Strike Energy Limited (STX.AX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] Investor Relations and Corporate Development role. And so she'll be looking forward to engaging with you all as the year progresses. So I thought I'd start today with just a reminder of who we are today at Strike. So you all know Strike as a listed energy company and with a number of key projects that I'll work through today. We have a refreshed Board since the end of the financial year with Nev Power as Chair, Jill Hoffmann, Will Barker and Steve Bizzell joining me on the Board. So what we found is that a smaller fit-for-purpose Board is working really well for Strike, and we're enjoying moving the company forward as a group. This is just a brief overview of our portfolio for those that perhaps who have joined in more recently onto the register. On the right, there's a map. And what you see in the blue there, very extensive portfolio of more than 3,000 square kilometers of acreage in the Perth Basin. And all that acreage is 100% owned by Strike, apart from the West Erregulla joint venture, which is 50-50 with Hancock Energy. So our key projects that I'll talk about today are Walyering, West Erregulla and South Erregulla as well as our exploration projects, Ocean Hill, Kadathinni and the remainder of the Perth Basin. So if we talk about the highlights of FY '26 and recent milestones, certainly, it's been an exciting year for Strike FY '26 with the continuing construction, getting very close to commissioning of the South Erregulla Power project. which we call SEPP. So SEPP is an 85-megawatt power station based in the Midwest and we are very close to getting that power station online with Western Power in the final stages of commissioning and dynamic modeling. So that's very exciting for us because it's been a big project on the go for a little while now. We also have West Erregulla, where we increased our net reserves, net 2P reserves. And that's another exciting project I'll talk about. If you're on the recent webinar, you'll know, but we certainly reached agreement with Hancock on the way forward on a pathway to market for us, which is great. And with Walyering, we'll talk through Walyering and where we're up to. And so here -- on here, we're also talking about the $30 million Macquarie facility that was made available when we reached agreement with Hancock on the implementation agreement. If we get through to our financial results now, so we can talk to the sales revenue of $62.8 million. The underlying EBITDA of $17.6 million and cash at 30 June, $46.3 million. The important thing to note here is that we did have a big year of CapEx of $151.3 million, which is predominantly for the South Erregulla Power Station. Acknowledging we had lower Walyering production, just with the natural field decline, but we've certainly done things to get that sorted out. But that has meant an increased third-party gas sort of purchasing and sales during the year which impacted our EBITDA. What it has done, though, with -- certainly with our investment has increased materially by around $59.1 million with the advent of South Erregulla. If we talk to Walyering, now, Walyering is the project that's been around for a little while. So it's been producing for a few years, what we have seen is lower field production. So certainly, reservoir decline and as a result of that, we certainly had to do some interventions, which has included compression, bringing compression on and purchasing third-party gas to meet our contractual commitments. But I think the important thing here to note is that we are moving forward. We have put the compression online successfully and also drilled Walyering West, which has been a discovery and has given us a 21% increase in reserves there. So that's really important to keep that plant running into the future. We're currently working through the FEED process on the Walyering West well, and we'll keep you updated on that as we move forward. So what I would say is with compression online and Walyering West preparing to be tied in, Walyering is certainly looking better. South Erregulla, the power station, there's a lovely photo of it there. We're certainly very close now. The facility is amazing. It's 100% Strike owned, and we're running that power station from our own gas reserves. This is a very important project for us because it's certainly -- for one that demonstrates that we are able to bring a project online like this, this is the first gas reciprocating engine power station on the SWIS and so it's new for WA, but it's very excitingly new for Strike as well. And the team have done an outstanding job in getting this project through to this point. What this project means for us is a new high margin earnings stream for Strike with exposure to both capacity credit payments and the electricity markets. So this slide gives you a little bit of a look at the capacity revenue that we look to be able to achieve through the power station once it's online. So for calendar year '27, $19 million in capacity revenue payments. Calendar year '28, $31 million and calendar year '29, up to $42 million. So with those capacity revenue payments, we actually get a 2-year firm look ahead on what the price is going to be. And at the moment, the prices are increasing. And so that's positive for us. In addition to these capacity revenue payments, we have the actual electricity sales. So that revenue is driven by how many hours we are online. So how it will work at South Erregulla is a peaking plant is that we will look to optimize coming online when the wind is not blowing. So when wind comes online, the price in the market drops and we will stay out of the market. But as the wind falls, South Erregulla will come online and begin generating. So we've got a very quick ramp-up time with the power station. We can come on as quickly as we like. The power