Baytex Energy Corp. (BTE) Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Baytex Energy Corp Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial and Operating Results Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Ector, Senior Vice President, Capital Markets and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ashida. Good morning, and welcome to Baytex's fourth quarter full year 2025 results conference call. Joining me today are Eric Greager, our CEO; Chad Lundberg, our President and COO; and Chad Kalmakoff, our CFO. Before we begin, please note that our discussion today contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, I refer you to the advisories regarding forward-looking statements, oil and gas information and non-GAAP financial and capital management measures in yesterday's press release. On the call today, we will also be discussing the evaluation of our reserves at year-end 2025. These evaluations have been prepared in accordance with Canadian disclosure standards, which are not comparable in all respects between the United States or other disclosure standards. Our remarks regarding reserves are also forward-looking statements. All dollar amounts referenced in our remarks are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise specified. And after our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions from analysts, webcast participants can also submit questions online. So with that, let me turn the call over to Eric.

Thanks, Brian. Good morning, everyone. 2025 was a defining year for Baytex. With the closing of the Eagle Ford sale in December, we successfully completed the repositioning of this company into a focused, high-return Canadian oil producer. This is our first call since that milestone and a significant upshift in the trajectory. Baytex is a technically driven organization with an industry-leading balance sheet by exiting the year in a net cash position, we have established a premier platform built for discipline, long-term value creation. We are entering 2026 with a clear strategy and the financial flexibility to navigate any market environment. With this strategic pivot now complete, it is the right time to formalize our leadership transition. As we announced yesterday, Chad Lundberg will succeed me as CEO following our AGM in May. Chad has been a valuable partner to me and to this organization and his promotion is the result of a deliberate structured succession process to help ensure our positive momentum remain interrupted. I have complete confidence in Chad's leadership and ability to drive our next chapter. I'm proud of the foundation we've built together. Baytex is in excellent shape, and I look forward to its continued success under Chad's leadership. I now turn the call over to Chad Lundberg for his remarks and a detailed operational overview.

Thank you, Eric. I appreciate the Board's confidence, and I'm excited to lead Baytex and our team into the next chapter. My focus as we move forward is simple. We remain committed to technical leadership and disciplined capital allocation to create value. We will continue to build our business by prioritizing our heavy oil and Duvernay assets with an enhanced focus on exploration and new play development, all of which is underpinned by a balance sheet that is in great shape and we will prioritize a competitive return through a combination of organic growth, share buybacks and dividends. Let's turn to our operational performance. In 2025, our Canadian portfolio delivered annual production of 65,500 BOE per day, which, excluding dispositions, represented 6% organic growth year-over-year. We invested $548 million in Canada in a highly efficient capital program and delivered solid reserves growth, low F&D costs and healthy recycle ratios across all reserve categories. Our Pembina Duvernay and heavy oil development contributed significantly to this performance and continued a strong track record of value creation. This demonstrates the long-term resiliency and sustainability of our business. Importantly, we have significant running room across our portfolio and are excited about our business going forward. First, let's talk about the Duvernay. We have assembled a 91,500 net acres and identified approximately 210 drilling locations. 2025 was a breakthrough year. We validated the resource potential, reduced well costs on a per foot basis and improved our characterization of the play. We grew production to 10,600 BOE per day in the fourth quarter, a 46% increase over Q4 2024. We are now transitioning to full commercialization with plans to bring 12 wells on stream this year, a 50% increase over 2025. We currently have 1 rig drilling a 4-well pad on our southern acreage. Completion operations are scheduled for the second quarter with the wells expected on stream by midyear and the remaining 2 pads in the third and fourth quarters. Shifting to heavy oil, we continue to see strong, predictable performance across the portfolio. Our heavy oil assets comprise 750,000 net acres and 1,100 drilling locations, supporting 12 years of drilling at our current pace of development. In total, we expect to bring 91 heavy oil wells on stream in 2026. We are pleased with the expansion of our Northeast Alberta acreage, where we are currently targeting 7 discrete horizons in the Mannville stack. Recent success includes 2 multilateral wells in the Sparky and a 5-well pad in the upper Waseca. Our 2026 program will also see increased exploration activity, including stratigraphic tests, step-out wells and 3D seismic to expand our development inventory and test new play concepts across our extensive heavy oil fairway. In addition, we are advancing 2 waterflood pilots Peavine blending the attractive capital efficiencies of multilateral primary development with the potential for enhanced recovery and moderated decline rates. Thank you to our teams for executing safely through 2025 and into 2026. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Chad Kalmakoff to discuss our financial results.

