Saturn Oil & Gas Inc. (SOIL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Saturn's Fourth Quarter 2025 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the meeting over to Ms. Cindy Gray, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Cindy.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us to hear management's remarks about Saturn's Q4 and year-end 2025 results and reserves. Please note that our financial statements, MD&A, annual information form and press release are all filed on SEDAR+ and available on our website. Some of the statements on today's call may contain forward-looking information reference to non-IFRS and other financial measures. And as such, listeners are encouraged to review the disclaimers outlined in our most recent MD&A. Listeners are also cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements since a number of factors could cause the actual future results to differ materially from the targets and expectations expressed. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise unless expressly required by applicable securities law. For further information on our risk factors, please see the company's AIF filed on SEDAR+ and on website. Also note, all amounts discussed today are Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. On the call today, we'll hear from John Jeffrey, Saturn's CEO; Justin Kaufmann, our Chief Development Officer; and Scott Sanborn, our CFO, followed by Q&A. I'll now hand the call over to John.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to join us today. I'm very proud to provide comments on Saturn's standout fourth quarter that capped off a year of strong performance despite the oil price headwinds that rocked the broader markets. While navigating volatility and the equity markets, we have consistently met or beat our guidance targets for several consecutive quarters. Throughout 2025, we continue to execute on our Blueprint strategy, optimizing and developing our low-decline light oil-weighted asset base while reducing our net debt, buying back shares and returning value to our shareholders. By year-end 2025, this approach resulted in Saturn delivering an industry-leading 50% free funds flow yield, which speaks directly to the quality of our asset base and the discipline of our execution. Once again, we exceeded analysts' expectations across all key metrics, including production, net debt reduction, adjusted funds flow, free funds flow and operating cost per BOE even with realized oil prices that averaged 13% lower than they did in 2024. I've always believed that a $1 put towards debt is $1 return to the shareholders. And in 2025, we returned just under $145 million to shareholders. $33 million through a combination of our NCIB as well as our SIB and an additional $110 million repaid on our senior notes. If you include the share buybacks we've made to date throughout 2026, a we've returned a total of almost $155 million back to shareholders, equating to about 1/4 of our current market cap. This confirms net debt reduction remains at the forefront for Saturn. In addition to reducing the principal on our senior notes by $110 million in 2025, which includes an extra quarterly amortization payment. This focus on debt reduction contributed to robust growth in our debt adjusted per share metrics, including a 46% growth in our production per debt adjusted share over 2024 and growth per reserves per debt-adjusted share of 31% on PDP and 1P and 32% on 2P. The nimble nature of our asset base and flexible capital budget allowed us to pivot quickly last fall in response to a broader market conditions when buying barrels was all of a sudden more attractive than drilling. We were able to quickly reduce our capital spend by $65 million or about 27% in September and redirect capital to do tuck-in acquisitions that meaningfully expanded our multi-leg open hole position in Southeast Saskatchewan. The strategy of acquiring assets at attractive valuations, then optimizing and developing has driven excellent returns to date. Each of the 4 major deals we've completed since 2021 have generated significant value and position Saturn with measurable upside that is yet to be unlocked. As an example, our $82 million Oxbow acquisition has generated net value of over $270 million, and that's after you take into account not only the purchase price but also the invested capital of $160 million. On top of that, there's also an additional $365 million of 1P reserves booked as of this year. Out of those 4 major acquisitions combined, we've seen over $1 billion of free cash flow generated at the asset level with twice that amount remained in booked 1P reserves along. Further, these acquisitions, along with the tuck-ins we did in 2025, have set the stage to materially advance our multi-lake open hole development. This is a relatively new technique that allows us to develop previously uneconomic areas, improve recoveries and enhance the profitability of our assets, which Justin will expand later on in this call. The impact of our open hole multi-lat development is already being reflected in production. Adjusted funds flow and free funds flow, all of which set new records last year. We achieved the highest annual and quarterly production volumes in our history with Q4 nearing 43,700 barrels a day, exceeding our own guidance and the analyst expectations by over 1,000 barrels a day. This demonstrates Saturn's ongoing type curve outperformance which averaged 23% ahead across our entire asset base last year. Operating cost reduction remains a key differential for us here at Saturn. Since 2021, Saturn has reduced OpEx per BOE by 32%, demonstrating our ability to drive efficiencies across every part of the business. We came in under the low end of our OpEx per BOE guidance, which not only contributed to adjusted funds flow and prefunds flow, but also had a meaningfully positive impact on our year-end reserve bookings. Our strong AFF and lower capital spending in 2025 enabled Saturn to allocate prefunds flow to the combination of debt reduction, ongoing share buyback and the accretive tuck-in acquisitions. As mentioned earlier, in August of 2024, when we started buying back these shares through to date, Saturn has returned over $54 million to shareholders by purchasing and canceling over 22 million shares. Now at an average cost of $2.45. That's significantly below our recent trading. Our strategy is always to acquire the highest quality barrel at the best price. And with Saturn's current discounted valuation, that means buying back our own stock continues to offer an attractive return on our capital. Based on the reserve evaluators 2026 price forecast of approximately $59 WTI and or about 19% lower than the prior year. Our PDP net asset value was in line with last year at just under $5.50 a share. This represents the blowdown value of our assets after taking into account debt and ARO. Even with today's higher oil price, our shares continue to trade at about 65% to 70% of our PDP NAV. Now when we compare that to our peers, whose shares are trading at an average of 230% of the PDP NAV, if Saturn shares continue to trade at the same average as our peers, we'd be just over $9 a share. We see significant opportunity to narrow this gap and continue to expand on Saturn's market cap and performance as we see such intrinsic value in the name, especially at this level. Alongside our operational focus, safety remains at the core of everything we do here. In 2025, we achieved our second consecutive year with 0 lost time