Brandon Elliott
Analyst · Stifel. Your line is now live
Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. We're happy to welcome you to Northern's Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. Before we get to the results, let me cover our Safe Harbor language. Please be advised that our remarks today, including the answers to your questions may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from the expectations contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Those risks include, among others, matters that we have described in our earnings release as well as in our filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. During this conference call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted net income and adjusted EBITDA. Reconciliations of these measures to the closest GAAP measures can be found in the earnings release that we issued this morning. All right, during our call today, I will make a few summary comments before turning the call over to Nick O'Grady for his remarks; Northern's Chairman, Bahram Akradi is going to comment on the ongoing consent solicitation, our exchange and strategy moving forward. And finally, we'll open it up for the Q&A portion of the call. In addition to those I mentioned, we also have Chad Allen, our Chief Accounting Officer; Adam Dirlam, our EVP of Land; and Jim Evans, our VP of Engineering in the room with us as well. Northern had a solid quarter with production up 17% sequentially and 53% year-over-year to 3.75 million barrels of oil equivalent, averaging 40,786 barrels of oil equivalent per day. This production is despite continued curtailment and shut-ins that we have estimate reduced our production by approximately 4,500 barrels oil equivalent per day during the quarter. This was almost 2,000 BOE per day worse than our initial forecast. Offsetting those headwinds has been the success we have had over the last six to 12 months in our ground game acquisitions. These acquisitions have helped offset the curtailed production as some of the net well additions from prior ground game acquisitions have outperformed both our estimates and initial production and have come online slightly ahead of our initial plan. Also, the VEN Bakken acquisition that we closed early in the third quarter has been slightly outperforming our initial forecast. Our hedging program continued to perform as designed and help to protect us from recent volatility in the oil markets. Natural gas and NGL prices were particularly weak during the quarter. As we mentioned last quarter we think infrastructure expansions planned for late this year and into 2020 will bring welcome relief both on the oil volumes we continue to see affected by the constraints, but also in the ability to move and get better pricing on the natural gas and NGL side. Lease operating expenses were up 5% sequentially to $8.62 per BOE. Some of this increase was expected as we had indicated the VEN Bakken assets do have a slightly higher LOE than our previous corporate average. But there was also some negative effects on fixed costs due to the curtailments and shut-ins. Net-net we still expect our guidance of $8 to $8.50 per BOE for the year to be a reasonable expectation. Again this quarter we tried to focus our capital expenditures on the highest return opportunities. We consented to about 80 gross wells during the quarter and non-consented six. The wells we non-consented did not meet our investment hurdles, mainly as a result of one operator targeting a Three Forks formation that did not meet our hurdle rate. In this instance, we were able to consent to the middle Bakken wells and retain our optionality in future well proposals to each formation. Our proactive capital allocation decisions should augment our returns and cash flows moving forward. The positive cash flow we have generated after organic drilling and development capital expenditures continues to be focused on generating the best possible returns, and importantly focused on increasing our cash flow as we look to the culmination of this next step in our process to position Northern to begin returning capital to shareholders in 2020. Bahram will cover this in his remarks momentarily. Now let me turn the call over to Nick to cover some of the financial highlights and our updated guidance.
Nicholas O’Grady : Thanks, Brandon and good morning from an icy Minneapolis. I have a few highlights to go over this quarter starting with a quick summary on Northern's financial performance. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was 124.4 million, up sequentially from the second quarter. This is driven by higher production primarily from our VEN Bakken acquisition, offsets as prior mentioned, the production curtailments and very poor realized gas prices, and the carrying costs of fixed LOE from wells that have yet to return to sales. The fog of war and the basin driven by curtailment has been frustrating. However, the end game remains the same, the significant processing capacity coming online, a huge swath of wells turning to sales and improvements in NGL takeaway that should lead to improve pricing in the long run. Cash G&A came in at $1.15 per BOE this quarter slightly higher than the second quarter, the main driver was over 1.3 million in transaction expenses associated with the VEN Bakken acquisition. Excluding these onetime items, G&A was actually lower quarter-over-quarter. Oil differentials are around the midpoint of our guidance this quarter at around $5.5 per barrel. This is in spite of significantly narrowing Gulf Coast differentials. While shut-ins combined with a higher LOE at VEN Bakken drove LOE up sequentially to 862 per barrel. We expect this to moderate in coming quarters as field issues normalize and newer wells turn to sales. We expect no changes to guidance. Our organic D&C spend was approximately 80.1 million and we turned a total of 13.3 net wells to sales, 10 of which were organic and 3.3 associated with the ground game acquisitions. With respect to discretionary capital, we allocated approximately 32.9 million this quarter, made up of money 9.9 million for ground game acquisitions, and 23 million in total ground game associated development capital. The ground game investments continue to have some impact on our production levels this year. But we should start to see some significant impact or volume in cash flows as we close out 2019 and into early 2020. Now, to guidance, we're leaving our fourth quarter production guidance intact based on the current levels of activity, and the trajectory going into 2020 remains the same subject to winter weather of course. For our LOE guidance, it remains 8 to 8.50 despite the curtailments keeping LOE elevated into the third quarter. As of now we expect modest improvements in the fourth quarter. We are changing our tax guidance to 10% on net crude sales and $0.075 per Mcfe, which more closely approximates the actual North Dakota tax code. This should allow us to be more accurate in the future as the old percentages move around too much depending on the spread between gas and oil prices. Cash G&A guidance has been maintained to a range with a high end of $1.15 per BOE. We may incur some costs with a recently announced consent and tender process that cannot be capitalized, but we'll make sure to call them out if it should happen. On the hedging front, we've continued to make progress, particularly in 2021. On differentials, we expect oil differentials to be wider in the fourth quarter as production curtailments begin to roll off and gas realizations may remain weaker than normal until the large NGL takeaways complete in the first quarter of 2020. On the capital front, we remain on track and we're still guiding to 33 to 34 organic net well additions for 2019. We do think however, given we have seen a few net well additions come online earlier than expected. We could be towards the high end of the organic spend. The ground game has remained active, but we are trimming the top end of our 2019 acquisition spending to a maximum of $40 million as we believe here in November our spending for the year is largely complete. We're widening the ground game D&C CapEx for the same reason I just mentioned with respect to the organic D&C spend. We've continued to be surprised to see operators turning wells to sale faster and in many cases accelerating development. With investors still focused on free cash, I want to make one thing clear; we are generating free cash flow on an organic basis. The most important question is what are we doing with it? The acquisitions we have made with this cash are purposeful and driven towards building our cash wedge. And with our consent process almost complete, we can now focus on harvesting of this. With many participants scrambling to cut capital in any way, shape or form, we are counter-cyclically investing in those capital projects, high return wells in process that will generate cash within a few quarters. Given the choice between 20% to 100% risk adjusted returns versus paying down four and a half – 4% to 5% bank debt there's been an easy capital allocation decision for us until such time that we were in a position to return capital meaningfully to shareholders, and that time is coming in 2020. Given our success and robust levels of activity, our ground game particularly for wells and process is likely to slow and mainly to focus on projects for 2021 and beyond. 2020 will be a time to harvest all the success we've had this year both in terms of debt retirement and shareholder returns. Thanks and let me turn it over to Bahram.