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Comstock Resources, Inc. (CRK)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Wed, May 4, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Comstock Resources First Quarter 2016 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 is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Jay Allison, Chief Executive Officer. Sir, you may begin. M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Chelsea, thank you. Welcome to Comstock Resources' First Quarter 2016 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'll find a presentation entitled First Quarter 2016 Results. I am Jay Allison, Chief Executive Officer of Comstock, and with me is Roland Burns, our President and Chief Financial Officer; Mack Good, our Chief Operating Officer. During this call, we will discuss our first quarter operating and financial results. This continues to be a very difficult environment, as you all know, with the continued weak oil and natural gas prices. Our Haynesville shale program continues to deliver great results, but we do need higher natural gas prices to get the company back on track. Please refer to slide two in our presentation and note that our discussion today will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of securities laws. While we believe the expectations in such statements to be reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. If you turn to slide three, a summary of our first quarter is outlined on slide three. Oil and gas prices continue to be weak. Our realized oil price fell by 40% and our average realized natural gas…

Roland O. Burns - President and Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thanks, Jay. Slide four shows our natural gas production. Our Haynesville shale drilling program is driving the growth that we expect for this year. We started drilling again in March, so we expect gas production to increase again in the second quarter with three new wells coming online. Our gas production averaged 152 million cubic feet per day in the first quarter, which was 67% higher than the first quarter of 2015. 10 million cubic feet per day of our production in the first quarter is from our South Texas gas properties that we plan to divest of this year. We expect our natural gas production this year will average between 145 million cubic feet per day to 160 million cubic feet per day after the divestitures. On slide five we summarize our oil production. Our oil production averaged 4,600 barrels per day in the first quarter, a 60% decrease from the first quarter last year. The production decline is due to the sale of our Burleson County properties in July of last year and shutting down the oil drilling program in our South Texas Eagle Ford at the end of 2014. With little drilling activity this year, we expect oil production to decline further. We expect our oil production in 2016 will approximate between 4,000 barrels per day and 4,300 barrels per day. In slide six we show our hedge position, which hasn't changed. We have 10 million Btu per day of our gas production hedged at $3.20 per Mcf. We hope to be able to try to hedge 2017 as gas prices continue to improve in the longer term. On slide seven we summarize the first quarter financial results. We had a 69% increase in gas production, offset by a 60% decrease in oil production in the quarter.…

Mack D. Good - Chief Operating Officer

Management

Thank you, sir. Good morning, everybody. If you flip over to slide 10, you'll see our Cotton Valley, Haynesville and Bossier acreage outlines in Texas and Louisiana. As you know, we began drilling and completing significantly longer and better Haynesville wells during the first quarter of 2015. And I think most, if not all of you, also know by now that our 2015 drilling program was extremely successful. All of our wells were high IP rate completions and confirm that our new completion design was the way to go. Anyway, after drilling our 10th 2015 program well last year, we stacked our rig on the location where we planned to drill the first of our 2016 program wells. As planned, we resumed drilling with this rig during the first quarter of this year, and we will drill between three and nine wells this year using the same rig. And no one should be surprised by the fact that we will try to use the same strategy that we did last year. We will make an effort to stack the rig after drilling our third 2016 program well, while we evaluate prevailing market conditions. We'll resume drilling whenever we believe the market will support the resumption of drilling additional Haynesville or Bossier horizontal wells. And if you move over to slide 11, you'll see that the current cost of services that Comstock has for a 7,500-foot horizontal Haynesville well completion can now deliver a rate of return between 24% to 48% at a gas price between $2 and $2.50 per Mcf. As the slide also shows, we have a significant inventory of both Haynesville and Bossier horizontal wells for future development. The way our Haynesville and Bossier acreage is laid out will allow us to drill at least 386 extended lateral…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of Don Crist with Johnson Rice. Your line is now open. Don P. Crist - Johnson Rice & Co. LLC: Good morning. Jay, you touched on it briefly on slide three, but can you give us any details on the asset sale process, like when we should assume an announcement on that and the discussions ongoing on the JV that you talked about on the last call? M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I mean, my comments, Roland can add to it, the same group that delivered the buyer for our East Texas Eagle Ford acreage is in charge of selling it. Our conventional gas in South Texas that we've probably owned for 20 years is probably 10,000 acres. It's 11 million Btu a day production...

