Good morning, and thank you all for attending the Northwest Natural Holdings Company's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. My name is [ Brika ] and I will be your moderator for today. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Nikki Sparley, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may proceed, Nikki.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter 2025 earnings call. A presentation for today's call is available on our Investor Relations website at ir.northwestnaturalholdings.com. And following this call, a recording will also be available on our website. Turning to Slide 2. As a reminder, some things that will be said this morning contain forward-looking statements. They are based on management's assumptions, which may or may not occur. For a complete list of cautionary statements, refer to the language at the end of our press release. Additionally, our risk factors are provided in our 10-Q and 10-K filings. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. For additional disclosures about these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures, please see the slides that accompany today's call, which are available on the Investor Relations page of our website. Please note, our guidance assumes continued customer growth, average weather conditions and no significant changes in prevailing regulatory policies, mechanisms or assumed outcomes or significant changes in local, state or federal laws, legislation or regulations. We expect to file our 10-Q later today. Please note, these calls are designed for the financial community. If you are an investor and have additional questions after the call, please contact me directly at (503) 721-2530. News media may contact David Roy at (503) 610-7157. Moving to Slide 3. With us today are Justin Palfreyman, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Ray Kaszuba, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Justin will provide an update on each of our businesses, and Ray will walk through our financial results, liquidity and financing and guidance. After Justin and Ray's prepared remarks, they will be available along with other members of our executive team to answer your questions. With that, I will turn it over to Justin on Slide 4.

Thanks, Nikki. Good morning, and welcome, everyone. I am very proud of the effort and dedication from our team so far this year, resulting in significant progress toward our strategic goals while fulfilling our mission of delivering safe, reliable and affordable service to our nearly 1 million customers. We continue to expand our customer base, invest in our systems, drive operational excellence through cost efficiency and discipline and achieve constructive regulatory outcomes. We are well positioned to deliver on our commitments to shareholders and create value in the future. Starting this morning with financial results. Northwest Natural Holdings continued its momentum from the first half of the year and delivered a strong third quarter. Our results reinforce my confidence in executing against our 2025 plan. That's why we are expecting full year 2025 results to be above the midpoint of our adjusted earnings range of $2.75 per share to $2.95 per share. Through September 30, we invested over $330 million in our gas and water systems to support customer growth, system reliability and long-term infrastructure resilience. Our combined utility customer growth rate was 10.9% for the 12 months ended September 30. This substantial growth was largely driven by our gas utility acquisitions in Texas. Northwest Natural Water also contributed incremental meter growth, posting a 4.1% increase. With our robust long-term capital plan and customer growth, we are reaffirming our long-term earnings growth rate of 4% to 6%. We remain highly confident in our ability to execute. I am pleased to report that in the fourth quarter, the Board approved a dividend increase, making this the 70th consecutive year of annual dividend increases. Northwest Natural Holdings is 1 of only 3 companies on the New York Stock Exchange with this outstanding record. While our growth and financial results are strong, we…

Thank you, Justin, and good morning, everyone. Turning to Slide 6. As Justin mentioned, third quarter results continued our momentum from the strong first half of the year. This performance keeps us firmly on track with our expectation to be above the midpoint of our guidance range for 2025. As a reminder, our gas utility earnings are seasonal with the majority of revenues and earnings generated in the first and fourth quarters during the winter heating months. We reported a loss of $0.73 per share for the third quarter of 2025, relatively unchanged from the loss of $0.71 per share for the same period in 2024. For our Northwest Natural Gas segment, earnings per share improved slightly, largely in line with last year. SiEnergy provided an incremental $0.04 of earnings per share for the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period last year. In our first year after the acquisition, margin and net income are trending well and are aligned with our expectations. Our Water segment earnings per share increased $0.04. The key drivers were new rates at our largest water and wastewater utility in Arizona and additional revenues from the ICH utilities after the acquisition in September 2024. Finally, the adjusted net loss of our other segment increased $0.14 per share compared to the same period last year, primarily due to higher interest expense at the holding company. On Slide 7, we have outlined our year-to-date results. Adjusted earnings per share were $1.52 to date in 2025 compared to $0.88 for the same period of 2024. The year-to-date increase in earnings per share reflected strong earnings across all business segments, including new rates for our gas utility in Oregon, contributions from SiEnergy, higher net income from our water utilities and earnings contribution from renewables, which is in…

[Operator Instructions] The first question we have comes from Alex Kania with BTIG.

Maybe the first question would just be on -- a little bit more color just on the lower equity requirement for '25. Is this a function of just performance year-to-date, kind of better cash flow generation? And is there any potential read-through kind of on an ongoing basis to fund CapEx?

Alex, I appreciate the question. I think you've got it. We start the year off. We look at our plans from an overall capital structure perspective, debt issuance, earnings, cash flow. As the year goes, we reassess that. That's what you're seeing here where we are now over or complete with our ATM program for the full year, and we wanted to communicate that.

Great. And maybe just a kind of some additional follow-up just on where the company is seeing additional tuck-in opportunities, I guess, particularly in Texas around the water and gas lines of business here. Is there -- on top of the organic growth that you're seeing as well? It's just -- is there a fairly wide kind of a wide range of other kind of opportunities to tuck in relative maybe -- and kind of how would you compare that relative to the organic growth pattern?

Yes. Thanks for that question, Alex. This is Justin. So the tuck-in opportunities for us across our water business -- they constantly exist, but we have built up a platform now that gives us the opportunity to continue to build and expand through organic growth, and we are prioritizing that. We will continue to look at opportunities on an opportunistic basis as they arise. And as you probably know, the water segment is very, very fragmented. There's a lot of small systems out there. But where we're seeing most of our growth right now is organically, and it's in areas like Texas, Arizona and Idaho, where there's strong housing growth.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from Selman Akyol with Stifel.

Tyler on for Selman. With the change in the rate case timing with sort of one behind you now in Oregon, does it seem as though the commission has been more or less receptive to certain items in the request versus the multiyear rate cases?

Yes. Thanks for your question, Tyler. So we are -- the commission has just opened up a docket on multiyear planning in Oregon. As you know, that's something that's been in place for a while now in Washington. And as part of legislation that passed earlier this year, the commission is looking at implementing multiyear plans. We'll be engaged with them throughout that process, which will be a rule-making process that occurs next year. But right now, with new rates in effect here in Oregon, we think we're well positioned.

And then is there any change in the status of the -- like the hydrogen pilot projects given attitude with the administration? Has anything been kind of sidelined for the time being on blending or otherwise?

Yes. So we have -- as you know, we've done hydrogen blending tests over the last few years at our facilities in Sherwood and are very comfortable with the technical capabilities there. We also had a hydrogen pilot at one of our facilities where we're testing new methane pyrolysis technology, and that pilot is largely complete as well. There are broader hydrogen production projects that you probably heard of the hydrogen hub projects across the country that were supported under the Biden administration. The latest news there, and we are not directly involved in those projects, but the latest news there is that funding has been reallocated away from those projects. So I think those are up in the air. But at some point in the future, if there is a clean hydrogen available that's affordable and can compete with other forms of renewable fuels on an affordability basis, we would be in a position to blend that in, in our systems.

I would like to conclude the question-and-answer session here and hand it back to Justin Palfreyman for some final closing comments.

Great. Thank you. Appreciate everybody's interest in participating in this call this morning and appreciate the questions and wishing everyone a safe rest of the week. Thank you.

Thank you all for joining. I can confirm that does conclude the Northwest Natural Holdings Company's Third Quarter 202 Earnings Call. Thank you all for your participation. You may now disconnect, and please enjoy the rest of your day.