Black Stone Minerals LP

Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's Blackstone Minerals first quarter 2023 earnings release. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, you will have the opportunity to ask questions during the question and answer session. You may register to ask a question at any time by pressing the star and 1 on your touchstone phone. You may withdraw yourself from the queue by pressing star and 2. Please note this call will be recorded and I will be standing by if you should need any assistance. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Mr. Steve Putman, Senior Vice President and General Counsel. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Todd, and good morning to everyone. Thanks for joining us either by phone or online for Blackstone's first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded and will be available on our website along with the earnings release that was issued last night. Before we start, I'd like to advise you that we will be making forward-looking statements during this call about our plans, expectations, and assumptions regarding our future performance. These statements involve risks that may cause our actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. For discussion of these risks, you should refer to the cautionary information about forward-looking statements in our press release from yesterday in the risk factors section of our 2022 10-K. and our 10QB fund later. We may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. Reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure and other information about these non-GAAP metrics are described in our earnings to press release from yesterday, which can be found on our website at www.blackstoneminerals.com. Joining me on the call from the company are Tom Carter, Chairman and CEO, Evan Kiefer, Interim Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Kerry Clark, Senior Vice President of Land and Commercial. Garrett Grimione, Vice President of Engineering and Geology. And Thad McCormick, Vice President of Land. I'll now turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, Steve. Morning to you all, and thank you for joining us today to discuss our first quarter 23 results. We posted a strong quarter, and despite headwinds in the current pricing environment, we continue to see success in our development programs with Athon and various operators in the chalk. among others. We generated total production volumes for the quarter of 39.3 thousand BOE per day, a decrease of 8% from our fourth quarter volumes. Primary driver of that was reduced oil volumes in the Permian. Fourth quarter 22 volumes were unusually high due to first time payments from several major operators that spanned multiple months that were collected in that period. Royalty volumes came in at 36.8,000 BOE per day and 24% above the first quarter of 2022. We continue to see strong production in the Hainesville-Bossier, both Louisiana and in the Shelby Trough in East Texas. Athon continues to ramp up production in the Shelby Trough and had five rigs on location at the end of the quarter and is expected to meet the minimum pace of 27 wells per year by the end of the year in Angelina and San Augustine counties. To date, 20 wells have been turned to sales in the Shelby Trough under our development agreements with ATHON, six new wells since the beginning of the year, and another 19 are in various stages of drilling and or completion. In addition, 21 new gen multi-stage completion wells have been turned to sales in our concentrated acreage position in the East Texas Austin Chalk, with potential for an additional 14 wells this year. It is exciting to see the positive momentum from the organic initiatives that we've focused on over the last couple of years, and we continue to work putting in place new long-term development deals to further accelerate production on our acreage with minimal capital requirements. This strategy has created incentives to continue developing through the commodity cycles, and we expect it to add long-term value to Blackstone and its unit holders. We saw a decrease in rigs operating on our acreage in the first quarter with 78 rigs currently running on our acreage as of March 31st. The decrease was driven largely from the Permian where we had a higher than average number of rigs in the fourth quarter. Blackstone averages approximately 10 to 15% of the US rigs drilling on our acreage and expect that to continue going forward. Despite the lower rig count in the first quarter, Permitted activity in the first quarter remained in line with the fourth quarter with over 400 horizontal permits added on our acreage. Realized prices for the first quarter were approximately $77 per barrel and $3.50 per mm BTU. While both crude and natural gas were down in the quarter, we saw the benefit of our hedge portfolio bringing in over $13 million for the quarter with hedge natural gas prices over $5 per mm BTU. We reported adjusted EBITDA of 109 million and distributable cash flow of 104 million for the first quarter, both up 11 to 12% from the first quarter of 2022. Despite some challenges with natural gas prices, we're confident in our guidance and we're able to maintain the highest distribution Blackstone has had as a public company at 47.5 cents per unit for the first quarter. Overall, it was a great start to the year, and we continue to work on our new and existing operators to continue driving activity on our acreage. With that, I'll turn it over to Evan to walk through the details of the quarter.