is actually driven by 15-minute intervals. And so we'll be asked to come online based on the price that we've set. So for example, there's a couple of revenue streams there for -- if we were producing 6 hours a day at a certain price or 10 hours a day at a certain price, we will be certainly generating decent revenue. So although we've built some debt against this project to deliver, we certainly will have some 2 good revenue streams from SEPP coming into play as we move forward. The other thing that's interesting about SEPP is its location. So SEPP is located on Strike, 100% owned freehold land. So we have 3,500 hectares of land in the Midwest. And you can see South Erregulla, the gas field there is just to the south of West Erregulla, the joint venture we have with Hancock. We have a connection through to the transmission network on a 132 KV line. And we also have been running studies on that land area for some time now to understand wind generation. So we've got up to 300 megawatts of wind capacity there. So it's a quite a neat little project, which gives us lots of different opportunities. We're close to Perth, close to Geraldton, close to the Brand Highway where the fiber optic cable runs. So a few different ideas coming through here, but lots of opportunity for this site. Moving on to West Erregulla, it was the big project that we announced on the 31st of August that we actually had reached agreement with Hancock on the pathway forward to putting our gas through the 100% owned Belisama gas processing facility. So the Belisama gas processing facility is located just directly between South Erregulla and West Erregulla and so just 3 kilometers from the West Erregulla field. And so Ultimately, it was a very good choice to choose that pathway for our gas, and we're now working very closely with Hancock to get our long-form documents completed before the end of this year. So here is some indicative revenue that we have from the West Erregulla facility and from our field at $8 a gigajoule is $127 million. So we're targeting upstream FID by mid-FY '28, which is the piece around the West Erregulla joint venture, the wells and so on. And then those wells will be connected through to the Belisama facility targeting first gas by mid-calendar year '29. So certainly, we have materially advanced our documents with Hancock over the past short period of time. And this is really one of Strike's biggest projects, biggest, most exciting projects. So we're looking forward to getting this moving as quickly as we can. What we currently have with Hancock is we have the implementation agreement in place, which is the framework of all the key principles that help to guide our long-form document creation. So in those -- in that implementation agreement, a couple of things we have are a fixed capacity charge, which means we derisk, we understand the cost of putting our gas through the Belisama plant, and we then own that -- still own that gas out the other side to sell into the market. We certainly are very aligned with Hancock on this development. We're looking forward to working closely with them to bring this project to market because I think as we go forward, the gas market is tightening in Western Australia. There's going to be a bigger gap between supply and demand between about 2030. So this gas is really materially important for the state of Western Australia. This is just a slide briefly outlining the Macquarie debt structure. So it's been out in the domain previously, but I think it's just useful to understand we still have Tranche C, which is uncommitted and subject to CPs on West Erregulla. So at the moment, our borrowings are $157.7 million, and that's predominantly on the Strike -- on the South Erregulla project. And our cash and net debt position is shown there as well. So this is a slide that some of you will have been familiar with and I've spoken to previously a couple of times. But really for us is the money slide. It shows our pipeline of growth. It's exciting for us. We have our foundation project Walyering with around $52 million revenue per annum and looking to backfill that production, the production decline with that Walyering West well coming online fairly soon. Then we have South Erregulla, the power station. So as soon as we get that commissioned by the end of this year, that's going to be real near-term cash flow. So that's another how you look at it, but $50 million to $75 million of revenue on top of Walyering. And then West Erregulla, coming online mid-'29 is very exciting. And we've got a little bar chart there, which just shows illustrative gas prices and their revenue at that gas price of our 43.5 terajoules a day. So the Belisama facility has a 210 TJ-a-day capacity so our 43.5 TJs a day is a significant portion of that. And based on, say, an $8 gas price, we're looking at a revenue stream there of $127 million. So when you add those 3 revenue streams together, we're starting to look at a significantly different Strike as we go forward. The Fourth box there is around our exploration portfolio, and I know shareholders have been patiently waiting for some developments there around exploration and progress. So as we bring these cash flows online and we start generating some revenue paying down our debt, we're going to be very carefully managing capital, but we certainly have in our sights the importance of bringing on some of those exploration programs that we've all been waiting for. So Ocean Hill and Kadathinni are probably the first in the stack, and there are a number of others as well. So it's a very exciting profile for us of Strike and truly at a transformational point with Walyering already producing and giving us revenue, South Erregulla really close West Erregulla, on the short-term horizon and then our big exploration portfolio at the other side. So I think we have enormous opportunity here