Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to EQT Corporation ASQ Event. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today.
Thank you.
Good morning, and thank you for joining today's conference call. With me today are Toby Rice, President and Chief Executive Officer David Conte, Chief Financial Officer and Will Jordan, General Counsel and Chair of EQT's ESG Committee. A replay for today's call will be available on our website beginning this evening. In a moment, Toby will present his prepared remarks, then we'll open up the line for a question and answer session. On our website, we posted an investor presentation and our 2020 ESG report was published yesterday.
We will reference certain slides and information from the presentation and the report during today's discussion. I'd like to remind you that today's call may also contain forward looking statements. Actual results and future events could materially differ from these forward looking statements because of factors described in our investor presentation, in the Risk Factors section of our 2020 Form 10 ks and in subsequent filings we make with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update forward looking statements. Thank you for your interest in today's discussion.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Toby.
Thanks, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. Today marks an important milestone for the continuing evolution of our company. Yesterday, we published our 2020 ESG report with a theme of empowering evolution. Our prepared remarks will summarize some of the key outputs of that report and also build on it. But the takeaway that we hope you have is simple, namely that EQT is equipped to excel in a low carbon future.
Turning to Slide 4, there are a number of reasons why we believe this to be the case. First, EQT has a long standing commitment to being a good corporate citizen with a deep track record of transparency and reporting. 2nd, over the last 2 years, we've built on this foundation to position the company to excel in a dynamic environment, implementing a modern operating model that is focused on driving industry leading efficiencies. And third, when combined, our strong ESG foundation and modern operating model will allow us to act nimbly and with trust as we accelerate a sustainable pathway to a low carbon future. And when we say this, we're talking about a few concepts.
1, we want to achieve our collective climate goals. 2, we think there are many ways to meet these goals, not just 1. And 3, in selecting which pathway to follow, we believe it should be the one that moves as quickly as possible, but in a sustainable manner. We want to reach our climate goals full stop. But if you accept that there are multiple paths achieve this goal, we need to keep in mind that the output of our choice has a really important impact, human progress.
Turning to Slide 5. As these charts demonstrate, higher energy consumption leads to an enhanced quality of life and longer life expectancy. That concept is firmly embedded in the Paris Agreement, and it recognizes that the energy policies of participating nations will be felt most profoundly by the billions of global citizens currently living in an energy deficit. With that in mind, we are firm believers that natural gas is an energy source that should play a leading role in the energy mix of the future. As the largest producer of U.
S. Natural gas, we see it as our duty to maintain and enhance the potential for natural gas to play that leading role, giving policymakers and stakeholders a necessary tool to achieve our climate and human progress goals. That's our purpose that will shape how we move forward. Slide 6 provides a bit more color on why we believe natural gas has the optimal attributes to play the leading role in the sustainable energy ecosystem. 1st, natural gas is the ideal baseload, providing the type of reliable, low emissions, low cost baseload that can support increasing renewables.
2nd, natural gas is scalable, meaning we could rapidly increase its availability to advance its benefits and third, natural gas is exportable, an especially important factor that I will expand on later. Turning to Slide 7, I want to dive a bit deeper into cost and reliability. Natural gas provides the lowest cost form of reliable energy. As the chart on the left demonstrates, natural gas fire generation has a cost roughly half that of average non dispatchable power sources. While cost is obviously important in addressing the energy needs of a world with a net deficit in energy, reliability is also coming into more focus as of late.
As we increase our leverage on non dispatchable power sources, the volatility of energy grids will inherently increase. To make renewables as effective as they are intended to be, they need to be supported by an environmentally preferable baseload and in the times of intermittency backfilled similarly. We've seen countries and states try to limit traditional base loads and an all in approach on renewables before, and those efforts have consistently resulted in both higher electricity costs and either reduced reliability or backfilling by more emissions intensive power sources. Alternatively, as Slide 8 demonstrates, prioritization of low emissions natural gas as a base load can have a meaningful impact on achieving our climate goals. As the shale era unlocked significant natural gas resources, coal consumption was reduced and renewables were able to be supported.
