Good morning, everyone. My name is Jeremy Tonet, and I cover the utilities and midstream spaces for J.P. Morgan Equity Research. In my position, I think we see an interesting vantage point for natural gas that's somewhat underappreciated in the market. Just seeing natural gas as key, as an affordable solution to the intermittency of renewables as energy evolution continues. With that, we're very excited to have Williams present here, really at the forefront of all these matters, is natural gas as a key solution going forward. I'm very happy to excite Alan Armstrong, CEO of Williams.
Great. Thank you, Jeremy. Good morning, everyone. Really appreciate you joining us this morning. I am gonna start off here on, really talking a little bit about natural gas and what's going on in that space, and some really interesting distinctions that I'm gonna try to draw for you this morning around the distinction between capacity for natural gas versus average annual use. If you see forecasts, you always see forecasts from, folks that always will show an average annual use of natural gas. Never will you really see much focus on peak day, but the business we're in and what we sell is capacity, which is on peak day, and we get paid on peak day. We don't get paid on how much average annual gas moves on our system, on our big transmission systems.
We get paid for reserve capacity. We get paid that every day. In fact, if you look at the variance on our pipelines, it's usually based on how many days there are in the quarter, more than about anything, because we get paid the same amount, based on the capacity that's reserved on our systems. I'm gonna try to really draw some distinction on that today. Just to remind people, if you really are focused on reducing emissions today, and you're not caught up with labeling, and you're not caught up with what is popular in the space today, natural gas is one of the few things that we can go and attack right here, right now and reduce emissions, and we can do it on what I call an economically sustainable basis as well.
In other words, one that the rest of the world can adopt without requiring subsidies and government grants. We can do all we want to here in the U.S., but if we're not tackling the issue of emissions globally, we're really not gonna make much difference. Michael Cembalest presentation, I know you all just saw that, always really reminds people what a small drop in the bucket we are around the world. The opportunity to reduce emissions around the world is very impressive, as well as the amount of coal that we still have that we're consuming here in the U.S. Again, we can do that on an economically sustainable basis.
One of the things that you're gonna see today is that our entrance really is in backing up renewables, and we're seeing it more and more in terms of the U.S. here. As more renewables go on, our peak days continue to go on, I think as we get into electrification load, we actually could see our peak days actually shift into the summer as well. We were really interested to see a study that McKinsey will be rolling out here in the near future that looks at what the actual growth in peak day power demand. This is a study of the PJM market, which we're one of the big suppliers into the PJM power grid on natural gas.
This looks at if the state mandates for renewables installation gets met, how much backup power would be required for this electrification? This is kind of a big push of electrification and a big push of renewables, and then they assume that the only cost effective way to make that happen would be on utilizing natural gas capacity. They study the alternatives, and this is what they've come up with as the peak day increase in natural gas demand for, again, what we sell. The actual average, even with this kind of growth in peak day, the actual annual average consumption of natural gas through 2040 under this study actually declines a little bit, but this peak day actually increases this much.
This really bodes well for our systems and for the storage capability and the load-following capability of big transmission systems, like Williams, gets to handle. We've actually already seen it. You look at 2019-2022, we saw an 85% increase in renewables in both our Northwest Pipeline market and our Transco market, but we saw a 9% and a 14% increase in peak days on our systems on those, and that was not on a weather basis. In other words, that was normalized weather. We're really continuing to see growth in peak day, and we are gonna continue to see that as renewables come on.
If you really, y ou know, I have the pleasure of sitting on the National Infrastructure Council, that is really looking hard at a lot of electrification studies right now. It is really shocking if you look at how much electrification is going on in all kinds of places: airports, port authorities, and the degree of data centers. AI is gonna continue to put a big load on that. More and more electrification continues to come on. The amount of load is really getting to be kind of, almost to the point where people are shaking their heads, and there's no way we're actually going to get there in terms of that much electrification, that much transmission that's going on.
