Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the First Quarter 2015 Comstock Resources' Earnings Conference Call. My name is Derek, and I'll be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We shall facilitate a question-and-answer session at the end of the conference. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like to turn the conference over to the Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Jay Allison. You may proceed. M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Derek, thank you. Welcome to the Comstock Resources first quarter 2015 financial and operating results conference call everyone. You can view a slide presentation during or after this call by going to our website at www.comstockresources.com and downloading the quarterly results presentation. There, you will find a presentation titled First Quarter 2015 Results. The highlight of this call really will not be the numbers we report today, you've seen those, but really the return of Mack Good as our Chief Operating Officer, and his overview of the company and our position. After 3.5 year break, Mack has returned to help us navigate through these difficult times with low commodity prices. I am Jay Allison, Chief Executive Officer of Comstock. And with me this morning in addition to Mack is Rowland Burns, our President and Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we will discuss our 2015 first quarter operating and financial results and our plan for the rest of this year. If you go to slide two, please turn to slide two in our presentation and note that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of securities laws. While we believe the expectations and such statements to be reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Slide three is a quick overview of the first quarter where we saw the rapid fall of both oil and gas prices. Without hedges in place, we felt the full brunt of the rapid decline in oil and gas prices in the first quarter as our realized oil price fell by 53% and our average realized natural gas price declined by 47%. The 11% increase in oil production was not enough to overcome the low prices of our oil and gas sales, fell by 53% to $67 million, EBITDAX came in at $40 million, and cash flow from operations $20 million or $0.43 per share. Our operations in the first quarter were focused on ramping up our oil drilling program and restarting our Haynesville shale program with improved completion designs. Our first two extended lateral wells in Haynesville were very successful as both had IP rates in excess of 20 million cubic feet per day as Mack will go over in detail in a few minutes. Our first rig frac in a producing Haynesville Shale well was also successful and was featured in Schlumberger's earning call. We expect to start growing our gas production again in the second quarter of this year. In March, we completed a $700 million bond offering, which paid off our bank credit facility and added liquidity to our balance sheet. Our goal was to establish a fortress balance sheet to weather this down cycle. We now have no debt maturities until 2019, and we have total liquidity of $279 million at the end of the first quarter. In order to safeguard our liquidity, we have significantly reduced our drilling expenditures for the remainder of 2015. I'll have Roland review the financial results with you in more detail. Roland? Roland O. Burns - President, CFO, Secretary, Director & Senior VP: Thanks, Jay. On slide four, we recap our oil production growth. Our oil production averaged 11,500 barrels per day in the first quarter, an 11% increase over the first quarter of last year. With the rapid fall in oil prices, we shut down our oil drilling program in late December. We experienced some delays in completions planned for our East Texas Eagle Ford property in the first quarter, and we had excessive downtime for offset fracs and artificial lift installation in the quarter, which caused our oil production to decline from the fourth quarter rate of 12,400 barrels per day. With little drilling activity this year planned for our oil projects, we expect oil production to decline further. For all of 2015, we're expecting oil production to average between 9,500 to 10,500 barrels per day. Slide five shows our natural gas production, which continued to decline in the first quarter of 2015 and was down 25% from 2014's first quarter. Gas production in the first quarter averaged 91 million cubic feet per day. Our Haynesville production was down a little more than expected due to the delay in completing our first extended lateral well. In addition, we had to shut in some production in March while we completed our first two extended lateral Haynesville wells. We expect the Haynesville to start drilling again in the second quarter. For all of 2015, we expect our gas production will average 130 million to 155 million cubic feet per day. On slide six, we summarize the first quarter financial results. The 11% increase in oil production was not enough to offset the 25% decrease in our gas production in the quarter. This, combined with 53% lower oil prices and 47% lower gas prices, caused our revenues, cash flow and EBITDAX to decline. Revenues this quarter were down 53% to $67 million, EBITDAX was down to $40 million, and cash flow from operations declined to $20 million or $0.43 per share. Our lifting costs in the quarter were down 14% with the lower sales. However, our DD&A was up 3% due to an increase in our DD&A rate in the quarter. Starting next quarter, we'll see some benefit from our new Haynesville program, which will help lower the DD&A rate. Our G&A cost in the quarter were down 5% to about $8 million, and we also had two significant accounting charges in the quarter. We recorded a $41 million impairment on our unevaluated properties for our southern Burleson County acreage due to poor drilling results. We also had a charge of $1.8 million included in exploration expense for payments made to release one of our operated rigs and a charge of $3.7 million for the early retirement of our bank credit facility, which was offset in part by a $1 million gain on the repurchase of $2 million of our unsecured bonds. Including these charges, we had a $78.5 million loss or $1.71 per share. Excluding these items, we would have a net loss of $1.06 per share. On slide seven, we detail our capital expenditures in the first quarter. We spent $121 million on development and exploration activities, not including the $1.7 million we spent on acreage. We also spent an additional $1.8 million to release the operated rig before its contract term expired. In the quarter, we drilled five horizontal oil wells, or four net to our interest; two horizontal natural gas wells or two net to our interest. We also put four South Texas Eagle Ford wells and four East Texas Eagle Ford wells on production in the quarter. In March, we announced our plans to release another drilling rig and reduce our capital budgets to $248 million, which is detailed on slide eight. We estimate that we'll spend $238 million this year for drilling and completion activities, $95 million of that will be spent to drill 9 Haynesville shale extended lateral wells and another $23 million will be spent to refrac 14 of our producing Haynesville wells. We also budgeted $30 million to finish drilling four wells on our East Texas Eagle Ford shale acreage that were in process at year-end and we budgeted $50 million for completion cost of eight Eagle Ford shale wells that were drilled in 2014 but will be completed this year, and $40 million on facilities recompletions capital projects. The spending was heavily weighted to the first quarter with almost half of the budget being spent in the first quarter. Slide nine recaps our balance sheet at the end of the first quarter, which includes the $700 million bond offering we completed in March. We have $229 million of cash on hand and about $1.4 billion of total debt outstanding. Net debt represents 53% of our total book capitalization. We no longer have a bank facility that is limited to a borrowing base. We do have a new $50 million four-year bank commitment that is not subject to reduction based on a borrowing base redetermination. So, our total liquidity at March 31 was $279 million. We chose to do a larger bond offering due to definitions in our existing bond indentures, which made a second lien facility and a borrowing-based bank credit facility unworkable for us. This new structure removes any concerns over future reductions in borrowing capability for the company. Our first debt maturities do not come until 2019, giving us a long runway to survive this down cycle. I'll now hand it over to Mack Good, who we're very happy to have back at the helm of our operations during these difficult times.