Kinder Morgan, Inc. (NYSE:KMI) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call April 17, 2024 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Rich Kinder - Executive Chairman
Kim Dang - CEO
Tom Martin - President
David Michels - VP and CFO
Sital Mody - President, Natural Gas Pipelines

Conference Call Participants

John Mackay - Goldman Sachs
Michael Blum - Wells Fargo
Jeremy Tonet - JPMorgan
Neal Dingmann - Truist Securities
Keith Stanley - Wolfe Research
Theresa Chen - Barclays
Dan Lungo - Bank of America

Operator

Welcome to the Quarterly Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time.

I’ll now turn the call over to Mr. Rich Kinder, Executive Chairman of Kinder Morgan. Thank you. You may begin.

Rich Kinder

Thank you, Ted. As always, before we begin, I'd like to remind you that KMI's earnings release today and this call include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and of course, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as well as certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Before making any investment decisions, we strongly encourage you to read our full disclosure on forward-looking statements and use of non-GAAP financial measures set forth at the end of our earnings release, as well as review our latest filings with the SEC for important material assumptions, expectations and risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated and described in such forward-looking statements.

Before turning the call over to Kim and the team who reported a good quarter at KMI, let me comment on another broader issue. In past quarters, I've talked a lot about the demand for natural gas resulting from this country's LNG export facilities. Today, I want to speak briefly about what I and others in the industry now see as another source of increased demand for our commodity, the tremendous expected growth in the need for electric power. This growth is being driven by a number of factors, most prominently by the increasing demand of new and expanding data centers, especially those required to support AI.

One recent survey showed a projected increase in electric demand to power data centers of 13% to 15% compounded annually through 2030. Put another way, data centers used about 2.5% of U.S. electricity in 2022 and are projected to use about 20% by 2030. AI demand alone is projected at about 15% of demand in 2030. If just 40% of that AI demand is served by natural gas that would result in incremental demand of 7 to 10 Bcf a day.