injuries. Even though our total man hours worked was increased by 18% over 2024, and that was 38% higher than 2023. This performance reflects Saturn's strong safety culture and proactive approach to identifying and mitigating risk again, we say this every time, making sure everyone gets home at night to their family is the #1 priority here, and I'm really proud that we've achieved this 2 years in a row. As you'd expect, we closely monitor developments in the Middle East and the resultant impact on oil prices. Given our high torque to oil, under Saturn's original sensitivities released in December, that was based on $60 WTI. For every $5 increase in oil, adjusted funds flow is impacted by about $50 million. Now that is not exactly linear due to some hedging impacts. But for example, at an $80 WTI, the increase of our annual funds flow would be more than $180 million. While also creating opportunities to layer in additional hedges that can protect from future downside risk. I'm just so incredibly proud of our performance and the momentum we've built through 2025. And with the dedication and hard work we see from our employees, coupled with the support from our stakeholders, I truly believe Saturn is just getting started. And with that, I'll turn it over to Justin to walk through our 2025 reserves and the capital program highlights. J.K., over to you.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I'll build on John's comments and walk through our capital execution, development program and reserves performance last year. 2025 was a record setting year for Saturn from an operational and technical standpoint. We continue to outperform, demonstrated by a highly efficient capital program that delivered solid reserve growth across all categories. As John highlighted, a key feature of our capital program last year was flexibility. Saturn has been able to pivot quickly and scale activity up or down depending on commodity prices, which is a key differentiator for us. In September, we made the decision to reduce our capital expenditures and instead undertake tuck-in acquisitions that added production, future development upside and land. These acquisitions enabled us to acquire production at less than $16,000 per flowing barrel. In addition, we were able to expand our land position, add incremental locations to our inventory of open hole or flat drills, which we view as one of the most exciting development opportunities within Saturn today. The open-hole multi-lat wells offers some of the shortest payouts and highest returns in our inventory. What makes this program particularly compelling is that we're applying the open hole multi-lat technique to assets that have no book locations, reserves or value ascribed to them at the time of acquisition. At year-end 2025, we've identified more than 380 gross open hole locations with only about 1/4 of those booked. With continued development and technical refinement, we see opportunity to further expand that inventory over time. As part of our ongoing development, we've been tweaking our open home multi-lat well design in the Bakken. By extending lateral lengths from 1 mile to 2 miles, we're seeing strong increases in production rates with slower declines compared to type curve. As a result, we signed to drill our Bakken open home multi-lat wells as 2 miles going forward where the land position allows. In Southeast Saskatchewan, our fourth spearfish open hole home multi-lat well was recently drilled. This 6-leg well is directly west of our previous 165 spearfish well, which exceeded type curve expectations by about 3x and was outlined by independent reports as being a top 10 producer in Saskatchewan in its producing category. To give you a sense of the value we are creating from this program, that incremental open-hole multilateral inventory value in the Bakken alone is at over $190 million, and that's assuming our 2026 guidance price deck at $60 WTI. There's an additional $240 million of development value across our full open hole multilateral inventory. Combined, this represents almost $0.5 billion of value that was not previously recognized or factored into asset purchase prices. As WTI oil prices rise above $60, that value just continues to compound. Another good example of our Blueprint strategy in action is what we're doing now at Roncott.This is an asset that was part of the Battrum, Flat Lake acquisition we closed 2024 which have not seen any new drilling since 2021. When we acquired at Roncott had 2 book locations with an estimated value of $5 million. By implying enhanced drilling techniques, which included 2 open hole extended reach Bakkens and Saturn's first reentry open-hole multilateral Bakken, we now see an additional $10 million of drilling value, plus about $2 million of incremental value through operating cost reduction and efficiency gains. That represents a base value increase of more than 3x even before considering future waterflood potential across the field. This kind of win is just not in Roncott. This is exactly what we're doing all across our asset base. we find new ways to reduce costs, improve recoveries and boost the profitability of our assets. Our operational success is clearly reflected in Saturn's year-end reserves. With positive technical performance, despite the reserve evaluators average 2026 oil price forecast coming in 19% lower than the prior year. We reported growth between 9% and 10% across all reserve categories over 2024 and achieved the largest positive PDP tech revision in Saturn's history, totaling 11.4 million barrels. This was driven by base well performance, year-over-year operating cost reductions, waterflood response and PDP conversions which more than offset the impact of pricing. Compared to 2024, our future drilling locations increased 8% to over 1,200. This includes 90 locations from our recent tuck-in acquisitions and we brought in 110 locations from our unbooked inventory to replace the wells drilled in 2025. We have internally identified incremental 1,400 unbooked locations, providing Saturn with the inventory that I can support approximately 20 years of flat production at our current pace of drilling. From a pure value perspective, even at the depressed WTI price forecast used in the reserve report, our net asset value per share remains robust at approximately $5.50 per share on a PDP basis of $7.75 a share on a 1P basis and nearly $13 a share on a 2P basis. If we applied last year's $71 WTI 3CA reserve price deck on this year's reserves, Saturn's PDP NAV per share would exceed $8. This value further expands as oil prices climb above $70. Leading up to spring breakup, Saturn had 4 rigs running, 3 drilling open home multilateral wells, 2 in the Bakken and 1 in the Midale on lands we acquired through our 2025 tuck-in acquisition with the fourth rig drilling conventional Mississippi and Spearfish wells. We anticipate drilling 20 wells in the first quarter of the year, investing $40 million to $50 million in capital to generate average production between 41,000 and 42,000 barrels. With roughly 70% of our capital budget weighted to the second half of the year and given our flexible capital spending profile, we have the benefit of time to assess whether adjusting capital spending is prudent given commodity prices and broader market conditions. As always, we will continue to monitor pricing closely, and we'll update the market should we choose to make any capital or guidance changes. With that, I'll hand things over to Scott for an overview of our financial results.

