John Schmitz
Analyst · Piper Sandler
Thanks, Chris. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'm excited to be discussing Select Energy again with you today. As I've outlined on each of our recent calls, we continue to focus on 3 primary strategic areas, which are: first, improving and bolstering the base business; second, advancing our technology, ESG initiatives and diversification efforts; and third, executing on strategic M&A. I am very pleased with the progress we have made across each of these areas during the third quarter. We continue to see the benefits of a strong commodity price backdrop, which has supported steady activity growth and productive pricing conversations with our customers. This has driven revenue and earnings higher during the third quarter. On technology and sustainability front, we continue to add new recycling facility, advance our emissions reduction efforts and have expanded our leadership team with the addition of a Chief Technology Officer to further advance our technology strategy. And lastly, we continue to execute our M&A strategy, having closed on the acquisitions of both Complete Energy Services and UltRecovery during the third quarter and Agua Libre Midstream at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Looking at our operational and financial performance during the third quarter in more detail. We generated strong overall revenue growth of 27%. Additionally, we saw adjusted EBITDA double, supported by both our base business and the Complete acquisition. Setting aside the growth contributions of our recent M&A activity, we still saw the base business grow revenue sequentially by 9%, generating incremental margins of more than 30%. This continued growth was driven by a combination of modest activity and market share increases and, more importantly, continued pricing improvements. Additionally, we saw good momentum throughout the quarter, with September representing our strongest month of the year-to-date. I'll let Nick speak to our fourth quarter financial outlook in more detail. But looking a bit further, I feel very good about our continuing ability to grow the business, meaningfully improve our pricing and capture market share heading into 2022. With oil above $80 and natural gas above $5, we expect to see capital budgets for our customers increasing next year by 20% or more. That said, we still expect to serve a disciplined marketplace with much of the E&P CapEx growth directed at an increased service pricing. Even with the service pricing growth, our customers are still very well positioned to generate meaningful cash flows improve their balance sheet and return capital to shareholders. All of these point to Select maintaining a positive momentum over the coming quarters. Looking beyond the macro-driven tailwinds and thinking about additional ways we can support our business improvements, we continue to make investments to support our technology, ESG and diversification efforts. I believe Select is already a technology leader in the water solutions marketplace. But continued investments in our automation, data analytics, emission reduction and FluidMatch solutions will be critical to provide our customers with lower cost and improved performance. To that end, I am pleased to announce the addition of Suzi Colbert as our -- to our leadership team as Select's first Chief Technology Officer. Suzi brings over 20 years of experience in a number of technology and financial operational leadership positions at Marathon, BP, Noble Drilling and Anadarko. Suzi will oversee the integration and development of our R&D, operational technology and IT efforts across the organization to ensure that we continue to advance our -- and grow our position as a technology leader in the sector. Additionally, while the E in ESG is often top of mind in our business, we believe the other areas are equally as important. Accordingly, Suzi will be focused on reviewing, accessing and enhancing our cyber strategy and data protection. This is especially important given the critical investments we are making in technology, machine learning, real-time data collection and cloud-based analytics. Shifting back to our environmental efforts, we continue to execute our emissions reduction, recycling and infrastructure strategies. On the emissions reduction side, since signing our exclusive distribution partnership with Emission Rx during the second quarter, we recently received our first delivered methane combustor unit during the third quarter. We quickly deployed this to our first customer. And we have 5 additional units on order that we expect to receive and deploy during the fourth quarter. To remind everyone, these Emission Rx solutions are designed to help control, reduce and ultimately eliminate methane and other waste gas emissions during the flowback and production phase of a well. This removes the need for open flaring on location and at the production facilities. We believe there is a significant demand for this new technology. And we are excited about the prospect of partnering with more customers in the coming months to further their emissions reduction strategies. On the water sustainability side, during the third quarter, we completed the expansion of our largest