Panoro Energy ASA

OSE:PEN

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[John Hamilton, executive]

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining our first quarter results presentation and the conference call. I'm joined today by a number of colleagues from both the financial and technical disciplines. And we also have dialed in some of our country managements in Africa. So it's well represented here from a Panoro perspective. What I'd like to do is take you through a presentation on our first quarter results, which were announced this morning.

As a reminder, today's conference call contains certain statements that are or may be deemed to be forward-looking statements, which include all statements other than statements of historical fact. Forward-looking statements involve making certain assumptions based on the company's experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions, expected future developments and other factors that we believe are appropriate under the circumstances. Although we believe the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual events or results may differ materially from those projected or implied in such forward-looking statements due to known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. And for your reference, our results were released this morning. A press release and the presentation are available on our website, www.panoroenergy.com.

Next slide, please. So for those of you who joined before, you know all about this, but there will be a chance for you to ask questions during my talk. You can type them in and you can also raise your hand if you would like to have your microphone unmuted. As you can see on the right side there, you can just click the hand and we will unmute you if you have any questions or you can type in questions as you see on the left panel there and we will endeavor to try and answer as many of those as possible. I will repeat these instructions at the end of my presentation.

Next slide, please. So our financials this quarter were, as expected, as guided and as preannounced. Quarter 1 was a good quarter for production. In fact, it was our record production quarter ever, 8,300 barrels a day net Panoro's working interest. And we -- but we had a reasonably small lifting period as it's been widely disclosed for many quarters now in a row. We're very, very dependent on the second half of this year to generate most of our liftings and that's when our revenue and our cash flow principally gets recognized. And the first quarter indeed was bang-on guidance at around 130,000 barrels a day lifted. This is principally some Tunisian barrels that were lifted during the quarter.

In terms of the financial highlights, we had a very good realized oil price in the quarter, USD 108 a barrel, that's after customary discounts. The Tunisian crude does sell at a couple of dollar discount to Brent. So we obviously caught a very, very good cycle of cargoes there with a revenue of about USD 16 million and capital expenditure in the quarter of about USD 11 million. This is all as per guidance and as per expectation. Cash at the end of the quarter, about USD 30 million with net debt about USD 60 million. And during the quarter, we actually repaid quite a bit of debt as well. We repaid about USD 8 million of debt. So we're delevering even in quarters where our cash flow and our revenue lines aren't that strong.

Next slide, please. So here it is in graphic form, our production. In the quarter, we produced 8,300 barrels a day net to our working interest, which is again our record quarter ever. That sits very comfortably within our full year guidance of between 8,000 and 9,000 barrels a day, and we are still on target during the course of 2023 to deliver in excess of 12,500 barrels a day, principally, as Dussafu, the next phase comes online, Hibiscus development comes online during the back end of this year and well into the first and second quarters of next year as well start coming online sequentially. You will see our production increase around these levels. So we have a very, very good production growth story, and it's very much intact at the moment.

Next slide, please. We announced during the quarter our annual statement of reserves. I think we're very happy to say that we have almost 100% reserve replacement from last year due to some upward revisions offsetting the production that we've produced during the year. So that gets netted off the reserves, obviously, as we produce the barrels, but we were able to replace almost 100% of those through reserve additions in the portfolio. So a very, very good position, continue to be in a good position, both on our 2P reserves, but also if you look at the 3P and the 2C resource numbers, it gives you an indication of some of the upsides that exist within the portfolio.

Next slide, please. couple of weeks ago, we announced an extension of our Block G license, which is Equatorial Guinea, the asset that we acquired from Tullow about a year ago. And the announcement was made as per stock exchange regulations as soon as we signed the deal. It was on a Monday and that was one of those Mondays where I think the world took fright of various macro events and our share price went down, bit unfortunate and therefore, didn't really get the attention that it deserves and we'll continue to try and provide the attention that it serves as more details about this come about.

