ConocoPhillips

Welcome to the third quarter 2024 ConocoPhillips Earnings Conference Call. My name is Liz and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. During the question and answer session, if you have a question, please press star 1 1 on your touchtone phone. I will now turn the call over to Phil Bresch, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning. Thank you, Liz, and welcome everyone to our third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. On the call today are several members of the ConocoPhillips leadership team, including Ryan Lance, Chairman and CEO, Bill Bullock, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Andy O'Brien, Senior Vice President of Strategy, Commercial, Sustainability, and Technology, Nick Olds, Executive Vice President of Lower 48, and Kirk Johnson, Senior Vice President of Global Operations. Ryan and Bill will kick off the call with some opening remarks, after which the team will be available for your questions. Along with today's release, we published supplemental financial materials and a slide presentation, which you can find on the Investor Relations website. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. Actual results may differ due to factors noted in today's release and in our periodic SEC filings. We'll make reference to some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to the nearest corresponding GAAP measure can be found in today's release and on our website. As we move to the Q&A afterwards, as a reminder, we'll take one question per caller. With that, I will turn the call over to Ryan.

Thanks, Phil, and thank you to everyone for joining our third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Let me start with a few comments about our results and the outlook for the rest of the year. and then I will provide an update on the marathon oil acquisition. Starting with the results, the company demonstrated strong execution in the third quarter. We exceeded the high end of our production guidance for the quarter and raised our full year production outlook largely driven by lower 48 performance. On return of capital, we remain on track to distribute at least $9 billion to shareholders this year. We have officially incorporated our VROC into the ordinary dividend, and consistent with our long-term track record, we are confident that we can grow our ordinary dividend at a top quartile rate relative to the S&P 500. On buybacks, our planned fourth quarter share repurchases will approach $2 billion, and we have increased our existing share repurchase authorization by up to $20 billion. Shifting to our planned acquisition of Marathon Oil, we're still on track to close this quarter. In the meantime, integration planning is progressing well. The team has now fully mapped out how we plan to achieve the initial guidance of at least 500 million of synergies, primarily from the overhead and operating cost reduction categories that we have previously talked about. And we now expect to at least double the initial 500 million target, driven by capital optimization. While we are still finalizing our 2025 budget and will provide formal guidance in February, we are confident that the combined company can grow at a low single-digit rate again in 2025 with pro forma capex of less than $13 billion. So to wrap up, we're pleased with our operational execution, and we look forward to closing the Marathon Oil acquisition later this quarter. Now let me turn the call over to Bill to cover our third quarter performance, and 2024 guidance in more detail.