Ithaca Energy plc

Good morning everyone.

Those of you who are unfortunately not on holiday and joined us and those who are welcome to our first half 2026 result presentation. My name is Yanni Friedman. I'm the executive chairman of Thaca Energy and with me on the call today Luciano Vasquez our CEO and Ian Lewis our CFO. First slide as you can see delivering on our strategy This is a perfect example of a first half of the year that we've been executing all pillars of our strategy and what we'll cover today in our agenda as you can see on slide to its first half 2026 highlights our strategic operational review financial updates and then we'll open it up for questions and answers If you please move this like for a high level again our vision for scale stability and strength well demonstrated in our first half 2026 record quarterly production of 131 000 barrels per day of barrels of oil equivalent with an improved post health look that supports our robust cash flow generation I could say that we had as we said last quarter you know we saw the trend going into q2 We're seeing this trending into Q3, which is a heavy tar quarter for us, but we're recovering very well from this tar season. We're seeing this strong production trending into the third quarter as well. Stability, Rosebank nearing final stages of execution, and we're moving our organic portfolio forwards. with a pipeline of projects to enable us to take final investment decision on through the end of 26 and into 2027 and strengths significant available liquidity we have 1.9 billion dollars of available liquidity we also have an accordion that we can expand in our reserve-based lending facility of above 400 million dollars so significant liquidity We're also tuned to the market and taking advantage of opportunities. So we've done a private bond cap of our euro bond, 155 million euros as 5.5% to further support our growth ambitions and optimize our balance sheets. And with that, we value distributions. We understand that this is important to our shareholders. And we're announcing today our first interim dividend for 2026 of $265 million. And we're upgrading our management guidance of our dividends to $500 to $530 million. And Ian will talk through that later as well. If you look at slide five, and what we did in slide five, we were focusing on stability. And we wanted to show that this is not a one-off quarter or one or first half of the year And what you see here is really a snapshot of the last 24 months since the effective date of our business combination And these are the type of charts that we that we like scale the production going up OPEX going down and stable Castro production and and distribution. I could also say, and Luciano will speak to that, that safety is obviously paramount to us, and we're seeing improved metrics there as well. So if you look at this slide, so first half production in 2026 of 128,000 barrels, OPEX going down from $22 a barrel in 2024 to about $18 in the first half of 2026. and as we said distributions are important for us and as you can see we've to date announced over 1.65 billion dollars in the course of the last three years and upgrading our dividend guidance range for 2026.