But very simply, we had an extension to 2040 of these licenses. When we bought the assets from Tullow, they were 2029 and 2033. And this extension is extremely important. It's what we always hopeful when we bought this asset from Tullow that we get the extension from 2029 and in the case of Ceiba to 2040 and 2034 in the case of Okume. What this does is it does multiple things. First of all, it creates new 2P reserves. We estimate somewhere between 2 and 3 million barrels of new reserves that we will be able to book on the next reserve report, that's a management estimate, but we think that that's an accurate one.

That's something like a 15% to 25% increase in the 2P reserves that we have currently booked. And it's approximately 5% to 10% higher total reserves for the group. Again, our share price were down on the news, but this is certainly a 5% to 10% uplift on our 2P reserves at the time of our last ASR. It does a few other things as well. It kind of supports the view of the joint venture that there are additional contingent resources here that are going to be worthwhile exploiting and bringing into that 2P bucket, drilling more wells. There's also a commitment to drill new production wells probably in the second half of 2023.

We'll continue to update the market as we go. But this is really exciting. This is really what we hoped as one of our upside cases when we bought the Tullow assets. Again, we bought the Tullow assets on a do nothing case basically at USD 45 oil. We are taking a gamble, I suspect that oil prices would be better than USD 45 a barrel and/or that the technical case will improve. And obviously, we're seeing the benefit of both of those things at the moment. So this has really validated the management's case towards buying this asset of Tullow.

The other thing that it will do is that it will provide upside to our medium-term production targets. Again, most analysts and indeed, our guidance to the market has been do nothing case in Equatorial Guinea, other than what was identified at the time. And what we're seeing now is that these additional production wells that we'll drill again in the second half of 2023 is our best estimate at the moment. We'll continue to provide a strong production growth and to level out the plateau of that production profile as we get into '24, '25, '26.

So this is an extremely accretive thing to have happened. It's almost like another acquisition as the way we like to look at it and we're very, very pleased with this. And again, we will try to help the market understand the importance of this as we go forward and as we define joint venture, the next steps in this work program.

Next slide, please. We also announced in the quarter the appointment of country managers for our business. Sofiane on the right, Tunisia has been with us already many years, but we recently hired both Antonino and Ghislain, whose nice faces you can see there. And the importance of this for Panoro is really to reflect the maturing of the company, Panoro, as we have grown through these acquisitions. We've also grown in country where these gentlemen are responsible for the day-to-day management of our businesses there, the interaction with the regulators and the ministries and driving corporate social responsibility and the ESG, mandates of the business.

And although these are 3 staff that you might not see much or hear much directly from, these people are critically important to the success of our business. And the impact that we're having locally in the countries in which we operate. We're very proud to have announced that we now have a country manager in each of our core countries of operation -- production.

Next slide, please. So just a quick little window shops of each of our production assets. Equatorial Guinea again, continues to be the lion's share of our production. It's our most important production asset at the moment. When Gabon comes full swing about a year from now, with all 6 -- new wells are online in Gabon, you'll see that leveling out a bit. But at the moment, Equatorial Guinea is driving the bulk of our production. We've got great uptime on the FPSO. They are better than budgeted. We always budget a little bit conservatively on that kind of thing, but the uptime has been fantastic. We have a number of work programs underway.

Production has been about 35,000 barrels a day gross in the quarter, which is a big uplift from when we bought the asset and was doing about 29,000, 30,000 barrels a day. So we're already seeing production growth in Equatorial Guinea. This really is turning out to be so far an excellent acquisition. In Gabon, already preannounced by ourselves in BW in terms of what the average production for the quarter was, around 11,600 barrels a day gross, about 2,000 barrels a day net to us.

There was during that period, there wasn't an annual workover program, maintenance program, excuse me, undertaken, which obviously impacts average production. Still working on optimizing the gas capacity such that we can increase production there. There's certainly several thousand barrels a day of latent production there that's not being produced while we're waiting for the gas lift solutions to be fully implemented. So we do have some upside in terms of even before the Hibiscus development comes online in terms of making sure that the current 6 wells are optimized as well as they can.