Thanks, Chad, and good morning, everyone. Our 2025 financial results demonstrates the cash-generating power of our Canadian assets and the transformative impact of the Eagle Ford divestiture. For the full year, we generated $1.5 billion in adjusted funds flow and $275 million in free cash flow. In the fourth quarter, we delivered $262 million of adjusted funds flow and $76 million in free cash flow, which included $35 million of nonrecurring expenses related to the Eagle Ford disposition. This was achieved despite a softer commodity backdrop with WTI averaging USD 59 per barrel during the quarter. The 2025 net loss of $604 million reflects the nonrecurring loss on the Eagle Ford disposition, a deferred tax expense related to the restructuring from the sale and $148 million impairment on our Viking assets. These noncash adjustments have no impact on our cash flow generation outlook for 2026. Turning to the balance sheet. We exited 2025 in the strongest financial position in Baytex's history. We eliminated our net debt and ended the year with $857 million in cash less bonds and our $750 million credit facility fully undrawn. We remain committed to returning a significant portion of the Eagle Ford proceeds to our shareholders and believe the NCIB program is the most efficient approach. Since reinitiating our buyback program in late December, we have repurchased 30 million shares, nearly 4% of the company for $141 million. Our current NCIB remains active through June, and we intend to launch a renewed NCIB in July. As we monitor the broader macro environment, we continue to assess the pace and mechanism of our buybacks to ensure we're maximizing the long-term value for our shareholders. We have considered an SIB or substantial issuer bid, but at this time, we believe we can meet our shareholder commitments through our NCIBs in 2026, while maintaining our annual dividend of $0.09 per share. I'll now turn the call back to Eric for closing remarks.

Thanks, Chad. To build on those points, this focused, high-return Canadian company is the next chapter for Baytex. For 2026, our operations are on track and our annual guidance of 67,000 to 69,000 BOE per day remains unchanged from December, with the high end of that range representing 5% organic growth year-over-year. We have significant inventory depth and optionality across our portfolio to support our current plan and potentially accelerate growth beyond these levels. I'm proud of the trajectory we've established. We are now positioned to demonstrate the true potential of this Canadian portfolio. Operator, let's open the call for a line of questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Menno Hulshof with TD Cowen.

Congrats to both of you on the transition. Yes, I'll just start with the question on the growth outlook. You're currently guiding 3% to 5% for 2026. But if we assume that oil prices remain elevated for longer than expected. Is there a scenario where growth exceeds the top end of the current range. And then has your overall thought process in terms of high-level deliverables for 2027 changed at all within the last several weeks.

Thanks, Menno. It's Chad. I'll take a crack at answering your question. So on growth, yes, I mean, we've guided to a capital program of $550 million to $625 million, delivering 67,000 to 69,000 barrels a day which represents 3% to 5% production growth. We're actively monitoring the macro kind of picture and situation right now and we would expect to make any decisions on increased growth at the breakup time frame. We certainly have the optionality within the portfolio depth and quality to go a little bit harder this year and to your point, into 2027. As I said, that will come. We'll look at that through breakup and make the decisions accordingly. Maybe just a little bit of an example of where we could look to expand the program. So potentially another pad in the Duvernay that may look like a drill that gets ducked into next year and completed or continued expansion in that Northeast Alberta Fairway where we utilized the 2 drill rigs that are drilling there today and potentially continue with that second rig. We could also pivot, though, just, again, an example of the depth of the inventory, pivot up into Peace River, where we've got some of the exploration work happening and elect to allocate capital up into that region as well. So lots of optionality currently on our radar. We're not moving it too fast, but those will come kind of decisions through breakup.

