Earnings Labs

Comstock Resources, Inc. (CRK)

Q2 2020 Earnings Call· Sat, Aug 8, 2020

$17.33

+2.97%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Second Quarter 2020 Comstock Resources Incorporated Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Now it’s my pleasure to turn the call to Jay Allison, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Jay Allison

Analyst

Thank you. Everyone that’s on the call, welcome to the Comstock Resources second quarter 2020 financial and operating results conference call. You can view a slide presentation during our act for this call by going to our website at www.comstockresources.com and downloading the quarterly result presentation. There, you’ll find a presentation titled Second Quarter 2020 Results. I am Jay Allison, Chief Executive Officer of Comstock. With me is Roland Burns, our President and Chief Financial Officer; Dan Harrison, our Chief Operating Officer; and Ron Mills, our VP of Finance and Investor Relations. If you go to Slide 2, it’s a disclaimer. 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 and such statements to be reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Before we get to Slide 3 I’ll make some comments. First of all, it’s a privilege to be able to talk to everybody. When each of you on this call this morning have an inbound call to hear from someone that has proven to take and create great wealth, you take that call and listen if you’re wise. Two and half years ago, Comstock Resources received a phone call from Jerry Jones and his family, which is why we as the Comstock management can report the quarterly results that we have today. Every train has a conductor and ours is Jerry Jones. He believed in natural gas in America. He believed that the Haynesville-Bossier shale in the United States was a Tier 1 natural gas play, and he put his $1 billion into Comstock because the Haynesville-Bossier has close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, geological predictability, availability above midstream pipelines…

Roland Burns

Analyst

All right. Thanks, Jay. On Slide 5 we combined Comstock and Covey Park’s production from the Haynesville-Bossier since 2016. In the second quarter of 2020 production from our Haynesville-Bossier wells was 1.2 billion cubic feet per day and was 9% higher than the 1.1 billion cubic feet per day that Comstock and Covey Park produced in the second quarter of 2019. Low completion activity in the quarter caused production to decline slightly from the first quarter. We only had 5.7 net wells turned to sales during the second quarter. Given the continued weakness in gas prices since our last conference call, we’ve adjusted our completion schedule to allow us to continue to generate free cash flow despite low gas prices. While we still plan to complete a similar number of wells as before, the timing of returning the wells to sales has moved to later in the year in order to align more of the new production to the winter months when we expect natural gas prices to improve. As a result, we expect our third quarter production to decline a little further. We did add back two frac crews at the beginning of the third quarter and we plan to add a third frac crew later this year. We plan to turn 25 net wells to sales in the last six months of this year. Much of the new production from these wells will be on late this year setting this up for a strong exit rate and for some growth in 2021 but not in time to show growth in the third quarter. Slide 6 recaps the production we had shut-in for the quarter, principally for offset frac activity. Our non-operated oil production experienced substantial curtailments in the second quarter. We had 23% of our oil production curtailed…

Dan Harrison

Analyst

Okay. Thanks, Roland. Over on Slide 15 you’re going to see the outline of the current acreage position. So we’re now standing at 305,000 net acres. There have been no material changes in our acreage position since we had our last call. We control the majority of the acreage. We’ve got a 92% operating position and we have an average working interest on the acreage of 80%. We currently have 2,007 net future drilling locations identified on the acreage with 95% of the acreage currently held by production. As a result of releasing our frac crews in early April we’ve not turned any additional wells to sales since the time of our last call so our well count still stands at 237 gross wells turned to sales since we re-entered the play in 2015. We’re currently running four rigs and we’re in the process of moving in a fifth rig this week. We also plan to add a sixth rig sometime before the year-end. Due to the frac holiday, this started in early April, our operated DUC well count increased to a maximum to 20 wells by the end of the second quarter. We currently have 16 operated DUCs at this time. We put two frac crews back to work at the end of June and we plan to add a third crew within the next couple of months as we prepare to drill down a number of DUCs and take advantage of the anticipated higher gas prices heading into the fall. Over on Slide 16. This is an updated breakdown of our Haynesville-Bossier drilling inventory at the end of the second quarter. Our total gross operated inventory currently stands at 2,520 locations with our net operated inventory at 1,849 locations. This represents an average of 73% working interest on…

