Cavvy Energy Ltd. (CVVY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Pieridae Energy First Quarter 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. James Millar, Director, External Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Millar.

Thanks very much, Catherine, and good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you to Pieridae Energy's Q1 2022 Financial Results Conference Call. With me today are Chief Executive Officer, Alfred Sorensen; President and Chief Operating Officer, Darcy Reding; and Chief Financial Officer, Adam Gray. Alfred, Darcy and Adam will begin today with some opening comments on our financial results and certain other company developments. Please note that a slide presentation will accompany their remarks. Following their prepared remarks, we will turn the call over to the conference coordinator for your questions. To provide everyone with an equal opportunity to participate, we ask that you limit yourself to 2 questions. If you have additional questions, please reenter the queue. Also we ask that you focus your questions on our industry, recent developments and key elements of our financial performance. Before Alfred begins, I would like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements that are subject to important risks and uncertainties. For more information on these risks and uncertainties, please see the reports filed by Pieridae with Canadian securities regulators on sedar.com. With that, I will turn things over to Alfred. Alfred?

Thank you, James, and good morning to everyone, and thank you for taking the time to listen to our presentation this morning. We are going to have Darcy do the full presentation with the assistance of Adam, and I'll be available to answer questions when we get to the end of the meeting. I'd also like to take this time to invite everyone to attend our shareholders' meeting, which will be held in 2 weeks virtually on May 26 at 8:30 Mountain Time. With that, I will pass it off to Darcy to begin the presentation.

Thank you, Alfred, and good morning to everybody. I'd like to start first by taking a moment to recognize that despite being very pleased with our first quarter performance and being excited about getting back to our collaborative work environments as we learn to manage the impacts of COVID-19, our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine and Eastern Europe as they continue to grapple with the direct impacts of the current geopolitical events. We are hopeful there will be an advancement towards a peaceful outcome in the coming weeks. Getting back to specific Pieridae business, the first quarter of '22 was an extremely successful one for Pieridae, and we believe it marks a positive turning point in the business. With excellent field production and infrastructure reliability despite at times extremely harsh winter weather, which can be typical in our operating areas, and buoyed by the exceptional commodity prices, $47 million of net operating income was realized in the quarter. Driven largely by the concern over energy security in Europe because of Russia's invasion of the Ukraine in February, we also saw a significant renewal of interest in our carbon emissions neutral East Coast LNG project, which was put on hold in July 2021 due to several factors previously communicated by the company. Pieridae is optimistic recent developments may stimulate advancement of our LNG project, and I'll be addressing that matter in more detail in a few minutes. We also remain extremely excited by our plans to commence Pieridae's very first drilling program, which, although still is subject to final internal approval and strong cash flow, it's expected that we'll see our first well spud in October later this year. And finally, we're really pleased that cash flow has been sufficiently robust to allow for a principal repayment of our existing term loan, which was done subsequent to the end of the first quarter in April, and Adam will provide more detail on that in a few minutes. Slide 5. As we communicated in our investor conference back in March, our 2022 strategy remains grounded in 3 priorities we believe are critical to the company's success. We need to refinance and reduce our existing term debt, successfully execute and deliver results from our planned drilling program and advance our plans to achieve carbon emissions neutrality, which fits within the context of our broad ESG commitments which are detailed in our corporate ESG report first released back in mid-2021. These 3 priorities are not new. However, we have added a fourth priority for 2022, which I have already alluded to, which is to reevaluate our East Coast LNG project. As I mentioned, I'll cover this topic in additional detail in a few moments. As far as our operational update, our first quarter operations results, we are very pleased with those results as production remained healthy at nearly 40,500 BOEs a day. Although this is an 8% reduction as compared to the same period in '21, this was achieved despite one scheduled outage in Central Alberta due to a partner dispute that was resolved in January and an unscheduled outage at our Jumping Pound gas plant in February, which we deemed necessary, consistent with our ongoing commitment to safely maintain our assets to immediately correct the identified process deficiency. As I mentioned previously, our field operations maintained very high reliability through the winter months of the first quarter, and we realized several stretches during the quarter where Pieridae's production actually exceeded 43,000 BOEs per day. Our underlying natural production decline remains 8% to 10% in '22, which we anticipate we can continue to mitigate to less than 5% through low-cost optimization initiatives. These ongoing initiatives help maintain our decline at one of the lowest amongst our peers and competitors. Before handing things over to Adam, I'd like to provide a few additional details on the drilling program we are eagerly anticipating moving forward with in early Q4. The 3-well program is within the Brown Creek strike area and targets Mannville-aged foothill plays that are geological extensions to those being successfully drilled by other operators in the Central Plains to the east of Pieridae's mineral land base. These conventional liquids-rich gas opportunities are sweet and are considered play openers to the largely unexploited foothills plays of Western Alberta. Successful well outcomes will help open up massive upside as Pieridae holds in excess of 1 million gross acres of mineral rights in the foothills of Alberta and Northeast British Columbia. Our first of the 3 wells was successfully licensed this week, and we are looking forward to licensing additional wells in the coming days. Once the drilling program is internally approved, each well needs approximately 50 days from spud to rig release. So we plan to drill over the calendar year end and into Q1 of 2023 with some completion work and all of the tie-in work to be done also in 2023. We also plan to prepare additional follow-up locations that could be spud later in 2023 after spring breakup. At this time, I'd like to turn things over to Pieridae's Chief Financial Officer, Adam Gray.

