Okay, if everyone could grab a seat. Next up, we have The Williams Companies, one of the premier natural gas infrastructure providers in the U.S. With us from the company, we have Alan Armstrong, President and CEO. Alan, thanks for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you.
Okay. Well, thank you, Mark, and thank you all for joining. Boy, it's really. I would say probably if you asked me three or four years ago if I would ever miss coming to these things, I'd have probably said, "No way." Actually, it is really nice to be back and get to see so many people. The one thing that's changed since four years ago, though, is that I can't read my notes anymore, so I'm gonna have to put some glasses on here. Let me roll right into this. Got quite a bit of material to get through here, and I hope when I get done, you'll agree with me. We really are a unique investment opportunity, even within the space.
A lot of great peers and competitors in the space, but I think Williams really has distinguished itself, and I'm gonna try to convince you of that here with the presentation this morning. First of all, looking at our track record, which I think really does speak for itself here, and even I think in a couple of impressive things here, a 21% CAGR over this long period of time here, beginning in 2018 on our adjusted EPS. An 8% CAGR on our EBITDA, and that's at our midpoint of guidance for this year. You can see the net debt to adjusted EBITDA continuing to make good progress, and that's a big number we were working against initially. We've made great progress on that by continuing to be very disciplined.
Importantly, the kind of coverage that we have against a 6% dividend CAGR, as well, and I think it's a real opportunity for Williams to distinguish itself in terms of being amongst the very large scale players about continuing to have very, strong dividend growth and plenty of coverage, for a very secure dividend. We're really excited about the way we've been able to continue to deliver on this. One other note I would make that I think that's really important is even through 2020, we continued to grow this business. Not very many people can say that, and we as well, that we met really towards the upper end of our guidance that year that was established well before COVID.
An extremely durable business, a growing business, and one with a very healthy balance sheet with a lot of opportunities to continue to accrete value to our shareholders. We're doing that with a very clear and focused strategy that we've had for a long time, very much centered around natural gas. We've been convicted to this for a long time. One of the things that's been very attractive to us and some of the durability is, one, the very high contracted nature of our three major natural gas pipeline systems, as well as the diversity of the various gathering basins that we serve as well. Both of those continue to produce extremely reliable and predictable cash flows.
Looking at why we are so convicted, I would tell you we think natural gas is going to continue to be here for a long time. This might surprise you, but so far this year, we again have hit two three-day average. We measure our peak periods typically in three-day averages, and we met a three-day peak period on Transco both in the wintertime, even though we didn't have an extremely cold winter. We hit a peak period on Transco for a three-day average in the winter, and we also this year hit a peak on the summer load as well. That's of all time. Our demands continue to grow in the business for natural gas, and that really wasn't driven by incremental LNG loads.
That was driven by, obviously, winter heating loads, on the one hand, that continue to grow. We'll talk a little bit about some of those growth opportunities, as well as power generation growth, obviously, for the summertime. I'll remind you right off the bat, because this is such an important concept to think about when you think about Williams. While we're gonna talk a lot today about natural gas demand growth, and when we're talking about that, we tend to talk about it in terms of an annual average market growth. What's really important to understand about Williams is the services that we sell on our transmission systems. We sell in long-term capacity obligations, 15-25 year capacity obligations. We don't really care what the actual volumes move.
When you think about intermittent loads as renewable power generation comes, you might see the demand continuing to come down, but the capacity requirements actually continue to come up. When we have more intermittent power loads, the capacity for the power generation continues to increase. A really important point to ask and think about when you're thinking about an investment in Williams. We also, I would just tell you, we have really got our heads looking to the future as well. We love the position we're on in natural gas right now. We have a very valuable network.