The Hibiscus/Ruche development is progressing well and is on target. So there's nothing new to update there other than things are going to plan there. In Tunisia, we produced 1,300 barrels a day net to ourselves. There's an extensive workover campaign going on as we speak. And we continue to see lots of opportunity there to increase our production over the short-to-medium term on this very important asset, including the completion of the exciting Douleb reservoir. It's a very productive reservoir in Guebiba, which we're currently eyeing and hoping to complete over the coming couple of months.

Next slide, please. So a couple of other assets and things to follow some of the catalysts within the company, Block 2B in South Africa, Africa Energy have been out there, Eco Atlantic have been out there, talking more and more about this well that we're drilling, the well looks like -- the rig looks like it's now mobilizing in July, which looks as probably we have a September spud on the Gazania well, which as you will remember, is drilling up dip from an existing discovery. We're looking for high-quality reservoir sands, the unrisked prospective resources on what we're drilling is significant, greater than 300 million barrels. So it has the potential to be quite big.

This area has come into focus. Many of you will have followed Total's Venus well, which looks like it's unlocked somewhere between 5 and 15 billion barrels of oil, which is not too far from where we are. We will be honest to say that this is a different geological setting than that, but this area is very hot. We've also had Shell building quite nearby, the graph discovery, which looks like it's in excess of 500 million barrels. So we're probably in the best post code on the planet right now with the largest oilfield -- offshore oil field ever discovered in the Venus, not too far from us.

So we feel we're in the right place. We've got a rig and we have a plan to drill this well. This could be quite an interesting catalyst as we move into the third and fourth quarter, and we look forward to updating the market more on that. The sale of our interest in Aje has been slow, but progress has been made with the government approvals, all secured. PetroNor made an announcement on Monday that certain other conditions to their deal have now been resolved. We are now in the sort of the legal and operational execution phases of this transaction. It's been frustrating for us and probably frustrating for shareholders with delays here, but the finish line is in sight. We hope to be able to announce in the near future the completion of that transaction.

Next slide, please. I won't go too much into this, but what we would like to do every quarter is to reconcile the cash flow. The P&L is, of course, always interesting to look at. The balance sheet is always interesting to look at. But for us, cash flow is what we look at, and we think is where the truth of what's going on in the business really lies. And so, we will, for transparency and to be able to articulate where the company is going, we will provide cash flow reconciliation every quarter for our investors, we can see exactly what's happening. I won't go into too much of the detail. If there are any questions, obviously, please do ask them in the Q&A module.

Next slide, please. I won't go too much into the detail here, but again, we will just continue to update the market every quarter in terms of where we are with our loan or debt maturity profile. Again, we repaid over USD 8 million in the quarter. So we continue to chip away at our debt. We repaid, I don't know, it was at 8% or 9% of our total debt. We've repaid in the quarter. So we're chipping away at the debt, which is not very challenging in the first place. The assets supports a much bigger debt capacity than we currently borrow. So we feel very comfortable with this. This is not an aggressive lending profile. And our capex, there's nothing changed here. We previously guided around USD 65 million this year, and nothing has changed there.

Next slide, please. Crude liftings are the things that changed a little bit. It's always difficult to exactly predict 12 months forward, exactly what your lifting profile is going to be. This is our best estimate at the moment. In the previous quarter, we had an estimate that we might be doing some small lifting in the second quarter. That is now just rounded into July. So just a couple of week change is kind of put it into a different quarter. Nothing fundamentally has changed here.

And what we're seeing and our best estimate now is that July will be a very, very busy month from us -- for us on the crude lifting side. We anticipate lifting approximately 850,000 barrels during July. We've broken out July from the rest of the third quarter just to show that it actually is right at the beginning of the quarter. And this is largely driven by a lifting that we have now planned in Equatorial Guinea, which will be the lion's share of this. The balance will be some Tunisian lifting we anticipate also in July. So July looks like a very, very busy month for us in terms of revenue recognition and ultimately, in terms of cash flow as well.