Thank you, Darcy, and good morning, everybody. With respect to our quarterly financial results released today, I'll focus your attention on a few of the highlights. Our realized natural gas price of $4.08 per Mcf and realized condensate price of $106.13, both in Canadian dollars, were clearly up significantly from prior quarters as a result of very strong underlying prices. Additionally, the discount from benchmark to our realized prices of 14% and 16%, respectively, is the smallest discount we've experienced in recent history. As a result of a smaller percentage of our hedged production that is hedged and at least on the condensate side, hedge prices much closer to market prices. As a reminder, when I say hedges throughout this presentation, I refer to our use of forward fixed price physical sales contracts, which we do not mark-to-market in our financial statements. These prices resulted in gross revenue of $123 million during the quarter, an increase of 51% from the comparative quarter last year. However, higher prices also increased our royalty and transportation burden, which came in at 15% and 5% of gross revenue, respectively. As we discussed on our last investor call, within royalties, we may see some benefit on gas cost allowance annual true-ups next quarter, but are otherwise forecasting royalties to remain relatively consistent as a percentage of revenue for the remainder of the year. During the quarter, operating costs came in at $57 million versus $58 million in the comparative quarter last year, an overall reduction, but an increase on a per BOE basis of 7%. As we have previously discussed, the majority of our operating cost is fixed. So I believe if we hadn't experienced the production outages in the quarter, as Darcy mentioned, we could have seen per BOE OpEx much closer to flat year-over-year. As Darcy mentioned previously, inflationary pressures in the industry are expected to continue challenging our operations and supply chain teams, but we are working very hard to mitigate these, and I believe we've shown relative success doing so, so far this year. So overall, for the quarter, we generated net income -- net operating income, excuse me, of $47 million or $0.30 per share and GAAP net income of $10.5 million or $0.07 per share after consideration of G&A, interest and depletion expense. I believe last call, I said I would be happy to see a netback per BOE above $10. So Q1 netback of nearly $13 per BOE is a very favorable result and raises our expectations for the remainder of the year. When I consider netback per BOE as our most important KPI and compare that to our peers, we still have significant room to improve, most specifically on the OpEx per BOE metrics. While we're working on a number of initiatives to do so, when you consider the scope and capacity of the midstream infrastructure we acquired from Shell and the cost to run and maintain that infrastructure, our most preferred path to increasing netback is to increase the volumes through those gas plants. Drilling to increase company operated production is a great first step to do so. Okay. Moving to the next slide on the balance sheet. You'll see that through positive cash flow, we've improved our working capital deficit by over $23 million during the quarter, representing primarily cash deployed to get us back to agreed-upon payment terms with our trade vendors. Now that our payable situation has normalized, we've turned our attention to reducing long-term debt. In addition to the 1.75% mandatory quarterly debt repayments, which are partially offset by an interest in kind mechanism, we paid an additional $2 million principal in April and are planning to pay a further $5 million in May. Based on the commodity prices underlying our updated guidance, which are quite conservative when compared to recent strip, we forecast an additional $30 million to $50 million in principal repayments over the next 12 months. I'll remind you that a covenant with our lender caps our adjusted working capital ratio at 0.85 and sweep excess cash as principal repayments to the lender thereafter. Our adjusted working capital ratio at March 31 was 0.89, which drives that $5 million May debt principal repayment. As the working capital ratio continues to improve, large principal repayments will result. While working to reduce outstanding principal in the next 18 months, we'll also be exploring options to refinance the term loan well in advance of its October 2023 maturity date. Okay. Slide 3. Now let's focus on the hedging program for a moment. As previously discussed, we have a covenant with our lender to hedge 60% of production volumes on an 18-month rolling average. Our lender has been very supportive in providing waivers against this covenant all the way through 2021 and now through August of 2022, which has allowed us to participate in these rising prices in a much more meaningful way than we have otherwise been possible. At the moment, we are 41% hedged for the remainder of 2022 on gas and 28% on condensate, representing a net May through December 2022 hedge position of 35%. We also have a small amount of gas volumes hedged in Q1 of 2023. As prices have continued to move during the quarter, accompanied by some pretty extreme volatility, our mark-to-market is moving around a lot, but sits at approximately negative $90 million on our existing forward sales contracts, which reflects the drastic increase in both gas and liquids prices during the year. When this mark-to-market and associated credit restrictions allow, we will begin to place new hedges to the extent possible. I'll close my remarks today by updating you on our 2022 outlook. With AECO pricing as volatile as it's been, our forecasted annual cash flows moved quite a lot on a week-by-week basis. However, we've pegged guidance using a fairly conservative average of $4.96 per Mcf on AECO and USD 88 per barrel WTI. Based on these inputs, we've revised upwards our 2022 net operating income guidance from a range of $100 million to $130 million to $120 million to $160 million. We have not updated our other guidance measures as we do not foresee anything material at this time, which would change our view on production, operating costs or capital expenditures, scope or cost. Any further increase in forecasted NOI based on stronger commodity prices will be allocated for the most part to further reducing our term debt. With that, I'll turn things back over to Darcy to finish this off.

