions reductions that we can achieve right here right now. And our footprint allows for the lowest cost and with the lowest environmental impact that can provide supply to meet these near-term emissions reduction opportunities. With respect to coal power generation, there are still over 75 coal plants just along the Transco footprint that are still in operation today. Converting these plants to natural gas will equate to 12 Bcf a day of new pipeline capacity for Transco and would reduce over 380 million metric tons of CO2 emission, which is the equivalent of removing 84 million cars from the road every year. That's like removing 1/3 of all of the vehicles that are on the road today. And to put that further into perspective, the EPA estimates that the entire oil and gas industry produces 340 million metric tons of CO2 annually. By converting those coal plants to natural gas, we can remove more than the entire emissions from the oil and gas industry in one achievable near-term effort. Another opportunity set for Williams to help lower CO2 emissions is capturing new business through displacement of heating oil in the Northeast, which is still used to heat residential homes. In 2019, the Northeast burned on average 7.5 million gallons of heating oil every day, equating to over 65 million barrels per year. Converting to natural gas would result in a reduction of over 6 million metric tons of CO2 per year, which is equivalent to removing over 1 million cars from the road every year. In the energy industry, existing infrastructure is more important and more valuable than ever. And with the largest and most flexible gas transmission system in the nation, we are well positioned to serve new demand as natural gas continues to displace coal and heating oil. With over 100 Bcf a day of interconnectivity, we continue to discover ways to repurpose and reconfigure our pipeline networks to provide additional capacity with the lowest environmental impact. Brownfield expansions and finding ways to integrate emerging clean technologies into the existing infrastructure is the fastest and most efficient way to create large-scale and meaningful emissions reductions, and we're very focused on achieving those. And as we look forward, our assets can deliver here and now, but also our footprint and capabilities, we believe, position us to be a leader in charting the next generation of clean energy solutions. Even before ESG was cool, you heard that Williams has been focused on natural gas infrastructure. And that's in large part because of a fundamental belief that natural gas is critical to lowering emissions in the U.S. and around the world, while increasing access to more reliable and less costly energy. As a result of the triple-punch benefits that natural gas provides, one, clean energy; plus two, low-cost and abundant supply; plus three, a reliable, always available resource, we believe that the market fundamentals for natural gas will remain strong for many, many years to come. At the same time, natural gas and natural gas infrastructure set the stage for enabling the next generation of clean energy technologies. No energy infrastructure system integrates a reliable delivery network with a massive storage solution on the scale that natural gas infrastructure does. For many months of the year, we overproduce natural gas but we have the unique capability to store that production, to store that energy in a manner that doesn't deplete over time. And during high demand times, we can pull from that storage to meet the demand. This ability to efficiently manage the delivery of clean energy supply through the peaks and valleys of energy demand is exactly what we need for renewable and emerging technologies to be successful and to reach full potential. And we believe our infrastructure can be a critical part of both those near- and long-term solutions. Near-term efforts focused on renewable natural gas and solar energy. As you've heard, our footprint is ideal for bringing renewable natural gas to market in the most meaningful way and is ideally positioned to bring solar projects into the supply mix as well. We have over a dozen RNG projects currently in our pipeline. These near-term project opportunities include the potential to capture methane emissions from landfills, dairy farms and wastewater treatment facilities located across 8 different states within our footprint, and these initial projects constitute over $200 million of attractive investment opportunities. And as we build the capability and experience the RNG space, we are not only working with existing project opportunities and developers to connect to our systems, we're also ramping up our ability to identify candidate RNG sites where we can work with those facilities to develop the infrastructure to capture and process methane emissions and bring that renewable natural gas to our pipeline network. We discussed the previously announced $400 million solar initiative that spans across 9 states in the Williams footprint. Initial slate of projects consist of 13 solar power facilities that have advanced through the first phase of our engineering and development process. And we expect to further advance this initial set of projects throughout 2021. These initial projects consist -- constitute over $250 million of investment opportunity with targeted service dates by the end of 2023. The initial slate of solar power projects consist of projects across 6 different states within our footprint, ranging up to 42 megawatts in size with most opportunities in the 10- to 20-megawatt range. These projects consist of installations to supply power for electric compression at Transco and Northeast gathering systems as well as at Williams natural gas processing facilities. We have effectively identified where our own existing electric demand can be displaced through solar power that can be sited on land that we either own or that we can procure in close proximity to our facilities. In addition to this initial set of projects, we have dozens of additional candidate sites that we're evaluating for a next round of potential investment. This strategy will also continue to converge with a broader strategy that we have to create modernization investment opportunities along the Transco and Northwest pipeline footprints. And as we look into the future, we have expanded our origination team so that we can explore additional opportunities, including hydrogen as a greenfield source. We are advancing partnerships with universities and research institutes as well as initiating an effort to forge partnerships with customers as well as state and federal agencies. We believe that no energy infrastructure is better positioned to facilitate meaningful introduction of green hydrogen both into the existing natural gas mix as well as identifying dedicated point-to-point solutions. We expect to advance our hydrogen road map in 2021, and we're focused on charting how best Williams can play a role in bringing green hydrogen to market in a meaningful way. And finally, as Alan teased earlier in the presentation, we are very excited to announce a strategic relationship with Microsoft that will ultimately transform Williams' energy infrastructure network through new digital technology and innovation while advancing both companies' net zero emissions goals. Microsoft and Williams share a vision for a net zero carbon future and a common commitment to helping customers achieve their sustainability goals. By leveraging our respective capabilities with a focus on modernization, both companies will build on our industry-leading commitments to sustainability. To bring our modernization plans to life and advance our next -- net zero goals, we'll be focused in 3 key areas: first, in improving emissions reporting, detection and remediation through governance and transparency; second, through achieving additional operational efficiencies through a connected workforce and data-driven intelligence, advancing even further, as Alan mentioned, our ability to set up our systems so that on any given day we're employing the most energy efficient and emissions-reductive techniques in order to deliver the energy that we that we move; and finally, through expanding our low carbon investments among renewable natural gas, solar, hydrogen as well as carbon capture and storage. The shared vision of Williams and Microsoft for a net zero carbon future aligns both companies, and we are committed to working together to drive a reduction in carbon emissions in order to meet natural gas demand that is complemented by renewable energy sources. This alignment between a global technology leader and one of the United States' largest energy infrastructure operators demonstrates the environmental and economic benefits that are possible when we work together to achieve practical and immediate reductions in emissions. We've established a team within Williams to work to develop this partnership with Microsoft, and I'm, again, excited about what that team will accomplish. And we expect the partnership with Microsoft to be just one example of how we will continue to explore partnerships and opportunities for innovation that will both transform the way we work as well as deliver efficiencies for our operations, while also creating attractive investment opportunities as we continue to lead as part of the clean energy economy. And with that, I'll turn the presentation over to John Chandler.