And August, September looks like it's principally September. It looks like it's going to be another busy month. And then probably December, it looks like that the next big lifting point. So these are important points for us because again, that's revenue recognition and is cash flow. We've always said the second half is going to be dominated and it certainly is the case. We are fortunate that quite a bit of it is happening right at the beginning of the quarter. We remain largely unhedged.

We have the historical hedges in place from our Tunisian loan, which were put in place by the lenders back last year, which continue to not look great, but it's probably about 6% of our estimated production for the year. So very, very modestly hedged at 90%, 95% of our production is completely unhedged for the year, which is great.

We have decided to take out some small hedges for that July cargo, around 200,000 barrels out of that 850 has been locked in at around USD 104.50 a barrel, just to make sure we have some triple digits in there. Just in case something funny happens, we wanted to start chipping away and making sure that we had triple digits. These are interesting times with respect to the oil price and we're enjoying being unhedged. But we'll continue to try and target some risk management around -- specifically around liftings.

Next slide, please. This is the final slide and we've shown it before that some of the words are a little bit different, but this is the way we like to summarize the company. We have a great foundation for shareholder returns. We fully expect to be returning the significant cash flows that we generate from these assets and with these high oil prices as soon as practically possible. And we think we've got a great company set up to do that. We have a very high-quality asset base with very long life reserves.

So this is not a company that is flashing the pan over the next 3 years and then nothing. We have a 13-year reserve life on this thing with very low operating cost assets. We've got organic reserves growth. We've just demonstrated that again in Equatorial Guinea and we have an active development program going on and that will continue over the years to come.

On the yellow, we believe we have a very strong board. And in fact, we have our Annual General Meeting of Shareholders in approximately an hour and a half. We've announced the creation of a sustainability committee. And we've also announced the nomination, the post appointment of Grace Skaugen to the Board. Grace, assuming that she gets voted in today, which I entirely expect to be the case, brings with her a great experience and a great addition to the Board. Grace has been involved with Lundin Energy for many, many years and as the Chairman of the new Lundin Energy post the disposal merger with AkerBP.

She was also Deputy Chairwoman of Statoil back in the day before it became Equinor, and she sits on the board of a number of other very high-profile companies. So it's really a super addition to the board, assuming that she gets voted in today. We look forward to her role as Chairwoman of the Sustainability Committee, which she has a great experience in. So we already have a strong board and strong governance, but this has now really made a big step forward with Grace.

And finally, we have visible production growth. Again, we are strong believers in the macro environment now. We believe oil will continue to be very, very strong. Leaving the tragic events in Ukraine to the side, there's been a structural imbalance in the supply side of this business for many years with people being scared off of investing in oil and gas, due to the energy transition. And what we're seeing is now that oil and gas is certainly an important part of that transition and will continue to be an important part of that transition for longer than perhaps was originally expected.

And the underinvestment that we've seen over the past 10 years in this business is bad and will create a very, very tight dynamic in the markets. We are a company that is growing our production into that dynamic and we look to be increasing our production by about 50% over the next 12 months or so and we are largely unhedged. So again, we believe this is a great company, a great foundation to the company and a great foundation to start returning that cash to shareholders as soon as practically possible.

So with that, I will conclude my remarks and open up to questions. Again, you can raise your hand using the hand icon, and we will attempt to unmute you or you can type in questions into the question panel. And we will endeavor to cover as many of those questions as possible. If your questions have already been answered through a previous question, we may bypass it, but we will endeavor to answer the questions as much as we possibly can. So I open it up for questions now. If there's anybody that would like to ask anything.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, John. The first question is from Teodor Sveen-Nilsen.

[Teodor Nilsen, analyst]

A few questions for me. First, I just want could you give a brief note on the gas lifting issue at the Dussafu? Second question, just on timing on the PetroNor dividend, should we expect that to be Q3 or Q4 event? And finally, maybe the most important one is on cost inflation. Of course, we see across your all sectors more than usual cost inflation. I just wonder, which are your input factors do you see the most pressure on? And do you have any thoughts around your full year CapEx guidance of USD 65 million. How much of that USD 65 million are actually locked in on fixed prices?