Thank you, Adam. Earlier, I mentioned that there was growing support for Pieridae's carbon-neutral East Coast LNG project, and I'd like to provide a few additional details on that matter. We believe Pieridae has a solution to help Canada to take a lead role in addressing energy security concerns magnified by recent geopolitical events. Furthermore, we believe as Canadians, we have a national obligation to do so. And doing so in the shortest time possible is very imperative. Pieridae's LNG project can help by delivering natural gas produced in Alberta to the East Coast, where it can be liquefied and shipped to Western Europe. This can all be done with a net-zero carbon emissions footprint by utilizing our proposed large-scale carbon capture facility in Alberta. We've experienced renewed interest and growing support for our LNG project from stakeholders, including government, potential partners and other stakeholders. We continue to be optimistic the project can be resurrected, which requires resolution of several principles and potential impediments. We expect more details will be available in the coming days. Pieridae has been transparent in our previous communications that for East Coast LNG to succeed, we need resolution on these 5 principles. Pieridae can control delivering the net-zero solution with our Caroline carbon sequestration project in Alberta, but the remaining 4 principles summarized on this page need more work and more support. Pieridae is committed to moving our project forward with the needed support in place as we believe to do so is in Canada's national interest, and we continue to anticipate a favorable outcome where all 5 of these principles can be successfully addressed. In conclusion, Pieridae is committed to maintaining a safe and reliable operation with a focus on delivering on our ESG commitments while improving our cost structure. We will not lose sight of this despite the exceptional commodity prices we are currently benefiting from. We own an attractive 40,000-plus BOE per day upstream business with significant high-impact upside drilling opportunities that we are excited about proving up, but we are also very excited about the opportunity to resurrect and advance our carbon-neutral East Coast LNG project under the right circumstances. With that, I would like to conclude the main portion of our investor call at this time, and I would like to hand the floor back to James Miller.

Thanks, Darcy. The conference coordinator will now manage the question-and-answer portion of our call. Alfred, Darcy and Adam will answer your questions. Catherine?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Chris Jones with Hayward Securities.

Questions on inflation, which obviously has been a key theme throughout Q1 reporting. Development CapEx was last unchanged between $17 million and $25 million. So just wondering how we should think about the Q4 drilling program and perhaps that extended into Q1 of next year, whether you see an increase there or what kind of -- what type of magnitude of inflation are you guys observing in the capital program?

It's Darcy here. I think it's a very astute observation on your part. Obviously, there's been lots of talk in the industry about cost escalations, and we don't think we're immune to that by any means. As it pertains to our development capital program, we believe that we have made reasonable estimates that anticipated those inflationary cost pressures. And so we still believe that our 3-well program that's planned and scheduled for the fourth quarter, as mentioned, can be done for $25 million gross all-in. So that's still the number that we're anticipating seeing and that's the number that we're carrying right now.

Okay. And then in the news release, you guys talked about executing non-core asset dispositions. So can you maybe elaborate and provide some color what's sort of non-core in your portfolio?

Yes, absolutely. It's prudent for any operating company to continuously look at their core assets and high grade. And like most operating companies, we believe that we have some better performing and better upside assets and poor performing and lesser upside assets, and we rank them accordingly. And I think we're always looking at the bottom 1/3 of our assets and looking at how we can potentially rationalize those to make the pro forma results of our business look better.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Miller.

Thanks very much, Catherine, and thanks to all of you for participating today. We obviously very much appreciate your interest in Pieridae Energy. If you have further questions, you can call us at (403) 261-5900 or e-mail at [email protected], and we would be happy to respond. There will be a replay available of this call about 2 hours from now. Please use the same URL in the media advisory to access it. Thanks, again, and we look forward to speaking to you very soon. Operator?

Thank you. This conference call has now ended. Please disconnect your lines. We thank you for your participation.