HighPeak Energy, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the High Peak Energy 2024 First Quarter 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 the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Stephen Dolan, CFO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to High Peak Energy's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Representing High Peak today are Chairman and CEO Jack Hightower, President Michael Hollis, and I'm Stephen Dolan, the Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we will make reference to our May investor presentation and our first quarter earnings release, which can be found on High Peak's website. Today's call participants may make certain forward-looking statements relating to the company's financial condition, results of operations, expectations, plans, goals, assumptions, and future performance. These refer to the cautionary information regarding forward-looking statements and related risks in the company's SEC filings, including the fact that actual results may differ materially from our expectations due to a variety of reasons, many of which are beyond our control. We will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on today's call, so please see the reconciliations in the earnings release and in our May investor presentation. I will now turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Jack Hightower.

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. My prepared remarks will begin on slide four of our May investor presentation. I'm very excited to report we had a great start to the year. Results were in line or exceeded our expectations. We continue to stay committed to our 2024 core values, which, if you recall, include maintaining disciplined operations, strengthening our balance sheet, and maximizing shareholder value. We are going to continue staying within our capital budget expenditures and not getting out over our skis. Operationally, you heard me say last quarter that running a two rig development program will allow our operations team to aggressively focus on reducing capital costs, optimize daily operations, and drive down operating expenses. The operations team absolutely delivered on these goals. Financially, we generated positive free cash flow from operations for the third consecutive quarter, and we're prioritizing debt reduction in the utilization of that free cash flow, while also steadily increasing capital returns to shareholders. In addition, we continued our pursuit of increasing shareholder value through raising our dividend, implementing our share buyback program, continuing to organically add high-value, liquids-rich inventory to our portfolio, and ultimately maximizing shareholder value through our strategic alternatives process. Now, turning to slide five on the operations front, we had a great first quarter. We held our average production levels flat compared to the fourth quarter at roughly 50,000 barrels a day. We made huge strides in continuing to lower our operating expenses as evidenced by the 16% decrease in LOE or BOE from last quarter down to $6.30. And I want to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank our operations team for all their hard work as we are starting to realize significant progress and savings in this area. The reduction in LOE costs further improved our already peer-leading EBITDAX margins. Our operational success led to generating first quarter EBITDAX in line with our fourth quarter, which on a run rate approaches $1 billion. We increased our free cash flow by 42% compared to the last quarter, and we've now generated positive free cash flow of over $150 million in the last three quarters. We utilized free cash generated in the first quarter to reduce long-term debt by $30 million. We increased our dividend by 60%, and we implemented our share repurchase plan, whereby we acquired over 565,000 shares during the first quarter. Now I'll turn the call back over to our president, Mike Hollis, to provide an update on our first quarter operations. Mike.