From 2,007 to 2020, natural gas grew as a source of power generation by 20%, greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 25%, positioning the United States to be the only OECD country on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. As an exportable energy source, the United States has both the ability and responsibility to expand on this performance on a world stage. The United States is fortunate to be among the minority of countries that have an abundance of energy resources. These resources can be used to supply countries that are in an energy deficit as well as to replace the consumption of more emissions intensive energy sources globally. And there is a compelling opportunity for natural gas to replace carbon intensive energy sources globally.
As Slide 9 highlights, over onethree of global power in 2019 was generated using coal. In China alone, there are nearly a quarter 1000000 megawatts of coal fired power generation projects in various stages of construction today. This translates 23 Bcf per day of gas demand and 370,000,000 fewer tons of CO2 emissions per year. These represent meaningful opportunities for the United States to influence climate change on a global level. So if natural gas is the solution, where should we be looking to source the most sustainable production?
Slide 10 gives us that answer. As you can see from the chart on the left of the slide, EQT has an emissions intensity that is materially lower than most major producing countries and roughly half that of Russia, the world's 2nd largest natural gas producer. This should not be surprising to anyone. 1st, whereas a number of the countries listed have their oil and gas operations nationalized, we are accountable to our shareholders. If we aren't up to the job, they will demand change.
2nd, the United States and states like Pennsylvania have some of the most stringent environmental reporting standards. Taken together, you have the combination of high expectations and accountability that do not exist among most oil and gas producing nations. The net result of which is an industry that has adapted its production methods to generate the same hydrocarbons at a fraction of the emissions. This is not going unnoticed. Downstream sectors seeking to decarbonize are increasingly turning to U.
S. Natural gas, in part supporting the significant traction we are seeing in the market for differentiated or responsibly sourced gas. And this is the process, not only taking global market share for more emission intensive energy sources, but also taking market share from more emissions intensive producers. It's about incentivizing the optimization of our energy choices to meet our climate goals, and a key strategy of our company is to position EQT to lead in a world that values differentiation. On slide 11, you will see the driving force behind our evolution, our workforce.
EQT's engaged, values driven workforce is driving ESG excellence. We highlight what we've already done here at EQT in just the last 2 years in this regard. First, as you'll see in the bottom left chart, between 2018 2020, we had a step change in employee engagement, resulting in EQT being named a national top workplace in 2021. Over the same period, we cut our combustion emissions roughly in half while maintaining flat production, primarily as a result of implementing our modern operating model. When you combine the productivity of our assets, our engaged and purpose driven workforce, our combo development strategy and our commitment to responsible production techniques, you get the chart on the bottom right of Slide 11, which shows our combustion emissions being a fraction of others in the industry, and we have a great opportunity to build on this success.
Moving on to Slide 12, I will highlight our announced goals, which are as follows: 1, net 0 buyer before 2025 2, reducing greenhouse gas emissions intensity by approximately 70% by or before 2025 and 3, reducing methane emissions intensity by approximately 65% by or before 2025. Slide 13 provides context on our goals. While industry is setting aggressive targets, EQT is leading, as demonstrated by our peer leading annualized GHG emissions reduction percentage. Our methane intensity target of 0.02% is oneten the intensity of the 2025 target of the oil and gas climate initiative, and our GHG emission targets is about onesixteen the average for the oil and gas industry. And as a result, meeting our net zero goal would make us one of, if not the 1st major producer to reach net 0 on a Scope 1 and 2 basis.
But this is not the finish line. We are in an enviable position on our journey to net 0. And as mentioned earlier, we've already done a lot of work to build on this position, in particular, on the combustion side of things. While combustion emissions are the largest category of emissions in the upstream space, the next most impactful aside from flaring, which we do not do, is attributable to a single piece of equipment, natural gas powered pneumatics. Unlike combustion, which is activity driven, pneumatics are principally a result of scale.
