Alan S. Armstrong
President and Chief Executive Officer at Williams Companies
Okay. Well, thanks, John. I'm gonna move on here to -- on Slide 5 to the key investor focus areas. So I know this may sound a little bit like a broken record but --on this first bullet but without a doubt we are the most natural gas centric of the large-scale midstream companies, and there's a reason we've stuck with our natural gas focused strategy for as long as we have. Not only is this strategy delivering in the current environment, but the signals coming from the market show that it's going to continue to deliver substantial growth for the long term as well. We continue to see strong fundamentals driving a great pipeline of growth opportunities, particularly increasing demand for US LNG exports and power generation along Transco corridor. Importantly, we continue to see strong demand for our services domestically as well, evidenced by a three-day peak summer delivery that we achieved on the Transco pipeline in early July this year as we continue to see weather driven demand for cooling. So, really seeing a lot of big pulls, you're seeing some strong basis differentials setting up in these areas where we've got some strong peak demands during the heat wave that the Southeast experienced. And notably, we continue to see these record levels of demand for natural gas even with the Freeport LNG facility being out.
So we see these as good indicators of the long-term health of our business, but I'll remind you that business on our Transco system is actually driven by contracted capacity and not the actual transported volumes, but obviously when we see peaks like that our customers are seeing those as well and know that the demand on our system is -- and the growth in demand on our system is needed and the contracts come with that. This demand growth continues to increase in the face of higher natural gas prices which speaks to the continued and elastic demand for natural gas both here and abroad, and the fact that natural gas remains a bargain versus alternative fuels.
Our G&P business also continues to thrive in the current environment allowing us to capture the upside benefit of pricing and inflation adjusters in our rate that had been sitting on their forward [Phonetic] for many years. And recently volumes on our systems have finally begun to respond to the higher prices that we've seen in gas space.
So moving on to financial strength and stability, as John just detailed, we increased our guidance midpoint beyond the high end of the previous range for the second time this year to $6.25 billion, and this was driven by the following items. First of all, strong base business performance with volumes in the Northeast G&P business for balance of the year, increased volume outlook for our upstream JVs especially in the Haynesville, the benefit of higher commodity prices in our upstream JVs, and finally, commodity volatility and strong pulls for power generation that are currently driving our Gas and NGL marketing business upside.
With our recent updated guidance we expect to achieve a five-year EBITDA CAGR of 7%, and an impressive EPS CAGR of 22% at the midpoint of this recent guidance. Our business continues to fire on all cylinders, giving our -- driving our financial strength and stability, and despite the current inflationary environment we have significant contract protection to minimize financial impacts from inflation to our business. Also worth noting, our business is well positioned given the strong fundamentals today, and we don't expect much to change should recession come to fruition. As you may recall in 2020, Williams exceeded our pre-COVID guidance for that year despite facing challenges like key producer bankruptcies, declining commodity prices, and major hurricanes in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico.
So now looking over at our position of growth, we recently announced that we reached a final investment decision on our Louisiana Energy Gateway project, a 1.8 Bcf per day gathering system that will help us advance our wellhead to water strategy while also positioning our customers with access to favorable pricing markets along Transco. Within our transmission business, the Gulfstream Phase 4 expansion is in service more than three months early, and I'm also pleased to announce that Williams has reached a rate case settlement in principle on our Northwest Pipeline system. And this provides a win-win outcome for both ourselves and our long-term customers on the system. So we continue to execute as well on an attractive high return backlog of growth projects including six projects now in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, five Transco projects totaling 1.9 Bcf a day, four expansion projects in our North East G&P business that will really unlock some high-margin business for us in that area, and four in the Haynesville which continues to grow at a pace well beyond our initial expectations. And as well on the Transco projects just last week the FERC issued the final EIS on our Regional Energy Access project expanding takeaway from the Northeast PA area, which obviously helps us as well on our gathering systems up there and the volumes up there, and serving growth in the New Jersey area as well. So really excited to see the progress with the FERC on bringing that project to fruition.