Jay Allison

Analyst

Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Roland. I’ll go over the outlook for everybody on the call, turn it over for some guidance from Ron and we’ll open it up to questions. So if you go to 18, really, I’d like to direct you to Slide 18 where we summarize our outlook for the rest of this year. This year we’re primarily focused on free cash flow generation as we stated over and over and managing the company to the current low oil and natural gas price environment. While current natural gas prices remain relatively low, the outlook for natural gas has improved substantially for late 2020 and 2021 driven by our expectations for significant declines in natural gas supply in 2020 and 2021 due to a continued reduction in natural gas-directed drilling and completion activities and less associated gas production for related activities in oil basins, resulting from the collapse of oil prices. The strength we have is our industry-leading low-cost structure and well economics. With our industry-leading low cost structure, our Haynesville drilling program generates economic returns even at today’s low natural gas prices. We have cut back the number of wells we’re drilling and adjusted our completion schedule intentionally in order to generate free cash flow the way we used to pay down our debt and strengthen our balance sheet. We still expect 3% to 5% pro forma production growth in 2020, even with the reduced activity and the third completion schedule. Importantly, the lower volumes due to the agility completion schedule are just being deferred until later in 2020 and into early 2021 as previously anticipated. We prioritize free cash flow goals for 2020 over production growth, but have maintained adequate investment to grow our production on a longer-term basis. We’ve hedged almost half of our production over the remainder of 2020 and 64% of our production in 2021 and have strong financial liquidity of $612 million following our recent bond offering. So now, I’m going to turn it over to Ron to provide some specific guidance for the rest of the year. Ron?

Roland Burns

Analyst

Thanks, Jay. On slide 19, we provide financial guidance for the rest of this year for our analysts. This updated guidance reflects the impact of the deferred completion schedule, which we’ve mentioned on the call and which is shifting the turned to sales schedule on a number of wells to the later this year and into 2021. As a result, the production impact associated with those deferred completions will show up later this year and in the early part of 2021. We anticipate spending $400 million to $440 million on our drilling and completion activities and the associated impact on our 2020 production guidance as we now expect production to total 1.25 Bcfe to 1.3 Bcfe per day, of which 97% to 99% is expected to be natural gas. Our cost items are unchanged from prior guidance with LOE expected to average $0.23 to $0.27 per Mcfe, gathering and transportation cost expected to average $0.23 to $0.27 per Mcfe, production taxes at $0.06 to $0.08 per Mcfe, and DD&A at $0.85 to $0.95 per Mcfe. We continue to anticipate cash G&A will average $0.05 to $0.07 per Mcfe. For the rest of the call, we’ll take questions from the analysts who follow the company.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Dun McIntosh with Johnson Rice. Please go ahead.

Dun McIntosh

Analyst

Good morning, Jay, Roland, Ron and Dan.

Jay Allison

Analyst

Good morning.

Dun McIntosh

Analyst

Just wanted to give a little more color on the back half of the year, you are pretty clear about looking to push completions out and try to capture a higher gas price but CapEx is fairly flat. So they can– on the lines of your spending this year to bring volumes on next year, just how are you all thinking about the trajectory for 2021 and balance in cash flow and CapEx?

Jay Allison

Analyst

So, you know what we do, we kind of mentioned this, we’re going to look at this free cash flow number of $150 million to $200 million plus. And then we want to assure that we can have that, and we back into what our CapEx budget should look like and also with that we want to have some growth. I mean we want have 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% growth and that just depends upon what our CapEx budget is and that depends upon prices and then we risk-adjust all that. I mean, we’re pretty comfortable with what the well results should look like. So we really risk-adjust the commodity price with the hedging, that’s where the 60% comes in, but you don’t get paid to grow. Now, you could go out of business if you don’t grow and you can impact your RBL if you don’t maintain it, which we would like to maintain that. We’d like to pay it down, we’d like to maintain where we are, if possible, and have a little growth and have a lot of profits. The key is, we said this two or three times, you really are [indiscernible] we are the low cost operator of the highest margins period and in the last two and a half years, we think a great strides to kind of take that pole position if we’re not in a pole or near it, with your oil or gas, so we want to stay there. I don’t think our leverage is too high but I think we do need to pay down our debt. I think we need to have lower cost of capital. And I think that’s one of our goals, because if you cure our cost of capital, that we’re really all in an unenviable position. Does that answer your question?

