Operator
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Comstock Resources Second Quarter 2015 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference call may be recorded. At this time, I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Jay Allison, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Sir, you may begin. M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Perfect, thank you, Saeed and welcome to the Comstock Resources second quarter 2015 financial and operating results conference call. 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 second quarter 2015 results. I am Jay Allison, Chief Executive Officer of Comstock and with me is Roland Burns, our President and Chief Financial Officer and Mack Good, our Chief Operating Officer. During this call, we will discuss our 2015 second quarter operating and financial results and our plan for the rest of this year. This has been a tough environment for the sector and for us as well with a severe decline in oil prices. But the one major bright spot, the positive spot we have to share today with our stakeholders is the excellent results in our Haynesville shale program which Mack will review during this call. Please refer to slide 2 in our presentations and note that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of securities laws. While we believe the expectations of such statements to be reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. If you will turn to slide 3 our 2015 Q2 highlights. This slide provides an overview that the second quarter where low oil and gas prices continue to negatively impact our financial results. Our realized oil price fell by 43% and our average realized natural gas price declined by 46% in the second quarter. The 10% increase we had in our gas production was not enough to overcome this low price as our oil and gas sales fell by 50% to $77 million, EBITDAX came in at $48 million and cash flow from operations at $15 million or $0.33 per share. Our operations on the first half of the year were focused on ramping up our oil drilling program and restarting our Haynesville shale program with our improved completion design. Our first five extended lateral wells in Haynesville were excellent with an average IP rate of 23 million per day per well. Our first two re-fracs of producing Haynesville shale wells were also successful and added bonus, which Mack will talk about in a moment, is the uplift seven producing wells got from the newly drilled wells where we had a 15 million a day gain in production. We are very pleased with the first five wells which were producing above our 15.6 Bcf type curve. We've taken several steps to both drive liquidity in this poor environment that we're in. In March, we completed a $700 million bond offering which paid off our bank credit facility and added liquidity to our balance sheet. In July, we sold our Burleson County properties for $115 million. We have no debt maturities until 2019, and have total liquidity pro forma for the sale of $283 million. In order to safeguard our liquidity, we have significantly reduced our drilling expenditures for the remainder of 2015. Please refer to slide 4 in our presentation where we summarize our recent sale of our East Texas Eagle Ford properties. On July 22, we completed the sale of our East Texas Eagle Ford operations to a private firm for $115 million. We sold these properties to enhance our liquidity after we decided they were non-core due to disappointing drilling results. We would have been required to drill two or three wells next year to retain all the leases in the oil window, proved reserves related to these properties were 3.9 million barrels of oil equivalent. We received good value for the undrilled acreage in the oil window in this transaction. These properties produced 267,000 barrels of oil and 649 Mcf of gas in the first six months of 2015. This represents about 9% of our total oil and 2% of our total gas production. We did realize a loss of $112 million on this transaction for this quarter. I'll now turn it over to Roland Burns to review the second quarter results in more detail. Roland? Roland O. Burns - President, CFO, Secretary, Director & Senior VP: Thanks, Jay. On slide 5, we recap our oil production. Oil production averaged 10,200 barrels per day in the second quarter which was a 17% decrease from the second quarter of last year. With the rapid fall in oil prices, we shut down our oil drilling program in late December and with little drilling activity planned for this year in oil, we expect oil production to decline further. In the second half of the year, taking into account the sale of our East Texas Eagle Ford properties, we're expecting oil production to average between 7,000 and 8,000 barrels per day. Slide 6 shows our natural gas production. With our new Haynesville well starting to come online, our gas production grew 10% from 2014 second quarter to 122 million cubic feet per day. Gas production