The more wells you have, the more pneumatics you have in service. When we started diving deeply into our emissions footprint after stepping into the company, we found that natural gas pneumatics were the source of a majority of our GHG emissions in substantially all of our methane emissions, and they are replaceable. We have over 8,000 pneumatics, and the industry has nearly 1,000,000 in use today. For us, the cost of replacement is minimal, less than $20,000,000 and we are aiming to have all 8,000 of these replaced by 2023. This effort will translate and resulting and resulting efficiencies, our transition to exclusively using electric frac crews and our efforts to maximize uptime, completing this replacement program will put us substantially on our way to meeting our emissions intensity reduction targets.
What will be left is around 300,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year that are difficult to abate under current technologies. Our 2025 net zero target assumes that these remaining emissions are countered by internally generated carbon offsets. Given the short timeline, we're looking at opportunities that are readily accessible and in which we feel we have core competencies, primarily land based carbon management. That includes things like afforestation and modern farming techniques. EQT has over 100,000 landowner partners with an acreage footprint of approximately 1,800,000 acres in rural Appalachia.
If we can convert opportunities on as little as 3% of our total footprint, we'll exceed our offset needs. And we see this as another low dollar per ton offset opportunity for us. And honestly, the ramp up in our offset generation efforts is the true governor on the timing of our net zero achievement. Before we leave this slide, I want to point you to the chart on the bottom left. From 2018 to 2020, EQT reduces greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 30%, which is greater than roughly half of the publicly announced multiyear targets of industry peers, and that was before making a net zero commitment.
We are committed to leading efforts in methane management. Turning to Slide 14. Reducing global methane emissions is particularly critical to achieving our climate goals. As we are all aware, methane emissions have an outsized impact on global warming. However, less talked about, but equally critical is that methane has a half life of only 9 years, whereas carbon dioxide is estimated at over 100 years.
What this means is that methane emission reductions represent a significant opportunity for our actions today to result in real changes in the near term as we are only fighting methane emissions from the previous decade, not century. That is why just last week, we announced that we have joined the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership 2.0. By doing so, we are committing to fostering a methane detection monitoring and reporting regime that moves beyond desktop emissions estimates to one that harnesses the latest monitoring technologies. And it is why we are prioritizing elimination of our natural gas pneumatics to achieve rapid reductions in methane emissions, something that can be replicated to drive improvement in other warrant methane intensive basins. Now that we've covered how we are optimizing our existing assets to minimize our associated emissions, I'd like to talk about the energy transition to a low carbon future.
In particular, I'd like to discuss how our corporate strategy has evolved to position EQT to participate and excel in the future and extend our ability to generate sustainable shareholder value. We have entered the sustainable shale era. This era values free cash flow generation, balance sheet strength, net zero targets and returning capital to our shareholders. These concepts are firmly embedded in our 3 corporate strategies outlined on Slide 15, evolve, consolidate and new ventures. The goal of our evolve strategy is to realize the full potential of our assets.
A clear shareholder mandate for executing on this strategy is the principal reason why I am in this role I am in today. And the effectiveness of our efforts can be seen in our operational and financial outputs, where we've cut both development costs and emissions by 30%. Successful execution of this strategy will maximize the free cash flow generation of our assets. Maximizing the profitability of EQT is a key driver that is maximizing the sustainability of EQT. In addition to creating a more sustainable business, a key output of our evolve strategy is differentiation, which leads us into our 2nd corporate strategy, consolidate.
This concept is fairly straightforward. It's about leveraging our modern operating model on a broader set of assets to create meaningful value for our shareholders and generate meaningful ESG accretion for all stakeholders. Successful execution of this strategy requires a disciplined approach to ensure that we are only transacting on opportunities that are accretive to our free cash flow per share and NAV per share metrics, while also strengthening our balance sheet. We've seen the strategy work to date with recent acquisitions having checked all the boxes of our acquisition criteria. Not only do successful acquisitions drive profitability, itself a requirement for sustainability, it also allows us to leverage our differentiated operating model on a larger set of assets to maximize emissions reductions.