Roland Burns

Analyst

And then maybe just to add to that, if you would. I think as you look today at all those factors that Jay went over, I mean, we’re looking toward– we think a 6-operated rig program fits all those parameters right now. Now, things could be different three months from now and so we might have a different answer. And that’s one reason the operations group is planned to, by the end of the year, be at that level and so that would be a little bit higher activity level supported by the stronger natural gas prices that are out there, that we’ve already locked in with our hedging program. And so, we really see a very attractive year next year, that’s a great balance of a little bit higher activity, some growth in production at the same time, very substantial free cash flow generation, and we think all everything seems to be aligning up to that, to that type of year next year.

Jay Allison

Analyst

You know, there’s a lot of the noise in the numbers. I mean, you’ve got the Denham Series A preferred, we needed to get that noise out of the numbers as four shares, we said that we did stretched on the use of the RBL, we did that intentionally with the Covey Park because we knew what we should look like post-COVID and we do look like that. So when we issued the bonds, we did take the attention of liquidity and then, you can see even in the first quarter and we might almost $10 million and it’s a pretty hard quarter to have free cash flow wanted to have any profits too. As you can see, we are committed to hedging. Because we need to bring hedge whether were at the top, that we have or not, we should have a risk program for hedging, but now we’re going to start out with six rigs. We probably keep those six rigs for 2022 right now, that’s our goal, we can change it. We can change that, on the fourth quarter of 2019 we had nine rigs. Of course, in January of 2020, we had six, we’ll drop down to five, four, and end up at four. So we have definitely been toggling it, most of these rig contracts were well to well to well, and again, as you see, the service call is collapsing because the service companies are really in a fatigue position with these low prices. We should get these cost per foot down, like Dan had said. We’re probably at $1,400, $1,500 in 2018-2019, we’re lower a thousand now, hopefully we can get those down, so costs are coming our way, commodity prices are coming our way and we do control the rig count and we’ve shown you that, we’re not telling you things that we haven’t already done before. So I think that’s why in May and June the market trust us for the bond offering and the equity offering.

Roland Burns

Analyst

And Dan, I think that this quarter, like Jay phrased it at the very beginning, you’re really stress-tested the whole company with these very low gas prices, very low oil prices, we had no impairments. I don’t know how many companies can say that this quarter. And that just shows you that our cost is fundamentally low. We still achieved EBITDAX margin of 73%, probably the highest– the highest of any companies we tracked in the entire industry, and even if you strip the hedges away, we still had a 60% margin, even if it is that you don’t use your hedges. So I think that what you did see is that the company can withstand these low prices because of the really strong cost structure.

Jay Allison

Analyst

I mean, you know, a certain analogy, everybody went behind the card [indiscernible] see what you are made of. And we look pretty good.

Dun McIntosh

Analyst

Yes, absolutely. Thanks for the color. And it’s clear that you are executing at a high level despite a challenging take, but hopefully that gets better here in the back half of the year and into next year like you’re currently thinking about. Just for a quick follow-up, you have made a lot of progress on the balance sheet and congrats on getting off two deals. And as I said, was a really challenging environment for Q2. Ultimately, you talk about a long-term leverage target of under two times, what are some of the other levers you could pull over to potentially expedite that deleveraging, and I mean like I said, what you got done is remarkable in the second quarter. But is there anything else you could look to do in the capital markets or maybe M&A is still an option for deleveraging? What are you seeing on that front?