We have irreplaceable infrastructure, and we are gonna make sure that wherever the opportunities exist to help meet a decarbonized future for energy, that we are gonna be smack dab in the middle of it to the degree that we have competitive advantages that can add value, and our teams are doing a fantastic job of staying on top of that. I'll remind you, Williams is a 120-year-old business, and we didn't start off in the natural gas transmission business. We've been in the fiber optics business. We've made a lot of really important moves. Today, I would tell you the future looks very bright again in natural gas, but we are gonna make sure that as new opportunities invest themselves, that we can deliver with high returns and competitive advantages. We're gonna be a part of that.
I don't know where this receiver is. Can you advance that for me? There we go. Thank you. I went on pause myself there for a minute. Sorry about that. Okay, back at it here. I would just say again, you know, it's really remarkable, even at the high prices that people are talking about here on natural gas today, natural gas continues to be a real bargain when it comes to energy use, both at the residential level and at the industrial level, and really continues to be, if you think about comparing it to fuel oil or propane or even electricity, continues to be about a fifth of the cost on a heated BTU in the house, about a fifth of the cost of electricity in most areas.
Even at these higher prices today, it continues to be a real bargain. We think there's gonna be a lot of attention drawn to the fact that natural gas is clean and reliable here as people's utility bills start to really show up. I will tell you that in our discussions with the Biden administration, we are quick to, you know, let them know that while the focus has been on gasoline prices here from the administration for quite some time, where the puck is going is actually gonna be on people's utility bills. The impact of high natural gas prices on power prices is about to poke its head through as well as people's heating bills this summer, and we think there's gonna be a lot of attention drawn to that issue.
We're gonna be quick to say, this is not a lack of natural gas supply. We have plenty of low-cost natural gas supplies here in the U.S. What we don't have is infrastructure, and infrastructure is keeping us from being able to deliver on lower costs for consumers. We are really positioning ourselves to take a real position on this with the administration. Looking at some of the things that will drive demand, and again, this is a good thing to think about if you think about capacity. This is, you can see the power generation, we're actually expecting to decline, and this is actually a WoodMac read of it. We're actually showing power generation declining here on a total consumption level.
That doesn't mean, again, that there isn't quite a bit of incremental demand for natural gas capacity to back that up, and we'll show that a little bit more here. This is on an annual average use or consumption. You can see really the drivers that are expected here are continuing to be LNG exports, Mexican exports. Importantly, this is nobody's really been talking about this much, but if you think about how high the prices are in other manufacturing areas and other petrochemical areas around the world on the backs, they have been relying on natural gas for a lot of that manufacturing, you can imagine that with the U.S.
Having much lower gas prices available, we are gonna bring home a lot of industrial loads here, whether it is for fertilizer production, for anything that is heavy, gas intensive, we're gonna have a real opportunity to continue to bring manufacturing and industrial loads back here to the U.S. because of the price that it's taking. Even if we got enough LNG capacity built out to catch up with the European prices, we're still gonna have a big advantage in terms of both the liquefaction, the transport, and the regasification expenses on that gas. The U.S. is gonna be well-positioned for a long time to grow its industrial base. Obviously, you can see the impact here from LNG that everybody's very well aware of. Williams, I would just tell you, is extremely well-positioned up against this load.
This shows the 20.1 BCF of projects that are either already active or are in the execution mode within the Transco footprint. That's 20.1 against an existing about 13 BCF a day, and then another 20.5 BCF a day that are getting very close to FID. A lot of new capacity coming on. Importantly, all of the approved and proposed U.S. LNG export facilities are located within our Transco pipeline corridor, which is gonna create additional opportunities for expansions on our system.
We're really excited about the way we're gonna be positioned up against this, with both our transmission and our storage infrastructure, being able to deliver that for a long time to come. The other area that's a really big opportunity for us, both in terms of expansions on Transco as well as emissions reductions, is replacing coal within our corridor. You can see here that there's 66 remaining coal plants with about 65 gigawatts of net summer capacity for generation. That would equate to about 10.2 Bcf a day of new transportation capacity. Put that in perspective for you, that's about a 52% increase in the existing Transco capacity, and that's about a 10% increase in the amount of the current U.S. demand. A lot of opportunity.