Thanks, Chad. We've been positioning ourselves over the last several years to have a business model that is sustainable over the long run. Just a couple of years ago, we heard a lot of concerns about master limited partnerships, and we had a fair amount of assets that were owned by master limited partnership. We bought that interest in 2018. We've also been selling assets over the last few years to help fund our expansion and growth opportunities, thereby eliminating our needs to rely on the debt or equity markets to support our growth. We've maintained significant excess cash flow coverage above our dividend where today we're generating anywhere from $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion of cash above our dividends. And again, we've been able to use that money to reinvest in our business for growth. And because of that excess cash, we've been able to grow EBITDA while not growing our leverage. And it's put us on a path to hitting our leverage goal of 4.2x debt-to-EBITDA, if not by the end of this year, certainly by the early part of next year. So when you think about that in total: lower leverage, big dividend coverage, conservative financial management and strong governance, we think these are the bedrocks of a long-term sustainable company and we think we check that box for investors. In addition, we've attempted to broaden our transparency around our company's earnings, and we provided additional franchise-level EBITDA information. And where possible, we're trying to provide additional volume data. Of course, we have to take into consideration the concerns of our producing customers when we do that. And with our sustainability reports, and we filed our second report last year, we're providing much more information about our emissions, our spills and releases, our safety and our social initiatives. I hope those of you that have followed our shift appreciate our commitment to being a leader of the space as evidenced by everything you've heard here today. And so now we're moving into a new phase of expanding our investment horizons to include renewables. You heard Chad talk about solar investments, renewable natural gas investments, hydrogen opportunities, and emissions reduction investments on our Transco pipeline system. With those new investment opportunities will come new financing options. Of course, because we're a noncash taxpayer at least through 2024, we will be looking for tax equity partners to take advantage of investment tax credits. We have been approached by some renewables SPACs that have foreign money to invest in this space, and we expect there'll be more and more money dedicated to renewable funds that would want to invest in these projects. And of course, on the bond financing side, we've seen the emergence of green bonds and sustainable bonds, transition bonds and sustainable linked loans. And we're looking at those. Today the interest rates on those aren't particularly better than our normal way financing, but I think over time that could prove out to be a better financing option for us, and we'll certainly be on the forefront of that as that market emerges. So as we think about all of the things that are coming with emissions reductions, I think some view that as negative for the space or it's negative for Williams. And I would tell you that emissions reductions will bring benefits to Williams over the long run. You've heard that today. At the heart of that will be growth on our Transco pipeline system, again, as we continue to invest in infrastructure to help back utilities who are moving away from coal-fired generation. In addition, you've heard a discussion about removing people from heating oil in the Northeast. That's just emerging and just starting to happen, and as that happens there will be more investment opportunities along our Transco pipeline system. With the continued development of renewable natural gas, we'll continue to see investment opportunities to bring that renewable natural gas into our transmission systems. We've talked about emissions reductions and Micheal spent some time talking about replacing some of our compression along our systems, which will help reduce emissions. And then finally, the solar initiatives Chad talked about, how we're actively underway pursuing solar initiatives. So as we look at those -- all of those opportunities that are right in front of us today, and look over the period of 2021 to 2025, we clearly see over $3 billion of investment opportunities that will be available to us to pursue those projects. And we've tried to break those out on this slide. About 35% of that $3 billion will be on our transmission systems, specifically Transco. 2 unique projects that will help reduce emissions will be Regional Energy Access and our Leidy South pipeline project, which again will help serve and take people off of coal-fired power. Roughly 40% of this $3 billion investment will be to pursue emissions reduction opportunities on Northwest pipeline and Transco. And we are in the process of working through those locations and those investments with our shippers today. We're talking about whether or not we have an emissions reduction tracker or whether that's part of our rate base and rate negotiations, and we're still working through that today. About 15% of that $3 billion is for solar investments that we expect we'll be able to make over the next 3 to 4 years. And then the remaining 10% is tied to renewable natural gas investments, again, tying new renewable natural gas into our transmission systems and potentially helping co-invest in some of the upstream investments there as well. And as we go forward, beyond 2025, we see many new opportunities emerging. As utilities move into renewable power generation, whether it's solar or wind power, they will need backup generation support from natural gas, and that will be new investment opportunities for us. RNG, we believe, will continue to expand significantly, and with that there'll be continued investment opportunities for us. And of course, we're out on the forefront of hydrogen, whether it's blended hydrogen in our existing systems or hydrogen-dedicated pipelines. And we, of course, at Williams will be on the forefront of that as well. So again, as we look at emissions reductions and the world we're in today, we view that not as a negative but as a net positive to the opportunities that will be made available to us over the long run. We thought it might be interesting to just spend a moment. And as we look at these investments -- before I move to that, as we look at these investments, we're doing these investments, and they have to stand it up relative to the returns that we see on other expansion projects within our systems, and they do. And so we thought we would go through an example of the solar investment opportunity and show you how we get return out of these projects. Now as we think about solar investments and solar projects and determining where we put a site, of course, there are several things we have to consider. One of the things is the renewable energy credits, and how much they're worth. In different markets, renewable energy credits are better than other markets. And we've got a broad range on this slide of $6 for renewable energy credit all the way to $90. On average, we're seeing something in the $40 range in the projects that we're looking at. So that's one thing we take into consideration. The other, and Chad mentioned this, is the land that we already own. How much capacity do we have at our plants or our compression stations to build the facility? And how much additional land do we need to lease? So we have to take that into consideration as we build these facilities. Of course, the size of the power load at the unique facility is important. And of course, the cost that, that utility charges us for the existing power there today. So we take that into consideration. And of course, the solar resource available at that location. You've got to have a reasonable amount of sunshine, obviously, to make that work. And so as we thought through those, as Chad mentioned, we've identified 13 sites currently that we're pursuing in 6 states. And again, all of those sites support an existing Williams plant or Williams compression station. So just to give you some of the examples of the economics around that. As we look at a facility that's anywhere from 10 to 20 megawatts, the cost to build that facility is around $1,100 per kilowatt. And so when you think about a 10-megawatt facility, for example, that's an $11 million investment for us to build that facility. And when you think about the utilization, the average utilization of these facilities is somewhere between 20% to 25%. I think about daytime, the sun shines from 8 to 5. That's 38% of a day. But of course, you think about weather patterns and the efficiency of the sunshine, generally these facilities are producing at a 20% to 25% utilization level. So for a 10-megawatt facility, a 22%, let's say, utilization rate, that means we're generating 19,000 megawatt hours of usable power during a year. So you think about the income side of this, how much money we're making from this. The 2 ways we make money, of course, is it takes us off of buying power from the utility. In this example that I'm using here, we're paying $65 per megawatt hour for power, plus we're receiving $40 of a renewable energy credit. So we're generating $105 per kilowatt hour of revenues or cost reductions. And it takes about $25 to $30 per megawatt hour to operate the facility. That's for property taxes, that's for additional land leases to the extent we need to buy some additional land. So we're generating around $75 per megawatt hour of net profit to us on 19,000 megawatt hours per year on a 10-megawatt facility. When you do that math, it works out up to $1.4 million of revenue on an $11 million investment, and you carry that out over an extended period of time. And that's going to generate a low double digit return, which you're seeing here on this slide. Add to that, any investment tax credits, and we get ourselves into a mid-double -- 10% to 15% return range on these projects. So again, I take you through all that math just to say that these projects are projects that can stand tall relative to our other investment opportunities, especially when we're supporting our own needs here with these solar projects. So one thing I wanted to talk about a little bit. We hear a lot of chatter about the longevity of our business. And while we see -- we believe clearly that natural gas has a long-term future, and part of the cleaner solution for our environment. We do worry that some of this chatter, obviously, has negative -- creates negative sentiment to us and certainly impacts our investors. And that could be a hard thing to isolate and measure. But we thought it would be interesting to try to demonstrate at least one investor class and how they feel about us as a company. And it's by looking about how our 30-year bonds trade relative to other industries. Obviously, 30 years from today pushes us into 2050 and well beyond the time frame when some say that fossil fuels will be gone completely. We, of course, don't believe that. What's interesting is, again, bond investors apparently don't see it that way. So what you see on this slide is a representation of where Transco's 30-year bonds trade as a premium to the 30-year Treasury relative to the other industries. And you can see Transco's bonds trade at 155 basis [ points ] premium to the 30-year Treasury. And you can see the only industries that trade better are utilities and the transportation sector. The transportation sector, of course, is railroads. All the other industries trade wider than Transco. And by the way, Williams trades at 180 basis point premium to the 30-year Treasury. So when you compare to other BBB credit rated industries, Transco trades better than health services, distribution services, consumer services, industrial services and producer manufacturing. So it appears that the bond markets have spoken, and they view Transco risk as obviously favorable relative to the broader industry. Just one other side note, we issued a 30-year bond last year for Transco in May, and we issued it at 3.95%. If we issued that same bond today, we would issue it for 3.4%. And those bonds obviously are trading at a premium to par at $1.09 of par value. So again, long-dated bond investors have spoken, and they certainly see the longevity of our business. The final thing I would say, obviously, from an investor standpoint, an equity investor standpoint, the pursuits that we are moving towards on the ESG front are bringing new investors to us, and that's a good thing. And so we looked at the 12 largest funds that are dedicated to ESG funds and what their investments in Williams look like. And you can see there's been a significant increase over the last 6 to 9 months. In fact, if you went back 3 years ago, these funds owned only about 8,000 shares of Williams. And today, they own 1 million shares of Williams. And we think that investment pool is only going to continue to grow for ESG funds. And of course, as we've talked about here today, we feel like we are a very attractive investment option for those funds. Now one other thing that's not on this slide yet, this slide stops at September 30. And we did mention earlier that the Dow Jones Sustainability Index added us as 1 of 8 energy securities as part of that index, and that happened in November. So certainly, that will bring new investors to us that aren't even represented here on the slide. So again, the message here are the -- all of the efforts, while they are the right thing to do, they also are bringing more investors in the way. I'll now turn the discussion back over to Alan.