will cover strategic and operational review I'll hand over to Luciano to talk about safety production and projects Luciano please all right good morning everybody and if we now move to slide number seven our performance in the first half is fully consistent with the pillars of our strategy that we've presented several times I'll take you through the first two this morning extracting value from our versatile portfolio in UK progressing discipline organic flow a growth opportunities which are strengthening our business for the future the operational momentum from 25 carried strongly into a h126 delivering clear progress across safety environmental performance production efficiencies in each state and cost discipline and this of course reflects our focus on the operational excellence which we've done through our perfect day safer stronger reliability and a lower operating cost per barrel on the growth side we've continued selecting investment across the producing portfolio prioritizing fast cycle value opportunities from captain sickness and also jr and angel franklin as i'll speak through and at the same time our organic growth pipeline is moving forward with purpose with fortla tornado and cambo progressing towards readiness for fid Rossbank has also reached a major milestone with the FPSO now on location ahead of the expected product first production in H1 2027 and following the round-up. If we can now move to slide 8 and I want to stress that our excellent overall performance in H1 2026 was underpinned, as Yaniv said, by strong health, safety and environmental results. for the third quarter on a roll we recorded tier 1 or tier 2 zero process safety vent and sustained again a positive total recordable incident rate trend at 1.2 cases per million hours in H1 and 1.7 on a one-year rolling basis well below the UK North Sea Basin average of 3.95 This is particularly notable given that two operated assets reached cessation of production and this required greater focus to safely execute non-routine end-of-life life activities. Both the SPF1 and ALBA FSU were removed from their locations, transferred to the commissioning yards as planned without any recordable incident. The emission performance also remains strong with emission intensity now at 16.4 kilograms CO2 per barrel equivalent, which is substantially below the batting average of around 25 and continuing to trend downwards. And this reflects the increased weighting towards lower emission assets and the retirement, of course, of the higher intensity ALBA and GSA fields. If we move now to slide eight, sorry to slide number nine with with production we achieved as we said record production in Q2 26 averaging 131 thousand bar per day as operations rebounded strongly from the weather related challenges experienced in Q1 confirming the robustness of our portfolio despite the challenges both in the operated and the non-operated assets this performance supported an average production of 128 thousand barrels per day in first half and production operations continue strong as we said beyond q2 which provides us confidence in our production outlook for the year still appropriately allowing for the planned impact of the q3 turnaround season and the production mix also strengthened with gas now representing 48 percent of h1 volumes versus 41 in h1 2025 and the shifts Reflects the strategic portfolio reshaping that were delivered through the M&A activities in 2025 particularly increased contribution from Cygnus and Segal gas fields if we move to slide 10 now a Captain the deployment of the PDLJ is already demonstrating the value of our industry collaboration model unlocking near-term production and through three-month drill program on well B15 which is progressing well and expected to be on stream from early Q4. The wider captain 13th well campaign remains on schedule. The well C75 was successfully brought on stream in Q2 and following the current ongoing maintenance activity the final well of the campaign which is an injector will be executed. Captain continues to deliver fast cycle high return opportunities with the 14th campaign plan to fall immediately after the 13th one and in parallel sanction of the captain subsea well campaign which comprises two wells and will leverage it again the PDLJ capacity is expected to be to be reached in q4 this year The first production from the subsea campaign is targeted for 28, adding further depth to Captain's long-term production outlook, which is underpinned by the EOR Stage 1 and Stage 2 initiatives that are delivering in line with their field development plans. If we now move to slide 11, we talk about thickness, where the infill drilling program continues to make strong operational progress, The C-13 well, which was brought on stream in May, is performing ahead of expectations thanks to a successful completion, design and execution of the hydraulic factoring program. C-14 has since been spotted and remains on track to prefer gas in November. before then the campaign progresses to C15. On completion of C16, the rig then is expected to move to the Bravo area in Q2 2027 for the C16 and C17 two-world campaign, which we expect to sanction in the second half of this year, subject to the required field development plan approvals. C16 is a clear example of production-led exploration, reinforcing our commitment to maximize value from sickness. so timely regulatory approval is essential to maintain momentum and support continued delivery of domestic gas from one of the UK's most significant fields if we move to slides 12 now we turn to two key assets in our non-operated portfolio J area continues to provide a stable low-cost production contribution Supported by strong performance from Jocelyn South and Talbot which continue to be ahead of expectation The operator performance remains high underpinned by an open and constructive partnership and the assets offer further upside through well interventions new and few wells as well as production and infrastructure led exploration and appraisal opportunities such as courageous and peach with the potential to replicate the Jocelyn South success And, frankly, with the new operator Neonex Plus, we have sanctioned a two-wall program comprising EIJ and EIH, which was an opportunity previously deferred in response to the energy profit levy. And the campaign is scheduled to start in Q4 this year and represents a short cycle, again, high return investment, targeting 4.5 thousand barrels per day of net incremental production in 2028. with EIJ expected on stream in January and EIH in August. And then, if we move to slide 13, we talk about Rossbank, which continues to move into its final stages of execution, with the operator now narrowing first production in first half 2027 and ramp up to plateau from summer next year, subject to regulatory approvals. A major milestone was achieved in June with the FPSO arriving and being moved on location after a short dock phase in Bergen and at this moment hookup activities are ongoing which will be followed by the commission prior to first oil. Following the April equipment handling incident the drilling rig returned to service at the end of July after a period of hire and has responded well activities focused now on delivering the minimum wealth stock required for the planned ramp-up. 2026 capital spending now expected to be lower than previously guided reflecting the refacing of this drilling activity and associated costs into 2027 including the final FPSO commissioning. Rosbank remains attractive as a project with expected post-tax capex below $4 per barrel equivalent reducing to below 3.5 with the anticipated high value A12 and an overall cost performance within project contingency envelope and to close we go in slide 14 our key organic growth projects FOTLA, Tornado and Campbell have all progressed materially and now are technically assured with front-end engineering design and tendering largely complete. Fortla is moving towards execution, supported by the successful farm down and rig sharing agreement with Harbour Energy. The key long-lead items including installation vessels and PBLJ drilling rig capacity have been secured, reducing development risk and increasing confidence in reaching FAD in 2026. The West of Shetland remains central to our strategy and an important growth basin Tornado will be a key gas enabler for future tiebacks and have advanced towards FID following the obtaining of 18 months license extension to March 2028 with critical long lead items and vessels secured alongside our partner Aduara subject to regulatory approvals and Campbell the largest Free FID and developed discovery of the UK continental shelves remains a strategically important option for both Ithaca and the UK indeed. With front-end engineering and tendering substantially complete, major contracts ready for award, value engineering, re-tendering, commercial and financial work streams progressing, the project is increasingly de-risked as it moves towards sanction and equity front-down. With that, I pass the word again to Gianni Riffa.

