Empire Petroleum Corporation

Good day and welcome to the Empire Petroleum second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Stephanie Prince of PCG Advisory. Please go ahead.

Thank you, MJ, and thank you to everyone joining us today. Empire Petroleum released their second quarter financial results early this morning. If you don't have a copy of the press release, please go to the company's website at empirepetroleumcorp.com. and click on the news and press releases in the investor relations section. With me on the call today are Tommy Pritchard, CEO and board director, and Mike Morissette, president and board director. Also on the call are Eugene Sweeney, COO, and Angela Baker, chief accounting officer. Tommy will begin the call with an introduction to Empire Petroleum along with some opening remarks. Mike will then provide a financial review the second quarter before opening the call for questions. Before turning the call over to management, I would like to make the following remarks concerning forward looking statements. Please note that various remarks that may be made on this conference call about future expectations, plans, and prospects for the company constitute forward looking statements for the purposes of safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may vary materially from those indicated by these forward looking statements as a result of various important factors including those discussed in the company's filings with the SEC. The company assumes no obligation to update the information contained in this conference call. I would now like to turn the call over to Tommy Pritchard. Tommy?

Yeah, thanks, Stephanie. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for your interest in Empire. Since this is our first ever call, I thought it might be a good idea to step back for a second tell you guys kind of how we got here. And then, of course, we're available after the call to fill everybody in. And I also will direct you to our website where you guys can download our most recent presentation and previous presentations. But Empire has been a public entity since the mid-'80s. Mike and I took over back in 2018 and we focused on buying, producing pre-developed producing properties. At that time, the stock traded on the OTCQB exchange and we bought our first properties at the end of 2018 in Louisiana, followed that up in 2019. where we were successful bidders for a private equity backed north dakota montana properties from energy quest and in 2020 we added the full trinidad field in texas so it had us operating in texas for the first time and in 2021 we added this transformative nevesco acquisition when we bought the uh iconic eunice monument uh and our arrowhead graybird fields from exxon or xto and with the help of our largest shareholder, the Energy Evolution Fund. And then that brings us to 2022, where we uplisted on the New York Stock Exchange American, became a member of the Russell 3000 and 2000, and we'll talk about our record second quarter here. So obviously there's much more to the story than that, but you guys can take a look at our website for previous presentations. We'll be happy to field calls after this call or whenever you guys would like to call in to us. Let me share with you our record results for the second quarter. As you can tell, we're pretty fired up about these results. The results are a direct reflection of our ability to execute on our core strategy of controlling operating costs. have consistent production and the ability to add scalable assets. During the quarter, Empire benefited from strong production and obviously higher realized oil and gas prices. And the result was a record-setting revenue and net income. Revenue increased 26% over our first quarter. In fact, when you combine both quarters, Empire's revenue was higher than all of the last year's or any previous year at $29.5 million. Our net income combined for the two quarters is $9.5 million, and our EBITDA is over $13 million. Our total debt remains low at 8.2, while our cash position has closed the quarter out at 12.4. Empire's sales volume was 195,000 BOE, almost doubling the same quarter of last year, which we reported 104 back last year. This doubling shows what a transformative acquisition coupled with a focused eye on production and costs will do for a company like Empire. At the end of our second quarter, Empire kicked off its Priority Wealth program in our Starbuck field in Botanical County, North Dakota. The plan is projected to cost $10 million and target strong increases in production and book reserves. Early phase work will start at the end of the second quarter. And we saw our team re-stimulating current completions in the field. Field-wide, they focused on water pressure conformance in the water flow, injecting several times the previous injection rate, thereby increasing reservoir pressures. And what we've seen, our early results are showing terrific response and adding to our production. In the second quarter, Empire closed on its successful pursuit of the land of Madison unit, also in Botnett County. This unit is the other half of the land of field that we didn't operate or own. And the acquisition added to our production, but more importantly, it adds to our growing priority well list for 2023 and beyond. The field was originally calculated to contain nearly 15 million barrels in place, combined with 15 million barrels in place. And combine that with Starbuck, that exposes Empire to over 40 million barrels in just those two fields alone. And we have several other fields in North Dakota that have similar characteristics. Our capital spend program is still on track. And even though we haven't provided guidance, we've picked up the pace. We look forward to continued results from this in the second half of 2022. Looking forward into the third quarter, our operations will continue at Starbuck as we lateral sidetrack that to seven wells utilizing a cool tubing drilling unit. These sidetracks are designed to expose more wellbore to productive zones. MPRIME will also drill up to four new vertical wells in the field. Of course, we'll continue to upgrade surface facilities as we move along for better operational efficiencies. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Mike to discuss our financial results.