Donald W. Rush - CNX Resources Corp.
Analyst
Thanks, Nick, and good morning, everyone. This quarter really highlights our ability to execute our strategy on all fronts. In the quarter, we generated significant free cash flow. We reduced our net debt. We reduced our leverage ratio to below 2.5 times. We bought back approximately 4% of the company. We lowered our cash operating costs. We brought 35 new wells on line. We added to our hedge book and we grew our consolidated EBITDAX per outstanding share by almost 150% year-over-year. Slide 5 shows some of our financial stats. And I think it is important to reemphasize our strong cash margins of $1.88 per Mcfe for the quarter. It is clear our margins are benefiting from significantly lower cost, which Tim will touch on shortly. Slide 6 highlights the attributable versus consolidated math. As I mentioned on the last earnings call, we will continue to show it both ways to provide clarity to our investors. And ultimately, it is important to understand both businesses individually as well as combined to truly understand our intrinsic value. Moving to slide 7. We are approximately 80% hedged for 2018. In the third quarter, we added 123.8 Bcf of NYMEX hedges, and 99.7 Bcf of basis hedges out through 2023. As we have said, our hedging approach is a major component of our strategy. It's an important part of our balance sheet and gives us the opportunity to focus our efforts on risk-adjusted returns and NAV per share. While discussing marketing, I would like to highlight that our 2018 volumes are expected to be comprised of 7% to 8% liquids, which you can see on slide 8. And in the quarter, strong NGL pricing definitely helped increase overall realizations. However, it is important to note that NGLs are difficult to hedge and, as we have witnessed, very volatile. This is the reason we have taken a flexible approach when it comes to NGLs. Our wet and dry midstream systems and our asset base allows us the flexibility to adjust as liquids prices change, instead of trying to guess what they are going to do next and predict the future. On slide 8, you can see we have updated some of our 2018 financial guidance. Most notably, as Nick briefly mentioned, we increased our 2018 EBITDAX guidance by approximately $50 million compared to the previous guidance. Our cost and E&P capital guidance remains unchanged, and we narrowed our 2018 production range while keeping the midpoint the same. Our consolidated capital for 2018 increased slightly due to our MLP CNX Midstream increasing its 2018 capital guidance this quarter. We will touch on this in more detail during the Midstream call, but essentially, CNXM made a strategic land acquisition, upsized their systems due to CNX well improvements, and accelerated some additional projects and construction activity from 2019 into 2018. With that, I'll hand it over to Tim.