Our consolidation strategy has an important strategic offshoot as well and that's scale, which feeds our 3rd corporate strategy, new ventures. Our new venture strategy will leverage EQT's scale, in particular its asset scale as the largest producer of low intensity natural gas to forge new paths and open new markets to achieve sustainable growth, enabling greater free cash flow and NAV per share generation for EQT shareholders. Our scale will afford us the ability to explore meaningful opportunities without gravitating away from our return of capital commitments to shareholders. To that end, our Board has recently approved budget of $75,000,000 to be spent over the next 5 years for ESG and new venture opportunities. This seed capital will allow us to initiate a pilot program to interesting opportunities.
Pending the success of these pilots, we will have a clearer view on profitability of each and be positioned to intelligently finance any follow on efforts in a way that allows us to protect our robust free cash flow profile and commitment to returning capital to our shareholders. Successful execution of the strategy will require a guided approach, staying tethered to our core principles outlined in Slide 16. We will continue to be diligent stewards of capital in this regard, focusing on opportunities adjacencies that leverage our assets, skill sets and our relationships that present meaningful scale and growth opportunity that deploy proven technology and opportunities that improve our ESG reputation. New ventures are not new to us. At Rice Energy, we were generally viewed as being ahead of the industry in the application of technologies.
Between the sale of Rice Energy and my appointment as CEO, family established a fund that invested in energy transition opportunities. When you combine our core competencies with the asset base of EQT, things get exciting. 2 areas that are particularly exciting natural gas adjacencies are hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. Unlike many other transition opportunities, blue hydrogen is not an area that needs a technological breakthrough. The technology exists, but what doesn't exist is the end market and consistent pricing.
Our regionalized hydrogen hub in Appalachia makes a ton of sense. Given the proximity of low emissions natural gas, potential demand from otherwise tough to de carbonized industries and sequestration opportunities. Setting the stage for this opportunity will take time, but it can be done in a way that requires limited capital until the market manifests. On top of all this, it unlocks the opportunity for carbon capture and storage at scale, something we believe can be applied across our asset platform. We've been working behind the scenes with industry partners and regulators to start framing out the opportunity, and we look forward to continuing to make progress in this regard over time.
But the opportunity is significant, and we're excited to push things forward. To conclude, I'd like to take a moment to thank our stakeholders for the trust you've placed in us and our employees for the efforts they've made to turn our vision into a reality over the last couple of years, growing the sustainability of EQT. We are an exciting and important inflection point for our company, and we look forward to continuing to deliver on our mission to be the operator of choice for all of our stakeholders. With that, I would like to turn the call back to the operator for Q and A.
Your first question comes from Nitin Kumar from Wells Fargo.
Hi, good morning. I'm sorry. Good morning, Tobey and team. Toby, first of all, let me congratulate you. I think this is a very interesting and important presentation, not only for the company, but for the sector.
My first question is maybe looking a little bit at current than the past, but you talked about export demand and how natural gas plays a role in global energy supply. Can you talk about the infrastructure? You have the molecules to produce, can you talk a little bit about the infrastructure around you and in the U. S. And what would be required on that front?
Yes. So specifically talking about exportability, talking about LNG and we're seeing a pretty significant investment that's already been made in the United States, and we do see those investments continuing. When you think about the opportunity, what does it take for the world to receive the LNG? The regasification infrastructure is relatively minor when you think about the cost to actually build the LNG facilities. So to frame this up, when you look at the opportunity that we called out on one of our slides was looking at what would it take to how much demand would be created from retiring all the new coal fired generation in China.
But when you look at what would it take what's the opportunity if we replaced all of the coal around the world, that would translate to about 175 Bcf a day of natural gas demand. So it's a very large opportunity set for natural gas. And so the regasification is a pretty low bar to get into, and then it's really just looking at the amount of pipelines and infrastructure that's needed to allow these countries to benefit from reliably produced reliable low cost, low emissions natural gas. I'd say the only other factor I'd put in on the infrastructure side is just looking at where this where the population densities are of these international countries sorry, of the countries would be. I mean, a lot of this demand is needed sort of near the coast.
So, the amount of pipeline infrastructure, while it could be significant, is it would be pretty impactful.