Thank you Luciano and we just spoke about organic growth opportunities and if you move to into production for the course of the next 18 months through FID decisions that we intend to make. I won't run through the project again, but this gives you a good idea on the organic growth potential that we have and the materiality and quality of our pipeline. If we move to slide six, so we've shared a version of the slides in one of our conferences before, and we talked about how we're seeing this ability on a 1 billion barrel license potential. Luciano alluded to that as well. We're prioritizing infrastructure-led exploration, production-led exploration opportunities as additional avenue for long-term value creation with our 60 million barrels of all equivalent of 2P2C resources. We are seeing kind of unbooked 2C contingent and prospective resources up to 1 billion But we also have another tool, which is the transitional energy certificates that are providing a pathway beyond the existing license resources for additional value creation. And we're working this, and you see this, and we're maturing those, and they will obviously, through the maturity, we'll convert them to resources and then to projects that we can take file investment decision on. So we're seeing significant value in the UK continental shelf and when people talk about new exploration licenses what we want to show is that even without new exploration licenses formally we have where to grow in the UK further but patient pursue of M&A and what we're doing as well is optimizing our balance sheet to support our growth ambitions and strategy if we look at the UK and consolidation in our core UK TS market so you just talked about our Organic portfolio and obviously projects or potential acquisitions apologies in the UK needs to compete for capital with with our organic projects and We have a very strong portfolio of organic projects, but at the same time we are looking opportunities And as we always say we look to value land so they need to meet our investment thresholds when we look at international expansions or focus international expansion so we're maintaining an active patient pursuit of opportunities and we have a very clear strategy around this right so you know we want to deliver both growth and yield through these acquisitions and sustainable production and cash flows it's important for us to keep the strength of our balance sheet agility and flexibility so we're you know we're imposing a ceiling on our leverage position and We're looking at regions that would not be one-off that would offer further expansion opportunities To ensure that we can develop our business And and continue any true sustainability and you know and skill going forward and at the same time Regions or geographies that are offering a stable fiscal and regulatory So we talked about our available firepower in terms of liquidity and and that's definitely supporting potential M&A activity in the future. With that, I will hand over to Ian Lewis for our first half financial update. Ian, please.