Great. Well, thank you, John. And we've covered quite a bit of material over the past hour and 20 minutes here, and we certainly want to leave time to answer your questions. So let me just close with a few points. First of all, Williams is in a strong, growing market and is a well-run company with a sustainable business model. We've intentionally built a business that is steady and predictable, and our natural gas focused strategy positions us well to capitalize on continued natural gas growth. Second, we're bullish on natural gas because it is and will continue to be a critical part of our long-term clean energy future. And thanks to natural gas, the U.S. continues to see significant reductions in CO2 emissions, lower consumer utility bills and enhanced opportunities for investments in renewable energy. Williams is focused on sustainable operations, including ready-now solutions, to address climate change. And by setting a near-term goal for 2030, we will leverage our natural gas focused strategy and technology that is available today to focus on immediate opportunities to reduce emissions, scale renewables and build a clean energy economy. But we also are looking forward and anticipating future innovations and technologies that we can use our key energy networks to deliver on this next phase of the energy transition, as you heard from Chad. As a leader in this space, we hope to challenge others to establish similar goals and continue on this important journey. And finally, tomorrow is Inauguration Day. And now more than ever, we need bipartisan collaboration to confront the challenges and implement solutions. It's truly a time for an all-hands-on-deck approach with everybody pulling in the same direction and a functioning Washington, D.C. is fundamentally important for all of us. We look forward to working with President-elect Biden, and I have pledged my support, and that of Williams' in helping him implement his climate, clean energy and infrastructure policy agenda. So with that, I'll turn it back to Danilo, who has a few instructions for our question-and-answer session. Danilo?

