Good morning. My name is Carmen and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Stone Energy Corporation First Quarter 2008 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) Thank you. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Welch. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Carmen. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to the 2008 first quarter conference call. I'm joined this morning by Rich Smith our Exploration Vice President and Ken Beer, our Senior VP and CFO. Ken will be discussing some of the financial highlights of the quarter, followed by my general comments on our future activities, and then we'll take your questions. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Ken.

Thank you, Dave. Let me start with the forward-looking statements. In this conference call we may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are subject to all of the risks and uncertainties normally incident to the exploration for and development, production and sale of natural gas and oil. We urge you to read our 2007 annual report on form 10-K for a discussion of the risks that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those in any forward-looking statements we may make today. In addition, in this call we may refer to financial measures that may be deemed to be non-GAAP financial measures as defined under the exchange act. Please refer to the press release we issued yesterday, which is posted on our website for a reconciliation of the differences between these financial measures and the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. With that, once again rather than going through the financials in great detail, we'll assume everyone has seen the press release and the attached financials. Accordingly I'll just try to focus on the few highlighted areas. First, there really were no unusual items in the first quarter. It was pretty vanilla overall. Our quarterly net income totaled $62 million or $2.22 per share and discretionary cash flow was just over $150 million. Both earnings and cash flow were well above the first quarter estimate. Production for the quarter came in at 185 million cubic feet a day equivalent, in the middle of our 180 to 190 million a day guidance for the quarter. For April, though volumes were above the 200 million a day level as we completed a couple of exploitation wells at Ewing bank 305. As noted in our…

Okay, thank you very much, Ken. As you've heard, this has been a good quarter for us as we once again had strong cash flow driven by solid production performance, good commodity pricing and cost control. On the production front, we hit exactly in the middle of our first quarter guidance of 180 to 190, delivering 185 million cubic feet equivalent per day. As noted in the press release, this was below last year's first quarter which was almost entirely due to the sale of our Rockies production last year, and the sale of some non-core Gulf properties in the first quarter of this year, as we continue to try to improve our portfolio. Our operations and exploitations group continued to look to deliver stable production; and their work along with portfolio improvements are keeping a lid on inflation as we're able to reduce our lease operating expense at the same time. These results are underpinning our strong earnings and cash flow. We expect an increase in production in the second quarter as these new volumes, Ken mentioned from Ewing 305 exploitation drilling have already been placed on production. The first two wells were successfully completed and are contributing combined rates slightly in excess of 20 million cubic feet per day. Although these wells in our production are expressed in gas equivalents, these two wells are primarily oil wells and our overall production profile is actually slightly biased to oil as a result of preferentially focusing on oil during today's commodity price environment. We're presently producing 51% oil on a BTU basis and 75% oil on a current price basis. In addition to Ewing 305, we're also active on our South Pelto’s 23 major rig workover programs, as our continuous push on well work; compressor upgrades and production up time…

(Operator Instructions) At this time, gentlemen, I am showing that there are no questions.

Okay. Thank you very much, Carmen, and thank you everyone. This will conclude our conference call. Thanks for attending.

This concludes today's Stone Energy first quarter 2008 earnings conference call. You may now disconnect.