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

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Pieridae Energy Q3 2022 Quarterly Financial Results Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Dallas McConnell, Vice President, Corporate Finance. Please go ahead, Mr. McConnell.

Thanks very much, Amy, and good morning, everyone. I would like to welcome you to Pieridae Energy's Third Quarter 2022 Conference Call. With me today are Chief Executive Officer, Alfred Sorensen; President and Chief Operating Officer, Darcy Reding; and Chief Financial Officer, Adam Gray. Darcy and Adam will begin today with a review of our quarterly financial results and certain other company developments. Please note that a brief slide presentation will accompany the remarks. Following these remarks, we will turn the call over to the conference coordinator for your questions. Before Darcy 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 the Canadian securities regulators on sedar.com. With that, I will now turn the call over to our President and COO, Darcy Reding, who will provide more detail on our operational performance last quarter and recent developments with our operations.

Thank you, Dallas. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. We are pleased to speak to you today to our third quarter 2022 results, which delivered significant year-over-year improvement on most financial parameters while successfully advancing key corporate strategic initiatives. As I stated in our second quarter investor call back in August, we are well positioned to enhance shareholder value through our unique advantage as the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin's largest foothills conventional hydrocarbon producer. We benefit from a best-in-class low natural annual base decline of approximately 8% and have identified over 300 gross drilling locations on existing company mineral acreage. We are tremendously excited about commencing our previously disclosed drilling program in late October in the Brown Creek area of West Central Alberta, and we are looking forward to preliminary results from its first well late in the fourth quarter. Also consistent with our stated corporate strategy, we made a sizable contribution to debt reduction in the quarter while also seeing the end of most of our exposure to out-of-the-money natural gas hedges that have been a story line for Pieridae in 2022 and prior. Our remaining lowest priced hedges rolled off in October; and when combined with our power hedges, we now have a substantial positive mark-to-market hedge position. Risk management through active hedging remains a strategic priority going forward, and Adam will provide additional information on our hedge situation in a few moments. Further elaborating on our results, third quarter production was down year-over-year and as compared to Q2 of this year coming in at 35,959 BOEs per day. Pieridae's third quarter production in any year is typically lower due to these months being where much of the scheduled annual field maintenance and turnaround activity takes place. However, Q3 of this year witnessed several significant rainfall events that caused unanticipated downtime. In addition, volatile and at times, low AECO natural gas pricing in the quarter resulted in management's decision to temporarily shut in a portion of production. And lastly, the suspension of the Pembina-operated Alberta ethane gathering system pipeline as of July 1 eliminated the ability to sell liquid ethane at our Waterton and Jumping Pound gas plants. Although sold into TC Energy system as heating value within the natural gas sales stream, reported production is negatively impacted when the ethane is not sold as liquid. In combination, these events negatively impacted third quarter production by approximately 3,400 BOEs per day, with 2/3 of that due to the ethane reinjection. The described weather-related impacts were resolved by the end of October, and we are optimistic AECO volatility has subsided and pricing will remain strong as we firmly enter the winter season. The ethane reinjection into sales gas is expected to continue indefinitely, and Pieridae's forward-looking information will now reflect this assumption. Operating expenses in the third quarter were $57.4 million or $17.36 per BOE, which were an increase as compared to the same period year-over-year and versus the second quarter of this year. These dollar cost increases are reflective of higher scheduled maintenance activity versus the previously mentioned quarters, while the dollar per BOE costs are also increased by the lower production versus the comparable quarters as I detailed a minute ago. Two of the company's highest operating expense items are power costs and processing fees at third-party facilities. For the full year 2022, these expenses are nearly 50% of our total operating expense. And while the overall higher natural gas prices are driving favorable revenue for the company, power costs and many of our processing contracts are indexed to AECO pricing, although our power hedging strategy has been effective in mitigating some of these power cost increases. Coupled with current inflation challenges, these factors continue to pressure the company's operating cost structure and will continue to be a focus area for the business as we move into 2023. It is noteworthy that our operating expenses exclude the substantial third-party processing and other income streams, such as road use revenue. In the third quarter, we realized nearly $8 million of third-party income, which is 14% of the operating expense. Furthermore, the company's significant sulfur sales revenue of nearly $5 million in the quarter improves net operating income, even though the operation of sulfur recovery equipment at the gas plants adds to the facility costs. At this time, I would like to turn things over to Pieridae's Chief Financial Officer, Adam Gray.