Thanks, Alan. So we're going to take a brief break so we can get our speakers ready for the Q&A portion of the event. I do ask that you keep your questions focused to ESG-related matters as we'll defer questions related to the fourth quarter and 2021 guidance at our upcoming quarterly call. Before that, we are going to have an operator on standby to prepare the Q&A roster. So please follow the operator's instruction. So with that, we'll be back here shortly.

[Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call back over to Danilo Juvane. [Break] [Presentation]

And welcome back, and excited to have you for our Q&A session. We could have the first question, please.

Our first question comes from Gabe Moreen from Mizuho.

Two questions, if I could. One is just -- I appreciate the overview in the presentation. But just in terms of, I guess, the ability to, I think, rate base and recover some of the expenditures, whether it's solar investments or other emissions reductions, investments you're making, particularly along Transco and Northwest I know at one point there was an emissions tracker discussion or proposal. Can you talk about kind of where that stands? And how you see these solar investments or other investments? Whether they can make their way into rate base and easier recovery from customers?

Yes, I'm going to have Micheal Dunn, help me out with that, but I'll just open that up real quickly and just say, yes, there's a lot of opportunity there. We have a lot of room in our rate base on Transco as well as Northwest pipeline. And we have a lot of need for our customers for us to reduce emissions in those markets as well. And so there's a lot of activity that's been going on that front. And that certainly remains a very viable and sizable investment opportunity for us. And I'll let Micheal provides some further detail on that.

Thanks, Alan. As part of our rate case that we had on Transco, we had an agreement with our customers that we would form committee to evaluate the emissions reduction program. Ultimately, agreeing upon a program that we bring back to FERC for their approval. We're in that process today, working with our customers and their stakeholders to negotiate that. Ultimately, we think we'll have success on that. We've got about $1.7 billion of opportunity over the next 7 years, just on the Transco and Northwest pipeline systems to replace over 168 reciprocating engines that I talked about earlier within our systems with new state-of-the-art technology. So ultimately, we believe we'll have an ERP program that's agreed upon by our Transco customers. We do believe we've got a number of these near-term replacements we can embark upon today in conjunction with some of our growth projects, where we can create synergies in that capital investment across both of those investment opportunities. And we'll likely file a new rate case in the near-term on the Transco system in accordance with our previous settlement to capture those if we don't have an ERP program in place with our customers. But we really believe we'll have an agreement with our customers that we'll take to FERC and have approval on that and will have a rider that covers those investments on our system.

Great. Thank you, Micheal. I might just add to that -- sorry, before we go into the second question, I might just add to that, that the -- obviously, the solar investment opportunities, those can be addressed 1 of 2 ways there obviously. And so -- but I think right now we're targeting returns that we would probably do those independent, but we will evaluate each of those opportunities as to where those kind of investments would go as a private company providing the power or as part of a rate base. So still weighing out how -- exactly what those returns would look like in various locations. But thank you for the great question, Gabe.

Your next question comes from Jeremy Tonet from JPMorgan.

Just wanted to see, I guess, if you had touched base with the new administration anyway. It seems like the Biden administration has more of a role for natural gas, I think, in its clean energy transition than maybe other Democrats might have. And just wondering if any view you have there, if you reached out to them, or any thoughts in general on this topic?

Jeremy, thank you very much. That's a great question and obviously very timely. And yes, we have reached out, and we certainly have offered our support in the transition and certainly think that we are very well positioned to bring sensible solutions and immediate right-here, right-now opportunities to emissions reduction. And we want to make that clear. And we want to make sure that people see us as very cooperative and that we have a lot to offer in that regard. So yes, we've reached out. Yes, we intend to be very active in dialogue, and we look forward to the new administration getting established and starting to make great progress towards some of those goals. Thanks again for the question.

Our next question comes from Praneeth Satish from Wells Fargo.

You guys are looking at some complementary assets in the RNG space. Can you just elaborate on what that would be? And would that be pushing further into that actual RNG processing facilities or some other avenues there?

Thank you very much. I'm going to have Chad Zamarin join me for that question. I would tell you, to date, as we mentioned, most of our investment opportunity has been around the interconnections there. But obviously there is a need for capital and opportunity upstream to that. So Chad, if you'll take that, please?

