Antero Resources Corporation

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

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for Antero's fourth 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-GAF financial measures. Please refer 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, Dave Canalongo, Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation, and Justin Fowler, Senior Vice President of Natural Gas Marketing. I will now turn the call over to Paul.

Thank you, Brendan, and good morning, everyone. Let me start on slide number three, and as I introduce this, let me point out that last year, 2024, was a remarkable year for us. The name of the slide is Reduced Maintenance Capital. The chart on the left side shows our full drilling and completion capital that came in in at just $620 million as illustrated by the dark green bar in the center of the display. This was $55 million or 8% below our initial guidance and nearly $300 million below our 2023 CapEx of $909 million. Despite this lower spend, our production came in 2% above our initial guidance range averaging over 3.4 BCF equivalent per day, as shown on the right hand of the slide. Let's move on to slide number four, titled Drilling and Completion Efficiencies, which details the drivers behind our exceptional operating performance during 2024. We've highlighted some of these drilling and completion stats in prior calls. The results have continued to improve each subsequent quarter in 2024 And here we show the full year as compared to the prior two years. On the drilling side, shown in the top of the left side of the slide, we reduced the time it takes to drill a well to just 10 days in 2024. This is a nearly 30% improvement compared to the 14 days that we averaged a couple of years ago, that is 2022. On the completion side, shown on the top right-hand side of the slide, we averaged 12.2 completion stages per day in 2024, while once again setting new quarterly records, averaging 13.2 completion stages per day in the fourth quarter of 2024. The annual average represents a 53% increase compared to the completion stages back in 2022. Moving to the chart on the bottom of the slide, these improvements in drilling and completion rates reduced our cycle times to just 123 days, which is 25% below the 2022 level of 163 days. This performance allows us to run a very lean program with just two rigs on average and just over one completion crew on average in order to hold 3.4 BCF equivalent per day of production flat. Now, to touch on the current liquids and NGL fundamentals side, I'm going to turn it over to our Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation, Dave Canalongo, for his comments.