Antero Resources Corporation

Greetings and welcome to the Antero Resources second quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Brendan Kruger, Vice President of Finance. Thank you. You may begin.

Yes, good morning. Thank you for joining us for Antero's second quarter 2024 investor conference call. We'll spend a few minutes going through the financial and operating highlights, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. I would also like to direct you to the homepage of our website at www.anteroresources.com, where we have provided a separate earnings call presentation that will be reviewed during today's call. Today's call may contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our earnings press release for important disclosures regarding such measures, including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures. Joining me on the call today are Paul Rady, Chairman, CEO, and President, Michael Kennedy, CFO, Justin Fowler, Senior Vice President of Natural Gas Marketing, and Dave Canalongo, Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation. I will now turn the call over to Paul.

Thank you, Brendan, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to start my comments on slide number three, titled Drilling and Completion Efficiencies. We continue to realize impressive operational efficiency gains. During the second quarter, we exceeded our record performance that we had in 2023, that's just last year, and in the first quarter of this year. Starting with the chart on the top left-hand side of our slide, our wells continue to get longer and averaged a quarterly record of over 18,000 lateral feet per well during this second quarter of 2024. This is 16% longer than our prior quarterly record. During the quarter, we completed a five-well pad that averaged nearly 20,000 lateral feet per well. The ability to drill these long laterals reflects the concentrated acreage position that we have built in West Virginia. We also benefit from our organic leasing efforts that are instrumental in filling in acreage blocks around our development program. On the drilling side, we've averaged four days from spud to kickoff point during the first half of the year, which is an improvement from the 4.4 days last year, 2023. On the completion side, we once again set a quarterly record averaging 11.9 stages per day during the second quarter. This is an increase from the 10.7 stages per day in 2023. These operational improvements resulted shorter cycle times as shown on the bottom of the page. Not only are we drilling these wells faster and more efficiently, but our well performance continues to be impressive. During the second quarter, we recorded the second highest production rate per well in company history, with one pad averaging 37 million cubic feet equivalent per day per well over 60 days. Slide number four highlights Antero's cumulative well productivity versus our peers. Since 2020, Antero's wells have outperformed the peer average well performance by 24%. Helping drive this outperformance has been improving liquids productivity in our liquids trend over that time. Now let's turn to slide number five, titled Antero Capital Efficiency versus PEERS. This slide depicts the tangible benefits from our operational efficiency gains and strong well performance. Antero has the lowest maintenance capital per MCF equivalent of its peer group at just 54 cents per MCFE. This is 43% below the peer average of 95 cents per MCFE. Our capital efficiency provides us with important flexibility in our development plans. Given current natural gas pricing, we were able to defer a pad from the third quarter until the end of this year. Despite this deferral, we're still able to increase our 2024 annual production guidance as a result of the strong productivity and efficiency gains. Now, to touch on the current liquids and NGN, NGL fundamentals, I'm going to turn it over to our Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation, Dave Canalongo for his comments. Dave?