Thanks, Darcy. With respect to our quarterly results, I'll focus your attention on a few of the highlights from our press release. This was a relatively stable and on-target quarter from my perspective. As Darcy mentioned, Q3 is typically when we experience the weakest seasonal gas pricing, and planned maintenance most often occurs during the summer months. That was certainly the case this year. So while results today are not as robust as Q2, we remain on track from our guidance and forecast perspectives and in fact, have narrowed and increased our net operating income guidance for the year, as I'll get into later. Our realized AECO price was $3.62 in the quarter against a benchmark price of $4.28. We were approximately 60% hedged on a total volume basis, which is the primary driver between realized and benchmark prices. And I'll speak more to our hedge position in a moment. We generated net operating income of $30 million in the quarter and adjusted funds from operations of $22.5 million representing $0.22 and $0.14 per share, respectively. On a year-to-date basis, we have generated $133 million of NOI and $116 million of AFFO. These results are all substantially higher than the comparatives in 2021. Our netback came in at $9.07 per BOE and $13 year-to-date. We continue to see dramatic increase in royalties expense in 2022 versus 2021, largely on the back of higher benchmark prices. Royalty burden year-to-date was roughly 16.6% of total revenue, which normalizes at these prices to about 14% of revenue if you remove the impact from hedging. As you likely know, royalties are paid on the basis of benchmark or reference prices, not on our specific realized prices. Our per BOE operating expense of $17.36 continues to be impacted by about $1 due to the reinjection of liquid ethane back into the gas stream. Darcy already mentioned this, and I'll just reconfirm that while total molecules we produce does not change, the volumes converted to a BOE basis are about 2,200 BOEs a day less when we sell ethane back into the natural gas stream for selling it as a liquid. So this negatively impacts our operating expense per BOE on a comparative basis, but it does not have the same proportionately negative impact on revenue. Additionally, while we are substantially hedged on power, we've seen higher power prices this year for the small component of our usage that remains unhedged. You'll see on this slide that we realized approximately $24 million of power cost savings through our hedges year-to-date, which is $2.35 per BOE that we would otherwise have seen as expense. That is a very impactful hedge program. Okay. Turning your attention to use of cash. We continue to focus on debt reduction. We had a great Q2 in this regard and continued in Q3 to push as much of our free cash flow towards debt reduction as possible, resulting in a further payment of approximately $15 million during the quarter. Starting with an all-in debt balance of $262 million at the beginning of the year, we're now down to $228 million while also allocating $35 million towards the reduction of our working capital deficit so far this year. For the fourth quarter and extending into 2023, I continue to focus primarily on aggressive deleveraging and funding a bit of development capital during the winter, as Darcy mentioned. We are also working to refinance the existing term loan well in advance of its October 2023 expiry. Turning your attention to hedges now. Pieridae's hedge policy and program are in place to protect the cash flow we require to meet our debt service obligations, which are both interest in principal as well as to ensure our sustaining capital program commitments are met. As you recall, our current lender has been very supportive in providing waivers against our hedging covenants through 2022 and now all of -- sorry, 2021 and now through 2022, which has allowed us to participate in these stronger prices in a much more meaningful way than would have otherwise been possible. However, now that through the passage of time, our large negative mark-to-market on the physical hedge book and associated lack of credit has largely rolled off, we seek to rebuild our hedge positions. To that end, following Q3, we have started adding both physical and financial contracts. It's still very early days on this, but we have so far protected approximately 50% of our condensate production for the first 3 quarters of 2023 and begun to protect our gas as well while navigating ongoing unbelievable volatility and very tight AECO liquidity. As of today, we're approximately 30% hedged for the remainder of 2022 and 20% for much of 2023 on an all-in production basis. And we continue to add as the market allows. Expect these percentages to grow meaningfully over time. Okay. I've already touched on our power hedge book and the benefit we've realized from that. The mark to market on that position is approximately $39 million today, most of which represents value we expect to realize in 2023 here. I'll close by briefly updating you on our guidance for the rest of the year. We've not made any substantive changes to guidance other than to narrow our NOI forecast to the upper half of our previous range. We've also slipped some development capital from late 2022 into early 2023, which you see reflected as a reduction in capital spend here but can really be considered a timing shift. I expect we'll be in a position to release formal guidance for 2023 before the end of the year. However, I don't have any further granular commentary to provide on 2023 today. So with that, I'll turn things back to Dallas to finish this off.

Thanks, Adam. Sorry, actually, we're going to go to Darcy for a couple of key takeaways.

My apologies.

Thanks, Dallas. To wrap things up, I'd like to emphasize our ongoing focus on safe and reliable operations. We continue to identify and implement optimization opportunities and cost structure improvements while maintaining our commitment to regulatory and internal standards. Our quality drilling inventory provides attractive investment and growth opportunities that we will pursue with the appropriate balance to debt reduction. In the third quarter, an internal steering committee was struck to advance, amongst other things, our carbon emissions mitigation plan. We remain committed to our overall ESG strategy, and we look forward to providing future updates as we advance this work. As we look towards 2023, our focus will be on continued safe, reliable and compliant operation of our gas plants and other assets; maintaining production year-over-year; and safely and efficiently executing the scheduled Waterton gas plant turnaround. As Adam mentioned a few minutes ago, we will target releasing formal 2023 guidance by the end of the calendar year. With that, I would like to conclude the formal portion of our investor call. And at this time, I will ask Dallas to wrap things up and prepare for questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Darcy. The operator will now manage the question-and-answer portion of the call. Alfred, Darcy and Adam will answer your questions.

[Operator Instructions]

I see we have a question here on our plans for debt refinancing and interest rates. As I mentioned during the call, we're actively working to refinance that debt at rates that we believe are at market. I don't think I have much more in the way of an update to provide on that today.

And there are no further telephone questions at this time. I'd like to turn it back to Mr. McConnell.

Okay. That looks like that's all we have for questions on the webcast as well. So with that, we will ask you to conclude the call. Thanks, everyone, for participating today. We appreciate your interest. And if you have further questions, you can call us at (403) 261-5900 or e-mail us at [email protected]. Thanks again, and we look forward to speaking to you soon.

Thank you. The conference call has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.