Well, why would we go replace perfectly good coal plants? I would tell you that is the equivalent, replacing those with gas is the equivalent of taking 30% of the U.S. cars off the road today. Something that we can do economically, something that we have the technology to do, something that we don't have to wait on for a long time, a huge opportunity to continue to replace coal with gas here in the U.S. We think this is a big opportunity, and we certainly are seeing this through our RFPs from our customers, the continued effort to replace these. That is driving some of our pipeline of opportunity on Transco and Gulfstream systems right now.
You know, this is a really interesting picture because note what this says, and there's so much misunderstanding within this space. Note the title of this, U.S. Installed Power Capacity Mix. That's capacity. That is not power generation, total power generation. That is capacity to generate power. You can see that it looks like we've got a whole lot of new power generation on the solar and wind, and we do. That is gonna take a lot of backup because that's total capacity installed. The actual utilization of that averages about 26%. The incremental load from that is either gonna have to come from storage, which you can see is picked up there, or it's gonna have to come from continued natural gas demand.
Right now, people are leaning pretty heavy into that being natural gas in terms of the request for services on our system. I think it's a really important thing to understand when we talk about capacity additions, that that is on a basis that is what the total deliverable capacity of those facilities are. We are in a really strong position in the gas space to help back that up. We think because of that, our pipeline capacity in serving the heavily populated areas is gonna continue to be extremely important for this future of a decarbonized power generation market. On the global side, the U.S. is certainly gonna get called on. We know there's a lot of activity on the LNG side, and so where is all that gas gonna come from?
There is a notion sometimes in Washington that we should restrict LNG exports because we don't have enough supply. That couldn't be further from the truth. We have a tremendous amount of long-term, long-lived supplies below the $5 mark, even below the $4 mark. We have plenty of supplies here in the U.S. Our challenge is infrastructure, period. As we look about where the gas is gonna come from, you can see the Northeast remains by far the largest. The only reason that isn't growing faster than it is on this forecast is because of the lack of infrastructure. This is beginning to catch a lot of attention when people start to look to the future.
You can see the Permian obviously is gonna be an important gas supply for the future here as the flare gas is captured as well as the continued growth in the Permian. As well, this factors in the fact that that field is becoming gassier with the gas-to-oil ratios actually increasing on the older wells there. A lot of incremental gas to come off the Permian. Then you can see the Haynesville, which I will tell you has been carrying the load of things like stopping the Mountain Valley Pipeline and that gas not being available in the short term. The Haynesville growth is really surprising us. I think by the end of the year, it's gonna surprise a lot of people how fast gas supplies have grown in the Haynesville, and that's not gonna be stopping anytime soon.
I'll show you a little bit of how we're positioned there in a moment. This is really where the gas supply is. Again, plenty of long-term gas supplies available in the area, but really the infrastructure is gonna be the key. This is now just focusing in on those three key areas. You can see here the amount of growth, about 3.8 BCF a day in the Marcellus and Utica. I think if MVP gets built and expanded, our Regional Energy Access project, which is about 840 million a day of new capacity, is going very well and is actually before the FERC at their certificate hearing process right now. We should probably hear on that in the next 30-40 days.
That's gone extremely well through the permitting process because most of it is on our existing rights of way. We are seeing some signs of increase coming from that area. You can also see here again the strong growth coming out of the Permian. I will remind you that's oil directed, so it's not gonna be all that sensitive to gas prices one way or the other. But the areas that are sensitive to gas price, the Marcellus, the Utica, and the Haynesville is an area that Williams has extremely focused on, and is very well positioned in. In fact, if you look at the amount of remaining reserves here, getting up on almost 350 Tcf of remaining reserves, that are under $5.