Yes, sure. Thanks. That's a great question. We have historically been focused on interconnections and bringing RNG into the existing pipeline system, potentially building lateral pipelines that would extend into RNG facilities. But we have over the past 12 months been evaluating the potential further upstream investment opportunity. And I will say that the returns on those potential investments are actually compelling. The technology is technology that we're familiar with. At the end of the day, it's capturing gas and cleaning and processing that gas in order to make it suitable for delivering into the existing pipeline network. And so I think from a technology perspective, we're very comfortable with that opportunity. We are having to learn more about landfills and dairy farms and how much renewable natural gas a cow can produce, which is something I never thought we'd have to consider in one of our economic models. But I will say that I mentioned in my comments that nearest term opportunities are building interconnectivity into the system for projects that are under development, but we are now out evaluating our footprint, identifying candidate sites. And if necessary, we're prepared, if the investments are attractive, to invest in that infrastructure in order to bring that, one, to deliver the emissions reductions but also bring that methane into our natural gas network.

Our last question for today's event will come from Derek Walker from Bank of America.

Alan, you talked briefly just a little bit around your partnership with EIC just around sort of focusing on meaningful and durable measures and sort of aligning it with the Williams long-term strategy. Do you feel like those measures have been identified as of today? Or do you think there's more progress that needs to be made on the front?

Derek, thank you very much for the question. No, they have been and that template has been rolled out and it's for both the Energy Infrastructure Council members and as well as the GPA Midstream members as well. And so really, our goal there has been to get very wide adoption of that. We've tested that with the investor base and with the ratings agency. So we've got quite a bit to go out over the last year -- we actually started that about this time last year with EIC and we've done quite a bit of work over the last year and Lori Ziebart with Energy Infrastructure Council has done a tremendous job of pooling that together. And frankly, I thought it was going to be much more difficult when we started down that journey. Bob Phillips with Crestwood and I co-chaired that effort, and I really thought that it was going to be a pretty daunting effort to get people to come together on that. But really great work by lot of folks here at Williams as well as a lot of the other industry participants really hashing out. And the real principle that we laid out is that we were not trying to pick winners and losers with those metrics. We really were trying to make sure that they were durable, they were science based, they were based on good physics. And the team really kept kind of going back to that as the principle. And as a result of that, and people buying into that notion, that really allowed us to push through and got to metrics that are very sensible and very durable. So they're out there. They're available. And really great efforts by -- across the industry on getting those pooled together. And, frankly, we've gotten really great feedback from a lot of big institutional investors about how thankful they are because there have so many different raters to look at and so much different information to look at and really coalescing around some important metrics really was needed. And as I mentioned in my remarks earlier, from a Williams' perspective, we were really, when we saw all of that, we thought, wow, you can go chasing some of these metrics but you're not really running your business to reduce emissions. And eventually, we're going to get to sensible metrics. And so that's what really caused us to go after and try to drive the metrics that we could actually run our business to. And I can tell you that Micheal's effort and his team's effort to really run the execution, when they get a goal set in front of them, they expect it to be durable and something they can pursue. And so that really is what our organization deserves is to have something that we can pursue for the long term. So they're out there. Really important for the industry. And I'm really thankful for all the industry participants that took part in that and for the EIC bringing people together to make that happen. So thank you very much for the question.

We have a couple more questions in queue. Our next question comes from Betty Jiang from Crédit Suisse.

I really appreciate the breakdown of the sources of the emission reduction on Page 24. Just wondering how should we you think about which factors are really going to be the more immediate drivers of these reduction for the next 5 to 10 years? And then you did mention a lot about returns. Do you expect these investments to really carry a similar return to your conventional CapEx programs?

Yes. I'm going to -- I'll take that last half of the question first, and then I'm going to ask Micheal to address the detail and kind of the timing of the emission reduction opportunities that were spelled out. On the return piece, I would just tell you that as you think about Williams' portfolio of investment opportunities, we have some very high incremental return businesses around our gathering, around our deepwater. Those are very high incremental return investments. Then we have the interstate growth business, which are very attractive returns. And those are growth projects on our system and very low risk. Then we have -- as we get below that, and that's really what we've been investing in pretty heavily for the last couple of years. As we get below that, then we start to get to rate base level investments, so very low risk and not necessarily growth, but very low risk and covered by our rate base. That is pretty well the same kind of level of investment -- return investment opportunity that we will see with the solar business that Chad pointed out and John went through. And so those are kind of the return levels kind of down to that rate base level. And certainly for us to invest in that, we're going to have to make sure that risk level is appropriate with those rate base and so far it really looks like it is. And there are some ways for us to improve those returns in terms of bringing in partners that are willing to take lower returns and the fact they will be giving us a higher slice of return on those projects because they're ours and we own them. And so that is the way, and we are certainly looking at that with a number of partners for other parties to take a little lower return and we would extract a higher return out of those opportunities. So hopefully that answers that. And I'll turn it over to Micheal to address the first part of your question.

Thanks, Alan. The near-term opportunities we have to really make a big increase in those reductions or the solar projects that Chad talked about in great detail there. And we have many different avenues, we believe, to recover our investments on those. Many of the other things that we've undertaken for a number of years are already embedded in our rates in our transmission business or things that are in our gathering business that we're obviously covering those costs. But we've really taken a concerted effort over the last several years to reduce the cost of running our business. We've undertaken several initiatives to reprioritize our work and evaluate everything we do within the business, especially in the operation side, in the field side where we're incredibly efficient today from where we have been in the past. And we think we have opportunities to continue to do that in order to cover some of these costs that we will create here and continuing our goal to hit our 2030 and our 2050 targets. But as far as the capital investment opportunities go, as John Chandler talked about, those have to compete with the rest of our business and our growth projects, and we think they can in today's environment.

Your next question comes from Jean Ann Salisbury from Bernstein.

When you talk to ESG investors, are they more focused on gas' role in the energy transition and how well Williams is positioned for that? Or do you find that they are more focus on growing EBITDA from renewable assets, like R&D and solar, in order to be in some of these indices?