Thanks, Anif. Good morning, all. You can go to slide 19, please. And as usual, we call out the key numbers here on the finance side, the green numbers really describing the performance in the half year, and then the blue ones are kind of financial position at the close. of June so strong production delivery 128,000 barrels a day remembering that we recovered from some difficult weather in January in the production front supposing strong production delivery the cost per barrel result of $18 is very pleasing our medium term plan of course has been to maintain the $20 barrel region able to push that down to $18 this half year and that is the aim as you move forward in the year able to today announce reduced management guidance on OPEX due to the cost control in the company and that enables additional free cash flow and EBITDAX so you can see the 1.1 EBITDAX for the half year free cash flow of nearly half a billion and net cash from OPS of nearly a billion and a profit of 127 million. So on track, robust and continued good financial delivery. I suppose in terms of the plans for the future and the optionality that Yaniv and Luciano has referred to, we are maintaining a high liquidity and low net debt position, 0.49 times proforma leverage at the end of June with 1.9 billion of liquidity available. That is part of our strategy. It enables us to look at opportunities with clear pathways to deliver the financial capability to land them. And that's part of our story as we move forward. Slide 20, if we can move to that, summarizes the financial position in a bit more detail. You can see that we are at the end of June in the net debt position sitting on significant net cash. RBL of 1.3 billion and 571 million of cash taking net debt down to just over 1 billion dollars and you can see in terms of the liquidity position there that our ongoing RBL of 1.3 billion and the cash balance can be augmented by an open and untriggered recording facility on the RBL so material debt capacity in the business and cash position now that was added to in the in the quarter the last quarter by the bond tap and as you mentioned this is a opportunistic and highly valuable delivery of additional cash flow strong demand for bonds in the market responding to that and adding to liquidity on the euro bond was well received and set us up as we move into the into the next phase of the business leverage you can see has been very stable in the 0.5 times now through from December 22 right through to where we are today so stable management of the balance sheet and significant liquidity capacity at the end of the quarter move to slide 21 the hedge book which continues to be of significant interest obviously in a volatile oil and gas market You can see on the charts here that we've shown the forward curve as at 17th of August. Then the average hedge floor and average hedge ceiling that is in our hedge book. The average ceiling being the combination of swaps, collar floors and also wide collar floors that we put together. I think the key thing to point out to everyone is that we are well hedged the next two years. and we are right now just riding the price curve and taking the upside on the unhedged barrels you can see that what we've been able to do on the hedge front and oil particularly is to take the hedge ceiling and floors and move them upwards as we move through the 2028 able to add to the hedge boot through 2028 in this last in this last few months that's really been our focus as has been our characteristic trend here we look 12, 24, 36 months in advance and seek to establish strong cash flow delivery certainty out ahead in the business and we see that on the oil side on gas you can see there's a significant upside in the market currently on the front end and we deliberately have left more unhedged on gas at the front end for exactly this kind of eventuality and in Q4 this year for example when prices are currently sitting at 150 and above we're 30% unhedged for gas in Q4 26 so I think continuing the trend of long term stability in our cash delivery of the business by hedging well but leaving upside on the table to benefit from just exactly the kind of environment we're seeing at the moment 22 and of course the output of all of the management of the business from an A to C perspective and production and cost management and good investment is the ability to deliver dividends to shareholders we are very satisfied with the record we have here of delivering returns from 23 at 400 million increased in 24 and 25 to 500 million and now as per our guidance update today expecting to be about 500 million for 2026 with a 500 to 530 million range representing 30% post tax cash from operations now remember we moved to a 50 50 payment structure in terms of the dividend this year so that we have a flat dividend across the year we are for this half year delivering a 255 million dividend as the first interim declared today obviously on the market gains numbers the 500 530 tells you there is some upside in that but delivering 255 million for the half year so solid return with dividend upgrading thanks to production prices and cost management we move to slide 24 this will just reinforce the the guidance that we gave at the start of the year and upgrades in a couple of areas so we are reaffirming all guidance across our suite of metrics here but we are reducing OPEX reducing it to 20 million dollars at the midpoint that's at 135 US dollar rates of course significant amount of our expenditures in pounds and the actual average rate for the first six months has been below 135 so the FX adjusted reduction would be lower but good strong cost performance in the half year has led us to be able to forecast out a reduction for the full year you can see Rosebank cap is down 35 million dollars at the midpoint that again is reflective as Luciana's mentioned of the Rosebank rig deferral given the three and a half months of delay on the rig program but again as referred to not impacting first oil and the ramp-up 327. And all of that flowing through with higher prices into a higher dividend of 500 to 530 million as outlined. So, Andy, back to you for slide 25 to close us out.

