Peyto Exploration & Development Corp

TSX:PEY

Earnings Call Transcript 2018-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Peyto's Third Quarter 2018 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.I would now like to turn the conference over to President and CEO, Darren Gee. Please go ahead.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Thanks, Jord. And good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to everybody for tuning into our third quarter 2018 results conference call. Before we get started today I would like to remind everybody that all statements made by the company during this call today are subject to the same forward-looking disclaimer and advisory set forth in our company news release issued yesterday. So please have a read of that.In the room this morning we've got all of the Peyto management team. We've got Kathy Turgeon, our Chief Financial Officer; JP Lachance is our VP, Engineering and Chief Operating Officer; Dave Thomas, is our VP, Exploration here; Lee Curran is our VP of Drilling and Completions, he is here; Todd Burdick, our VP, Production; Tim Louie, our VP of Land; and we've also got Scott Robinson, our Executive VP of New Ventures. So feel free to pepper Scott with some questions later about our all new ventures.

[Scott Robinson, Former Executive VP of New Ventures & Director]

Or not.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Before I get started with my comments today about our quarterly results, I do want to recognize the efforts of the entire Peyto team, including all of our field personnel. We didn't have a lot of completion and drilling activity in the quarter, but they were still very hard at work with production operations and cost control, particularly in light of the wet conditions that we had in the third quarter. And as usual, our team did a great job. So on behalf of all Peyto shareholders, I just like to say thank you for the big team effort out there in the field and here in the office.So just some general comments. I'd start off this morning with just a few comments about the quarter and then we can take some questions from those listening in. Going to try and keep this relatively brief as this is a very busy week of reporting. And of course, we have our 20th anniversary party to get ready for tonight. So we'll get through this quarter quickly.As I mentioned in the release, we are back drilling again. We've ramped up our drilling activity throughout the quarter. We were able to keep drilling even through a lot of the wet weather because we were sitting on many pad sites within Greater Sundance. We weren't quite as lucky on the completion side. We were shut in and shut out of many of our completion sites due to road bans in the West Hudson area during September. Frac pumpers are the heaviest equipment that we have to move around in the field. And so of course we need some relatively firm roads to do that. We still managed to get 25 wells drilled though in the quarter, 15 completed and just a few more brought on production by the end of the quarter.Of course, we hope to do more, especially considering the nice rally we had in gas price in the latter part of September. We wanted more production ready for that early winter rally that we saw. But then of course I suppose we would have been shutting some of those volumes in because then in later October, we saw gas prices collapse again. And now they're taking off again. So we're busy adding those volumes that we drilled throughout the latter part of the third quarter and here into the fourth quarter.As also mentioned in the quarter, we experimented with a couple of different completion designs for our Cardium well. JP can give us more details on that. We did several wells with a couple of different technologies. Of course, we keep looking for better ways to complete this big resource that we've got and keep looking at new technologies that are always being developed. Just because we found one way to do it doesn't mean we're going to stop innovating when it comes to our completion design and when it comes to improving our results. I know at Peyto, we don't really like to be on the bleeding edge of technology, but certainly as soon as some of these technologies are proven, we're generally one of the best at putting it into practice and then perfecting it.As we also mentioned in the quarter we're officially a Montney player. During the quarter, we picked up 50 sections of land and we are currently drilling on our first exploratory well on those lands. So stay tuned on that. Kudos to our team for how quickly they were able to jump on that new opportunity. We picked up the land in the quarter and already we're drilling on it. So that's pretty fast turnaround. The quarter, as we mentioned, was not very enjoyable from a commodity price perspective. There's some very weak and volatile natural gas prices. And so sadly our plan of delaying a lot of our capital to the fall and even shutting in some of our summer production was one we had to put into practice.Of course, one of the main reasons for those weak prices is that the traditional storage reservoirs in the province that add demand for gas in the summertime, that market just wasn't really present