Jack Hightower
Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners. Your line is open
Thank you, Steven, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to today’s call. As you probably realize, every CEO is always excited to talk about their company and the performance of the company. I’m more of a macro person in terms of annualized performance. But this is a great exciting time with HighPeak and with oil and gas prices in the world, unfortunately, some of which contributing to the Ukraine crisis. But we had a great fourth quarter. Our average production averaged over 14,900 barrels a day, which was an 81% increase compared with our third quarter average. We successfully executed our drilling program and averaged almost three rigs throughout the quarter. We had a large number of wells that are in the process of being completed, and most of these wells will come online and be completed and contributing to our production towards the end of this year. The majority of the wells are anticipated to ramp-up and be reaching peak rates towards the end of the year again. We added our fourth rig in January, and are now very active with four rigs running in the market. We continue to [Technical Difficulty] consider adding to our rig count if commodity prices remain strong. And so we are contemplating adding to our drilling activity. And with our cash flow as we go through the numbers, you can see we could do so without increasing our outspend. HighPeak is a growth story, and we’re going to take advantage of current market strength in oil and gas process to create additional value for our shareholders. So I’d like everyone to point to Slide 4 of our March Investor Presentation. And this gives you an overview and key statistics for the company. I previously mentioned that our average production was 14,900 barrels a day, consisting of 95% liquids. This contributes tremendously to our economic success. We continue to realize peer leading prices and cash operating margins. And on a BOE basis, our fourth quarter unhedged cash margin was $60.26 per barrel of oil equivalent, approximately 84% of our fourth quarter realized pricing. Also, in the in the first quarter of 2022, we entered into a series of acquisitions, which in the aggregate, include 9,500 acres and almost 2,500 barrels a day of production, and an additional 40 locations with a saltwater disposal system, including three disposal wells and rights to the local non-potable water sourcing of approximately 35,000 barrels a day. These acquisitions also contribute to about $3 million per year in savings on water. The acquisitions just in closing in the first quarter at 15% increase to our flat top acreage, I mean to our acreage – total acreage position and 29% to our flat top acreage position. If you think about it and looking back a year ago, in 2021, we had about 51,000 acres. And today, with the closing of that transaction, we will have almost 72,000 acres and a little over a year a 40% increase for HighPeak, increasing our scale and giving additional locations to our inventory. The acquisitions check all the boxes, they’re immediately available for development and related gathering infrastructure is already in place. We paid less than a three times multiple on cash flow and were projected to increase our EBITDAX in 2020 to over $50 million, more than that with present pricing, but $50 million assuming commodity prices it stay in the range of $70 to $90 a barrel. The assets are contiguous to our flat top operating area, they provide many synergies, including adding to our robust infrastructure system. The acreage is 100% operated and will be easy to integrate into our development plan. The 40 locations with $15 million to $20 million of net present value and, of course, it’s hard to pick pricing right now because prices are so high compared to the numbers that we’ve been utilizing. But they add potential upside value to HighPeak in addition to the current PDP value. In other words, we will be actively developing that area. And each well at approximately $20 million net present value with 40 locations can add significantly to our value. If you’ll turn to Page 5, or Slide 5, I’m only going to pick out a few things in this particular slide. We still have the highest oil cut amongst our peers in the basin. Our income stream was 88% oil, 95% liquids. Our realized price was $72.07 on a BOE basis, which was 93% of the weighted average of NYMEX oil price during the quarter. And this is because we have such a high percentage of oil. Our hedge price was $67.50, still a great price compared to a lot of our peers that are having significant write-downs because of their hedges. We lowered our LOE by $0.60 a barrel in the third quarter compared to the third quarter. But I look at what’s happening in the future. And Mike is going to talk about operationally what’s happening with our lease operating expenses. But they’re going to continue decreasing once the substation and other things become operable that are active things in progress. Our EBITDAX was $72.4 million, which is 117% increase. But that was at a very low oil price of $72. Think about what it would be today on an unhedged basis, that gives you a sense of what’s happening in the future and how excited we are about our future plans and our future drilling and our future EBITDAX. If you’ll turn to Slide 6, our track record of delivering capital efficient always growth will continue into the future. You look at 2020 from a 1,900 barrels a day, all the way up to this fifth – almost 15,000 barrels, and then take our guidance for this year of averaging on the low end 27,000 barrels to 32,500 barrels with the four rigs drilling and going all the way up to around 45,000 barrels. That’s tremendous growth. If you look at our EBITDAX as a function of increasing production, and we’ll talk about drilling performance in terms of single well performance payout in reserves. But if you think about, this was based on roughly $70 to $90 oil at $600 million to $800 million average for 2022 and exiting the year at between $850 million and $1.100 billion at a higher oil price of around $110 a barrel, that takes us up to a $1.04 billion to $1.06 billion in 2022. And so that you can see what oil and gas prices are doing for HighPeak in terms of cash flow. And now if you turn to Slide 7, HighPeak is continuing to provide rapid proved developed reserves growth. I’ve mentioned many times and I’m going to mention many times in today’s presentation, we are a growth company. If you look at our growth from 2020 going up from $51 million to $400 million to $744 million to exiting this year at over $815 million in proved developed reserves and another added up to $1.498 billion counting our proved reserves and that’s at a low price deck. It’s much higher than that at today’s prices just a month or so after the end of the year. And then you look at and this is very important to look at our rapid growth and what that’s going to do to us going into the end of 2022. And we did some numbers at a price deck of $110 a barrel, basically $14 a barrel below, actually oil prices are higher than that right this minute, almost $19 a barrel cheaper, I mean, more expensive today than what we projected, and it takes us up to $3.8 billion of proved reserves in just this 12-month period, not counting what will be in process of being completed at year-end. So we are on a rapid growth. We’re very excited about what’s taking place. We’re going to drill over 100 wells this year. And as you can see and use your own imagination as to what price deck you want to use, we are having tremendous success. And with that, I’ll turn the presentation over to Mike, who is going to talk about the next few slides and give you an update on operations.