Yes, that's a great question, Jean. I would say it seems to be quite a mix. I don't think there's kind of a colorless perspective around that. I think there's still a lot of people making determinations within that. But I think there's -- I would say generally the approach is more pragmatic than what you hear in the news and so forth. So I would say, from the real buy-side and the big institutional investor, they're very pragmatic around the sustainability. And it's always interesting to me, the term sustainability in itself means they are a long-term investor. And that's really where their focus is. They want to make sure that things we're investing in today will make good investments for the long term, and they want to make sure that they are consistent with good, sound principles around ESG. Obviously, very focused on good governance, and clearly Williams always checks the box very well on that. And increasingly concerned about social issues, not just for the sake of social issues, but again for very practical reasons around how are you going to attract great talent, how are you going to make sure that you're getting the very best out of your employee base? So it truly is -- from my perspective, when we talk to the big institutional buyers, it truly is bringing a long-term perspective to investment objectives. And frankly I think Williams shows very well with those concerns out there. So, one, I'd say it's a mix and, two, I would say it's a fairly pragmatic perspective that's not just focused on the element and how that element creates good long-term value. So again, thank you very much for the question. And I think that's it. We have got one more? Okay.

My apologies, we have a few more questions in queue. Your next one comes from Chris Shere from Tuohy Brothers.

A lot around the immediate upside from domestically and globally replacing coal-fired generation with gas-fired options. And also domestically from shifting from heating oil to nat gas in the Northeast. But kind of 2-part question. First, can you opine about opportunities to further drive global emission reductions by moving the nat gas market share to replace heating oil and LPGs more globally? And related to that, achieving the maximum here and now, the emission reduction opportunities obviously seems to require new LNG export solutions. And obviously Williams would be in a position of supporting that logistically. Do you have any further thoughts about prospects for that in the coming years?

Yes, Craig. Thank you very much. It's a really insightful question because that is really the opportunity. If you think back to some of the comments I made, it's always amazing to me we tend to focus almost uniquely on power generation as we kind of have this mindset that all energy comes out, from a consumer perspective, in the form of electric power. But only 17% of the world's energy on that end user level, so when you are measuring the energy use at the end use level, only 17%, in 2019 actually came from electric power. And obviously that mix of fuel is pretty balanced and certainly growing towards renewables. But the balance of that and about a little over 80% is in fossil fuels on that. That's a huge opportunity. But the reason that gas is so important there is that trying to use electricity as a direct-fired heat option really is not very efficient. So you have to generate the electricity, then you have to convert it, and frankly the processes today that our industries are set up for really aren't set up to use electricity very efficiently. And so in all of those areas where we're using heavier than natural gas, hydrocarbon for those direct-fired opportunities, there's a huge amount of opportunity. And importantly, really importantly, it can be done economically. And if we can -- and if we in the U.S. can realize that getting our gas to the coastline and getting it there in a cost-effective way and getting it exported in a cost-effective way really can make dramatic impact on our ability to influence the world's use of natural gas rather than the heavier hydrocarbons that are out there as an alternative. There's not very many alternatives that we have that are economical. So when I see in a number of areas, when I see prohibition, people trying to stop getting that infrastructure built to the coastline, I think about how shortsighted that really is in accomplishing the basic principles that I laid out around climate change which is the first 2 are, it's got to be global -- we have to think about it globally; and two, it has to be economic because if it's not economic, all we're going to do is push that emissions off overseas where somebody will use a lower cost fuel. So natural gas is extremely low-cost here in the U.S. I mean our independent producers have learned to get natural gas out of the ground at a very low cost. And we should be applauding that, and we should be figuring out how we use that great tool to help reduce emissions around the world. And really Williams is extremely well positioned to help make that happen. And so again, as I mentioned, one of the biggest challenges I see is in the polarization that is going on around no fossil fuels as an answer. And again, the climate doesn't know -- I'm sorry, our atmosphere doesn't know where emissions reduction came from. It only knows that the emissions were reduced. And we really have to get focused on that. And it is a huge opportunity for Williams, and it's going to not only benefit our transmission systems but as well our gathering systems that are placed in these lowest cost gas basins in the U.S. and in some comparisons in the world. So we're really well positioned to make that happen. And we've got to do a better job of communicating and getting that solution on the table as we really come up against this challenge in a very pragmatic way. So Craig, thank you for the question, and, as always, very insightful.

Our next question comes from Gabe Moreen from Mizuho.

I just had a quick follow-up just in terms clearly you've been very proactive as a company in terms of methane reduction, but just the company's viewpoint on, I guess, the need for national regulation around the methane and flaring reduction or things like that particularly since I think you started to see some international pushback emerge around U.S. LNG exports?

Yes. Great question. And it's one that I know that big groups like the API have been wrestling with. And frankly, I'll just give you my own perspective on this. Flaring is not a good use of energy. It's a waste. We've been pretty vocal in the state of Texas on that issue. And frankly I would tell you I think a lot of the producers really believe that regulation would actually be good for the industry, but they don't have any choice frankly where, I should say, a lot of them -- some of the more independent producers they're going to do whatever is most economically feasible unless there is regulation. But as I always point out, there is regulation on not dumping your produced water on the ground and there's good reason for that. And there also should be a reason for not just flaring gas ineffectively for all the inefficient flaring that goes on that does increase other emissions, including VOCs and methane emissions when it's not burned completely. So yes, the answer to the question is, I do think that there are cases where -- I'm not a big fan of regulation in general, but I do think that there's got to be clarity on some of that. And it will bring the industry in a line on that. So obviously a hot topic, but I think from a waste perspective we are pretty clear-minded on what should be happening there.

Your next question comes from Travis Miller from Morningstar.

I appreciate the presentation here this morning. Quick question on the $3 billion of investment that you talked about through 2025. Is that included in a plan that would get you in that normal $1 billion to $1.5 billion annual run rate? Or is that investment that could be incremental and perhaps get you over, say -- you talked about the $1.3 billion, $1.2 billion and then up to $1.5 billion or more.