was up 35% from the first quarter rate of 91 million per day. We expect our Haynesville production to continue growing in the next two quarters. For all of 2015, we estimate our gas production will average between 125 million cubic feet per day to 150 million cubic feet per day. We recently added some natural gas hedges at $3.20 per Mcf starting in July for the next 12 months as detailed on slide 7. These hedges only cover 10 million per day of our gas production, but it represents a start to the hedge position we're seeking to build for 2016 to support our Haynesville drilling program next year. On slide 8, we summarize our second quarter financial results. We had a 10% increase in gas production offset by a 17% decrease in our oil production in the quarter. This combined with 45% lower oil prices and 46% lower gas prices caused our revenues, cash flow and EBITDAX to decline. Revenues this quarter were down 50% to $77 million, EBITDAX was down to $48 million, and cash flow was $15 million or $0.33 per share. Lifting costs in the quarter were up 6% with additional cost that we had to add artificial lift to our oil production. But our DD&A was down 4% due to improvement in our DD&A rate this quarter. Our DD&A rate in the quarter was $5.43 per Mcfe which improved 14% from the first quarter rate of $6.35. Our G&A cost were down 25% to this quarter to $7 million. During the second quarter, we incurred a loss from the sale of oil and gas properties of $112 million related to the East Texas Eagle Ford sale and we had impairments on oil and gas properties and unevaluated leases of $25 million. We also had unrealized hedging gains of $600,000 and a net gain on extinguishment of debt of $7.3 million. Including these charges, we had a $135 million loss or $2.93 per share this quarter. If you exclude these items, we had a net loss of $51 million or $1.11 per share. Slide 9 summarizes the financial results for the first half of this year. For the first half this year, oil production was down 4% and our gas production was down 9% from 2014. This combined with the 50% lower oil prices and 47% lower gas prices caused our – again caused our revenues, cash flow and EBITDAX to be lower. Revenues for the first six months were down 52% to $144 million, EBITDAX was $88 million, and cash flow was $35 million or $0.76 per share. Lifting costs for the first half of this year were down about 5% with the lower sales numbers and our DD&A rate was just down slightly. Our general and administrative costs decreased 16% in the first half of this year to a total of $15 million. And we had – the unusual items for the first six months we had the loss on the sale of $112 million. Total impairments of properties and unevaluated leases of $66 million and we had drilling rig termination fees we paid at $1.8 million. We also had an unrealized hedging gain of $600,000 and a net gain on extinguishment of debt of $4.5 million. Now with these charges, we had a $214 million loss or $4.64 per share for the first six months this year and without these items, we had a net loss of $100 million or $2.18 per share. On slide 10, we detail our capital expenditures so far this year. We spent $169 million on drilling and exploration activities excluding $7 million that we spend on acreage. Spending in the second quarter fell to $48 million as compared to the $129 million we spend in the first quarter. We expect spending to decline further in the second half of this year to a total of $68 million. As shown on slide 11, our budget remains unchanged for a total of $248 million to be spent on drilling and exploration and acreage acquisitions. As Mack will explain it and as we currently plan to do fewer refracs but may substitute another new well on our Haynesville program for the amounts budgeted for the refracs. Slide 12 recaps our balance sheet at the end of the second quarter. We had a $130 million of cash on hand and about $1.4 billion of total debt outstanding on June 30. The pro forma for the sale of the East Texas Eagle Ford assets in Burleson County, we would have cash of $233 million and on that basis our net debt would represent 56% of our total book capitalization. We no longer have a bank facility that's limited to burrowing base and we are not subject to any upcoming redeterminations for the next several years. We do have a four-year $50 million bank commitment. So our total liquidity pro forma for the sale is about $283 million. We have retired $16.8 million in face amount of our 9.5% bonds so far in the first six months of this year for a cash payment of $7.8 million and we recognized the gain of $9 million on these repurchases. We'll continue to repurchase some of our debt this year at attractive prices but will balance that opportunity with maintaining adequate liquidity to get through this down cycle. Our first debt maturities do not come due until 2019 giving us a long runaway to survive this cycle. I will now hand it over to Mack Good.