Thanks, Justin, and good morning, everyone. Operationally, we delivered a strong fourth quarter and annual results that build on our track record of exceeding expectations and guidance. Production in Q4 approached 43,700 BOE per day, contributing to record annual production or 41,700 BOE per day. Q4 volumes were up 6% from both the previous quarter and the same period last year with 2025 annual volumes increasing 22% year-over-year. Our strong operating performance translated into record financial results. For the full year, we generated adjusted funds flow of $464 million or $2.40 per share with $121 million or $0.64 per share generated in the fourth quarter. Our free funds flow in Q4 totaled $56 million, supporting record 2025 free funds flow of $223 million or $1.15 per share, driving a year-end free funds flow yield of 50%. As John spoke about earlier, we continue to fulfill Saturn's goal of debt reduction through 2025, directing $110 million towards the repayment of our senior notes. We exited 2025 with net debt of $761.5 million, resulting in a net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio of 1.35x. These results reflect our disciplined approach to debt reduction, which included taking advantage of opportunities to retire debt at a discounted rate when market conditions allowed in the second quarter. At year-end, our $150 million credit facility, which has an uncommitted accordion feature that can be expanded to $250 million had a modest $34.5 million drop, reflecting our active drilling program. As we had in the spring breakup and generated higher free funds flow, this draw is expected to be repaid. Alongside debt repayment, Saturn continues to prioritize the return of capital to shareholders. In total, during 2025, we returned over $33 million with a repurchase and cancellation of 14.4 million shares under our NCIB and SIB programs. Subsequent to year-end, we returned an additional $10 million through open market purchase of 3.2 million shares under NCIB. The active management of our hedge book continued through the fourth quarter with Saturn recording net realized gains over $24 million between both commodity and foreign exchange derivatives. While capitalizing on market disruption to the shareholders' benefit. As the recent turmoil in the Middle East caused oil prices to spike, Saturn successfully layered on additional swaps and collars at attractive ranges through 2026 and 2027 and as outlined in our financial statements, we remain very well positioned to navigate future volatility. Finally, our strong torque oil prices remain a key differentiator for Saturn as U.S. WTI prices have increased by more than $20 per barrel over a $60 guidance assumption, we anticipate this benefiting our cash flow and supporting greater free funds flow generation. The company will continue to prioritize the allocation of capital towards a reduction of net debt, share buybacks, tuck-in acquisitions or other initiatives that support long-term value creation. That concludes our formal remarks. So I'll thank everyone for joining us and hand the call back to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question will come from Amir Arif with ATB Cormark Capital.