[John Hamilton, executive]

Right. Yes. Good question, Teodor. On the gas lift, we don't have any additional information than what has previously been discussed and disclosed by BW. They have their results also in a couple of days, perhaps they will say a bit more. But basically, the intention is that towards the third and fourth quarter that we will have some resolution of the gas lift issue with additional unit being procured and brought in. These are big units. So these are not things you just order up on Amazon as I'm sure you appreciate. They take a while to come. But when it does, it should allow us to better balance the wells.

We currently have 4 wells under production with 2 basically not producing due to shortage of gas lift. And it's very, very frustrating for all parties concerned, not least to which our shareholders, but also for the government of Gabon, for BW, for ourselves, for the company's oil company, for all the partners. So there is no lack of attention and urgency on this issue. But there's no additional guidance on it at the moment. The wells are still not producing to their optimum. They are still within the guidance that has been provided by BW previously. So there's not a change in the guidance. The guidance has always been expecting that this comes a little bit later, and that remains to be the case.

The PetroNor dividend, I expect that it could still be second quarter, more likely third quarter rather than fourth quarter though. I think there are a few procedural steps left and PetroNor to issue the shares. They need to get them to us. We need to dividend them out. So there are a number of kind of slightly procedural and boring steps to this, which are now underway. I would expect that it would be a late second quarter, the first part of the third quarter.

Cost inflation, I think of the CapEx guidance we've given for this year, I think that's reasonably solid because most of that CapEx had been agreed and procured and contracts signed in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, South Africa. These things have been agreed well upfront. There could be some cost inflation around some of the ancillary services that have not yet been contracted. But I would expect not to at this point, expect any major changes to that CapEx guidance as a result of inflation.

I think where we are more concerned would be with 2023 work programs and budgets, which are obviously still not agreed and defined, but we would expect the biggest elements of that cost inflation to probably come through on the rigs and the ancillary services around the drilling of wells, I think, is probably principally where we see cost inflation risk. How big that is yet? I'm not prepared to -- I'm not informed enough to quantify because we're not in the market tendering for 2023 yet. 2022, I think, is reasonably solid, Teodor. We were lucky enough to have locked in most of that early enough. But it certainly is a theme that we will continue to see in the sector.

[Teodor Nilsen, analyst]

Okay. Just a follow up on that CapEx for 2023 in terms of activity levels, should we expect a higher CapEx year-on-year assuming the same prices?

[John Hamilton, executive]

What we've guided and what BW guided, obviously, is that we have in 2023, we have the first part maybe of the next phase of Hibiscus kind of lined up. So there's a little bit of CapEx in there for that. Equatorial Guinea with our license extension, we really want to go after 3 new development wells there. We've guided USD 65 million this year. We haven't guided next year. But if I was forced to answer a question on CapEx guidance for next year, I would say, directionally, it should be in and around where we are in 2023 -- 2022, excuse me.

So is it USD 50 million or USD 60 million? I don't know. But I think if I was forced to estimate, it'd probably be in that range, which would be a combination of Dussafu, It would be Equatorial Guinea, 3 new development wells. And there's always hopefully things we can do in Tunisia, which are of a lower quantum clearly, but quite impactful nonetheless.

[Unknown Executive]

The next question is from Stephane Foucaud.

[Stephane Guy Foucaud, analyst]

I had 2 questions. The first one was around the availability of the FPSO in Equatorial Guinea that was really good in 1Q. And I was wondering whether you would see that continue in the rest of the year? And if not, what sort of efficiency do you assume in the budget or in the guidance? That's my first question. My second question is back on inflation. The first question was around CapEx and have the same on OpEx. So in the presentation, you talked about that USD 17 a barrel OpEx, well over where you probably stand at the moment. How do you see that evolving over the year and next year?

