Tim Duncan
Analyst · Benchmark Company. Please go ahead
Thank you, Sergio. I'm proud of our company's performance this quarter as we delivered solid operational results despite the challenges brought on by Hurricane Ida. The quarter results included strong unhedged EBITDA margins, positive free cash flow generation and strong environmental health and safety performance. This is a testament to the resiliency and cost structure of our asset base, our ongoing ability to successfully invest in attractive opportunities around our infrastructure and our operational capabilities is one of the largest independent E&Ps in the Gulf today. On a strategic level, as we diversify what we can deliver as an energy company, we've made significant strides advancing our carbon capture and storage initiatives including a major first-of-its-kind award for a dedicated offshore sequestration site located off the coast of Texas. We look forward to sustaining these trends as we close out the final months of 2021 with expectations to deliver a full year of 2021 that will include record production, attractive margins, significant positive free cash flow, leverage reduction and major progress in all of our strategic goals. I'll first address some details of the quarter including the impact of Hurricane Ida. We generated average daily production of 56,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day for the quarter reduced by approximately 10,000 to 11,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day as compared to our pre-hurricane expectations, which would have otherwise made this the third consecutive record production volume quarter. To put that into perspective the attractive and resilient nature of our assets that includes a commodity mix of 69% oil and 78% total liquids even with the material -- a material weather-related shut-in our unhedged adjusted EBITDA margin was over 70%. If we hadn't had the shut in this quarter and the deferred production was to be considered here the unhedged adjusted EBITDA margin would have been upwards of 76%. Hurricane Ida did not cause any major lasting impacts to our facilities across the Gulf, but rather drove production outages resulting from issues at our downstream providers assets such as pipelines, terminals and refineries. Although, the vast majority of our production has been restored, we are still expecting selected outages of approximately 4,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day which we expect to return by the end of the year and is reflected in our fourth quarter production guidance of 64,000 to 66,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. We also anticipate having less capital expenditures in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter which should lead to significant positive free cash flow generation for the fourth quarter and full year 2021. We expect to continue to pay down our revolving credit facility and continue to lower our overall leverage metrics below 2 time net debt-to-EBITDA at year end. With respect to our ongoing drill bit activities as we wrap up our 2021 capital program, we experienced early success in our Pompano platform rig program in recent weeks with the execution of certain low-risk asset management projects that we believe will add between 1,500 and 2,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day of production by year end, which will help set up 2022 production adds. Following these asset management projects, we will begin a drilling program on Pompano in 2022 that will take up the bulk of next year and include a combination of infield development and step-out exploitation opportunities around our 100% owned and operated Pompano facility in Mississippi, Canyon. As a reminder a similar program at our 100% owned Green Canyon 18 facility recently brought online significant production additions at highly attractive economics and margins earlier this year. These low-risk and quick turnaround projects are a key part of our strategy of creating additional value from largely fixed cost assets in our portfolio by redeveloping these assets with more modern seismic technology and imaging as well as drilling and completion techniques. Additionally in other areas of our portfolio, we're also planning a 2022 drilling program that we expect to include several subsea tiebacks and other drilling opportunities. We expect that the 2022 wells will include a combination of low-risk, shorter-cycle exploitation projects, high-impact exploration opportunities as well as the appraisal of our Puma West discovery in the second half of the year. I also want to remind everyone that we will have our regularly scheduled dry docking of the HP-1 floating production unit next year, which will result in approximately 45 to 60 days of total shut-in time in our Phoenix Complex. This is a regulatory required dry docking that needs to occur every 2.5 to 3 years, and the last one was in 2019. So it's time now. We expect the dry docking to take place in the summer months, which means the production deferral impact should occur in the second and third quarters of 2022. We will aim to update the market with our formal 2022 operation and financial guidance in the coming months, but investors should expect the plan consistent with our focus on a balanced capital program across risk reward, categories, and appropriate reinvestment rate and significant free cash flow generation, material total debt and leverage ratio reductions and advancement of other key catalysts for the business. Turning to strategic initiatives, we are particularly focused on growing our carbon capture business, as well as our oil and gas business, so I'll discuss them individually. I'm very pleased with our rapid advancement in the carbon capture and storage segment of our business. In our last earnings call, I spoke about the pride, we have here at Talos with respect to our culture of being nimble commercial and forward thinking. Over the years, we found success as an early mover and an out-of-box thinker. And that has been the case in how we thought about participating in the low-carbon initiatives and committed ourselves to pushing hard into being the first mover in the carbon capture and storage space. I was direct on our last call, when I said, I was very confident in what we could achieve with the right level of focus urgency and creativity. And in the third quarter, we began to deliver on those expectations by being named the winning bidder and the operator of the Texas General Land Office's, Jefferson County carbon sequestration site and a joint bid with our partner Carbonvert. This location is the first major offshore carbon sequestration site in the United States, comprising over 40,000 acres just off the coast of Beaumont and Port Arthur's, Texas industrial corridor. Upon completing the lease agreement, which we expect will happen before the end of this year Talos will be the only public company, with a tangible large-scale carbon capture and storage site along the United States Gulf Coast. This is a great accomplishment for our team, and one we believe will ultimately generate significant value for our shareholders, while also playing a direct role in reducing industrial emissions in our communities. And we do not want to stop there. This is only the first of what we expect to be several sequestration sites we own and operate along the Gulf Coast. We took our goal of being a meaningful leader of carbon capture and storage project development, a step further by expanding our offering along the Gulf Coast, and state waters of the Gulf of Mexico, with a joint venture with Storegga Geotechnologies. Storegga is a dedicated CCS company headquartered in the United Kingdom, and is the architect of what will be one of the largest offshore carbon capture projects in the world the Acorn project in offshore Scotland. Since the announcement of the Texas GLO award and the Storegga JV, we have laid out our broader carbon capture ambition in our public investment materials, which is to have multiple identified storage sites along the Gulf Coast in the coming 12 months, and pulling together joint venture partners in the value chain, such as, midstream providers and working with industrial sources to bring "anchor tenants" to our storage sites. All these work streams are happening in parallel, and we'll provide additional information to the market as they become available. We are also building alliances with key service providers. One example of those include, what we recently announced with TechnipFMC, a leading global engineering and EPC company. TechnipFMC will contribute engineering services and FEED studies that will help us accelerate a line of sight toward project FIDs within our intended portfolio. With the focus and commitment that we're putting into this offering, we continue to expect that our carbon capture and storage business which leverages the technical and operational skills we already possess in-house will become a tangible material portion of our business in the future. Moving back to the oil and gas side, we are also very focused on continuing to grow our oil and gas business through both organic drilling and pursuing transformational M&A. The US Gulf of Mexico is still our primary focus for M&A, but we are seeing impactful opportunities in other areas of the Atlantic margin such as West Africa and South America, as well as in the North Sea. We believe our skill sets can travel to these offshore provinces and we can create shareholder value in these areas as well. We believe our commitment to sustainability including our carbon capture business makes us an attractive counterparty. Transactions are not always easy to bring across the finish line, but we are absolutely focused on value-enhancing and accretive M&A opportunities. Lastly, I will also mention that, stakeholders should expect our second annual ESG and sustainability report to be published in November. We're excited about the progress in all aspects of our ESG efforts from emissions reductions community impacts and governance changes at the Board level, and we look forward to highlighting those efforts in our upcoming report. With that, I'll turn it over to Shane to address some of the financial details of the quarter.