Jay Allison

Analyst

You know, on the M&A front, we are trying to position ourselves to be the funnel for companies that we’d like to be, to have a transaction in the Haynesville-Bossier area. Now, the markers that we’ve said are the low cost and half margins and the quality of inventory we have. So anything that we would do, we would have to de-lever the company. I mean, we don’t have to do anything right now, we’re in really good shape. We would like to continue to grow, get that opportunities there, but you know, we are not out aggressively seeking to get bigger for the sake of getting bigger. We’re not going to do that. I think we will have some opportunities. I think there’ll be some decisions that we’ll make, and the Board and the Jones will make about whether we want to grow or not. In fact, we’re always in discussions with the opportunities that are out there. And I’ll tell you, as you know, we’re very transparent company, we’ve got a respected management, because we’ve been through really, really hard times and we’ve not misbehaved. So I think most of the other companies, they would like to do something, they’d like to deal with a Comstock top culture and I think that’s a big plus we have, that they know us.

Roland Burns

Analyst

I think, Dun, if we just stick to our stake, there are basic plans here and stick to our knitting, we look ahead and just based on today’s commodity prices that are out there for the future, with about 2022, we’re under 2.5 times levered. So stick to our game plan and be very disciplined and achieve it through organic growth. It doesn’t happen overnight, but I think that’s an option too. So I think that’s really how we’re looking at it and think that we’ve taken the moves in the capital markets, we think to derisk the company, to make sure you can withstand the volatility in the markets. And if we will just stick to our plan, we will achieve our leverage goal.

Jay Allison

Analyst

And that is our plan and if something else comes as – that makes us a better company, then you know, we would probably act on it.

Dun McIntosh

Analyst

All right, great, thanks. Thank you for the call – sorry, thank you for the color. Looking forward to following along.

Jay Allison

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Phillips Johnston with Capital One. Please go ahead.

Phillips Johnston

Analyst · Capital One. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys, thank you. Jay, now that the company’s scaled up in terms of size and now that your trading liquidity has increased with the larger float, I’m sure you’ve been talking to potential investors there, kicking the tires now that Comstock’s back on many focus-radar screens. Based on those conversations, what would you think is the most under-appreciated aspect to the Comstock story today?

Jay Allison

Analyst · Capital One. Please go ahead.

Yes, it’s a great question. I think the Haynesville itself is kind of undiscovered, everybody has had their 2020 vision on the Appalachian and nobody has been asked to be educated on the Haynesville-Bossier. I think there is a select group of analysts, and you’re one of them, that take your binoculars closer to the Gulf of Mexico, close to Mexico, close to the LNG, close to industrial corridor, closer to where the midstream pipeline are, because that’s where Jerry’s vision was. And you said, well, okay, but I don’t have any opportunities there. And what we did is we created the opportunity where you could come look at the Haynesville. So one, I think is education. I don’t think that we’ve exposed the Haynesville properly because it’s in its infancy. I think two, Appalachian, you’ve got down six, seven, eight, ten companies there that are public, you don’t have that top of the landscape in the Haynesville. I mean, we sell more Haynesville-Bossier gas than antibody, we’re public. The others are mainly private or they’re really small, or they’re not a big player in the Haynesville. So I think education, one. I think execution, we’ve financed some calls from some big fund managers when we did the roadshows, telephonic roadshows for both the equity and bond, and they said, wow, your cost structure is like that. Wow, you do have those margins which Roland alluded to, wow, you do compare that favorable to the Appalachian. We didn’t know that. So yes, I think over– kind of like we had to do with you, you got to say prove it, and a lot of these companies have revenue, they’re going to dig all the way, we actually have proven it particularly in the second quarter when at the end wells…

Phillips Johnston

Analyst · Capital One. Please go ahead.

Yes, absolutely does. You mentioned the Haynesville landscape, I asked you last quarter about big-picture thoughts on industry consolidation in the Haynesville. Maybe I’ll ask it again, especially now that just fixing the process of the pre-packaged Chapter 11.

Jay Allison

Analyst · Capital One. Please go ahead.