[John Hamilton, executive]

Nigel, you're able to talk a little bit about the FPSO in Block G and Equatorial Guinea. The question was your voice came through a little bit wobbly, but I think the question was around why the upside was so strong and whether we had budgeted such a strong outcome.

[Nigel McKim, executive]

Absolutely, John. Yes. So a very good performance indeed. And I think the first thing to mention is it underlies the significance of the investment activities over the past year or so. on the Sabre field and the FPSO itself. So a lot of work has been done to improve the performance at Sabre: repair of the gas lift distribution units, subsea flow lines, the reconditioning of 2 multiphase pumps on 2 of the clusters. So all of that has come together to produce much better results for that field and for the FPSO performance.

We have assumed both in our CPR reserves estimates and also in our forecasted profiles for the budget purposes at 85% uptime at Sabre and 98% of the Kosmos. So clearly, we're in excess of that. Realistically, over the long term, uptimes would be less than 99%. And typically, I think for a facility of this type, it would be in the range of, say, 93% to 95%. But clearly, we're very encouraged by what we see. And it's a great sign that the investments are delivering value now.

[Stephane Guy Foucaud, analyst]

That's very helpful.

[John Hamilton, executive]

And then on inflation, it's probably a little early to say, Stephane. I think we're seeing inflation across the board globally in everything. So I think it would be safe to assume there's going to be inflation on the operating cost. Depending on the asset, a lot of the fixed costs on these operations is through the -- a lot of the cost is fixed, like, for instance, some of the FPSO leases and things like that. Now where you have on the variable costs, you have staff costs and equipment and everything else that goes into it. And undoubtedly, there will be some cost inflation on that. But it's hard to quantify that at the moment. We have our existing budgets agreed and contracts in place. So again, I don't expect a massive change this year, but I think, obviously, cost inflation is going to creep into the world generally.

[Unknown Executive]

John, a couple of questions that have come in through Q&A portal. Could you please elaborate on Panoro's hedging strategy? And what further hedges we may be contemplating or our approach to it this year? And also, maybe if you can touch on whenever you refer to a potential upside on the 12,500 barrel a day target rate achievable in 2023. Just how thinking around that may be evolving?

[John Hamilton, executive]

Sure. The hedging comes from 2 sides: one will be lenders. Lenders typically in our business have a certain expectation around hedging. In the case of our Tunisian business, you'll see we have those historic hedges in there. Under that loan agreement, we were required to hedge a certain percentage of production on a rolling 2-year basis, which is why we have these hedges, which were imminently sensible. And by the way, during the times of USD 10 and USD 20 oil, we're doing very, very well for us. Now we're seeing the flip side of that. Those aren't looking as good. Again, that's just about 600 barrels a day of production. So thankfully, it's minimal.

And in that particular case, we have not put any 2023 hedges in place around that particular lending situation. So we've managed to kind of keep that bit unhedged. And in the case of the loan that we have to back the acquisitions that we made, that one is a little bit more benign. That one -- they're not as strict. They like us to really look at the rolling 12 months and try and keep an eye on lifting schedules. And that's really where the corporate strategy principally is focused is because we have very few lifting events, those are quite important events for us.

And what you don't want to do is get exposed to some bad luck, if you happen to lift on July 1 and the ensuing 5-day period, which is when cargo is normally priced, happens to be a day where there's a big market sell-off and then it rallies the next day. These kind of things can happen, of course. So what we try and do is try and identify where we're lifting and try and get some risk management in and around that. Just like I've just announced today that we have 200,000 barrels out of that 800 hedged at around USD 104.50 a barrel. That's just trying to lock in and chip away at that to make sure that we don't get exposed to very small windows of pricing periods.

And that will continue to be the case. It's -- after we do this, we'll probably look at that September lifting that we anticipate. And as that becomes a little bit more firm, we'll try and start hedging in and around that. So I think you'll see some sort of tactical hedging. You won't see us, I don't think, locking in longer-term oil price hedges at the moment. That's constantly under evaluation. I mean, we recognize that the majority of our equity investors like the exposure to the oil price, is one of the reasons they invest in the company. And when you take that away, it takes away some of that upside that the investor is investing in Sector 4.

