NET Power Inc. 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to NET Power's second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me on the call today, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Danny Rice, our President and Chief Operating Officer, Marc Horstman, and our Chief Financial Officer, Lee Shuman. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026, which is available on our investor relations website at ir.netpower.com. During today's call, our remarks will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those stated or implied by forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties associated with our business, which are discussed in our SEC filings. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

A full description of these risks is available in the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and the quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, each filed with the SEC. With that, I'll turn the call over to Danny Rice, NET Power's Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Bryce, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us this morning. We've spent the last four months in an intensive customer engagement and marketing process. We talked to a broad set of prospective power buyers, the hyperscalers, the data center developers, general industrial companies looking to procure power, and what we heard was unambiguous. The market needs speed, scale, and reliability, and it's willing to pay a fair price for it. Given the shortage of having speeds to reliable power at scale, which I think we'd all agree is mission-critical to the U.S. winning the AI race, the tech industry needs to see as much capital pointed directly at solving that problem today.

So in our case, I think NET Power is unique because underneath our clean gas technology layer is a fundamental understanding of all things gas power generation, both the equipment and the know-how for where these projects make good sense to site for end customers. The market's told us that our 80-megawatt clean gas is very credible, but what they really need is a lot more power, and they need it sooner. We believe the clean piece is important, but just as it's always been, it will only come at scale once society's basic energy pillars of reliable, affordable power are fully in place. Power demand is outstripping supply today.

So it's incumbent upon us to take a step back and reassess our allocation of our capital and our skills to help meet these basic energy needs while preserving the ability to do what we originally came here to do, which is to transform natural gas into the lowest cost form of clean, firm power. That's still our North Star. This transition to leading with unabated power, first is simply a more actionable and likely lower-risk pathway to eventually get to a cleaner energy future. That isn't a judgment about the long-term importance of CCS. We believe in it, and it works. Just several weeks ago, the Entropy team commissioned the world's first clean gas power plant in Canada, and that's a huge milestone for the industry. We're sitting here with tens of billions of tons of annual CO2 demand in the Permian Basin for EOR.

As oil prices rise, as they have been recently, the demand for CO2 just continues to grow. I want to spend a moment on why we believe this strategic recalibration is durable. We view it as a pragmatic response to a structural market condition that we think runs for many, many years. The grid has quickly become a binding constraint on data center growth. First in markets like PJM and MISO, but it's quickly made its way to ERCOT as well. It's interesting. I think a lot of folks in the industry viewed ERCOT as a safe haven for speed to power. For a long time, that was especially true. Shorter queue times, better grid reliability, and access to lower cost power. But I don't think Texas was really prepared for the onslaught of demand that's now showing up.

ERCOT queues are getting backed up into the 2030s with no real end in sight to when new supply will catch up to meet this new demand. So it's forcing creativity to bring this power to market. The overwhelming response that we're seeing is solutions like behind the meter, on-site generation with targeted reliability that has become the most actionable near-term solution in the market. We see ourselves as part of that ecosystem. We have the site, we have the Oxy land relationship, and we have the technical capabilities to deliver firm dispatchable power at scale. That's what the market really needs today, and we believe allocating our capital in this manner is the right thing for shareholders and the power industry alike. On the point of grid constraints, it's a primary concern for local communities, too.

Over the past several months, we've listened closely to the local and national conversations around data center development. The Texas legislative activity, the moratorium discussions, the scrutiny on water consumption and grid impact, the broad and diverse community questions around this new kind of infrastructure. These are real concerns from real communities, and they deserve real solutions. The pressure emerging around conventional data center development is, if anything, accelerating the demand for what we aspire to build. Behind the meter and completely off-grid power solutions that don't strain the grid, don't sit in an interconnection queue, and are sited and designed so that carbon capture can be added over time. That's not just commercially attractive, it's the kind of project that has a credible answer for a regulator or a community asking hard questions.

Through every step of Project Permian's development and evolution, our focus has been to be a good neighbor who endeavors to add long-term value to the communities where we live and work. We think the direction of the concerns point toward our recalibrated model, not away from it. Our commercial strategy is now organized around what today's power customers are actually prioritizing: speed to power, reliability, and scale. Natural gas power generation, co-located with customer load and deployable in a fast timeline, is how we meet that demand. We are redirecting near-term capital and execution focus towards the development of unabated natural gas power generation capacity, with carbon capture retained as an option, a credible, meaningful, preserved option to be layered into projects over time as customer requirements, project economics, and financing support it.

We actually think this will be a very differentiating strategy as time moves on, particularly once power supply catches up to demand and the focus begins to shift back to finding low-cost ways to decarbonize our country's newly installed power generation asset base. The key will be possessing the skills to do it, which we will retain, but also having projects in the right areas where it's technically and geologically feasible to do carbon capture. Let me expand on what this means for our projects and our partnerships. Project Permian, our site in West Texas, is being redesigned for co-located demand. Based on current market feedback, we do not expect to deploy post-combustion carbon capture in the initial phase of deployment. The project is being designed to preserve the ability to add capture in later phases.

The siting is right, and the Oxy relationship for CO2 offtake via enhanced oil recovery remains intact as a future pathway. What we are not doing is requiring customers to pay for clean power before they've asked for it. The site has capacity for approximately 1 to 1.5 gigawatts of power generation across multiple phases, and the initial phase is being sized to meet what the market will actually contract for today. On our relationship with Entropy, we're discussing a revised framework under which the parties may pursue deployment of Entropy's post-combustion capture technology in later phases of NET Power's projects, as and when supported by customer demand, economics, and financing. But today, it just wouldn't make sense for us to commit capital for something that isn't actionable yet.

We're going to try to preserve the relationship and the great work our teams have already done together. That work has shed a lot of insight on project design to accommodate carbon capture so that the retrofit option is a consideration in broader power site design. Clean power remains the long-term destination. The North Star for us hasn't changed, but what has changed is the order of operations. We build the power first, a lot of it on an accelerated timeline to meet customers' needs now, and we capture when it makes sense. I'll pass it over to Marc to give you a brief operational update, and then Lee will cover the financials.

Marc? Thanks, Danny. Good morning, everyone.