As that happens, I will just tell you from a Williams standpoint, this is a very positive thing for our business because we're going to be there, ready to serve these increases in demand capacity. We are very focused on natural gas. We've been very dedicated to this strategy for quite some time because we do see it as the low-cost, low-carbon fuel that we can actually go tackle emissions with right now. We're going to continue to stick to that strategy. We really like where we are, and it truly should be. If you look at the opportunities to reduce emissions around the world, it truly should be the golden age for natural gas. One of the things, though, that we've got to tackle is we have to tackle methane emissions from this industry.
In fact, I would tell you from Williams perspective, we're supportive of even tighter and tighter regulation on methane emissions because we think it's a very positive thing for our industry. We are working hard on this. In fact, we had two satellites that were on the Orbital Sidekick launch here about two months ago. We will be using those to track emissions, along with other monitoring devices on our own systems. We feed that information into what we call NextGen Gas, which is our work that we've been doing with Context Labs, which we're an owner in Context Labs.
This is blockchain technology, taking all of the various input of emissions, both methane and CO2, and being able to apply it directly to our customers' production, so on the producing side, and being able to certify that gas and sell it into markets. In fact, we've actually had two fairly significant gas sales now done with both Dominion and PSEG, where they're buying certified NextGen Gas and buying it from our upstream customers. We're really excited to see that breakthrough. That is a fully audited process and one that we are very carefully following because we know that we can't have any missteps on that.
We know there's going to be a lot of scrutiny around certification of this kind, we are taking that extremely serious, we truly expect to be the gold standard on that issue. Now, now kind of more into the investment side for Williams. You know, we continue to be really surprised with how high our yield is, given the kind of growth that we've produced over time, given the big runway of growth that we've got out in front of us. We took a look at how we stood within the S&P 500. First of all, we trimmed this back to investment-grade-only companies with $10 billion of market cap. We looked at companies that were responsible, you can see that's really not a very big trimming.
Most of the big S&P 500 companies are very responsible companies and have pretty high markings when it comes to their , ESG rating. Really not a very big trimming of the funnel from that. We looked at, okay, well, who actually has a 10-year record of year-over-year EBITDA growth? That really starts to trim the group. There's not very many people that have that kind of track record of year-over-year growth. We said, okay, well, who has free cash flow yield and dividend yield of greater than 5%? As you can see, there are not very many that meet all of those requirements of continuous proven track record of growth, as well as continuing to have a yield that's above 5%.
I thought this was a really interesting picture of how we stand today in the market. One of the things that right now, I would tell you, I think, has got continued to put pressure on us this last year, is people's concern about how we stand up against commodity price swings. You'll see in our appendix of materials, you'll see the two things that correlate to our EBITDA are our contracted capacity on our pipelines and our gathering volumes. Those are the two things. If you add those together, that correlates very closely to what our EBITDA looks like over time. You can see in this picture, gas price there, swinging around pretty violently from 2022-20 23.
You can see here, at our guidance, midpoint of guidance for 2023 now, really continued growth, even despite a very low gas price in the market. We have tried over and over and over to tell people that gas prices are not a big driver of our earnings. We do have some exposure through assets that we picked up. The last time we had a gas price decline in 2020, we picked up a couple of properties through bankruptcy that have turned out to be a real positive thing for us. Even that is very small relative to our overall portfolio, and has proven to be something we've been able to take the cash flow from and reinvest in.
In addition, though, to kind of the track record that we've produced and the fact that we've been able to stave off low commodity prices plenty in the past, and really not have much impact from that. This is a picture of the kind of projects that we have going forward, and you can see here a very long list of projects and developments. I'm going to go through these a little bit more in just a moment, but we've continued to produce this 5%-7% EBITDA growth over a long period of time. We've actually been outperforming that. If you look back on a five year CAGR, we're at an 8.5% number, but we think 5%-7% is the right long term planning number as you think about Williams.