Yes. I guess I was also getting at as you know, MVP seems like it's a 2022 event, but seems like there's a pushback in development of more infrastructure, just get Marcellus gas out to the coast or wherever it is. I guess the second part of my question is on which would piqued my interest is the future. You talked about your new ventures and your RSG. Maybe sticking with RSG for a second, have you framed out the opportunity there, maybe just in terms of the uplift that you can expect on pricing, are you seeing more utilities or users coming to the market for that?
Just your thoughts around that.
Yes. Hi, this is Dave Pani. So yes, RSV is in its early stages. We have done a couple of transactions already with a premium. I would just say, we are in a very early price discovery of RHD And what we're finding is the end users of gas, both domestic and global, are very interested.
We've been getting a lot of inbounds on it. And so I would imagine that over time, the value of that RFP is going to go up. And here's a simple calculation you should think about. What is the delta between our gas on a Scope 1, Scope 2 and the average U. S.
Gas and their average global gas, we give you that emissions intensity number in our slide deck. Right now, we're onetenth the emissions intensity of the U. S. That number is going to get better and the delta is going to get wider. And so you're going to take the tons that you effectively are saving by taking our gas and then you're going to multiply it by the price of carbon, which right now there's not a U.
S. Trading scheme. There is RGGI that trades at $8 a ton. There is California that trades at $19 and then there is Europe that trades, we call it $50 $60 and rising. So you can do the math and you get to imagine over time as carbon prices go up, the value of our RFP is going to go up as well.
Great. And I am going to sneak in one more guys, but just on the new venture, so you mentioned Blue Hydrogen and a few other technologies. But just in terms of your commitment or your company's commitment in terms of capital, why was this the right amount and sort of what is the is this something we should expect annually going forward or is this a one time expense? Just trying to figure out where the free cash flow is being directed.
Yes. So the $75,000,000 is set to be spent over the next 5 years. And great question on is that the right amount? And we've looked at the opportunities in front of us. And given where we're at and what we're trying to do is we're trying to execute pilots and this is a sufficient amount of dollars needed for us to get through these pilots.
What we're ultimately trying to do with these pilots is understand the feasibility of the technology and to to fill in and get a little bit more confidence in some of our assumptions. And at the end of the day, we're looking with these pilots for opportunities. I mean, we're looking for sustainable value creation. And sustainable does not just mean more environmentally friendly, sustainable means profitable. The feasibility of those the feasibility of those things and be able to come back and find us these appropriately.
I think the other thing I would say is the efforts Dave and team are making on RSG and creating a market for RSG, that incremental value that we bring that we can bring in from RSG, that could be a financing mechanism for some of the new venture projects post pilot. And that's really exciting when you think about it. This could be an opportunity for us for our customers with the premium with ROCE, they know that, that's going into more sustainable businesses that would our new ventures process ultimately will decarbonize the natural gas that we produce, which gives our customers another option to lower their carbon footprint, and it could really set up a really neat virtuous cycle. So the $75,000,000 will get us started, and we're looking forward to reporting on progress in the future.
Your next question comes from Brian Singer from Goldman Sachs.
Thank you. Good morning.
Good morning. Good morning.
I wanted to see if
you could talk a little bit more on the carbon offsets. Obviously, a very aggressive unique goal of getting to net 0 by 2025 beyond the emissions intensity reductions that you're planning. Can you talk a bit more about the use of carbon offsets and the verification behind that and the how and the openness about where those offsets are coming from you plan to have to the market?
Yes, sure, Brian. This is Will Jordan. So as Toby said, we're really looking into a couple of areas in particular that we think are kind of core competencies that we can build on both from our asset base and our relationships and that's afforestation and modern farm management. I think one I'd just note to your point on it being a short timeline, these offsets are really a bridge for us to get to the net zero target, right? And really pivot and start leaning in on the activities that are going to drive meaningful change on Scope 3.
And that's the new venture side. So when we're thinking about that, we have to have things that are readily available. On the verification side, we're obviously involved with kind of understanding VERA and the other certifies out there for a forestation and modern land management. But we're not looking to create credits to trade. So we're not trying to get some certification that says we can go out and we can monetize this.
We're purely trying to build the offset. And I think it's important to remember just in general as you're thinking about the offsets and kind of how meaningful this is to us versus peers, we're really operating at a very low unabatable or difficult to abate emissions here in 2 years. It's 300,000. I think our Scope 3 is less than some major Scope 1 emissions. So there's not much wood to chop.