for us. So we didn't put much gas into storage this summer, which normally translates into much higher winter prices because we won't have that stored gas to rely on this winter. And I think already, we're starting to see the effect over the last few days with some cold weather showing up in Western Canada and the big rally that we've seen in gas prices on November 3, they're negative, and yesterday they were $3.10, I think, was the closing price. So a big shoot up in AECO gas prices here just in the last few days with the cold weather.On the oil side. Oil price was pretty strong and so was our condensate price, so that was nice. And really, when you look at the combined price along with our hedges, the total price we realized in Q3 2018 wasn't much different actually than what we realized in Q3 '17. On the cost side, our cash costs were up a little bit. There's continued pressure from government regulation and taxes that are driving up the cost of our business. Municipal taxes, carbon taxes, Alberta Energy regulator fees, all these things are going up and that adds costs to our business.I believe we still are doing the best job in the industry to hold cost down. But our industry just keeps getting hit with higher and higher cost to do business. So eventually something is going to have to give there. Of course, part of our higher per unit cost had to do with our lower production. As we spread the same fixed costs over a lower volume base, it drives per unit costs up a little bit. And so some of the cost increase was us deliberately holding off on our capital investments and production to build out due to low prices.So the combination of those prices and our cash costs gives us a netback in the quarter of around $14 a barrel, which is quite a bit better than a lot of other gas producers that I've seen so far, who have even more liquids than we do right now. So I think as we increase our liquids weighting as we add more Cardium, I expect we'll be making up ground on the industries more in terms of our netback. So it's good to keep those at the top of the industry.On the marketing front. We continue to make some headway, diversifying our sales to the U.S. with some more AECO NYMEX basis deals. We basically hit our target for 2019 summer to have around 40% of our gas tied to NYMEX. We still have some work to do in 2020 and out into 2021. And then by the end of 2021, we expect the full addition of the Nova system expansion work to be done. And so that should give us a much increased access to the North American market.TransCanada was looking to add I think close to 2.5 Bcf a day of market access over the next couple of years with the $7 billion capital program here in Alberta. So that should close that basis differential between U.S. and Canadian gas prices for us.As we disclosed in our preliminary 2019 capital budget, we've got capital plans for around $275 million, midpoint of our guidance between $250 million and $300 million. That's up a bit from 2018. Our 2018 capital program looks to come in in probably around $230 million. But both of those numbers are really still very conservative relative to what we're capable of and relative to the capital programs that we've had in the past.All of our capital will be focused almost exclusively on the Cardium as those economics are still relatively robust even with the volatile gas price and even with the big differentials we're seeing right now on condensate prices. So we'll keep banging away on our Cardium because that looks like it's giving us the best returns.And we're starting to get a little bit bullish on winter gas prices of course, not much cold weather has really shown up this fall already and already we're seeing a lot of pressure on the ability of the supply to meet demand. Alberta demand is up year-over-year and supply is sort of capped by the pipe. So we're starting to see some good pressure on prices and we're starting to feel a little more bullish obviously as we head into winter here with the potential for AECO to really run.And if it starts to bring the back end of the curve up and we start to see some more strength in that AECO natural gas prices, obviously as we go further out into the future then we've got obviously a large inventory at Spirit River locations that we could start to dip into and start to add to our capital program that would result in us increasing our capital budgets if the commodity price is there to support it.So I would say at this point, we remain cautiously optimistic. But considering the volatility that we've had over the last few years, we're really ready for any kind of outcome.Anyway, that's just a few comments on the quarter, quick highlights as we run through them. We've got all the management team here, so I thought maybe we'd hit them up for some more color before we jump into questions from callers. So maybe we could start with the Drilling and Completions in our VP of Drilling, Lee Curran. Lee, we're trying to catch up from the month of wet weather that we had or I think it was maybe even more than a month. What's that looking like? How are we doing? And how are we set up for next year with rigs and completion spreads? What does the rig schedule look like for us going forward?