Congrats on a great quarter A couple of questions. Just first, just in terms of the excess cash flow in '26 that you will realize just given where oil prices are versus your budget. Just curious if you can just lay out your key priorities in terms of debt reduction, buybacks, and if some capital does come back to the growth side. What -- I understand it's very backward dated, but at what oil price do you sort of need oil to stabilize that before some cost does come back to the drill bit.

Thank you so much for the question. As always, we're going to prioritize net debt reduction. So again, things like monitoring the bond markets. So if we see an attractive price to jump in and buy and retire some bonds, we're going to look to that. There's also an option in our bond agreement that we can effectively doubled amort payments. So that's available to us as well. And if we do continue to see oil prices remain closer to that $70 mark or beyond. I think you're likely to see us expand some of our areas. And again, that's why we like feels like the Viking so much because that's a field that we can step in, license, gift production, get it online and flowing within 3 weeks. So we're not subject to these long lead time fields that we have to plan for, and it takes 6 to 9 months to these large pads online. There are things we can do in the short term, so we can lock in some favorable hedges, turnaround get some quick oil flowing of a few of our fields. And that, I think, is what you're going to see us focus on, again, priority number one, debt reduction priority, number 2 is definitely looking at expanding and growing our production, and we have the right asset base to do it.

I appreciate that color. And then just a second question on the first quarter outlook. Just the production level relative to the Q4 production level, it's a little lighter. I understand you are coming back some capital in Q1 relative to spent in Q4. I'm just curious is there anything else that's impacting that guidance outlook for Q1 on the production side other than the capital.

No, we did defer a little bit of capital from Q1 into Q3 but no, we should be well in line of all of our goals of the recent wells that we have had come online. Again, we are seeing a fairly consistent track record of success in terms of beating our type curve. So no, I think Q1 is going to be a very strong quarter for us.

Yes, I'll just add to that. Based on our weekly production, we are kind of ahead of forecast where we thought we were right now, and I think you'll see that when you see the Q1.

[Operator Instructions] The next question will come from Adam Gill with Ventum Financial.

A quick question on kind of M&A strategy. The stock has been up 70-plus percent year-to-date, clearly outperforming peers. You're getting a better cost of capital. Do you think with a better cost of capital, you will be more active on the M&A front? Or is it more related to the opportunities that present themselves and still want to focus on tuck-in acquisitions?