HighPeak Energy, Inc.

answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please 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, Stephen Tholen, CFO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to High Peak Energy's fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Representing High Peak today are Chairman and CEO Jack Hightower, President Michael Hollis, and I am Stephen Tholen, the Chief Financial Officer. During today's call, we will make reference to our March investor presentation and our fourth quarter earnings release, which can be found on High Peak's website. Today's call participants may make certain forward-looking statements related to the company's financial condition, results of operations, expectations, plans, goals, assumptions, and future performance. So please 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 also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on today's call, so please see the reconciliations in the earnings release and in our March 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 March investor presentation. So if everybody's had a chance to do that, and hopefully everybody's had a chance to review our press release. But before we turn the focus of today's call towards our 25 plans and guidance, I want to take a few minutes to highlight the tremendous success that we realized during last year's business. As you recall, going into 24 calendar year, we laid out a set of core values, which included maintaining disciplined operations, strengthening our balance sheet, and maximizing shareholder value. Maintaining disciplined operations incorporated our plan of maintenance level CapEx to hold production volumes flat while aggressively focusing our attention on reducing our cost structure, both on the CapEx and OpEx side of the equation. Not only did we achieve our goals, we delivered significant improvements across the board. Our efficient two rig program delivered a 10% increase in production year over year. This was a significant beat compared to our initial 24 expectations of flat production volumes. We're continuing to realize strong production performance across the acreage position, which includes our extension areas in the middle sprayberry zone, and that is extremely exciting. We increased our approved reserves by almost 30% to year-end 23, and that considers utilizing lower SEC guideline prices for calendar year 24. We not only continued to organically increase our acreage position, but we've already drilled wells and have demonstrated proven results on our new acreage that is similar to the core areas of our field. Our operations team continued hard work and intense focus translated to a 17% decrease in our lease operating expenses on a BOE basis. This is impressive as we have added a lot of new acreage and are tying those areas into our efficient infrastructure. We lowered our absolute debt by $120 million during 24. We will pay down another $30 million of our term loan balance at the end of March. And we were able to achieve 10% production increase in conjunction with a capital spend that was 40% less than in 23. All these positive achievements translate into High Peak continuing to improve our overall corporate efficiency, which is a theme that I will come back to here in a few slides as we discuss our 25 outlook. Now if you'll turn to slide five, our key objectives slide, and pillars of success. We're going to maintain capital discipline, especially in light of current market conditions, which remain volatile due to external factors. We will remain focused on continuing to improve our corporate efficiency, which is evidenced by our anticipated flat production volumes, coupled with a two-rig maintenance capital budget that is approximately 20% lower than in 24. We will look to optimize our capital structure, which we anticipate will significantly reduce our interest expense burden and consequently increase our levered free cash flow. And we will continue to pursue shareholder-friendly initiatives, which include paying down absolute debt, maintaining our dividend, and opportunistically buying back shares. Now I'd like everyone to turn to slide six and take a few minutes talking about the last quarter's results. The fourth quarter was another solid quarter for us on all fronts. Production continued to average over 50,000 BOEs per day. And as you can see on the slide, we're off to another strong start in the first quarter as our volumes have averaged over 52,000 barrels a day. We were also able to reduce our lease operating expenses during the year and expect to remain steady in 2025. The value of our approved reserves increased by 17% to the prior year. And again, that considers utilizing lower SEC guideline commodity prices. Our 2024 EBITDA was roughly flat year over year. even though oil prices were lower on average during 2024. I'd also like to point out that our fourth quarter CapEx was a little higher than we originally anticipated. This was a result of some efficiency gains that we were realizing on the drilling and completion side of our business. That allowed us to pull forward some drilling and stimulation activities into late 24, and to a lesser extent was also a result of initiating a couple of our key 2025 infrastructure projects in the last year's business. We ended the year at just over 1.2 times levered, and we remain in a very healthy financial position, even in light of oil prices declining. On the shareholder value front, throughout 2024, we reduced our absolute debt by 120 million, paid out roughly 22 million in dividends, and repurchased approximately 2.4 million shares of stock, equating to shareholder-friendly initiatives of about $177 million. Again, 2024 was a very successful year for High Peak, and we expect to continue to build off of that positive momentum in 2025. Now I'm going to turn the call over to Mike Hollis, our president, and he's going to walk you through the next exciting slides. Thanks, Jack.