Great. Thank you. And then my follow-up goes on the new ventures points and you talked about core competency and the pilot projects that you're planning. Can you talk about how you determine whether you have core competency when it comes to hydrogen and carbon capture? And then also, when you think about the net that you plan to cast, how wide do you think that is above and beyond the reducing your own emissions and emissions intensity, how wide a net in terms of looking for regional sources of anthropogenic CO2 are you planning to cast?
Yes, great question. I think our search for opportunities in energy transition starts by looking at what do we have and that really starts with what does our asset base afford us to do. We have a low cost molecule, methane, and we think that we can convert that into a decarbonized energy storm, which is hydrogen. From a competency perspective on that process, that's really where leaning in on leveraging proven technology matters. So we're leveraging technology to make blue hydrogen that already exists.
It's proven. So it's not going to be a technological stretch there. When we look at the carbon capture side of things, this really leverages our understanding of subsurface. And we're thinking about using our some of our depleted wellbores to be to evolve some depleted wellbores and evolve those from methane producers to CO2 injectors. So we have a good understanding of the subsurface.
We've done some reservoir modeling and think that that could be an opportunity where we can do a manufacture hydrogen in a net zero way by leveraging our existing wellbores to inject CO2. And so that's how we think about it. But I mean, I think it's really important that we're leveraging proven technology because that stuff is really that is our core competency. I mean, when we created my first business, it was all about leveraging proven technology. It was taking hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, proven technologies and finding the right application of those technologies.
And if you can do that, you can create a ton of value. And so that and we think with our asset base and the technology that's out there existing in the world today, there could be some interesting opportunities to combine those and create sustainable value for our shareholders.
Your next question is from Noel Parks from Tuohy Brothers. Your line is open.
Good morning. Good morning.
I was curious on the incentives and credits front, could you just talk about what assumptions you're using as far as how those dollars are expected to sort of flow into the industry?
We have new legislation that is going to set aside a lot of
money for these technologies. And I just wonder, as you evaluate the projects that you're going to be piloting, how do you sort of weigh what could work or is implementable today makes sense under the free market versus just the many variables that might lie ahead on what happens with incentives?
Yes. Right now, that's the question is what is the price of carbon going to be without legislation? That's a big question mark. We have seen the voluntary customers wanting to voluntarily pay for a premium product that has a lower CO2 footprint, which is great. But that's a big box that we're looking to get clarity on in our tests, in our pilots when we talk about some of those economic assumptions that would that we need to get clarity on.
It's the cost of carbon and sort of what is that premium that people would be voluntarily willing to pay until any legislation comes in.
And Toby, I'd just add. As far as like what is the regulatory framework as we're looking out to support these kind of new ventures markets and how does that play into our analysis? As Toby mentioned in the prior question, this isn't a technological breakthrough situation for us. This is really more of a market establishment situation. Hydrogen is interesting in particular because it is a pretty regionalized commodity and the opportunity there in Appalachia is really unique.
And so what we've been doing really is getting kind of the Appalachian region participants together to start framing out what a market would look like. And inherently in there is looking at what are the incentives, how do those incentives potentially change as legislation gets adopted and pivot your approach on finding solutions. So we're kind of approaching it not from a how do we scale up the asset, the technology, it's more how do we effectuate the market creation.
Got it. Great. Thanks. That's helpful. And just talking about your current technology, and as far as what you're using and what may be on the horizon for monitoring at the wellbore facility level.
Is that technology pretty much there? Or do you anticipate advances? Is that a significant part of what the $75,000,000 5 year budget is going to look at?
Yes. So we'll definitely be looking at monitoring technologies and there is still room to go. I think if you look at in particular our announcement of joining the OGMP 2.0, What the goal of that organization is, is really to establish a modern technology emissions monitoring framework. And the efforts we've made both with partnerships like that and with our approach to RSG is to try to guide the market towards an incentive structure that promotes adoption of modern monitoring technologies so that we can get beyond just admissions desktop estimates. That's the first step that we have to get to really kind of prove out the positioning of natural gas.