Yes. Let me have John Chandler join me to help address that, John?

Yes. As we look through our long-range plan, the $3 billion includes those projects that we talked about today. So we are able to fit those investments within our existing spending profile, keep our leverage in check, keep it where we need it to be and cover it with the cash generation that we're pursuing today. Now as bigger opportunities start to emerge around hydrogen, around additional renewable natural gas investments and things like that, we could start exceeding our capability to just pursue those with all the other projects that we have with our existing cash balances. And if that happens, keeping our leverage right is very important to us, so we'll look for partners. And there's a lot of people out there interested to coinvest, and we're talking to a lot today who would like to participate with us. But again that $3 billion that we see today, we can fit that into our existing investment profile and still meet our leverage targets with our existing cash flows.

Thanks, John.

And one other quick follow-up. On the solar side, what would be your thoughts? And what's the timing, say, on potential JVs or getting into investments that would be outside of your footprint as you described today?

Yes. That's a great question. I would say that there's a lot of well-heeled operators and developers there, and there's obviously plenty of low-cost capital in that space. And so there's going to have to be some unique competitive advantage that Williams bring to that, whether it's our right-of-way, our land. And so -- but I don't see us just making direct investment where we don't have competitive advantages given the returns that we've seen in this space, I think, we're going to focus on those that we can bring the competitive advantage to and help bring some of that low-cost capital that's wanting to make that alongside us and therefore increasing the return that we can bring or that we would extract for those kind of opportunities. So I don't see us getting into that on a wholesale basis at this level. But I do see us making sure that we're taking full advantage of our right-of-way, our land, our technology, our electric load and all of those things that help make -- that makes sense for us. So hopefully that answers your question.

Your next question comes from Sunil Sibal from Seaport Global Securities.

Just one question. So as the new administration is taking shape, I was curious, are there any specific signposts we should be looking for in terms of policy direction, which would basically result in Williams taking a more proactive approach or a more accelerated approach on the renewables investment beyond growing the gas portfolio?

Yes, good question. I'm not sure. I think the things that we will be keeping our eye on kind of initially obviously is what kind of actions come out on federal lands and particularly through the lease prohibition or drilling prohibition. I don't think -- I would just tell you, I'll be very surprised if when the polarization that has kind of engulfed politics for the last few years, when that hopefully settles down, particularly as it relates to climate change, I think that we're going to be looking for very practical solutions. I think this administration is going to be looking for practical solutions. And I think we're going to be in a position to help deliver that. So excited about some of the cabinet numbers that have been added that we think will really be looking for these practical solutions and not demonizing any one sector. So I would say if we start seeing prohibitions of any one particular fuel or anything like that, that would not be a good sign. If we see aggressive move toward actually going after measured emissions, we're going to see that as a very positive sign from a [ waves ] perspective because there's a lot of places that we can help deliver that in the right here and now. And that's really what we are hoping to see is some really focus on the measures and evidence of emissions reductions and not picking winners and losers about exactly how that gets done. So again I'm very hopeful that that's what we will see and we're going to be in a great position if we do see that [ happen ].

Your next question comes from Becca Followill from U.S. Capital Advisors.

Can you clarify about your 2030 goal of 56% reduction, would all the capital that was spent to get there is either recoverable in rates or recoverable through a return, especially given high percentage of your business is G&P?

Yes, sure. Yes, Becca, we certainly are focused on that plan does not have us investing dollars that are not adding to our financial returns as well. So we're certainly very conscious on every action that we take, and that's really gotten us to where we are today, and that gives us a lot of confidence on our ability to get there in the future. But we are not looking to make investments that don't have sound financial returns for our shareholders to get there.

And do you have a cost to achieve?

I'm sorry, repeat that Becca? I couldn't quite hear that.

Do you have a cost to achieve? If there's a cost to get to that 56% reduction, do you have the cost that it takes to get there?

Let me -- I know we've studied this quite a bit. I'm going to ask Chad to join me for that question. But the bottom line is, we've laid out what it takes to get there. Some of that would be in rate base, but some of it is frankly just good practice on our part and continued change of our operating practices. And so I would tell you, it is -- when I first heard that number, I was pretty shocked about how aggressive that would be. And as the team went through the examples of how we get there and what we've done already, I became less daunted by that challenge. Chad, you might address the part...

Yes. Maybe just -- I think I've spoken before about the annual strategy process that we go through. And it's a continuous process throughout the year, but we take a full 2 days with our Board of Directors as a leadership team. We spend a lot of time preparing for that strategy process. And as a part of that strategy process, we lay out our long-range plan. That long-range plan is a 10-year plan for investing, laid up against the goals that we want to achieve, both financial goals as well as emissions reduction goals. I talked about operationalizing ESG. We have woven those goals into that long-range plan. And so as John mentioned, when we think about what we can invest as a company in order to achieve our goals for EBITDA growth, our goals for leverage and our goals for emissions reductions, that's all -- that all has to fit within that long-range plan. And so we have identified -- you see the buckets of focus area on the slide that shows our net zero commitment. Those are areas where we're focusing our investments and we're very aware of what the investment needs to be and what the returns will look like for each of those investments. Where -- as we've talked about, where we see the ability to invest in what might look like traditional maintenance expense on the system, but has a very powerful emissions reduction benefit, we think that we can create efficient recovery mechanisms to invest in those at good acceptable returns. And so we've charted out those different areas. And so I would say that we expect to continue to invest at the levels that we've shown from a capital perspective over the next 10 years. I'd also mentioned earlier, it was talked about changes in policy. As part of our strategy refresh this year, we introduced a new stress testing of the plan where we ran 4 different scenarios through our planning process, including a scenario where there would be significant changes in legislation or regulatory oversight, and we are identifying ways where we ensure that our company's platform is resilient over any one of those different scenarios. And I would say that we continue to believe that we can maintain that very sustainable and predictable investment level over the next 10 years and achieve both our growth and our ESG and credit metric goals.