[Lee Russell Curran, Vice President of Drilling & Completions]

Sure, Darren. We certainly lost some ground relative to our plan schedule due to that excessively wet weather that spanned most of September and well into October. Although we are able to find a way to keep most of our drilling rigs moving, as you mentioned, we were certainly not so fortunate with our completion activity. In fact, we were held fracking only a single well in the entire month of September and just a pair of wells from a single pad in October, in the first half of October.The silver lining here is that market conditions are really supporting our capacity to ramp up activity and quickly catch up on that backlog both in terms of frozen access conditions that we're seeing right now and more importantly access to our services. We're having great success lining up crews. We fracked 9 wells over the last half of October and a second intense wave of activities starting this week with the schedule that hosts 8 fracking just 7 days. So everybody upstairs is going to be busy watching their screens.We expect to see some great cost efficiencies over this period as well given the majority of this standing inventory that's being served from both 2 and 3 well pads. And with this current market activity, there's some spare capacity in the pressure pumping market and we're receiving a little bit of incremental pricing discount to accommodate this Q4 activity.In addition to our single Montney drill, we have 6 core active drilling rigs, 5 of those are spread out across the Greater Sundance area, and one of those rigs has been bouncing around the Brazeau complex. It'll be diverted up to Kiskiu, just east of Grande Cache at the end of the year to follow up on a successful well we drilled earlier this fall. And all 6 of those rigs have been contracted through the first quarter of 2019. So with those, we continue to see performance improvements that we've always associated that we achieved with that consistent core fleet of people and equipment.We've populated a solid program of Cardium wells to keep these 6 rigs active. We presently have 4 full completion spreads and that represents the spare capacity that we need right now to catch up on this standing DUC inventory while keeping up with the newly generated wells that will follow those 6 rigs.The rig schedule for the first half of 2019 has essentially been fully populated. Of course with all things, we tweak it daily almost and try and optimize that for both movement and offsetting better results. We've got – but we've got a great lineup of ready to drill locations that represent our capital program. If weather and market conditions cooperate, a number of those locations are well poised for even accommodating some break up activity. So we'll see how that goes as that time approaches. One element that's kind of key to our flexibility in terms of capital expansion is we are starting to see some material improvement in terms of project approval time lines on the regulatory front.So adding newly generated projects to the schedule is steadily moving in the right direction. We're a very active participant in those discussions with the regulator. And although there's still some significant room for improvement, great strides are being made to shrink those time lines.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Okay, thanks, Lee. Maybe let's pop over to JP Lachance and talk about these new Cardium completion designs. JP, what can you tell us about them? How many did we do? What’s the result with them that we've seen so far?

[Jean-Paul H. Lachance]

Sure, Darren. I think last quarter, I shared some specifics about water volumes and spacing. But essentially we've tested 3 different liner designs with varying stage counts and intensity, including open hole and cemented ball drop systems and cold tubing annular frac systems. We did this potentially in a few areas and in -- for a few different wells and in different areas. As we mentioned in the press release, some of these wells with the higher frac density are cleaning up slowly or essentially flat at lower rates. So we kind of need to see those, see some time to determine if the increase in intensity, which translates to higher cost, is in fact creating more value.In the meantime, we've dialed in an open hole ball drop system that appears to provide us the best returns for now. Our average drill and complete cost for Sundance well with this design is about $2.8 million. So it's cheap. And all-in costs, full cycle costs of about $3.5 million.Our average production profile for the wells run with this system generally have a short cleanup period to peak rate of about 500 boes a day before declining out to what we estimate will be an ultimate recovery of around 3.7 BCFE.But most importantly, the liquid yield here we get from our Cardium wells. And don't forget, we have a lot of historical production here to validate our forecast assumptions. It typically ranges between 40 to 60 barrels a million, depends on which plan it goes to. But I should also note that some of our better wells recently have exhibited initial yields closer to 100 barrels per million under this new design.So when you factor all this in, our latest type curve yields close to a 40% rate of return on the current strip, which now includes the most recent higher condensate differentials. If gas prices continue to strengthen it makes our Cardium returns even that much better. So either way, the Cardium will be a primary focus for us next year. And as Lee and Darren said, as you said and Lee said, we're a little slow off the market, but I think there's some real positive things to come.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Okay. Thanks, JP. I think you mentioned that it was 9 wells that we had tried the new design on?