Plenty of growth going on in our business and a lot of acquisitions that have proved out very well for us. Effectively, we took some of the windfalls from the EMP cash flows last year and reinvested that into durable, long-term infrastructure plays that we're really excited about right now. You can see here the look on Transco now and the kind of growth that we've got going on a lot of these Transco projects, and the amount of capacity that we've got ramping into 2025. This is on an average annual. This isn't an end of year. This is taking the total annual average capacity for the year. And really kind of a good way to look at it from a cash flow standpoint.
You can see here that we really see a big ramp up here in 2025, as a lot of these big projects come on service. We're very fortunate that step up that you see into, 2022- 2023. You might look at that and go: "Well, that doesn't look very big. Don't you have half of REA coming on this year?" The answer is yes, but again, this is only on an average annual basis, and so you're only getting a month of half of Regional Energy Access coming on in here. Then you see that step up in 2024, as that project gets completed, the second half of that project gets completed in 2024.
A lot of about seven new projects coming online in at the end of 2024 that show up big in 2025 for us. A lot of incremental capacity coming on our system. In the Deepwater Gulf of Mexico, also 2025 will be a big year for us. You can see here, these five big actually six big projects now that will more than double our EBITDA in this area coming into 2025. These projects are going extremely well. In fact, all of the offshore work now, all of the offshore pipe installation work on well is all complete. That's really was the big money on that project, and that's all installed. The remaining tie-ins will be done to the platform.
Those will be done by the producer, Shell, on as the operator on that Shell and Chevron prospect well. That project's going extremely well. Again, our work is ahead of schedule and below budget at this point. You also see there the Shenandoah project. That also is a project that has capital, and I think we're about 40% complete on that project to date in terms of our work to be done on that project. The rest of these projects do not have CapEx, which are my favorite kind of projects. We're really excited. This is where we have excess capacity in the area, and the producer is actually installing the tie-in and the work to add those volumes to our system.
Some of those are very large, like Chevron's Ballymore project is a very large play, and we gather both the oil and the gas on that Ballymore project. You can also see there, Taggart actually came in service earlier than we were expecting, and it's actually performing extremely well. That project came on right at the end of the first quarter. A lot of growth continuing in our Deepwater business as well. This is the picture of the acquisitions that we've done in 2022, and you can see here, NorTex, which is a storage project expansion. I'm telling you, we kinda called this a little bit early, that we got into the storage business. Prices and value of storage facilities have come up pretty dramatically since we did this acquisition.
One of the reasons we did this acquisition was that Sequent, which is our gas marketing arm, was actually about a third of the capacity in this facility, and we realized how much more the storage facility could charge us, and they still would pay it. So, we actually noted that and said: "Well, if that's the case, then we ought to be the ones to buy it and raise the rates ourselves." So, this is, again, this is gonna be becoming more and more the play, where you see natural gas playing as a critical backup service for power generation, and particularly for places where you have a lot of wind power, like in West Texas, that affects this market. So this capacity for power generation in this local area becomes extremely important.
In addition to that, the Trace Midstream deal that we did, which also helped anchor our LEG project, and we recently got a big commitment from Chevron that was a complete upside to that project. They added their acreage in the area to the south end of that Trace system that we bought. That's turned into a really big positive for us, and we captured the upside. Finally, the MountainWest project, which we bought at about an 8.5x for fully contracted transmission capacity, serving the MountainWest region, and particularly the Salt Lake City market. We already had, and this was not in, it wasn't even in our upside model. There was an Overthrust expansion that we saw a lot of demand for.
We went out for an open season on that already this year. That's come back. It's been fully subscribed, and we're in the process of finalizing the precedent agreements for that project as well. That is complete upside to that business, and we're really excited to see. We have a number of other opportunities. In this area, there's a number of very large coal plants in the Wyoming market that have served western power markets for a lot of years, and those are being converted over to natural gas-fired power generating facilities, and we will likely be the winner for providing the capacity into those plants as well. A lot of upside coming with these acquisitions we've been doing.