Thank you. As mentioned, slide 25, just some closing remarks. So, record quality production, as mentioned, 131,000 barrels per day of production we've achieved in Q2 trending into Q3 and strengthening confidence in our employee production outlook and management guidance we have affirmed disciplined and agile balance sheet management strong capital generation opportunity as Ian mentioned that supports increasing our firepower to continue to deliver growth in the business Um, we were accelerating organic investment delivery. Um with you know incremental barrels in a high commodity environment so immediate deployment of the pblj rig to the captain b15 well Depth and quality of our organic portfolio were growing momentum towards final investment decision several projects and focusing on building the next wave of optionality beyond the 1 billion barrels of all equivalent research potential that we believe is definitely doable and at the same time delivering effective returns to shareholders first branch of 2026 dividend of 255 million dollars declared today and upgrading our dividend guidance for the full year of with some potential upsides with that and before we move to questions and answers as always I would like to take the opportunity to thank the entire ithaca energy team yes you're seeing and hearing us here but this is the work of many behind the scenes and I would like to thank them on behalf of all of us with that Drew I hand over to you and we'll be happy to take questions

Thank you. We can now start today's Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question on today's call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. And to withdraw your question, it's star followed by two. With that, our first question is from Kian Evans-Cowie from Bank of America. Your line's now open. Please go ahead with your question.

Hello. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I just have two, please, if I may. So, firstly, you know, it's nice to see the dividend guidance upgrade today, but, you know, given your payer policy, there's also an implicit CFO upgrade in there. And Ian, you spoke a bit about this, but it would be helpful if you could just talk through perhaps in a bit more detail the moving parts in this upgrade, please. I know some of it, you know, you mentioned is related to your your OPEX guide reduction but given that your production guide is unchanged what are the other components that are in there and then just related to that if you could talk us through again what your assumptions are that you're making for the rest of the year on the macro front to arrive at that guidance please and then for my second question on the production profile side of things if my memory serves me correctly your maintenance drop off should look substantially shallower this year compared to last year I mean is this still the working assumption and then how would you guide us to think about the movement or the quarterly delta for 3Q and 4Q thank you

Our guidance on dividend upgrade is really driven by pricing but also by cost control so as has been mentioned we are stable in our production range and they continue to expect to deliver within that. Costs have been well managed a little bit of FX help as well but this is largely cost management. In terms of price, second price assumptions, obviously we don't give specific price assumptions, but I'd say our hedge book probably tells you a lot of the story. If you look for the rest of the year, we have this in slide 21, we're kind of 85% downside protected on oil at $60 for the next six months. So you can assume that the bottom end of our dividend rate is kind of correlated in that kind of region. So I guess that's the kind of downside position. Obviously that limits the upside but that's part of the oil price protection that we deliver through the hedge book. But on gas as you say we've got significant downside protection but also 26% upside exposure on unhedged barrels for the second half of the year. with 30% on hedges in Q4 so those are the kind of numbers we're dealing with as we get to our range of dividend position but of course as prices move and work through and costs are rhythm and production managed we may well be giving guidance late on the year of different dividend it's not impossible that goes higher of course we'll continue to keep the market updated yeah on production we have Oren Essenson with us the COO who is Very well placed to talk to the turnaround this year compared to last year.

Yeah, so thanks for your question. So you are absolutely right. So this year we actually have approximately half the amount of turnaround days compared to last year. And we are progressing very well. August and September are the kind of key turnaround days, the months for us. and so far we have completed all our turnarounds except two it's one for Cygnus and it's a slowdown on the J area and I'm very pleased to confirm that we have completed those turnarounds on plan or ahead of them so the last one on Erskine was completed this week six days ahead of plan so so The risk exposure for the production for the remaining year is kind of very much reduced and you're kind of feeling very much in control of the turnaround exposure to this year.