Terrific. And then maybe I guess my second question relates to your opening comments on some of the comments that you made on the Peavine waterflood opportunity. Like how material could that be? How do you plan to tackle this relative to some of your peers who are already well down that track? And what could that look like over the next -- in terms of deliverables, what could that look like over the next, call it, 12 to 18 months?

So we're deploying 2 pilot projects this year. One is into the kind of part of the play that we've been actively drilling to this point. So you can expect that we produce barrels out of the well that's going to be converted ultimately into an injector. What we're looking for there is just how fast can we fill it up to then pressure support the entire system around it to ultimately drive a lower decline and more barrels out of the ground. The second pilot is in a new development area where we're actually drilling the producers and the injectors simultaneously with each other, and we'll turn them on together at the same time. So what's all this mean? I mean, certainly, the waterflood has been doing great things for our industry. We're not sure what happens with our rock. That's why we've committed to pilots at this point in time. As a reminder, our primary development is very strong, holding 48 of the top 50 wells in the play, and that's really part and parcel to the incremental pressure that we have in situ in the rock itself. So there's various factors that are maybe unique to our situation that are potentially different from others. If you extrapolate that out though to the big picture, we're pretty excited for what it could do if it were to work with respect to base declines and driving more oil out of the ground. What does that mean for the future in the next 18 months? I think we're going to work very hard to try and understand this through kind of end of the year and into the budget process. And then how does that translate into our program next year? It could mean incremental waterflood injector activity in 2027. It could mean leaving gaps in our drilling program in between primary producers for the future. And we're just going to have to wait and see Menno where we go.

Can you remind me, I should know this, but when is the last time Baytex dabbled in waterfloods, if at all?

Yes. So I mean waterflood is not new to Baytex at all. We've actually been at it for 2 decades. Waterflood and then also polymer floods. It just depends on the quality of rock and then oil that we're working with. But you could think about it this way Menno, approximately 10% of our heavy oil production so 43,000 barrels a day is waterflood derived production. So not new to the story, and it's not foreign to us. We've got technical capacity and teams to really, we think, advance this forward.

That's all the questions we have from the phone lines. I would like to turn the conference back over to Brian Ector for any questions received online. Please go ahead.

Yes, there are a few questions coming through the webcast. I'll try and run through those with you here, Chad. Menno spoke to sort of the current WTI price environment and optionality and growth. But another question comes in around, I think it's referencing sort of breakeven prices. Is there a WTI price that we would sort of pause the growth scenario, Chad?

Well, we set the budget out 3% to 5% centered at $60 oil, guiding to the high side, more than 5% at $65. And certainly, the flexibility is we've built the program to pull that back below $60 oil. I think that's how we think about our growth. And again, we're just really observing the macro climate right now. Obviously, it's incredibly dynamic. And we're taking it in and not going to make any knee-jerk moves. But I would remind that we have the optionality and flexibility to move harder if so desired.

Another question on the operations around our cost of production. And just can you speak to the capital efficiencies, meaning that you see in the business generally chat and steps we can take to continue to work on the cost of production and efficiencies overall.