Well, number one, let me tell how we look at PAT acquisitions. First of all, we look at rock quality, and I do think we understand rock quality and roads in Harrison County to DeSoto Parish, Caddo Parish, Sabine, we do rock quality. So, when we look at that, and I think that’s where our M&A group and David said and he’s fabulous when he was a leader at the Covey, I think that where David comes in as our head geologist. Again, we’ve got really good groups out here to understand the rock. We know most of the product rebacks companies. We know the management, we know the bankers and a lot of it is midstream cost, have you over drilled, what kind of the firm transportation commitments do you have. So we’ve looked at all of those and most of those companies growth is big. And you know, we want to grow. We want to have more acreage, but as Roland said, we’re not coveting to do something that doesn’t make us a much, much, much better company. Now, I think that some of those transactions are out there and we’re always willing to look at them and we look at them open eyes and if we can become better, they could become better. We delivered, and everybody is happy. Then, hopefully we’re smart enough to figure out how to do them. And then, at the same time, we’re smart enough to figure not to do deal, period. And I’d tell you, we always have a really good backstop. You asked a great question. If you pulled out a $1 billion from your pocket, not somebody else’s pocket or fund, you’re going to protect your investment, period. So we might have management, we might have a board, we may have all those things, but the thing that we have that most don’t, that none of them have, we’ve got a man who wrote a check from his pocket, period. And I’m telling you, that’s the phone call that we got two and a half years ago, that’s the difference in the trustworthiness of where you can go versus some others. That’s the big game-changer, and I think that’s the attractive part, so these opportunities that may come our way, I think they want to deal with Comstock.

Phillips Johnston

Analyst · Capital One. Please go ahead.

That’s it from me, Jay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Kashy Harrison with Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

Kashy Harrison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

Good morning everyone and thank you for taking my questions. So in the prior presentation, there is some commentary on how a portion of the improvement in D&C costs was driven by reductions in completion intensity. We can clearly see the benefit of that as costs are at $1,000 and it seems like you’re going to be below $1,000 as you look to the second half of the year. I was just wondering if you could help us from a modeling standpoint, think through based on the early data that you guys are looking at, how to think about the impact to near-term productivity from the lower completion intensity designs?

Dan Harrison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

This is Dan, so we are continuing to monitor the performance on those wells. It’s pretty hard to extrapolate out really good ore without getting probably six months of production on these wells. Everything that we’re looking at so far right now looks good. We’re just comparing what we’re recovering on these relatively downsized jobs and what we were getting on the larger jobs. Where we have the infield locations in the co-developed locations where we complete three or four wells side-by-side at the same time. So far on the data, we really haven’t seen that big of a difference to justify going back and continuing to pump the larger jobs. So that’s where we’re at, that’s still where we’re headed. We’ll continue to monitor the production and if we need to make some tweaks we will. We’ve also made some – our drilling costs were relatively flat, really last year and into the first quarter. I think we’re starting to see some benefit of a few things we’re doing there. We only turned seven wells to sales in the second quarter but we drilled – we had the 20 DUC at the end of Q2. If you just look at our drill cost, we are down 10% to 15% there since Q1. So I think that along with just holding the completion call is flat, we’re going to get to that $1,000 or probably below per foot. That’s our service goal stay in the same. I thought we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel in Q1. Who saw this whole COVID pandemic coming? That’s obviously put more stress on the pressure pumpers, and so we’ve seen another step down in service calls frac costs, basically from Q1 and to the end of Q2 and going into Q3. So that was a little bit unexpected. We had these targets in place really before that hit so that will help us maintain $1,000 a foot.

Kashy Harrison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

That’s helpful and good to know that it’s still in NPV positive decision. Then this is a good segue into my next question. At the 6-rig program that you all are thinking about for next year and the $1,000 per foot, I was wondering if you could just help us think through what that would imply from a CapEx standpoint based on what you know today.

Roland Burns

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

Yes, I think if you’re looking at that program and just timing of when those wells gets completed etcetera, I think we’re targeting CapEx for next year, probably in the similar levels to this year, maybe slightly higher. Probably the $450 million to $475 million area. I think that’s going to be the overall cost of that program.

Jay Allison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

You can use that $450 million number and go a little north or south. That’s going to be a good kind of middle of the road number. Ron, is that good?

Ron Mills

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

That’s good and that incorporates based on average and at least one incremental rig – plus or minus one incremental rig versus what we’re going to average this year.

Jay Allison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

Remember, we will have two frac crews and will toggle a third frac crew so we don’t have probably more than 15 DUCs at any given time.

