Vincent White
Analyst · Tudor, Pickering, Holt
Thank you, operator, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to Devon Energy's First Quarter 2011 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. For today's call, as usual, I'll begin with a few preliminary items and then I'll turn the call over to our President and CEO, John Richels. He will provide his perspective. And then Dave Hager, our Executive Vice President of Exploration and Production, will cover the operating highlights. Following Dave's remarks, Jeff Agosta, our Chief Financial Officer, will finish up with a financial review. We will follow with a Q&A period. And as usual, we'll hold the call to about an hour. Darryl Smette, who is our Senior Vice President of -- Executive Vice President of Marketing and Midstream; sorry, Darryl, and other senior members of management are with us today for the Q&A session. As always, we'll ask each participant on the call to limit his or her questions to one initial inquiry and one follow-up. A replay of the call will be available later today through a link on our Home page, that's www.devonenergy.com. During the call today, we will make some minor refinements to our forward-looking estimates for items such as production, capital expenditures and our hedge position. But since the revisions are so minor, we're not going to issue a new 8-K. We'll just post the changes to our Guidance page on our website. To find that, just click on the Guidance link found in the Investor Relations section of the Devon website. Please note that all references in today's call to our plans, forecast, expectations, estimates and so on are forward-looking statements under U.S. securities law. And while many factors could cause our actual results to differ from those estimates, we always strive to give you the very best guidance we can. We encourage you to review a discussion of risk factors if you're so inclined that is provided with our Form 8-K forecast. We will reference certain non-GAAP performance measures in today's call. When we use these measures, we're required to provide certain related disclosures and those disclosures can also be found on the Devon website. One final item, while our first quarter cash flow per share significantly beat the consensus estimate, our earnings per share from continuing operations came in about $0.05 shy of consensus. Production was better than expected and our pretax cost per barrel were lower than the midpoint of our guidance. However, our deferred taxes were higher than expected. Total adjusted income tax expense for the quarter of 34% of pretax earnings was 4 percentage points over the midpoint of our guidance. At this point, I'll turn the call over to our President and CEO, John Richels. John?