Yes. Brian, I think that gets into how we've laid out the budget for 2026. We've started a sustaining capital at $435 million, add the $50 million in growth, $50 million in infrastructure and then $50 million in exploration. I think when you look into each one of those buckets, they are designed to improve capital efficiency. So I'll just give an example in the Duvernay. The infrastructure spending is at a higher and elevated pace for the next 3 years and then falls off post 3 years to a much lower rate. That flows right through to capital efficiencies and excess free cash flow to the shareholder. If you look in our investor pack, we've done again centered on the Duvernay, a pretty good job of delineating the asset, improving the characterization and then also reducing cash costs. Specifically, in 2024, we improved by 11% on the characterization and then equally so, dropped our capital costs by 11%. So both of those flows straight through to capital efficiency. Maybe just a little bit on the heavy oil program, touched on the $50 million that's allocated to exploration. This is absolutely intended to enhance and lengthen our inventory position. And I think some of the wells that we released through Q4 of last year, up in the Sparky in the southern area, some of our upper Waseca wells as we step through that Northeast Alberta area and the 7 different layers in the Mannville stack, we're pretty excited about what it's doing for capital efficiency. I would make this motherhood statement, though, to end the conversation. We're not done. This is something that we do as a company. This is something that our teams are tremendously good at, and this is a huge focus and priority of mine as I step into this role, and we move forward into the future from here.

Chad. Let's shift gears to a couple of questions and conversations around the net cash balance sheet that we have. It's around $800 million and Chad just I know we've talked a little bit about the NCIB in the prepared remarks, but how did we see allocating that $800 million going forward?

So we've been pretty clear that a good portion of that is going to be returned to the shareholders by way of buyback. Chad Kalmakoff in his prepared remarks, talked about the NCIB as the preferred vehicle over an SIB at this point in time. But we've also been very clear about utilizing some of the proceeds for greenfield, tuck-in, land acquisition, bolt-on style activity in our key and core focus areas. We're still committed to that.

Maybe along those lines then, Chad, just when you look at buybacks, how would we evaluate kind of the market price, the value and where we see value in the buyback program itself.

Yes. So I would start here about this company is going to be all about value going forward and an intense focus on how we deliver that value. When we evaluate the buyback specifically, I think there's 3 things we look at. One is the macro commodity environment. And so we'd like to think about really acting countercyclically and respecting where we're at in the cycle. The second though is just how are we trading relative to our peers. And so as we evaluate that, it looks like we have a good potential to grow with respect to how our peers are trading today. And then lastly, and equally as important is just the intrinsic value of the business. We're constantly running models at different price scenarios, with different enhancements that we can put on top of the plan, speaking to the optionality that we have in the deep portfolio set in front of us. And that would inform us on an intrinsic value that all 3 of those combined would anchor the conversation for how we proceed forward with buybacks. I guess when we look at those altogether today, it would still signal that we are focused on the buybacks and continuing forward from here.

Excellent. One question I turn over to Chad Kalmakoff, our CFO. Chad, can you just talk to our -- the existing hedges in place, maybe WTI and WCS, what the policy will look like going forward?

Sure. We have hedges in place kind of through the back half of last year, collared structures put for us at 60. Through the transaction, we maintain those. So we'd be roughly, I'll call it, 60% hedged on TI Q1 and about 50% -- 45% to 50% hedged in Q2. Nothing has changed policy wise. I think we always talked in the past about a strong balance sheet is the best hedge you can have. So going forward, I think we obviously have a very pristine balance sheet. I wouldn't expect us to be looking to hedge WTI contracts really in the future, given the balance sheet we have today. That being said, I think we can still look at hedging WCS contracts. We're 45% to 50% hedged on WCS this year at about $13. We still think that's an important piece of business to keep hedging to kind of prevent any financial impact from major blowouts. So summary, WTI, those will be rolling off here at the end of June. I wouldn't expect us to be that active in the hedging market on WTI, maybe in specific circumstances continue to kind of hedge differentials.

Okay, great. I think that's going to wrap up the large portion of questions coming in from the webcast. I would like to thank everyone for joining us. For those who submitted webcast questions that we didn't get to address, please reach out to our Investor Relations team and we'll follow up directly. Thanks again for your time today. And have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.