And then the last one is on -- I don't think I really understand this relationship with Microsoft. Are you buying software? I don't really know exactly what that relationship is.

Yes. Let me have Chad address that. I would just say it's emerging. We're really excited about some of the leadership that is at Microsoft. They've been a good partner for a long term -- a long time with the company. But in particular, they've hired in some really great energy execs within Microsoft, previous energy experience execs, to help lead their ability to do their part to reduce emissions with their capabilities. And so that's kind of how we got introduced, and I'll have Chad talk about it in some more detail.

Yes. It's early on, but I'll give 2 very concrete examples to give you an idea of just a sampling of how we're thinking together with Microsoft. One would be for us to work on citing data centers, co-located with facilities where we can generate renewable power. That's something that we think could be a benefit that we could provide to Microsoft, because we control a lot of land and we're going to be building energy -- renewable energy production for our own energy needs. On the flip side, one of the things, and an example that I would offer is, in the refined products business, power is the largest, in many cases, in a pipeline transmission system, expense for a company and it oftentimes can't be passed along to the customers. So those companies are very focused on how efficient they run their operations to minimize the power that they use. On the natural gas side, we've been focused on efficiency. For example, the fuel that we utilize and the way that we operate our systems for the most part can be passed along to our customers in our rates. Now that doesn't mean we haven't been trying to be as efficient as possible, but hopefully what you've heard is with our fierce commitment on ESG, we're even more focused on how now we can better operate. So imagine getting up in the morning, looking at the vast network that we have, touching 30% of the nation's natural gas and having data systems that are evaluating what our customers are calling on, on any given day and we're setting up the system, the valve configuration, the operating modes, what compressor units do we turn on in any given configuration to achieve the very best, most efficient operations during any given day. And if you imagine a system the size of ours, if you reduced the gas utilization at compressor stations by even 5%, you're going to have a significant impact on emissions reductions. So that's just one example of one of the initiatives that we're kicking off with Microsoft to bring their big data and technology capabilities together with our operating capabilities and figure out ways to better optimize the energy network that we operate every day.

Your next question comes from Jeremy Tonet from JPMorgan.

Just want to follow up with regard to the Paris climate agreement, and if alignment there is something that makes sense for Williams. And then separately, I guess, kind of building on what you said, the right here, right now emissions reduction that you talk about with natural gas switching, do you think that local elected officials and policymakers understand the power to that message?

Well, that's a loaded question. But -- well, first of all, the Paris climate accord, yes, very much aligns with our interest. And again, I think it's going to put focus on making that happen. It's very consistent with the first principle that I laid out around making sure that, as we address climate change, we do it on a global level. And it's just kind of, frankly, the more people that sign on to that and the more people that we can have support that, the better off we're going to be because natural gas will just be that much more in demand to help solve some of those immediate problems. So yes, I think that that's a very positive thing. In terms of the elected officials and the local elected officials, it's an important issue. And I would just tell you there is a very noisy minority out there that for whatever motives that might exist are going after that, in small places and markets. But the reality is that the millions of the customers really don't want to have that little blue flame taken away. They understand how low cost it is. They understand how efficient it is. And we've got a job to do as an industry in educating people that if you are in a market where there are fossil fuels being used to generate electricity, even if it's natural gas, and you generate the electricity and then you transfer it and take the losses on your distribution system to get it to a home and then you try to convert it to a heat source, that is much less efficient from an emission standpoint than having originally burnt the gas on a direct heat basis at a home. And so we've got some education to do. That's one of the reasons that Williams led and has pulled together the Natural Allies group, and we're one of the founding members of that. We're really excited about that effort. We've run that pilot in 4 states, looking at bringing that message to the local elected officials. It's very targeted messaging. But we really are working to make sure that, that education is there. And it's certainly challenging given all the other things that a local elected official has coming at them all the time. But we see that as important. And we certainly think that the American Gas Association and the utilities recognize the importance of getting that message out there. And so we continue to look forward to partnering with them in getting that message to the local elected officials. But the good news is, really good news, is the facts are on our side on this issue and so is the public support. And so we've just got to make sure that the noisy minority doesn't run over the top of the sensible and reasoned approach and consumers' choice on the matter. So Jeremy, thank you very much for the question.

Our last question comes from Michael Cusimano from Heikkinen Energy Advisors.

My first question has been touched on a little earlier with your partner, Microsoft, but I was hoping you could give some examples as to how I think you all talked about tax benefits, increasing returns for renewable projects and Williams not being a large taxpayer for the near term, you might want to bring on partners that could benefit from those. And if you could, I guess, give a little more detail if Microsoft fits that box or if you all are continuing looking for partners that check that box.

Yes. I would just say, yes, that partner is quite a liquid market out there in terms of people investing in equity tax partnerships. And so there's a pretty liquid and efficient market out there of people willing and wanting to invest alongside that. So -- and that doesn't today -- I'm not saying that it wouldn't, but today that is not one of the targets that we have for our relationship with Microsoft.

I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Alan Armstrong for any closing remarks.

Thank you. Good. Well, thank you all very much for joining us today. We really appreciate the time, appreciate the great questions. We're really excited about the momentum we have as an organization. And I can tell you we have a lot of fresh energy in this organization with people with their eyes to the future and making sure that we're going to be a very important part of that. And I am very fortunate to get to lead a company that is so focused on doing the right things and makes my job and the congruence of my own values very easy. So I just want to tell you thank you for joining us today, and we really look forward to communicating with you on this issue in the future. Thank you.