[Jean-Paul H. Lachance]

Yes…

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

We'll watch those closely. Maybe jumping over to our VP Exploration, Dave Thomas. Looking at the 2019 budget, Dave, what can you tell us about the 75 to 90 locations that we've got teed up? Are they all Cardium? Or do we have a couple of other types of locations in there? Or are they all in Sundance? Or are we moving up north? And are we going to do any more Montney drilling next year?

[David Alan Thomas, Vice President of Exploration]

Darren, the majority of next year's wells will be Cardiums and most will be drilled in our Ansell, Sundance and Wildhay areas. Up in our northern area, as Lee mentioned, at Kakwa, Kiskiu we recently completed and tied in our first test well and we're happy with the result. So we've got 3 Cardium follow-ups lined up there this winter. We'll look to get feedback from those 3 wells to guide us on how aggressive are our northern drilling program will be in the summer and fall.Down south it's Brazeau where it's just about -- just about 2 Cardium test wells this November that will help evaluate the potential of a play in those lands. Gas pricing looks strong enough for the winter of 2020. We may also substitute in some Spirit River wells during next year's Q4 so that there is flush production to take advantage of the stronger winter prices.As for the Montney, we'll wait on completion results. It's an exploration well but it’s sweet and it has good liquids. We will get it tied into our Wildhay plant and follow it up later in the year.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Okay. Thanks Dave. Todd Burdick, our VP, Production. Todd one of the questions that I saw yesterday from an investor regarding our Cardium program and the intensity of it next year it was, had to do with the liquids. Are plants set up to handle all this extra LPG and condensate that we're getting from the Cardiums going forward?

[Todd Burdick, Vice President of Production]

Yes, yes, sure Darren. Maybe I'll start at the wellhead and then move through the gathered system at plants and finally delivery to sales. Because really we've been working on all those pieces of that value chain through the year here. So starting at wellhead where we separated gas condensate and water for measurement purposes. We made changes to piping within the surface facilities to accommodate more volumes of condensate and water. This has been easy and inexpensive change that we implemented after the first few Cardium wells earlier this year.The condensate and gas are then recombined and sent down the pipeline gathering system to the plant. Given that this new Cardium development is happening within our existing core areas of operations, we have existing pipeline infrastructure in place, so very little new pipe is needed to get the gas and condensate to the plants for processing.Now that being said, some wells have required new services. But in those cases the tie-in distances are relatively short as they connect to our larger chunk lines. One the gas and condensate arrives at the plant, that's again separated for processing. For the first 10 years of Peyto development we were a Cardium-focused company, so many of our plants already have the equipment in place to handle larger volumes of liquids. But much of that older Cardium development involved vertical wells with much lower liquid rates as opposed to what we see with multi-stage horizontals.So we do need to add some equipment depending on the facility to handle the anticipated liquid volumes that are literally coming down the pipe in 2019 and beyond. We've done all the scoping work to determine where the bottlenecks may be. And engineering is underway for the relatively small expansion plans and a couple other plans. We've had all of this equipment in -- or we have all of this equipment in our inventory. So we are the of mercy of long delivery times from manufacturers. It's anticipated some of this work will be undertaken and completed as early as Q1 of 2019.And then moving to the final sales of liquids. Of course in 2017 we put 2 liquid lines in the service that connected 4 of our gas plants. Those lines were built to accommodate much higher volumes going forward. I should also add that as of Q3 we are also moving our Brazeau gas plant LPG downpipe to market. Of course keeping all this product out of trucks and off the road infrastructure also means we see better realized pricing and safer conditions in an already congested area.And then beyond our own infrastructure, we've also been in discussions with the shippers we offload to ensure that they're able to accommodate any future volume increases which also includes the significant volume we would see from the addition of any deep cuts in the Greater Sundance Area. So really we're in good shape going forward and we're always looking ahead to make sure that we're able to move all of this liquid as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Okay, thanks Todd. That's great. I think that helps guys understand just how many pieces along the way that really is, that you've got to debottleneck when you start changing your production blend. And it's not quite as easy as some people think it is.Maybe switching gears, we could talk a little bit about land and future inventory. Tim Louie, VP of Land, we bought some new land this quarter and already we're drilling on it. But we also are harvesting a lot of Cardium inventory. So what's the outlook for maybe adding more Cardium lands and backfilling that inventory?

