Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the W&T Offshore Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Conference Call. During today's call, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared comments, the call will be open for questions and answers. During the question and answer session, we ask that you limit your questions to one and a follow-up. You can always rejoin the queue. This conference is being recorded and a replay will be made available on the company's website. I would now like to turn the conference over to Al Petrie, Investor Relations Coordinator. Please go ahead.

Thank you. On behalf of the management team, I'd like to welcome all of you to today's conference call to review W&T Offshore's fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial and operational results. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our comments may include forward-looking statements. It should be noted that a variety of factors could cause W&T's actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements. Today's call may also contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the earnings release that we issued yesterday for disclosures on forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Tracy Krohn, our Chairman and CEO.

Thanks, Al. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our year-end 2024 conference call. With me today are William Williford, our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Sameer Parasnis, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Trey Hartman, our Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. They're available to answer questions later during the call. Our proven strategy is simple and effective. We focus on generating free cash flow, maintaining and optimizing our high-quality conventional assets, and opportunistically capitalizing on accretive opportunities to build shareholder value. We have a strong balance sheet and further enhanced it in early 2025. We built a sustainable business with a long-term vision that's committed to profitability, operational execution, returning value to our stakeholders, and ensuring the safety of our employees and contractors. Our ability to deliver low decline production, meaningful EBITDA, and integrate accretive property acquisitions has helped W&T grow during our forty-year-plus history. Over the past year, we've accomplished many things that I'd like to highlight. In January 2024, we invested about $77 million of cash to purchase a 100% working interest in six shallow water Gulf of Mexico fields from Cox, which added 21.7 million barrels of oil equivalent of 2024 proved reserves. This equates to a price of about $3.38 per barrel oil equivalent booked when accounted for 2024 production from these fields. Those properties are adjacent to our existing operations, which provides the ability for us to capture synergies regarding personnel, well optimization, gathering, and transportation. While this helped us by adding about 3,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day to production in 2024, several fields were offline for most of 2024. As we announced in January, we expect to return the remaining three fields to production in the second quarter of 2025. The benefit of that production increase…

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If you have further questions, you may reenter the question queue. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question will come from John White with Roth Capital. Please go ahead.

Good morning and congratulations on the nice results and the very nice proved reserve report. Well done.

Nice job. Good morning.

Good morning. The midpoint of your full-year production guidance shows some nice growth. Is that all coming from restarting of well fields that were shut in in the first quarter and recompletions and workovers? I didn't see any mention of new drilling in the press release.

Yeah, you're correct, John. That doesn't include any new drilling. Doesn't mean we're not going to do any. We are faced with a quality dilemma. We're seeing assets come available in the market. We're contemplating and working on the asset acquisitions that we're seeing. And that may change our thought process with regards to additional drilling. This year, we still expect to be drilling in 2026, but it could defer something in 2025, late scheduled for late 2025, as opposed to chasing some acquisitions that we think would be a nice addition to our portfolio.

Okay. Thanks for that detail, and good luck with your transaction.

Thanks, John.

The next question will come from Jeffrey Robertson with Water Tower Research. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Tracy, to follow up on the drilling comments, can you provide or share an update on the drilling partnership that you spoke about in 2024?

Yeah, we're continuing to follow through on that. That still looks like the first well we would want to drill is at Holy Grail, which is our Magnolia Fields floating vessel out there. We'll have to put a platform rig on it. Fortunately, those are proved reserves that we would be chasing there. And then, we have another prospect lined up right after that, potentially with the same drilling rig. Fortunately, we have a choice on the second structure over at what we're calling our Payman prospect. So, yeah, we're still moving forward with a drilling program. The only thing that, again, as I just told John, that might change that is the potential for additional acquisitions. And that market seems to be getting a little bit looser, if you will.

On the acquisition front, is your preference still that it adds immediate cash flow as you add producing properties rather than obviously running the risk of drilling and adding cash flow twelve to eighteen months or longer after you drilled a well?

Yeah, you bet, Jeff. Anytime we can substitute acquisitions for drilling, that's probably the better thing to do, primarily because you take so much of the risk out of it. There's a lot of good to be had with organic growth. There's also risk with it. We think that prices on oil are stabilizing around $70 over the long term. We think that gas has real potential for moving up, and we've made some hedges accordingly just recently as a result of that.

Thank you.

No further questions. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tracy Krohn, Chairman and CEO, for any closing remarks.

Yeah, it looks like we have one more question, operator, from Jeff Robertson. You may go ahead.

Thanks, Tracy. A question on the operating expenses. How much progress did you all make in 2024 on the refurbishment on the Cox assets? How much is left to do in 2025? And can you provide some color around the range of $280 to $310 million for lease operating expenses in 2025?

Well, Jeff, just so happens I have the guys for that.

Yeah, thanks, Tracy. Hey, good morning, Jeff. We made a huge dent in that from an LOE standpoint. We still got quite a few things to do in 2025 to get the platform to W&T standards. So they're still ongoing, but we should see a lot of that completed in 2025.

On the two West Delta and the Main Pass fields that are scheduled to come on in the second quarter, do those facilities need much work, or have you already done whatever work is required there?

We have Main Pass. The Main Pass stuff is actually something that got caught up in the Cox issue with the bankruptcy. We've already had work done there. Essentially, we're just waiting to get that back online once we get everything squared away. And as far as the West Delta 73, all of that is just maintenance and work we're getting done to get that field back online. So the majority of that is done.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

With no further questions, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tracy Krohn, Chairman and CEO, for any closing remarks.

Thanks, operator. Last but not least, we've spent several years repaying all the debt the company has and managing that in spite of a lot of changes in our business and changes throughout the world with regard to fossil fuels and the philosophy around usage of the same and the fact that we've had some change in leadership in the country and a lot of random things that we couldn't have predicted. The good news is that we've managed to get that debt down in spite of all that, and we've refinanced the remainder, which is in pretty good shape now. So the company is poised to turn that corner. In fact, we are turning that corner and moving forward in 2025 as a growth entity. So now we think that we'll be able to start carrying on business more as usual with regard to making acquisitions, dispositions, and drilling wells in the Gulf of Mexico. With that, we'll terminate this call today, but look forward to hearing from us again in the very near future. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.