In other words, that can be economically produced at $5. You can see here that the Marcellus, the Utica, and the Haynesville have 86% of the remaining gas reserves here in the U.S. Thankfully, Williams is very well-positioned in that. In fact, 84% of our gathered volumes come out of these three critical basins that are gonna be here for a long time to come, and will continue to serve long after the Haynesville peak that we're seeing. We'll be relying more heavily on the Marcellus and the Utica to keep up with the LNG growth that we're beginning to see occur. Looking at specifically at where Williams is gonna be growing, and this is really exciting to me to see kind of the breadth of growth opportunities that we have.
These aren't. This is not speculative. This is ongoing execution projects. You can see here we have five projects in execution on our transmission systems. The vast majority of that is Transco, and these are sizable transmission expansion projects. Six high return expansion projects in the Deepwater, and really only two of those are we actually spending any incremental capital on. That will amount to here in 2025 doubling our EBITDA that we had in 2021 in the Deepwater. This isn't a whole lot of speculation around this as well. These are proven, developed reserves, and this is a matter of them getting connected into us at this point. We're really excited about what we're gonna see out of here in the Deepwater.
I'll tell you, it continues to grow. That's just what we have today in execution, but the opportunity list out there continues to grow as well. In the Northeast, we have four major expansion projects that are underway. One of those is to connect. We have excess volumes that we can't process at our West Virginia processing complex, and we're in the process of making an interconnect to our 50% owned Blue Racer system. That'll open up some new processing capacity for us in that area, as well as we have a major expansion for Coterra up in Susquehanna, some expansion for Chesapeake and their partners in the Bradford, and a very large project for Encino in the Utica that we're continuing to work on as well.
Really exciting growth going on in the Northeast as well. I would tell you the horse that came fast out of the gate this year on us was the Haynesville. It is growing much faster than we expected, and we are frankly having a really hard time keeping up with the amount of growth because the drilling success is kind of well beyond what everybody expected out of there. There actually is, you know, you haven't heard this term in a while, but there is actually gas curtailed now back behind our gathering systems and actually a lot of our peers as well, because the drilling success has been so big out there. Lots of gas waiting on these expansions to occur in that area.
On looking a little deeper at our transmission business, you can see here that this is the portfolio of projects that we have on our transmission system, and again, about 10 Bcf/d of incremental capacity, and that would be a 52% increase on the nation's largest pipeline. Very significant. I am just continuing to be really surprised about how quickly our team is moving these projects from being an RFP to being a contracted capacity. Again, we have 5 projects that are in execution right now and several more that are gonna be following behind that very quickly. We're having pretty, you know, really good luck on the permitting process.
Almost all of these projects are within our existing corridor, so I don't think anybody in their right mind would try to build a greenfield pipeline these days. But that requires FERC and approval. I think that's kind of, you know, not something I would expect to occur anytime soon. The expansion projects along these existing right of ways allow us to charge a much higher than the regulated cost of service. People always say, "Well, why are you excited about these projects? They're just regulated projects." We are allowed to charge because nobody can force us to expand our system. We are allowed to charge whatever the market will bear for those expansions. This allows us to get much higher rates of return on these expansion projects.
The difficulty of building new pipeline capacity actually accrues to our benefit when it comes to the margin and the pricing that we can establish for our pipeline business. That's not, by the way, that's not a really good thing for our country. I don't sit here and tell you that's real positive for our country, but the fact is, building infrastructure is costing us all as consumers in the nation. Hopefully we'll get that resolved, but for the time being, that is a very positive thing for us from a pricing standpoint. If you look at what we're doing on New Energy Ventures, I would tell you a lot of exciting work going on.
Probably the biggest challenge, you know, this is an interesting thing. You know, you wouldn't really think about maybe, but one of the interesting things for us is that we're challenged with keeping our talent, our human resource talent within the company focused on the old business, because particularly a lot of the younger population in the company wanna go work on the new energy venture stuff because it's new and exciting. That's probably one of our biggest challenges, is keeping our focus tight to those things that we can add a competitive advantage. We're not gonna go out and compete on competitive merchant solar arrays. We're not gonna go out in the business and compete on areas where we don't have a very significant competitive advantage.
