Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the MDU Resources Group, Inc. Year-end 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Brent Miller, Treasurer. Brent, please go ahead.

Thank you, Kevin, and welcome, everyone, to the MDU Resources Group Year-end 2025 Earnings Conference Call. You can find our earnings release and supplemental materials for this call on our website at mdu.com under the Investors heading. Leading today's call are Nicole Kivisto, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Jason Vollmer, Chief Financial Officer of MDU Resources Group. During today's call, we will make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. For more information about the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to vary from any forward-looking statements, please refer to our most recent SEC filings. I will now turn the call over to Nicole for her remarks. Nicole?

Thank you, Brent, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today and for your continued interest in MDU Resources. 2025 was our first full year as a pure-play regulated energy delivery business, and I am extremely proud of our team's performance. This morning, we reported 2025 earnings of, [ $190.4 million ], or $0.93 per share, which was in the middle of our earnings per share guidance range. In 2025, we deployed $792 million of capital, advancing key projects, we made meaningful progress on the regulatory front and delivered record results at our pipeline business. In addition, our utility experienced combined retail customer growth of 1.5% when compared to 2024, which is within our targeted annual growth rate of 1% to 2%. Included in our $792 million of capital investment was the 49% ownership interest in [ Badger ] Wind Farm, which was acquired and placed in service on December 31, 2025. This project, along with other capital investment placed in service at our utility resulted in utility rate base growing 16% year-over-year. Our 2026 through 2030 capital investment plan released last November had included the acquisition of Badger Wind in 2026, with the expectation that final payment would occur in 2026. We were excited to close the transaction earlier than planned and at our ownership share of this cost-effective energy resource to our diversified generation portfolio. As such, we have revised our 2026 through 2030 capital investment plan to $3.1 billion, which is reflected in the table in our earnings release. As I mentioned, 2025 was an active year on the regulatory front, which not only was a benefit to 2025 results, but should also set us up for future growth as we continue to execute on our capital investment plans. We filed for recovery of the Badger Wind…

Thanks, Nicole. I'm excited to share our results for 2025. This morning, we announced our full year earnings of $190.4 million, or $0.93 per share compared to 2024 earnings of $281.1 million, or $1.37 per share. It's important to note that certain costs associated with the spin-off of Everest in October of 2024, as well as its historical results of operations are reported in discontinued operations in our results. 2025 income from continuing operations was $191.4 million, or $0.93 per share diluted, compared to $181.1 million, or $0.88 per diluted share in 2024. As we turn to our individual segments, our electric utility reported earnings of $64.9 million, compared to $74.8 million in 2024. Higher retail sales revenue and volumes positively impacted results for the year but were more than offset by higher operation and maintenance expense, primarily from higher payroll-related costs, higher contract services related to electric generation station outages, higher software expense and higher insurance expense. Our natural gas utility reported earnings of $56.1 million, compared to $46.9 million in 2024, which is a 19.6% year-over-year increase. This increase was driven primarily by higher retail sales revenue largely from rate relief across multiple jurisdictions, including Washington, Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. Higher operation and maintenance expense, primarily higher insurance, payroll-related costs and software expenses partially offset the increase. Our pipeline business posted record earnings of $68.2 million in 2025, which compares to $68 million last year. The slight increase in earnings was driven by expansion projects placed in service throughout 2024 and late in 2025, and customer demand for short-term firm transportation contracts. Increase in earnings was partially offset by higher operation and maintenance expense, primarily due to payroll-related costs. The increase was further offset by the absence of proceeds received in 2024 from a customer settlement, as…

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Julien Dumoulin-Smith with Jefferies.

This is [ Tanner ] on for Julien. Maybe first here on the '26 guidance, just eyeballing the math here. If you delivered even just 6% EPS growth year-over-year, you'd kind of be towards the top end of the EPS range for the year. What are the year-over-year headwinds embedded in the guidance formally?

Yes. Thanks, Tanner. Happy to jump in and walk through that. So as we look at the growth that we saw in 2025, certainly tell you with how we finished the year on that front. As we look forward into 2026 and look at the guidance there, long-term guidance range, we do push a 6% to 8% guidance range that we expect -- 6% to 8% EPS growth rate over the long term. And I think as we've said before, we will have years where we exceed that, and we will have years where we probably don't meet that full amount. As we look into 2026, we've got a lot of exciting things underway. We've got a lot of rate case activity in front of us here, which we will see some partial impacts from throughout the year. In the addition of the Badger Wind Farm as we see in 2026 will be a benefit here as well. Certainly, some of that growth has taken some equity issuance on our side as well. So we do see some impacts of that as we look for that piece of it. But overall, as looking at 2026, we are expecting growth as we look at from that perspective, the midpoint of our range would show growth over where we ended this year. To your point, if you look at the midpoint of the range, it probably doesn't meet that 6% to 8% long-term range that we've talked about, but we are certainly over the long term, expecting that, that will hold true for us over the next several years.

Appreciate that. And can you elaborate on the continued contract negotiations with several interested parties for the Bakken East pipeline? And I see on the slide you provided the path toward FID, but there aren't any formal dates attached. Could you maybe help set a rough expectation for how we should be thinking about some of the more important parts of the process like FID and then formally -- formal integration into the CapEx plan?

Yes, absolutely. So kind of what I hear you asking is how do we articulate next steps as it relates to Bakken East. And as we disclosed in the script and otherwise, we've got the open season out publicly right now. So that goes through March 13, or mid-March. And so as we think about the binding open season, it's probably a little bit too early to discuss results coming out of that. As you know, we've been in ongoing discussions with customers on the project and are certainly pleased with the level of interest we're seeing. We like our strategic location. As a reminder, this is really a demand pull type of project versus producer push. And so you're really getting to, how do we continue to advance this? And so the open season I mentioned, we will continue with discussions to get committed interest. Following that we would look to finalize the ultimate design of the project, execute customer agreements, and then essentially at that juncture, we prepared to make a final investment decision on the project. We did do our prefiling with FERC in December of last year. In that filing, we also included some time lines as it relates to a final 7C with FERC in the third quarter of 2026. So those are kind of the time lines we're looking at right now, but certainly continue to be pleased with the level of interest and the discussions we're having with customers.

[Operator Instructions] I see no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Nicole Kivisto for closing remarks.

All right. We want to thank you all again for joining us today, and I want to thank our employees again for a successful 2025. We certainly appreciate your interest and support of MDU Resources and look forward to connecting with you as we progress throughout 2026. With that, I will turn the call back over to you, operator.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.