And as well in the Haynesville, just another note here, we are really seeing that paying a lot of long-term dividends, not just because of the growth in the business but because the Trace acquisition along with the LEG project is going to allow us to bring integrated services and bring -- and connect them to key markets for our customers. So the better markets those customers are connected to, the better margins and the more activity in drilling we see up there, and in fact we're seeing significant well outperformance in our Upstream Jay -- JV operations with GeoSouthern, which continue to improve our upstream margins. And as well, recall that the reasoning behind our upstream JVs was to drive utilization of latent midstream capacity, and this is exactly what's happening in the Haynesville right now and we expect the same capture of midstream value in the Wamsutter as our JV drilling program ramps in the coming months there as well.
So now moving on to sustainable strategy. I'll cover a few updates here for you on what's been going on our sustainable strategy. First of all, as I mentioned at the top of the call, we published our 2021 sustainability report last week as well as we filed our carbon emissions disclosure with the Carbon Disclosure Project.
As both of these reports detail, we are continuing to successfully leverage our natural gas focused strategy and today's technology to deliver on immediate opportunities to reduce emissions, in fact, we have reduced our company-wide scope 1 and 2 emissions by 47% since 2005 and we're on our way to meeting our 2030 goal of a 56% reduction below -- again below these 2005 levels. I am certainly proud of the progress that we've made to-date and that we'll continue to make as our 2022 all-employee annual incentive program now includes a total methane emissions reduction of 5% from our three-year average, which personally connect every employee to our long-term commitment to safe, reliable and environment-friendly -- environmentally friendly operations. Of course, our efforts go beyond what we see as the right here right now opportunities. We're also focusing on enabling the next generation of clean energy technologies.
I mentioned our LEG projects a few minutes ago, which is a key component of our low carbon wellhead to water strategy, and this project is actually very integrated and supports our partnerships with Context Labs, Encino Environmental, and Satlantis. Technology solutions will be integrated [Technical Issues] and will enable the measurement of end to end verifiable and transparent emissions data to demonstrate the low carbon benefits of produced and delivered Haynesville natural gas. We are really happy with the progress we're making on this project in the Haynesville and having -- we've recently completed implementation of the onsite monitoring and certification capabilities in our systems up there. So, really a lot of things coming together for us in the Haynesville in terms of great growth in the area as well as us demonstrating some of the new technology that we intend to deploy for that area. We're also advancing our wellhead to burner tip strategy in the Northeast with anchor customers to be announced later this year in that area. So lots of tangible solutions we will be delivering in this space, and all of these are positioned around supporting and enhancing our strong natural gas focused strategy.
So let me move on to a closing here. I'll reiterate that we have built a business that is steady and predictable with continued growth, improving returns and free cash flows. Our best-in-class long haul pipes are in the right place serving the right markets. Our formidable gathering assets are in the low cost basins that will be called on to meet gas demand as it continues to grow for decades, and our Sequent platform is providing infrastructure optimization services that create value for Williams and our customers while mitigating downside risk in these volatile and fast growing markets. You've heard me say before, that we are bullish on natural gas because of the critical role it plays and will continue to play in both our countries and the world's pursuit of a clean energy future.
But I'll go a step further here to say that we're also bullish on America's ability to lead on all fronts when it comes to clean, reliable and affordable energy. The United States is positioned better than any other country to solve the energy crisis and the climate crisis that we're facing around the world. But access to our abundant and low cost natural gas reserves is dependent on having the appropriate infrastructure to move energy where it is needed. The efforts to build out all forms of key infrastructure have been blocked by obstructionists who don't offer practical and sustainable solutions to serve these growing energy demands. The impacts of inadequate infrastructure are now finally front and center with consumers bearing the brunt of these actions in the form of high energy prices, high utility bills, and energy driven inflation both here and around the world. The good news is that this is exactly the kind of catalyst that it takes to bring public awareness to these matters, and the European crisis is even highlighting the matter further. That is why we are strongly advocating for actionable energy policy solutions and permitting reform that will support global emissions reductions, keep energy costs affordable, and grow our nation's competitiveness. Enabling the efficient, unobstructed build-out of our nation's energy infrastructure is foundational to the US' leadership on greenhouse gas emissions and energy security, and we believe that support is building out for just doing that. So with that, I'll open it up for your questions.
