Berry Corporation (bry)

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Berry Corporation Quarter 4 and Full Year 2022 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during your session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Todd Crabtree with Investor Relations. Todd, please go ahead.

Thank you, Amber, and welcome, everyone. And thank you for joining us for Barry's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings teleconference. Earlier today, Barry issued an earnings release highlighting full year 2022 and fourth quarter results. Speaking this morning will be Fernando Araujo, our Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Helm, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to call your attention to the safe harbor language found in our earnings release that was issued this morning. The release and today's discussion contain certain projections and other forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal security laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. These include risks and other factors outlined in our filings with the SEC, including our 10-K, which we filed next week. Our website, bry.com, has a link to the earnings release and our most recent investor presentation. Any information, including forward-looking statements made on this call or contained in the earnings release and that presentation, reflect our analysis as of the date made. We have no plans or duty to update them except as required by law. Please refer to the tables in our earnings release and on our website for a reconciliation between all adjusted measures mentioned in today's call and related gap measures. We will also post a replay link of this call and the transcript on our website. I will now turn the call over to Fernando.

Thanks, Todd. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us. 2022 was a good year for Berry, both financially and operationally. Once again, we showed the remarkable quality of our assets and our ability to navigate the California regulatory environment as we have done for so many years. I'm pleased to announce yesterday the Board of Directors approved certain enhancements to our shareholder return model, including doubling the quarterly fixed dividend to 12 cents per share, starting with the first quarter 2023. showing their confidence in our ability to continue to generate significant returns to shareholders. This is a testament to our high quality, low declining reserves, our long term view of executing our business plan and our visibility to our cash flows. Mike will expand on these value creating changes to our shareholder return model in a few minutes. Looking at our performance in 2022, I'd like to highlight some of our key accomplishments and the strong returns that we delivered as promised. In 2022, we generated $200 million of adjusted free cash flow. As of March, we will have returned $189 million in the form of fixed and variable dividends and share repurchases to shareholders. That's 27% of the current market capitalization returned to shareholders in one year. This is industry leading and a record for our company. We have proven that we can generate significant free cash flows, and we believe we have the assets and the ability to efficiently manage the business to consistently deliver strong shareholder returns. Notably, we deliver those returns while maintaining flat production levels, net of A&D activity, by applying the right technology, reservoir management tools, and increasing work over and sidetrack activity to access more of the tremendous amount of oil resources in our assets. We also achieved a reserve replacement ratio of 236%. Our operations team continues to look for other opportunities to increase our base production without relying on new well permits. A great example of this is our thermal diatomite asset, which we show on slide 12 of our February investor presentation. Without additional development drilling in thermal diatomite, we kept production flat in 2021 and 2022 through innovative re-completions and by optimizing our steam injection strategy. We have seen strong results from applying a similar strategy to our South Bell Ridge property. We believe the quality of our assets, including the tremendous amount of oil in place, gives us a competitive advantage over other energy companies. We have declined curves in low teens, and in 2022, we achieved 94% of our total annual production from our existing wells, our base production. Finally, in its first full year as a very own company, CNJ Wealth Services performance generated healthy margins. We believe CNJ's upside potential is benefited by the regulatory environment, and we expect another solid year of steady growth and performance. I will discuss our 2023 outlook in my concluding remarks. So with that, I will turn the call over to Mike.