recycling facility located in Martin County. We also completed our 3 newest Permian Basin facilities late in September. This brings our total combined fixed and mobile water recycling capacity in the Permian Basin to approximately 525,000 barrels per day. What's also exciting to me is that we've seen recent success in advancing our recycling efforts outside the Permian Basin as well. We were recently awarded a 3-year take-or-pay contract to build, own and operate a produced water recycling facility for a major integrated oil and gas company in the Rockies region. We commenced construction on this produced water recycling facility late in the third quarter of 2021 and expect it to be fully operational in the first quarter of 2022. This facility will support the recycling of up to 15,000 barrels of water per day with the ability to expand up to 30,000 barrels of water per day. This facility will be connected by pipeline to an existing saltwater disposal well owned and operated by Select. We believe this connection to our existing disposal infrastructure provides meaningful optionality and flexibility for our customer. In general, these fixed infrastructure recycling facilities streamline our customers' water logistics, reduce their costs and improve their results. In addition to meeting our customers' business needs, these facilities will also be critical in advancing our ESG goals and those of our customers through decreasing both freshwater usage and waste disposal. Now switching to M&A. We continue to be active in the marketplace with the recent acquisition of Complete Energy, Agua Libre Midstream and UltRecovery. We saw the benefit of this activity during the third quarter with more benefits still to come in the fourth quarter and beyond. Looking at the 2 larger transactions in more detail. The acquisitions of Complete Energy closed on July 9, thereby contributing for a majority of the third quarter. However, the acquisition of Agua Libre from Basic closed on October 1 and therefore did not contribute to the third quarter. I spoke to the benefits of Complete acquisition in detail on our last call. And I believe the acquisition of Agua Libre provides similar financial, strategic and operational advantages. Overall, with Agua Libre, we believe we've added $70 million to $80 million of annualized current run rate revenue and $6 million to $8 million of annualized current run rate adjusted EBITDA with meaningful room for operational improvements, cost synergies and high ROA growth. While we anticipate cost synergies resulting from each of these transactions over the course of the coming quarters, we expect these to largely take hold in 2022 as we consolidate operation locations, remove excess capacity and sell underutilized assets. Operationally, with Agua Libre, we are getting a solid production service presence in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and North Dakota as well as more than 550,000 barrels per day of permitted disposal capacity, approximately half of which is in the Permian Basin. Additionally, more than half of Agua Libre's current produced water volumes are delivered by pipelines, supported by a number of long-term contracts. Ultimately, we believe these assets are very well positioned for subsequent development opportunities such as recycling solutions. We view this captive supply of produced water as an alternative, sustainable water source. And we will continue to invest in technology and infrastructure needed to provide these solutions to our customers. As you've seen in our recent take-or-pay agreements in the Rockies, we believe that we have a very unique opportunity to build sustainable, full-life cycle recycling solutions around our existing and recently acquired infrastructure footprint and more importantly, have the ability to do it through long-term contractual commitments around these assets. In addition, with nearly 100% Agua Libre's revenue coming from production-related services and infrastructure, we've added further revenue stability to our core completions-oriented base business. Combined, these 2 deals have increased our production-related revenue from about 10% of our total revenue during the first half of 2021 to about 25% on a pro forma basis. As we look forward, I believe that continuing to grow our less cyclical production and industry-related revenues and adding contracted revenues through our recycling and pipeline infrastructure will further stabilize and enhance our cash flow generation capabilities and further separate Select from its competitors. Ultimately, I believe the continuing execution of this strategy will position us to reassess a more formal long-term shareholder return program over the course of 2022. Again, I am very excited about our recent M&A execution, our technology strategy, our recycling projects and our other ESG-focused investments. I firmly believe the market needs additional consolidation, and we are well positioned to execute on additional opportunities ahead. With growing activity, strong commodity prices and improved operational and financial performance in the third quarter and into next year, the future is exciting. With that, I'll hand it over to Nick to discuss the financial performance and outlook in more detail.