Got it. That's very, very helpful indeed. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Mark Wilson from Jefferies. Your line is now open. Please proceed.

Thank you and good morning and congratulations on results again and therefore unfortunately I have to ask regarding a question about things maybe not happening we're waiting for regulatory approval on Rosebank for production startup you also talk to future drilling FIDs on Cygnus that require regulatory approvals to continue investment there so can we talk about a expected timeline to certainly the first of those approvals and can we talk to what happens if that doesn't come or the variables that could actually be the decision from the government are we expecting just a straight yes no on production startup or could there be variables that

and as I say what happens if that doesn't come thank you yeah so good to hear you Mark I'll take that one we continue to see this as a regulatory process that's relatively straightforward we've been asked for emissions data on scope 3 we've provided it and answers have been given this is a very straightforward process in lots of ways and speculation on on results of processes that are pretty straightforward is probably not that helpful so you'll forgive us for not speculating I think in terms of other standard processes around approvals for fields for wells and fields etc these are all well-worn regulatory paths and nothing has changed on that for in fact some time uh nothing has changed on the approval processes around production since either apart from the scope for emissions uh change that happened last year so in lots of ways this is regular business normal business we have licenses as you need has taken us through that are very large and wide ranging and we continue to develop under those licenses issued by the government the oil and gas that is needed for the country

that that's very clear and you certainly make it look like normal business and so well done about that my second point is regarding the it's definitely clear that good the good operations you're showing do also come from partnerships that are stable and involve uh uh uh

Good morning, Mark. I'm not sure I fully understood the question, but if your question was around UKCS consolidation, then I think I've captured that. We're looking at opportunities, but we will do the right acquisitions and not an acquisition so we're focused on value we have a high quality portfolio and I think it's reflected in our results and our goal is to high grade rather than dilute what we have I think all the names that you've mentioned are today large players in the UKCS after kind of a wave of wave of consolidations that uh i believe this has started uh two years ago and we've seen this developing in you know in the past two years um and i think these kind of names will continue to uh to kind of dominate at ukcs and obviously there's a lot of optionality for all sorts of corporations i hope i've answered your question

I'll maybe just add Mark in terms of so clearly the future of the North Sea matters to us and the partnerships are deep and important therefore whatever happens to assets in the UK matters that's a slightly different question from M&A because we've always said it's the right assets at the right price we like lots of assets that aren't available at the right price so I think the key thing for us is that the assets in the UK are in the hands of people who will invest clearly we're the 100% owners of Campbell which we believe should move ahead as a project and therefore partners in this basin who are committed to Campbell in this basin and appropriately supportive regulatory regime is all important so partners are critical and they do play into M&A but it's both M&A and also field level equity support that is required as we move forward as a business in this basin

Thank you. Our next question comes from Nash Cohen from Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two, please. The first one is on Canva. I wonder if you could give us an update on that and what are the key milestones before the expected FID in 2027. Then my second one is also on M&A. We have seen quite a number of transactions in the wider North Sea area in the last few months, and one of your peers is thinking about farming down their assets in the UKCS. What is your view on that, and do you see the competition on the wider North Sea resources has increased meaningfully, and how will that affect your inorganic group plan? Thank you.

Thanks, Michelle. I'll take these. Look, on Tambo, we continue to do risk to projects, technically, commercially, financially, environmentally. So all these work streams are progressing and, as we say, with the target of taking final investment decision in 2027. I'm not going to go into specifics, but you know what constitutes projects, and there are a lot of Hundreds of line items and the in the checklist that we need to complete they're advancing On plan Obviously there is a you know, there is a regulatory piece to it and there is a partner piece to it and we're progressing all of those On our on our timeline. So, you know, we our expectation is that this would that this would move forward obviously, we need the right regulatory conditions to To enable that um On the M&A, I think what we're saying in the UK is people settling or companies understanding better the regulatory regime we're working under. And with the proposed implementation of the success of DPL and the certainty beyond that that allows investment going forward, there is definitely movement on the M&A front we are again as mentioned we believe in scale so we think scale helps and we understand that consolidation is important and we're seeing this in the market and as mentioned I believe we started that trend so you know I think that right now there are four large players in the UKCS uh that that are uh um controlling most of the most of the productions and most of the uh future projects um so i expect that this is what it will you know what will look like in the future as well very helpful thank you very much