Roland O. Burns - President and Chief Financial Officer

Management

10 million Btu. M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: 10 million Btu a day production. We've had a data room – I can tell you that there's 60-plus parties that have signed CAs that are interested in looking. We've had the data room completely full of people. We think it's a very marketable property because it's very predictable. We haven't spent hardly any money in the last 10-plus years on it. So it does have a lot of upside. I think we'll start getting results back for what the offers might be at the end of this month, and then we would close it shortly thereafter. On the price ranges, fortunately gas prices have gone up during the marketing process. So the price ranges kind of vary, but we think we should get a fair offer for that as we did when we sold our other properties in July of last year. Then on the JV area, we've looked at maybe JV-ing the Haynesville/Bossier. We've had some very, very interested parties that we've known for a while and some new faces. If you, Don, look at the results, it's pretty easy to figure out why you'd like to JV the area. Particularly as Mack said, where it's located, we don't have the firm transportation issues. We've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of locations. We don't have to drill any wells. What we're trying to do, though, is to maximize value for the stakeholders and decide should we do a JV, if so what size and how accretive is it to Comstock today, not a year from now but today, again because our total focus is on our liquidity. So Roland might want to add to that. I don't know if we can add much more to that, Roland, that we should talk about.

Roland O. Burns - President and Chief Financial Officer

Management

I think that we're working in those areas, but we of course don't have anything definitive to share today on those processes. I would think that toward the end of the second quarter we would hope to wrap up the sales process with an executed agreement. Don P. Crist - Johnson Rice & Co. LLC: Okay. And one for Mack, if I could. The upgrades that were done to the rig, how did that impact your well cost? And what I'm driving at is how much of those savings are forecast to stay in place from an efficiency standpoint once commodity prices rebound and we could get some price escalation on the cost side?

Mack D. Good - Chief Operating Officer

Management

Well, that's why we listed $8.5 million rather than $8.2 million for our 7,500-foot lateral D&C. To answer your question specifically, we did upgrade the rig, the rig pumps. We went to a larger drill stream. We increased the mud motor on the drilling assembly. And as a consequence of making those changes, we can drill faster, so our drill times have come down. And as you know, time is money in the oil patch when you're drilling. So about half of our savings that we've realized are from the upgraded drilling operation that we have, and the other half is as a result of lower frac costs. And so we do expect, once the commodity prices rebound, that there will be a slow escalation of service costs. But certainly, the drill time reductions and the completion strategy that we have now where we're able to frac three to four stages a day whereas when we first started we were fracking two stages a day. So that saved us a substantial amount of money. Those efficiencies will stay in place. So I guess to specifically answer your question, we do expect some price creep, cost creep upward, but it will be a slow process because of the efficiencies that we've baked into our game plan here. M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: I think the other thing Mack and his group and LaRae and the Land group has been doing, if you come to the Comstock office, I mean nobody is like Eeyore. I mean, everybody is working. We're all growing. In fact, if you look at the trade that we've reported in the last quarter where we exchanged acreage in our South Texas Eagle Ford for some Haynesville acreage, I mean we added 33% of the…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That does conclude today's question-and-answer session. I would now like to hand the call back to Mr. Jay Allison for closing remarks. M. Jay Allison - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Again, I think the report that Mack gave and Roland gave, the goal is to tell you the details. It should tell you where we are and the choppy market that we're in, and it should tell you where we're trying to go. And I think Don asked a great question, that is we're continuing to work our way out of the valley, we are, as all the big companies are, and we're working on our balance sheet. We've got a lot of allies there, and Roland has done a pretty good job in de-levering the company with the tools that we have. And we still have quite a bit of liquidity. We didn't buy big properties that we had to keep rigs drilling. We don't have wells that we have to drill and not complete just to hold acreage. So even though the facts are – they're straining, I think we've managed them the best that we can to provide value creation the best we could in the market that we're in. And everyone listening needs to know that we're all on our A game and we're working hard to make this work. It's a tough market. We've been through this for 30 years. We'll get through it. So thank you. Thank you, Chelsea.