Earnings Labs

W&T Offshore, Inc. (WTI)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, May 5, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the W&T Offshore Inc. First Quarter Earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star, zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Lisa Elliott. Thank you, Ms. Elliott. You may begin.

Lisa Elliott

Management

Thank you, Operator, and good morning everyone. We appreciate you joining us for W&T Offshore’s call to review the first quarter of 2016 financial results and for an operational update. Before I turn the call over to the company, I have a few items that I’d like to point out. If you wish to listen to a replay of today’s call, it will be available in a few hours via webcast by going to the Investor Relations section of the company’s website at www.wtoffshore.com, or via recorded replay until May 12. To use the replay feature, call 201-612-7415 and dial the passcode 13635554. That information is also in the press release that was released yesterday. As a reminder, information reported on this call speaks only as of today, May 5, 2015 and therefore time sensitive information may no longer be accurate as of the date of any replay. Please refer to the first quarter 2016 financial results announcement we released yesterday for disclosure on forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Mr. Tracy Krohn, W&T’s Chairman and CEO. Tracy?

Tracy Krohn

Management

Thanks Lisa. Good morning everyone. Joining me this morning are Jamie Vazquez, our President; Danny Gibbons, our Chief Financial Officer; Tom Murphy, our Chief Operations Officer, and Steve Schroeder, our Chief Technical Officer. Yesterday we released our financial and operations results for the first quarter and provided guidance for the second quarter and full year of 2016. Also, we will be filing our first quarter Form 10-Q with the SEC here in a day or so, and that will have even more detailed information. This morning I’ll briefly review some key items from the release and then we’ll be glad to address your questions. In the first quarter, we produced approximately 3.9 million of barrels equivalent for the quarter, of which about 57% was oil and liquids. Our oil production was up slightly compared to the first quarter of 2015 while our natural gas and natural gas liquids production decreased. Our new projects over the last five years have focused almost exclusively on oil exploration and development, so we’re continuing to see a shift towards a larger percentage of total production being crude oil. Though our production in the first quarter was slightly lower than we anticipated as our largest oil producing field, Ship Shoal 349 Mahogany, was offline for three weeks during March as a result of a scheduled maintenance project on a third party pipeline that services the field. Ship Shoal 208 was down from October through the end of February due to a fire - I believe that was at Black Bayou, and resulting outage at an onshore third party processing facility. We had a couple of other incidents that contributed to a total deferral for the quarter of about 800,000 barrels of oil equivalent; nonetheless, our full-year production guidance remains the same. Otherwise, most of our…

Operator

Operator

[Operator instructions] Our first question comes from Jon Evans with JWEST. Please state your question.

Jon Evans

Analyst

Thanks for your time, Tracy. I appreciate it.

Tracy Krohn

Management

My pleasure.

Jon Evans

Analyst

Could you just answer, last quarter you had a problem with a well, you were going to do an acid--some acid issues, et cetera, and try to get it restarted and producing. Can you give us any update on that? I don’t think you mentioned that in the script.

Tracy Krohn

Management

That would have been Gladden. Actually it wasn’t an acid issue, it was an asphalt themed issue, that the well had lower pressures, precipitates asphalt at the well bore interface. We had a very successful--we had some downtime, we had a very successful treatment on that using xylene through a control line, fairly novel approach. We were able to inject over about a two-week period. We did get the well back online at acceptable pressure levels, and we’ve put the well back on at slightly reduced rates. But the good news is we’re back online and as of the first of this month--I’m sorry, excuse me, as of the first of April.

Jon Evans

Analyst

Great. Then you guys have done a great job on cost. Obviously you’ve been chasing the commodity lower. Can you just talk on the cost side? Is there more blood to squeeze out of this turnip, or do you think we’ve kind of come to the end? Can you just help us understand kind of in SG&A and LOE?

Tracy Krohn

Management

I think about this a lot, Jon, so the short answer is yes, the rationale is that it takes a period of time for our vendors and contractors to precipitate a lower price for their cost of goods and services as well, so their suppliers have to respond going on down the chain. That continues to act out. We certainly saw a lowering of prices in the first quarter, so yes, the short answer is yes, that will continue as long as we have oil in these kind of price ranges.

Jon Evans

Analyst

Okay, thanks so much.

Tracy Krohn

Management

Yes sir.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Noel Parks with Ladenburg Thalmann. Please state your question.

Noel Parks

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Please state your question.

Good morning.

Tracy Krohn

Management

Good morning, Noel.

Noel Parks

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Please state your question.

First one - have you given any thoughts on how things look on the work-over and recompletion front, just what you might have in inventory at this point and what might be ahead?

Tracy Krohn

Management

I think we have a pretty good idea what we’re going to do. There’s things that we believe that we see as lower hanging fruit. We have some things to do at Mahogany that would certainly help us as well. It’s a matter of price. As price continues to stay up, we’ll take advantage of those opportunities. We did our budget based on some fairly dire assumptions, and hopefully these increases in price make a big difference. And they do - I mean, if you think about the difference between $26 and $45 oil, it doesn’t take a whole lot of rocket science to figure out the revenues are going to be much better.

Noel Parks

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Please state your question.

Right, right. Sort of along that same line, on the non-operated side, the price improvement has been us, I guess going into a couple months now, but is there anything from any of your partners, the operators--with the improvement in price, are there any stirrings of any activity maybe coming on the horizon that you didn’t originally plan with the more dire oil assumptions?

Tracy Krohn

Management

Yes, not anything that I could really point a finger to right now. Clearly when we get into better weather months, people pick up activity levels, so we’ll have a little better read on that after this quarter, of course. I would tell you that there’s still a lot of boats and rigs and stuff stacked up at the mouth of the river and [indiscernible] and everything else, so I’m not seeing a huge movement right now in work activity, but clearly it will get better in our better weather months.

Noel Parks

Analyst · Ladenburg Thalmann. Please state your question.

Great, thanks a lot.

Tracy Krohn

Management

Yes sir, thank you.

Operator

Operator

I will now turn the call back to Mr. Krohn for closing remarks.

Tracy Krohn

Management

Well thanks everyone. We appreciate you tuning in, and we’ll be talking to you next quarter, if not sooner. Thanks so much.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This does conclude today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines and have a wonderful day.