Santos Limited

Thank you and good morning and welcome to Santosi's 2023 half-year results question and answer investor call. Joining me today is Chief Financial Officer Anthea McKinnell. Anthea and I recorded a video presentation on today's results which you can find on our website along with the presentation. We're not going to repeat the video presentation on this call. We will, however, be happy to take your questions. Before we do that, I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional lands of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains from where I am speaking today. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and I also acknowledge and recognize the support of traditional owners and indigenous people everywhere Santos operates, including in Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and Alaska. I'm pleased to present yet another solid set of financial results that demonstrate the success of a disciplined operating model. Santos continues to generate strong cash flow despite the challenging operating environment. I'd also like to touch on some of the highlights from this result. In the first half of 2023, Santos generated sales revenue of $3 billion, EBITDAX of $2.1 billion, free cash flow from operations of $1.1 billion, and underlying profit of $800 million. The Board has determined to pay a dividend for the half of $283 million, or 8.7 cents per share, unfranked. The buybacks announced last year have now been completed. The board decided not to announce a buyback in conjunction with the interim dividend at this time and will consider the most effective way to return cash to shareholders in the context of the full year results. We are pleased to continue to deliver strong cash returns to our shareholders whilst also balancing the need to invest in our business. Always safe is a core value at Santos. Personal safety performance improved in the first half and pleasingly loss of containment incidents continue to reduce. In the second half of 2023, we are focused on implementing programs to improve contractor safety performance. Our performance on reducing spills has continued to improve, and we are world-class relative to international benchmarks. However, we recognize that some incidents are still occurring, and we continue to work on driving the number of incidents down. Across our business, it's been a very busy first half At GLNG, we have increased drilling productivity through horizontal drilling. In the Cooper, we're on track to drill more than 100 wells. And in Northern Australia, we're expecting at least one more LNG cargo from Bayou London. These are just a few of the operational highlights from across our business. Across our major projects, Barossa was 60% complete, including the Darwin Pipeline Duplication Project at the end of June. and we successfully submitted our drilling EP to NOPSIMA in July. We continue to consult with the First Nations and other relevant people regarding how the environmental impacts of the project will be managed, and we are making excellent progress on the FPSO with the hull successfully floated in the shipyard. At our PICA project, we were pleased to complete drilling of the first well this year, and we remain on track for first production in 2026. PICA is a Tier 1 project with a highly capable team in place, supportive stakeholders and partners, including our indigenous communities, and we are operating in a supportive and low sovereign risk jurisdiction with world-class environmental regulations, including for carbon emissions. In summary, it was a solid first half. The business is strong and benefiting from a diverse portfolio of high-quality assets. We are committed to to achieving our net zero scope one and two emissions target by 2040. And we are confident our disciplined approach to operating our business and allocating capital will deliver strong returns to shareholders over the long term. Our unrelenting focus on sticking to our strategy and implementing our disciplined operating model has delivered consistent results and kept the business resilient and performing strongly. We continue to generate strong free cash flows to maintain the strength of our balance sheet and to provide returns to shareholders. Thank you. We're now happy to open for questions.

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star 2. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from James Redfern from Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi, Kevin. I hope you're well. Yeah, hi.