Roland Burns

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

That will be bringing more wells to sales. We have kind of a carryover effect from 2020, but that’s probably bringing 55 net wells to sales for that program. So it lines up pretty well especially with the current drill and complete cost that we can achieve, the expected commodity prices. It really sets up for a really good 2021 combination of all those factors.

Jay Allison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

When you look at those collars too, if you look at the Comstock inventory, Covey inventory when you blend them all in our drilling program has been a 50-50 Comstock-Covey. Might be a little more toward Comstock locations and Covey. We drilled in all south-east wells of our 305,000-acre footprint. So both of those assets in those locations have complemented each other. So when you look at these costs, they’re not skewed toward one little focused area. It’s why we drilled everywhere. That’s important.

Dan Harrison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

You’re not going to drill all your wells in the – and maybe Elm Grove and the very top of our inventory, but it doesn’t make sense. You’d be shut in the entire year trying to complete them. So having a large footprint and having a lot of different areas, a lot of the program planning is around how do you efficiently bring the wells on, minimize downtime, create an overall best result and we use the entire field to achieve that. We don’t overly focus on one part of the acreage. Keeping it all spread out also gives you the lowest possible gathering cost because you don’t push any area too hard at one time.

Jay Allison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

I think when you look at those numbers again there hadn’t been a management group which includes Covey and Comstock that’s drilled and completed more of these extended lateral hence completed wells that we have. That’s a 237. We’ve got a lot of experience here.

Kashy Harrison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

That’s a lot of great detail. Thank you.

Jay Allison

Analyst · Simmons Energy. Please go ahead.

Great question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Welles Fitzpatrick with SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Welles Fitzpatrick

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning.

Jay Allison

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Good morning.

Welles Fitzpatrick

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Can you guys have any early indications as to the second half non-op spend and 2021 non-op spend? It seems like the PE guys are slowing down a little bit, but maybe not quite at the pace that some folks would initially thought.

Jay Allison

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

I’m sorry we missed the very first part of the question.

Welles Fitzpatrick

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Just non-ups spend for the back half and then also any thoughts on non-ops spend?

Roland Burns

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Non-op for Comstock. We think that that’s a pretty light amount of activity for the rest of the year for our non-op activity because most of that they will be circulating AFEs out. So there was a lot of stuff that carried over from last year, especially in that first quarter. But for the last year, we do have a few projects that are going to be completed, but I think the overall budget for non-op is for the remainder of the year is in the $15 million area $15 million to $18 million of total spend for the next six months.

Welles Fitzpatrick

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Okay. Perfect.

Roland Burns

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

The acreage trades that’s part of that. Those actually help. I think some of the stuff we actually spent money for in the first quarter we either do exchange with and so I think that’s always the goal of the operators to the extent that we can figure out how to swap acreage back and forth, just so we can have a bigger interest in our own wells. Everybody is motivated to do that. They just take a long time to complete, but we did complete some significant ones in the second quarter, just kind of help the overall location count get a lot longer. I think we increased our percentage of long laterals. It also helps eliminate. What we like too is eliminating some of that non-outspend.

Jay Allison

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

The beauty of the story in U.S. and non-outside but the beauty is 92% of our production we operate and we’ve got 95% HBP. So it’s a non-op. We do some of that but we’re not seeing any radical non-op operator out there drilling wells that are [indiscernible]. We don’t see any of that happen right now.

Welles Fitzpatrick

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Good to hear. You had to jump back to the operator side. Maybe I’m a little bit late to this party but it recently crossover six months at least on the state data. Can you talk to the George mills? It looks like it’s drilled on some of your more Eastern acreage. That’ll be a month for five or six months. Was there anything different in the completion of the flow back on the well?

Jay Allison

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

So now the George mills is definitely in a Tier 1 area over growth. We put that well along of labels in November of last year. We do have some limitations on the infrastructure over in that area. We have one primary gatherer that gathers all the gas in that area being the Tier 1 area that system stays relatively full. So here and there in some wells, we’re a bit limited as far as it might be getting them absolute max auto, but this will, in particular the George mills. We IP that will add about 35 million or 36 million a day and so essentially that rig we stayed in net 30 million to 35 million range for several months and I need to look at it in detail to give you the exact but that’s Bcf a month is right for several months after we put it online.