at Strike to actually really capitalize on all of this and to deliver something really special. This is just a refresh on the exploration upside that we do have at Strike. So I spoke to Ocean Hill and Kadathinni but in the middle there is L26, which is the West Erregulla footprint. So the tenure we hold with Hancock also has near-field upside. That will also be looked to be sort of further exploration carried out in the coming years. So the financial priorities for this year are obviously to get South Erregulla online, that's critical and to actually convert that into cash flow. So we're looking forward to that. Total forecast project cost was around $186 million, and we're really looking like seeing that plant coming online by the end of this year. Funding for West Erregulla, to FID has been really important. So our agreement with Hancock saw us secure $30 million in funding from Hancock to help us get through to FID, subject to Macquarie consent. But certainly, that will help us to get through on West Erregulla. Then we have our debt facility with Macquarie. So we've got an additional facility released from Macquarie just recently, and that will actually help us to sort of continue on all of our development fronts as well. And then around -- I guess the most important thing is us having real capital discipline to pursue exploration and development programs throughout the coming year. So this is the slide that I will end on. It's why Strike? Why now? I think everybody knows why Strike? Why now? We've got West Erregulla, Walyering and South Erregulla coming online. We've got a really solid revenue growth ahead of us and exposure to different markets. We've got the electricity market. We've got the gas market, which is great to have that diversification. And we also have the organic growth opportunities. And I'll speak again briefly about the opportunities we have at SEPP. With that land we have and the location of that land and the opportunities that are around that as well. So that is all in the presentation today, except we do have some questions that have come through. So I'll just run through them now.

The first one was just around what will be happening with third-party gas sales as we go forward at Walyering? So the idea is that now we have the Walyering compression installed that we're expecting to be able to meet that contract for a longer period of time. And then in the background, we're working on the FEED program to actually tie Walyering West back into the Walyering facility. So that will be looking to minimize any third-party gas purchases in the future. And I've just got some more questions that came through on e-mail. So the first question is, what are the key work streams to be funded by the $30 million Hancock pre-FID facility? So the upstream work program is expected to remain broadly consistent with the development scope previously communicated, including development drilling at West Erregulla 6 and completion activities, workovers of West Erregulla 2, 3 and 4. So the detailed scope sequencing and budget for pre-FID work is currently being aligned with Hancock through the JV work program and budget process. We, therefore, don't intend to provide a more detailed work program or update capital estimate until that is complete. However, the $30 million of Hancock pre-FID funding is intended to support Strike's share of expenditure required to progress West Erregulla towards FID. While we currently expect the overall upstream work program to remain broadly consistent with those assumptions made previously, Strike and Hancock are still aligned on the detailed work program and budget for the development. So we're still working through that with Hancock. So it's a little bit early to provide updated CapEx guidance at this stage. Importantly, Strike remains operator through to FID, which means we'll be allowed to control the definition and optimization of the upstream development plan. By FID, we expect to have a more mature work program and sufficiently defined CapEx estimate to provide updated guidance. So I hope that answers that question. The next question is, what guidance are you giving on remaining upstream CapEx at West Erregulla? Actually, I've have answered that one now. So then what's the remaining CapEx of South Erregulla as at 30 June 2026? As at 30 June '26, Strike forecast approximately $16 million of remaining CapEx to complete South Erregulla. Since year-end, the project has continued to progress and remaining forecast expenditure is now approximately $11 million. As with any projects nearing completion and commissioning, the remaining expenditure is forecast and remain subject to final commissioning activities, project closeout and any additional works that may be required. So what's the use of funds for the drawdown of the $30 million Macquarie facility in December? Is this for South Erregulla works? Or will it sit on the balance sheet for now? The $30 million Macquarie facility was drawn to provide additional liquidity as Strike completes South Erregulla and progresses its broader development program. The funds are not specifically quarantined to South Erregulla and will be deployed against the company's funding requirements as they arise. In the interim, any funds not immediately required will remain as cash on the balance sheet. So I think that's all the questions that we have today. So if there are any additional questions, please feel free to send them through to myself or Julia. We'll make sure that Julia's e-mail address is available for any of you that would like to reach out. I'm very pleased to have Julia on the team, and we'll be looking forward to getting out and meeting some more of the shareholders in the coming weeks and months. So thank you very much for joining us on the webinar today. Like I said, if you have any questions, please, please do send through. Thank you.