PDC Energy, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PDC Energy Third Quarter 2022 Conference 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. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Aaron Vandervoort. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, we will have President and CEO Bart Brookman, Executive Vice President Lance Locke, Chief Financial Officer Scott Myers, and Senior Vice President of Operations Dave Lillo. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our press release and posted a presentation that accompanies our remarks today. We also filed our Form 10-Q. The press release and presentation are available on our investor relations page of our website at www.pdce.com. On today's call, we will reference both forward-looking statements and non-US GAAP financial measures. The appropriate disclosures and reconciliations can be found on slide two and the appendix of that presentation. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CEO, Bart Brookman.

Thank you, Aaron, and hello, everyone. A solid quarter for the company as our results reflect the first full quarter with contributions from the Great Western Acquisition. I'd like to extend a sincere thanks to all employees, who worked so diligently on the successful and timely integration of this highly accretive merger. Be assured, as we go through our comments today, the company is incredibly well-positioned for ongoing operational, financial, and ESG success for many years to come. Let me pivot to some quarterly highlights. Free cash flow for the company, $440 million, or 25% annualized free cash flow yield, capital expenditures of $260 million, and production in line with our expectations of 250,000 BOE per day. Shareholder returns for the quarter of $295 million, including our base dividend and the repurchase of approximately 4.2 million shares of PDC stock. This represents 4.5% of shares outstanding repurchased in the third quarter. And the leverage ratio for the company decreased to 0.5 as we reduced total debt another $300 million. All this, while operational and G&A costs for the company beat our expectations. Dave and Scott will provide a lot more detail around these numbers in a moment. Along with these operational and financial highlights, our ESG program is making great strides. We are on target to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 15% and our methane emissions by 30% for the period 2021 to 2022. And we continue to expand our community outreach efforts, including our month-long employee volunteer campaign. This past September, The event succeeded in donating over 5,700 volunteer hours across over 40 charities. My sincere thanks to all the PDC employees for this tremendous effort. Let me share my thoughts on how the year is wrapping up. Production early fourth quarter looks encouraging. We anticipate over $1.5 billion free cash flow full year 2022. Shareholder returns for the year should be approximately $1 billion, with share repurchases over 10% of the outstanding shares of PDC. G&A for the company, fully reflecting the synergies of the Great Western merger, should be in the $1.55 to $1.65 per BOE range, an enduring story of financial success, including the company's incredibly strong balance sheet. In all this, while our operating teams continue delivering on some of the top projects in the country, projects clearly mapped by our multi-year permit and duck inventory in the state of Colorado. As I mentioned earlier, our greenhouse gas emissions and methane emission reduction goals are meeting or exceeding targets, and ongoing drilling and location optimization continues to enhance our capital efficiency. 2.5 and 3-mile laterals are becoming more common in our well design, and the company's completion pace is actually setting records. But the real success story here is how we are achieving these operational improvements with safety front and center always our top priority. All in all, the company is poised to deliver a solid fourth quarter in an extremely promising outlook for 2023. With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Dave Lillo for an update on our operations.