Finally, here on the unlocking value in the Northeast, you can see one of the things that we've been really pushing for a long time now is Mountain Valley Pipeline. You would kinda wonder, why would Williams push for Mountain Valley Pipeline? There's two really important reasons. One, a lot of the acreage upstream is acreage that EQT has, that is all dedicated to us. It was dedicated to us by Chevron when they owned that. Remember, EQT bought all of Chevron's acreage in the Marcellus, that was about 500,000 acres of Chevron acreage. A big portion of that came to us through the EQT transaction, a lot of the gas supplies that will serve MVP, we provide the gathering services on, we're very excited about that.
Secondly, we were in a very tough situation relative to supplies coming into this area. A lot of incremental demand for power generation capacity in this area, and for just general growth in gas service in the North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina markets. Frankly, we didn't have very low-cost expansions in our ability to get gas all the way into that area. Now, with MVP coming on, we have got a lot of very high margin, very high return expansion opportunities to serve, and now we have the supplies to be able to do that. That's been a very positive thing for us.
We're gonna benefit it from the upstream end as well as on the downstream end, to be able to serve a lot of the expansion needs that are coming on in that area. In addition to that, we also, the Regional Energy Access Project, you can see, that's about $830 million a day of new takeaway capacity out of the Susquehanna and Bradford County areas that we serve on the gathering. Not only do we have a great project, fully contracted transmission project that's contracted by the utilities, we also will be able to unlock a lot of gathering volumes from our producers upstream on that as well. All is going extremely well as we continue to deliver in the Northeast.
If you look back to the first quarter of this year, you'll see our volumes were up about 7% in the area, 7.2%, versus Sorry, a basin-wide average of about 1.4%. A big step up from the annual average, and I'm gonna couple of reasons that that's happened, I'll point to you here. One of those is Sequent. When we acquired Sequent a few years ago, this has been a really great investment for us, and I can tell you, I was a little bit skeptical of how well this could be integrated into our business.
One of the primary goals that we set for this team, day one, was we want gas moving out of Marcellus and Utica from our producers, the people we gather the gas for, and we want to make sure that wherever there's capacity held by Sequent, that that capacity gets biased towards our customers, and we're moving our customers' gas out of a constrained area. Because of a lot of the capacity that Sequent holds, we've been able to do that, and that's one of the reasons that you're seeing our volumes way outperform volumes in the area. Really excited about the way that's been going and the work's been going. I can tell you from a integration, I don't think I've seen a better integration of a gas marketing team to an operating company.
I've been around a long time. I've seen that tried a lot of different ways, and I can tell you this is working extremely well for us. They continued to find ways to take risk off of our books in areas and convert that into value. This has gone extremely well. We paid about between the purchase price and the working capital that we put to work, I think we paid about roughly $50 million purchase price, plus about $100 million of working capital. You can see here that our adjusted EBITDA on top of that purchase price, since that has been about $400 million.
Certainly a business that is not the steady, highly predictable cash flows that our business is used to, but they are producing a lot of value, and we've been taking those excess cash flows and investing those in big, durable investments, like we just got through talking about on our acquisitions. Just to close up here, you know, we're really excited the way we're positioned as Williams right now in the natural gas space and serving the incremental capacity that it's gonna take to continue to fuel the opportunities. We still have the ability to take out as much coal within our markets as would take out about 100 million tons of CO2 remaining.
We are extremely well-positioned here, within Williams, to continue to contribute towards emissions reductions, both here and around the world. Our balance sheet strength and stability has been proven. We've continued to improve that. We have plenty of good, strong growth right out in front of us, that we can fund with free cash flow. A great story, a strategy that's turned out very well for us, and one that's gonna be very durable for the future. With that, I'll take any questions you might have.
Maybe just kicking off here, capital allocation is something very topical in energy in general, and it seems like Williams has a good deal of financial flexibility with opportunity to do multiple different things. How do you think about competing objectives as far as a deep growth project slate, as you talked about there? Some of your peers looking to move down leverage, how you think about that, increasing maybe dry powder for future acquisitions, as well as the potential for buybacks? We've seen some dislocations in the market in the recent past, so just wondering how those competing priorities stack up?
