Earnings Labs

Vermilion Energy Inc. (VET)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Mon, Oct 31, 2016

$13.12

+4.04%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. My name is Sharon and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Vermilion Energy Inc. Third Quarter Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Mr. Anthony Marino, President and CEO, you may begin your conference.

Anthony Marino

Analyst

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us. I am Tony Marino, President and CEO of Vermilion. With me today are Mike Kaluza, Executive Vice President and COO; Curtis Hicks, Executive Vice President and CFO; and Kyle Preston, our Director of Investor Relations. I would first like to refer to the advisory regarding forward-looking statements contained in today's news release. These advisories describe the forward-looking information, non-GAAP measures, and oil and gas terms referred to today, and outline the risk factors and assumptions relevant to this discussion. This morning, I would like to provide you with an overview of our third quarter results, including some key highlights from the quarter, and then discuss our 2017 exploration and development capital budget, which we also release this morning. Third quarter production of 62,596 boe/d was in line with the second quarter, as higher production volumes in Ireland and Australia largely offset lower production in Canada, France, and the Netherlands. For full year 2016, we expect to achieve production at the top end of our guidance range of 62,500 to 63,500 boe/d. During the third quarter, we curtailed approximately 1,900 boe/d of natural gas weighted production in Canada. While the vast majority of this gas would have been economic to produce the third quarter prices, the volumes were not required to meet our corporate targets and we believe that by reactivating this production at higher winter prices we can generate more cash flow. We expect to bring the majority of this curtailed production back online in Q1 2017. We have also restricted oil production from our new wells in Australia as part of this effort to manage to our overall corporate production targets and to optimize pricing. Our third quarter fund flows from operations increased 11% quarter-over-quarter to CAD141 million…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Travis Wood from National Bank Financial. Your line is open.

Travis Wood

Analyst

Good morning, guys. I think in the past you’ve budgeted the Netherlands program on the exploration side to be about a 30% chance of success or so. And given the last few years of development and that success changed as you look out as you budget 2017? That's the first question. The second question is from the Miacomian field, is there any risk attached to that? Or is this just a pure development field similar to what you've done in the Paris basin in the past?

Anthony Marino

Analyst

Travis, thank you. I will take the first question about the Netherlands. I would say the success rates in the Netherlands have gradually been improving over time. We really budget for these things at a lower success rate than we’ve actually been achieving. I think the cumulative – as I've mentioned in the introduction, the cumulative success rate is about 67%. I believe the last few years we’ve run at a bit higher rate than that. I do think that the success rates may well improve over time. The more wells we drill there, the more we get used to the understanding the seismic signatures. It's all a very geophysically driven set of exploration projects there and I think that we just move up the learning curve as we continue the exploration on our lands there. And for the second question, I'll turn that over to Mike Kaluza.

Mike Kaluza

Analyst

Sure, thanks. On the Miacomian, that's a pretty established field and today we've just been doing the optimizations and workovers and having good results and now we're ready to do some drilling. It is definitely development play; we're looking at about a 90% chance of success on drilling those wells, so it's mostly just infill near step out, so pretty low-risk project.

Travis Wood

Analyst

Okay perfect and similar crude characteristics of the Paris basin from Champotran?

Anthony Marino

Analyst

It does have similar crude characteristics to Champotran.

Travis Wood

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] We do not have any questions over the phone at this time. I'll turn the call over to the presenters.

Anthony Marino

Analyst

Thank you for participating in our conference call. We look forward to speaking with you again at our fourth quarter and year end conference call in February.