At the same time, we have to manage our treasury as well as we can. So we have a duty to ourselves and to our shareholders also to manage our cash well. So it's about finding that balance. But we are -- as I said, we're about 94% unhedged at the moment for our production this year and completely unhedged in 2023. Our production upside from the new activities in Equatorial Guinea, we have a series of workshops going on literally as we speak. A few colleagues that are unable to join the call today because they are in another workshop around this, trying to define the timing of those wells and what those wells may deliver.

I think the best I can tell you right now is that there is a meaningful upside, I believe, to that 12,500 barrels a day in 2023. And just as importantly that it will increase the production, but then maintain a plateau at a higher level than is currently modeled by our guidance and the market's expectation. We would try to provide a little bit more granularity around that as the months come and as we get a little bit more specific around that. But like I said, we don't believe the market is quite woken up to it yet and that could be because we're not giving enough detail, but we really see this as almost another acquisition. We just think it's a great addition to reserves and a great addition to our production profile, and we'll try and articulate that a little bit more as we get a little more firm with our partners, driving in Kosmos on that.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, John. A further question from Teodor Sveen-Nilsen.

[Teodor Nilsen, analyst]

Well, I'm not sure if I have any more questions.

[John Hamilton, executive]

Okay. No problem.

[Unknown Executive]

Okay. John, I think that concludes the Q&A for today.

[John Hamilton, executive]

Perfect. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining. And we look forward to keep.

[Unknown Executive]

I think Oddvar is on the line. I don't know if you can see that.

[Unknown Executive]

Oddvar. Oddvar are you looking to ask a question. I think you are muted. I think you have to unmute yourself.

[Oddvar Bjørgan, analyst]

One question here. It's about the M&A market. I wonder if you can elaborate a bit around the potential M&A market in Africa? Do you still see the larger oil companies trying to get divest the oil assets? Or has this trend slowed down somewhat recently? If you can try to shed some light around that please?

[John Hamilton, executive]

Yes. We continue to see the large companies divesting of assets globally. Obviously, what's happened in Russia has put some question marks on the speed of that. They've effectively had some forced divestitures of production reserves out of Russia. But nonetheless, we continue to see the trend that we've seen for a number of years, with just larger oil companies shedding assets and it's true for Africa as well. We see a limited number of players like ourselves that are able to look at those things. I think that the higher oil prices right now, I think that that's creating a difficult dynamic between buyer and seller.

We'd love to do another Tullow deal where we get things as cheaply as we did. We don't see that opportunity set out there at the very moment. But the dynamic is interesting because some of these companies, it's not necessarily about trying to achieve the best price and show off, but they've sold something for a very high price. It's also strategically about divesting assets and using those proceeds towards energy transition. So we may see some opportunistic things happen.

One of the interesting things we're seeing early signs of, Oddvar, is that with energy security globally being challenged, the paradigms have been challenged by everything that's happening in Ukraine and Russia and the sanctioning and the flow of oils and gas, is that there seems to be the first signs of maybe a reconsideration of Africa as a reliable energy supplier, both gas and oil. So we're seeing that Africa may come a little bit more into focus from the investment community, the financial community, government support.

So we think we're very well positioned in all of that. We think that Africa is going to become a more important focus for global energy supply. So we think we're in the right place at the right time in that respect. But we're very, very choosy. We think we've got a lot in the company right now with our development asset in Gabon or all the good steps are being made in Equatorial Guinea, the new work program in Equatorial Guinea, we think we got our plate full. Obviously, if something really interesting comes along, we have to consider it. And the market is there. There are definitely sellers in the market. USD 100 oil makes funding a really nice deal, more difficult, more challenging though. So we're being extremely choosy.

Okay. I think that is it. And I thank you very much for joining and we look forward to continuing to update the market as we progress these assets. Thank you very much.