Antero Resources Corporation

Greetings. Welcome to Antero Resources third 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, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Brendan Krueger, CFO of Antero Midstream and Vice President of Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Antero's third 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'll start my comments on slide number three, titled Drilling and Completion Efficiencies. Our 2024 operating performance continues to set new records. I'd like to highlight the significant gains that we've achieved over the past two years. Faster drilling times have reduced the required time it takes for us to drill a well. Now it's below 11 days from 14 days in 2022. This is a 22% reduction from 2022. And on the completion side, we again set a new quarterly record averaging 12.1 stages per day. And in this last August, we set a new monthly record at 13.3 completion stages per day. The quarterly average represents a 51% increase compared to the completion stages per day average in 2022. These improvements in drilling and completion rates result in reduced cycle times. Shown in the chart on the bottom of the slide, our cycle times have declined to 126 days, which is 23% below the 2022 level of 163 days. Overall, these improvements have reduced our total well cost by 8% since last year to their lowest level since 2021. These step changes in operating efficiencies directly result in reduced capital expenditure requirements. This is shown on slide number four, titled Reduced Capital Budget. For this year, 2024, we reduced our drilling and completion capital budget to $650 million at the midpoint, a 28% decrease from 2023 while holding production flat. A significant driver behind this lower capital is that today we are able to sustain maintenance production with just two rigs and approximately one completion crew. Looking ahead to 2025, we will continue to focus on improving our efficiency. We recently switched to an E-Fleet for our completion activity. Early results have been encouraging, and we estimate potential future well cost savings could be upwards of $150,000 to as much as $200,000 per well, driven by increased pumping time and lower fuel costs. Now, to touch on the current liquids and 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?