And then over the long term, the RSG shifts, in my opinion at least, it's just from promoting that base load of or that base of technologies being applied across all the industry to really more optimization between who is the best producers and who is the not as good producers.
In other words, how do you trust the measurement? Yes. And how do you trust the measurement, not only who's got the lowest emissions intensity, but how do you trust that measurement so that the end user really can truly value that product?
Yes.
And so that's on sort of the production side of the business. The other technologies we're looking at for to continue to lower the combustion part of our emissions, which is what we identified is the harder to abate. Our Electrify the Oilfield strategy that we've been executing here, the thing that that is the key to eliminating diesel consumption in the field and electrifying equipment. An output of that strategy was the electric frac fleets. And we continue to step out and electrify other pieces of equipment.
And that will continue as well.
Great. Thanks. And then just the last one for me. Could you talk a bit about what you have done today and what you might anticipate doing as far as staffing on your government relations efforts either as a company or within different consortiums?
Yes. So on the government relations front, really, we just have presence on state level and really focused on local as well, so community and county and township representation. We participate in over 37 different associations And organizations like the Marcellus Shale Coalition, AXPC, those types of organizations are really what we lean on to help us on the federal side of things, but that's where we're at right now.
Your next question is from Betty Jiang from Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Thank you. Good morning. I have a follow-up on the LGMP.
You said LGMP is really the gold standard for methane measurement and monitoring. Just curious what is EQT implementing explicitly across your operations to ensure you meet their criteria? And if you can just talk about the planning, what needs to get done, potentially the cost of these technologies to put that in place across the entire operation?
Yes, sure, Betty. This is Will. So I think it's important to note that OGMP is itself going through the process of understanding what they are asking for. So part of this will be a process by which the participating members present plans for how they're going to get to a gold standard, which is a level 4 or 5. Right now, we're at level 3 with our emissions factor monitoring approach.
So it is going to be a little bit of a give and take. I think obviously we're looking at and the goal of OGMP is to look at all of the above as far as what types of technologies are used, both site level technologies like the ones we're using Project Canary, but also things like top down measurement in drones, satellite. These are things that we're obviously looking at and we've already executed on. So it's really an understanding of what the mix is that gets us to the level that we feel is appropriate, both in kind of understanding where our potential for biggest emissions are and kind of honing in on the technology that best captures that.
Got it. No, that's helpful. And then a second question about the responsibly sourced gas. As you talk to your customers, are they coalescing or even requesting a certain type of certification process to verify your gas credentials. Just curious what they're looking for and if there's any standards emerging right now in the market?
Yes. So as you can as you would expect in a kind of early stage market, there is no market practice as far as how do we either pass along a certification, is there a certain standard within as you're aware most likely these certifiers have different levels of certification. So there hasn't been necessarily a prescribed market balance of we need to see a performance above X from a specific certifier. So we're kind of part of the reason why we've leaned in on this is to accelerate those discussions, accelerate that market development, get to the point where we have a trusted framework, trusted certifiers, trusted data, so that we can actually start optimizing our energy sources.
Yes. I'd just say we're having discussions with probably 2 dozen end users of gas. And so as like ESG is being formed and there's a lots of different things out there. There is no one standard right now. I think that's where we're going to be heading and that's why we're doing all these multiple different things to see what is the right field monitoring equipment and process.
So but I think it's all heading in that direction. And it is expected that we're going to be doing it and it is needed, but getting to that one standard will be a little bit of a journey over this next year or so.
Yes. No, I understand. And it's great to have the operator and like yourself leading the efforts and engaging on these conversation and start talking about these standard setting and that's what's going to take to accelerate and move this forward. Thank you very much for the presentation. Very good.
Thanks, everybody.
I am showing no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Toby Weiss for closing remarks. Thank you.
Thanks for everybody's time today. We're really excited about all the work that we've done here at EQT to create a more sustainable organization that's capable of producing sustainable shareholder value creation. And we're really excited about the path we have in front of us and look forward to providing more updates as they come available. Thank you, everybody.