[Timothy Louie, Vice President of Land]

For sure, Darren. The third quarter was definitely [indiscernible] period for Crown sale acquisition. In addition to the 50 sections you previously mentioned that were acquired for the Montney, we also purchased another 5.5 sections during the quarter. Year-to-date Peyto has acquired 63 sections at Crown sales.Aside from the 50 Montney sections, the balance of the Crown lands were acquired primarily for Cardium. Given the average price paid for the Crown sale this year stands at $110 per acre we're pleased to state that our average acquisition cost thus far less far $79 per acre. Now we haven't been relying solely upon Crown sales for acquisitions. We are working on 2 asset deals that will also supplement our Cardium inventory.I can't provide any more details but I can say that both deals are anticipated to close by mid-December. And it is worthwhile to note that the new Cardium locations we have identified on the Crown and asset deal lands will more than replace with wells that will be drilled in 2018.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

That's good to hear. As usual, I expect we probably will add 1.5 or 2 wells for every well we drill this year. That seems to be the way Peyto has operated over the last 20 years, growing inventory when everybody thought we didn't have any land to grow it off of.Maybe last question is for Scott Robinson. Scott, we talked about our deep cut plants for Swanson. We've got a bunch of plants that we could deep cut, but looks like Swanson is next up on the list. Just curious maybe what kind of propane market do we need to see going into Q1 to pull the trigger on that and call FID?

[Scott Robinson, Former Executive VP of New Ventures & Director]

Yes, if you recall propane went through quite a rollercoaster ride there in 2015 and '16 and created some uncertainty. Whereas where we saw propane prices actually drop to below the gas value of propane. But if you look at our fourth quarter of last year, propane has recovered into the $30-plus per barrel range. And it's nicely finding its way into the $20 to $30 here as you look into the last several quarters. At least that's at -- and those prices are plant gates. Those prices work, that $20 to $20 -- $20 to $30 barrel propane price works with our capital costs, which are quite low relative to the industry to build facilities. And I think it's bringing to us that courage to go ahead with this investment which will be a very long lasting investment.We start with Swanson and build out a deep cut there, and then as you mentioned, moved to some other plants as those feedstreams continue to justify deep cutting. At Swanson it's interesting, if you look at current composition of the [indiscernible] plant, it comes from a number of different formations. Very little of it is Cardium. And it in its current state the liquid yield advantage that we would get would be about 14 barrels per million cubic feet at that plant. If you run those numbers with that propane price, it works out quite nicely.On the horizon though we've got all of this Cardium that's just now starting to come to fruition. And as we direct the southern part of our Cardium production to this plant, the Swanson plant, the Cardium in and of itself when you deep cut it will give you about 20 barrels per million of incremental liquids as compared to the 14 that we're seeing in Swanson.So as we fill Swanson with more Cardium and transition it to a richer feed stream, that will further enhance the economics of the deep cuts. So it's all coming together nicely. We mentioned that out there on the horizon there's some other enabling factors, AltaGas' Ridley Island project, some intra-Alberta propane consumption in the petrochemical side of the business. Those are all going to put new polls on propane which will further justify what we see is a very attractive economic investment profile from a facility vertical integration standpoint.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Okay, thanks, Scott. Hopefully that stimulates a little more thought and questions about some of our business from those listening in. So maybe Jord we can open the phone lines up and answer any additional questions that investors analysts have.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And I show no questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Darren Gee for closing remarks.

[Darren Gee, President, CEO & Director]

Well, thanks, Jord. Appreciate that it is a very busy morning with conference calls and other releases going on. And hopefully we've managed to answer all the questions that everybody had. So we'll get back to drilling. We've got an obviously an incredibly busy Q4 lined up right into what hopefully will be some much stronger gas prices as winter hits and as we start to test whether or not we truly have enough supply in Western Canada to satisfy the demand. And we'll come back to you, I guess it'll be late in the quarter, and give you an update. We'll talk to you then. Thanks for listening in.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating on today's conference. This does conclude today's program. And you may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.