Black Stone Minerals LP

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Blackstone Minerals 3Q earnings conference call. 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 star 1 on your telephone keypad. You may withdraw yourself from the queue by pressing star 2. Please note, this call is being recorded. I will be standing by if you should need any assistance. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the conference over to the Director of Finance, Mark Moe. Please go ahead.

Mark Moe Thank you. Good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us either by phone or online for Blackstone Minerals Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded and will be available on our website along with the earnings release which 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 and the risk factors section of our 2022 10Ks. 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 press release from yesterday, which can be found on our website at www.blackstoneminerals.com. Joining me on the call today from the company are Tom Carter, Chairman, CEO, and President, Evan Keeper, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Terry Clark, Senior Vice President, Land and Commercial, Steve Putman, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, and Thad Montgomery, Vice President Land.

I'll now turn the call over to Tom. Thank you, Mark. Good morning, and thanks for joining us for our third quarter 23 results. We posted a solid quarter with adjusted EBITDA of $130 million for the quarter, an increase of 19% compared to the second quarter. This is now the sixth consecutive quarter where Blackstone has generated over $100 million in adjusted EBITDA. We generated total production volumes for the third quarter of 42.6 thousand BOE per day. an increase of 18% from our second quarter volumes. And now we expect to be in the upper end of our production guidance range of 37 to 39,000 BOE per day. Much of the increase was driven by royalty volumes, which increased 20% from the second quarter to 40.3,000 BOE per day and 8% above the third quarter of 22. Primary driver of oil volumes was new wells coming online in the Permian. Additionally, we had six new wells come online in the third quarter in the Shelby Trough. Two of those were ATON and four were XPO. Despite the lower rig counts in the Louisiana Hainesville this year due to lower pricing, we continue to see activity from new wells resulting in our Louisiana Hainesville volumes increasing 13% compared to the second quarter. Athon continues to ramp up production in the Shelby Trough and held the six rigs on location at the end of the third quarter, increasing from five rigs in the second quarter. To date, 28 wells have been turned to sales in the Shelby Trough under our development agreement with Athon. And there are currently 35 wells in the drilling completion phase, which exceeds the minimum pace of 27 wells per year. Angelina and San Augustine counties that we expect to benefit our production in 2024. We saw a 4% increase in rigs operating on our acreage in the third quarter. The increase driven by Haynesville and Gulf Coast with 76 rigs currently running as of September 30th. Throughout the quarter, we saw rig count peak at 90 in August due to new drilling in the Permian from various operators. u.s rig count has contracted approximately six percent during the quarter which highlights the natural ebbs and flows of development on a diversified acreage position such as ours we previously announced that we are maintaining our distribution of 47.5 cents per unit or a dollar ninety on an annualized basis and a report and reported yesterday And as reported yesterday, it represents a 1.25 times coverage for the quarter. Despite the challenges with natural gas prices, we've been able to maintain a strong balance sheet through the year and hold the distribution at its highest level since going public. Additionally, we have put into place a $150 million unit repurchase program that replaces our previous $75 million programs. This will allow us the flexibility and ability to opportunistically buy our own units. It's been a great year, and we're encouraged by the positive momentum into the end of the year. Yesterday, we announced Evan Kiefer has been appointed as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, removing the interim in his title. With over 10 years of experience with Blackstone, I congratulate him on this position. With that, I'll turn it over to Evan to walk through the details of the quarter. Evan? Perfect.