Yeah, you know, for us, it's actually pretty simple. Because one of the things I didn't talk about that was on that list of projects is our emissions reductions project on Transco, that's about $1.3 billion of emission reduction projects, replacing old compression on our systems, 1950s vintage compression. In fact, last Friday, I got to go visit our first, that just came online, our station 180, we just replaced about probably a half a mile long worth of old compressor buildings with very old vintage compression. We just replaced that with two turbines that sit on the end of that are very, a lot lower emissions, both from a methane standpoint as well as CO2 emissions, really excited to see that happening.
That goes directly into our rate base, and when we file for our rate case, which will be starting, first test period will be starting in August of this year, that new capital goes into that rate base. That's roughly, you know, who knows what we're gonna be able to, with a higher inflationary period, be able to get out of a rate base, but historically, that's been about a 12.5% return for us in that business. That sits at the bottom of our stack of opportunity. We have a tremendous amount of investment that we can make like that even more. That's just the emission reduction project. That doesn't include line replacement that we can do on the system, but that is the lowest return.
If you think about that, when we think about stock buybacks, that effectively becomes the hurdle for us. If we're getting a 6% yield and a 6.5% growth rate, that is where... You know, that we've been outperforming that 6.5% growth rate, but it really is, as we look at the combination of our predictable growth as well as our yield, that's the pricing point that we buy back our own stock. We have been doing that. We have a $1.5 billion authority. We have been doing that when the opportunities present itself, and we'll continue, and that's how simply we think about that. We're really in a great position from a capital allocation standpoint.
Got it. That's very helpful. Maybe on a forward-looking basis, talk about Williams have 5%-7% EBITDA growth, kind of normalized, but it seems like projects might be more skewed to 2025, maybe 2024. Not as much comes into service, but maybe 2025, a lot comes into service. Just wondering if you could talk about, I guess, the trajectory of EBITDA from this point as you see it.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that's the reason we've stuck with this for a long time, and the good news is we outperformed it a little bit. Even if we don't see a big step-up in growth in 2024, we'll still be well with, you know, we'll still be well within towards the top end of that range for that long-term growth rate. But 2025 is a pretty big step up for us in growth. You know, when we started thinking about 2024 growth, we weren't thinking about things like Regional Energy Access coming on early, so half of Regional Energy Access coming on and some of these other projects that may come on early.
That will be 2025 is a very large step up for just because it just happens to be when a lot of these projects come on.
Got it. Maybe one last question, if I could, and you touched on it a few different times, is consternation in the market with regards to gas prices. Just wondering if you could walk us through how you see 2023 EBITDA guide and any impact there, thoughts you could share on that?
Yeah. No, we, you know, we saw this coming, right before we issued our guidance this year. We started looking at the fundamentals of gas and said, "Wow, we're way overproducing, as a country, we're overproducing relative to our demand and relative to the demand growth that was out there." We were up almost over five BCF a day. 1Q-2022- 1Q-2023, U.S. production was up almost five BCF a day. That's a lot, that's 5% in a, you know, pretty well-balanced market. We pulled back our guidance as a result of that. I mean, we didn't have guidance out there.
The guidance we established, I should say, was reflective of a softer gas market. That guidance we have out there, I would just say, I think we called it right. It has, you know, gas prices have backed up pretty substantially, but we're glad that we feel very good about where our guidance is right now. We did, you know, this is just on that note, we are now in our 29th quarter in a row of meeting or exceeding the Wall Street consensus estimates on our quarter, and those generally have been pretty well in line with our own guidance out there, that's been out there. It's proven to be pretty predictable. Our business is very predictable, and I think our guidance right now stands very firm.
That's great to hear. I think that does it for us on time. I want to say thank you again very much.
Great. Thank you all very much for being here.