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question on today's call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. And to withdraw your question, it's star followed by two. Our next question comes from Sam Wahab from Peel Hunt. Your line's now open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Morning all. Congrats again on another very solid set of results. I've got three questions from me. First, at Rosebank, so the operator has now narrowed first production to the first half of next year. Could you sort of lay out what are the remaining critical part items we should monitor over the next six or 12 months as you reach that plateau production? Second question is around OPEX, BOE. We've seen that all quite materially, so that's all very positive. But what's the core reasons driving that? And can we expect that that trend to continue once Rosebank comes on stream? And then finally, I know there's been a few other questions around inorganic opportunities, but how are you seeing the landscape in the UK currently in terms of the elevated commodity pricing? And, you know, we've seen in the news that BP plan to push on with the divestment. Do you see reports of that 2.6 billion package as being a reasonable value?

Yes, I think Odin will take the first one on Rosebank, then I'll deal with Alpex, then to Univ on M&A, I think.

Yes, so on Rosebank I think the kind of the key things going forward now is to continue to have good progress on the project making sure we are liquidating the remaining hours on the installation efficiently and then I think the other key performance indicator that we are looking for is the construction of the the wells that has now resumed again and progressing well so I think those are kind of the two key things that we will be looking for going forward and at the moment both are indicating well they're back on drilling again after the incident that we had and then we have full activity out on the installation, which is safely and robustly installed now on the field. So I think those two are the two key components that will take us efficiently to first production.

Yeah, and to answer your question, Simon, I mean, I often say there's operating costs, there are no silver bullets to maintaining operating costs as a planet. It's As Yannick mentioned, the work of many, everyone across the business, touches costs in some way or another. So it's around culture and around control, but also around the right supply chain relationships and depth so that we're working well with our partners in the supply chain. The OVEX for barrel number clearly is a combination of production and OVEX, and therefore if we can keep production high, and OPEX in a good place we drive that metric down and that's what we've been able to do but you know specifically in terms of all the effort that goes on you know Oda and I were sitting on a tender board yesterday we approve all contracts I sign all the contracts the head counties here is managed on a day to day basis by the VP of HR and Culture and myself in terms of numbers that's about having the right people in the right things and the right things and partnering with the right people so sorry there's no silver bullet answer on OPEX but that's how you control costs over the long term I would say one of the things that's not in here is the fact that we've managed to FX controls so we normalise the management guidance at 135 we've actually delivered over 10 million I think it's nearly 20 million of FX savings by hedging GBP to US dollar below the market position so we locked in some some hedges when when rates were really low so you know it's about discipline and cost management and risk management across the piece which we're very pleased with the results of today there's an awful lot of effort goes into one number which is $18 per barrel yeah I'm sorry yeah I'll just I'll just echo that I think what you're that's not what you're saying is is really around discipline but you know but also agility and adapting to

to market changes and our kind of very robust capital allocation framework and our ability to keep flexibility and optionality both in our portfolio and the way we manage our investments but also through our balance sheets on your third question I'll just say nice try but I'm not going to comment obviously on value I will say that obviously in periods of extreme volatility like we've been experiencing in the past six months. It is not easy to price assets and deals. Of course, there are ways of dealing with volatility or all sorts of mechanisms. I won't comment on that and I think I already answered on the UKCS landscape in terms of M&A and where the market is. so sorry to disappoint on that no problem thanks very much thank you that concludes the Q&A portion of today's call I'll now hand over to Yaniv for closing comments thank you Drew and thank you everyone for listening and asking questions we're always here to answer thank you and we'll speak again next quarter thank you very much have a nice summer