Even with that restriction, we have a lot of opportunities. One of the areas that you're gonna be seeing some press here in the near, not too distant future is on NextGen Gas. This is a certification process to where we're using Context Labs and working with some of our key producers to be able to actually certify their gas all the way from the wellhead all the way into where we deliver into the utilities. We're gonna be able to certify that as very low gas with third-party certification, not with our own certification, but with third-party certification. We're actually using our Sequent Energy marketing team to actually buy that gas and then find premium markets for that gas based on that certification.
You'll hear some more about that in the not too distant future, but we're really excited about the way that project is going. This is our Wellhead to Water strategy, and very focused today on the Haynesville. We hope to expand that to the Northeast, but today it's very focused on the Haynesville. You can see we have today about 4 Bcf a day of gathering now in the Haynesville, and that's growing rapidly. We intend to be able to make that delivered onto ship in a next gen certified gas. We are working with, again, a lot of excited customers on that effort as well. Really have all of the things coming together on this, including a carbon capture project that we've announced that would be off the tail end of our treater for LEG.
Obviously, the 45Q announcement and the Inflation Reduction Act is a really nice tailwinds for that project as well. If you look and see, this is a little more details on that project and what's going on with that. This is a target in service for Q4 of 2024. It does not require the typical permitting process 'cause we're expanding this as a gathering system, and so this does not require the typical permitting process, and it all is within the state of Louisiana. Moving on to the financial strength and flexibility. First of all, another look at kinda what's driving the capital allocation opportunities that we have right now, which is decreasing CapEx, improving balance sheet, and a fast-growing adjusted EBITDA.
You can see that this is moving up. One of the things you'll notice there in 2022 is the $2 billion of total capital. Of course, that has also got the emission reduction project, which is an added expense on our Transco system that will go into the rate base. A lot of times when you hear the term maintenance capital as an investor, that's a bad thing because that's just money out the door maintaining facilities. In Williams' case, a lot of our maintenance capital actually goes to increase our rate base, just like a utility, and it gives us additional earnings power.
For us, once we get above about the $300-$400 million maintenance capital, the remainder of that maintenance capital typically goes towards growing our rate base. This is our capital allocation priorities. I'm gonna skip over this 'cause I'm about to run out of time. Nothing new on this sheet. What is new, and I'm really happy to show you, is we have nothing to apologize for when it comes to how we've been investing our capital. This is a look back over the last four years, and this is something we constantly are required by our board to keep in front of them. This is the return on invested capital that we've produced over this period. You can see a 21.4% return on invested capital. That's working against decline.
That's not just taking the good parts of our business. That's working across any areas that we have in decline and actually developing in on top of that. That's total incremental EBITDA that we've grown on about $8 billion worth of capital. Really excited to be posting these kinda numbers. I will tell you, the future looks like we've got more of the same of this kind of return on our projects. The Inflation Reduction Act, I would tell you, overall is good for us. We are already well below the methane intensity level, so the methane fee is not going to be impacting us. On the book minimum tax, we expect to not be a cash taxpayer for 2023.
Some of the 45Q tax credits and some of the tax credits for the hydrogen hubs, we are well positioned to take advantage of. Net net is actually a good thing for us. We wish that it would have come with better permitting reform language, but we'll. The jury's still out in terms of whether that will occur or not. Overall, I hope you agree with me, Williams is a unique investment opportunity. We've got the financial strength and stability, we've got tremendous line of sight to growth that we're currently executing on, and we are focused on the very long-term shareholder value through the way that we both look to today's opportunities and to tomorrow's opportunities. We're gonna be running a business that's sustainable.
We are on our way to having a 56% reduction in our carbon emissions from our business between 2005 and 2031. Sorry, 2030. We are well on our way to doing that, and the organization is excited about being able to deliver on that promise. With that, I'm done, and I don't know if we have any time for questions, Mark.
Yeah, I think we're up on.
Okay
... time. Thank you everyone for coming. Thank you, Alan, for joining us today.