Welles Fitzpatrick

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Okay, perfect. Great to see you. Thank you.

Jay Allison

Analyst · SunTrust. Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And our next question is from Noel Parks with Coker & Palmer. Your line is open.

Noel Parks

Analyst

Good morning.

Jay Allison

Analyst

Good morning.

Noel Parks

Analyst

I hopped on a little late. I’m going to say, we talk about your improvement in the well cost per foot bringing it from $1,400, $1,500 down to $1,000, could you give some perspective on what you already accomplished in lowering it to that degree and what are the challenges still remaining to drive it down further as you seem to have pretty good confidence that you can go lower still?

Roland Burns

Analyst

We basically have been on a downward trend for several quarters now. That’s pretty much been driven by our drilling costs has been relatively – fairly unchanged during that trend. So really that was pretty much almost entirely driven by the completion side, mainly the frac costs. Just the frac health we’ve seen for several quarters. Just to provide our costs. Is really plummeted since back in probably mid-2018 timeframe. I think we’ve probably reached the bottom of the barrel here. I kind of felt we were there in the first quarter like I said earlier, but I think we’re probably there now. I just don’t see the frac costs probably going much lower than where they’re at today. Obviously we’ve done a pretty good job. I think today, we’re very efficient really from this point forward as far as getting that cost down a little bit further, it’s just really inefficiencies. We have gone to the downsides frac job that’s obviously part of the answer. We’ll continue to monitor performance on those, make sure we’re just getting the maximum NPV that we can. So it’s all about the efficiencies. It’s just getting a little bit better from here forward to get to that $1,000 a foot. So a little piece of that will be the frac costs because like I said, it did step down again from Q1 with the entire COVID-19 pandemic just kind of basically destroying the demand activities. The rig count drop activities drop but aside from that is just getting better at what we do. It’s saving a couple of those drilling the wells, it’s a couple of these lift frac in the wells. Hitting on the well sooner, minimizing any kind of problems, that’s kind of just really where the extra cost is, the extra efficiencies are.

Noel Parks

Analyst

Great, thanks. And just one other question, just thinking of the different regions the companies operate in over the years. We did actually have a transaction earlier in the week in North Louisiana and it got me wondering is there anything out there, any asset that could lure you back into conventional play at this point just given your inventory or any have in the Haynesville?

Jay Allison

Analyst

We’re not focused on the conventional so we probably would be the company to ask about that. We’re just going to stick with what got us here, and so we commented on that, we’re probably out of our court. The other color I’d like to add with, Dan, on your first question. Remember, he has been here since 2008. So every single well that we’ve ever touched in the Haynesville from 2008 all the way through today. He is forth tier and he has probably been involved in all that. So I think that’s really important when you ask the question, somebody he needs to be given the authority to hedge rate, and I don’t know if anybody who would have learned more authority than Dan would give you those answers. So I think that’s important. So a little detail there.

Dan Harrison

Analyst

I’ll just add to that. We’ve got a pretty good staff here, and obviously we’ve got, got a lot of experienced people on our staff in Haynesville. That’s what creates the numbers that you see.

Jay Allison

Analyst

In fact, if we were to open a lot of make and I’ll give you all the answer but it would typically take too long.

Noel Parks

Analyst

Okay, I look forward to it some other time. Thanks so much.

Jay Allison

Analyst

Thanks for your time.

Noel Parks

Analyst

You bet.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And this concludes our Q&A session for today. I would like to turn the call back to Jay Allison for his final remarks.

Jay Allison

Analyst

All right. Time I think is the most valuable thing we all have and so we are very thankful that you spent the last hour with us and we’re also very thankful to be positioned where we are and I’m telling you we’re very excited about the next 18 months to bring to the company. So thanks for your time. That’s it.

Operator

Operator

With that ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for participating in today’s program. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.

Comstock Resources, Inc. (CRK) Q2 2020 Earnings Date, Estimates & Pre… | Earnings Labs