Good morning, welcome to Western Midstream's fourth quarter 2025 fireside chat with our Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President, Kristen Schultz. Kristen, can you give us an overview of our fourth quarter and full year 2025 performance?
Yes, Daniel. If you take a look at fourth quarter, our Q4 Adjusted EBITDA came out to $636 million. However, that included the negative revenue recognition adjustments of close to $30 million. Without that adjustment, we would have been right around $665 million for Q4. From a throughput perspective, our gas decreased just a little bit, oil slight decrease, and then water obviously went up as we integrated the Aris assets. On the gas side, we've talked a lot about negative prices at Waha, and we saw some of that come through a little bit in Q4 as some of our private producers curtailed some of their volumes onto the system. For full year 2025, though, we finished above the midpoint of guidance at $2.48 billion.
Our CapEx was right in line with guidance at $722 million, which included CapEx related to the Aris assets too, and our Free Cash Flow was above the high end of guidance as well, at $1.53 billion. Distributions in line with the guidance that we gave. We saw throughput increase across all three products in the portfolio. Very good performance out of the DJ, great performance out of the Delaware Basin in particular. A really strong year in 2025, and seeing some of the cost-cutting efforts that we implemented in the second quarter of 2025 come through when you're looking at Adjusted EBITDA and then specifically OpEx. We also were successful in deploying our organic and inorganic growth strategies that we have. We sanctioned Pathfinder in 2025.
We sanctioned North Loving II in 2025, and then finally, we completed the acquisition of Aris, which is making us one of the largest water solution providers in the Delaware Basin.
WES has been talking a lot about efficiency initiatives and cost-saving strategies over the past few quarters. Can you give us an update on the progress the company has made in 2025 and the partnership's plans for 2026?
For WES, really proud of the efforts of all of our employees over the past year. As I mentioned previously, during the second quarter of 2025, we implemented a program here focused on cost-cutting and really just zero-basing the activities that we do, making sure we make them as simple as possible and reducing cost overall in the portfolio, whether that was our operations and maintenance cost or our general administrative cost. We even did some work on the capital side, zero-basing certain designs that we have and making them more efficient and more cost-competitive. If you look at our third quarter 2025 O&M relative to third quarter 2024 O&M, you'll see that decreased by 8% year-over-year.
If we look at 4th quarter compared to 2024 relative to 2025, you'll see another decrease of 12% year-over-year if we exclude Aris. You're really seeing those cost-cutting efforts actually come to fruition, and that's with increasing utility costs on top of it. Really proud of the team there. You're gonna see that continue into 2026 as well. In fact, when we look at O&M year-over-year, we're obviously including a full year of Aris in that compared to 2024, and we still expect O&M to only be up about 10%-15%, which is significantly below what the two standalone companies would have been on a pro forma basis.
From a G&A perspective, once you exclude the Aris costs that we had, transaction costs in the fourth quarter, G&A is relatively flat in 2025 compared to 2024. We expect the exact same thing in 2026. In fact, we kept really the growth functions within Aris. The commercial function and the Beneficial Reuse function, we're putting more money towards Beneficial Reuse in 2026, and we're still keeping G&A flat, which is just showing how the legacy business is continuing to cut cost out of that overhead as well.
Turning to 2026, can you give us an overview of the 2026 guidance WES published?
Adjusted EBITDA guidance range is $2.5 billion-$2.7 billion. That represents a growth of approximately 5% at the midpoint. We use our producers' forecast to come up with our throughput expectations for the year, and so what we saw really in the last few months of the year and into the beginning of this year has been a pullback in some of those forecasts. We're expecting declines in activity in the Powder River and the DJ. We talked about that last year some, but I think that's a little bit more pronounced than originally thought, and then also have some changes in activity within the Delaware Basin, too, and so it's impacting that throughput that we were expecting for 2026.
It's still in line with all the messaging that we had around wanting to grow Adjusted EBITDA by that mid-single digits rate. Additionally, the offset there is capital. Previously said, we thought we would be at least $1.1 billion. Our midpoint is now $925 million, you can really see that as a GMP, we're able to push and pull on the capital side of things in order to help manage Free Cash Flow when we are getting a little bit more of a volatile environment. From a distribution perspective, we're expecting at least $3.70 per unit. That includes an increase of $0.91 per unit to $0.93 per unit that we expect to recommend to the board, starting with the first quarter distribution.
It's a little bit over 2% on distribution increase, which is also in line with our messaging around a mid to low single-digit increase in the distribution. We have talked a lot about coverage and wanting to increase coverage naturally over time, and so as we're growing Adjusted EBITDA by 5%, and we're trailing that distribution, right around 2%, it'll help with that natural growth of Distribution Coverage.
... With lower activity levels tied to updated producer forecasts, do you see a change in strategy at WES?
No, we're not expecting to change our strategy. If you look at what we did in 2025 from more a growth perspective, both organic and inorganic, we expect to use the same playbook in 2026 and beyond in order to continue to grow the business. We've kept leverage low for a reason. It allows us to go out and go after these growth opportunities, and it allows us to make sure that our distribution is safe and in check as well. No change to the strategy, no change to any of the prior messaging around Adjusted EBITDA growth or distribution growth. That's all still intact.
In fact, I think if you take a look at our guidance for 2026, what it shows is that we've put the business into a great place over the years, and as we do see a little bit of a downturn or from producers' forecast, what is expected to be a downturn in 2026, we're able to ride through that with no issues at all.
We saw that you're guiding to Distributable Cash Flow. Is Free Cash Flow still an important metric for WES?
Yes, Free Cash Flow is still a very important metric for us. It is very much in our discussions and our strategy decision-making here. You know, we've talked about Free Cash Flow in the prepared remarks during the earnings call, said that would be roughly between $900 million and $1.1 billion, inclusive of what is a deliberately heavy capital year with sizable growth projects embedded in it. We agree that Free Cash Flow is a critical metric. We look at it when we're thinking about capital allocation decisions, just like leverage. In fact, our leverage is one of the lowest in all of the peer group. If you look at our DCF calculation that we do, it gives you a clean view of what it would cost us to really keep the business just running in a true downturn type of situation.
This is exactly what DCF is supposed to be doing, and we're gonna provide both metrics just to provide more transparency to people, but they're both important metrics, both of which we look at, both of which we think through when we're talking about capital allocation. As previously mentioned, we're focused on increasing the distribution coverage, and so when we look at 2026, the same actions that we took in 2025 around organic and inorganic growth, continued cost discipline, and cost cutting, those are all going to be the same type of actions you're going to be seeing from us in 2026.
Kristen, thank you for joining us today. For our listeners, if you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Our contact information is located in the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at westernmidstream.com.