ConocoPhillips

Welcome to the fourth 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 Gresh, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, Liz, and welcome everyone to our fourth 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, Lower 48, and Kirk Johnson, Senior Vice President of Global Operations. I also wanted to formally welcome Guy Weber, the former Vice President of Investor Relations for Marathon Oil, who has joined the Investor Relations team here at ConocoPhillips. Ryan and Bill will kick off the call with opening remarks, after which the team will be available for questions. For the Q&A, we'll be taking one question per caller. A few quick reminders. First, along with today's release, We published supplemental financial materials in a slide presentation, which you can find on the Investor Relations website. Second, during this call, we will make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. Actual results may differ due to factors noted in today's press release and in our periodic SEC filings. We will be making some non-GAAP financial metric references. Reconciliations to the nearest corresponding GAAP measure can be found in the release and on our website. With that, let me turn it over to Ryan.

Thanks, Phil, and let me extend my welcome to everybody for joining our fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. 2024 was certainly another strong year for ConocoPhillips. We executed well operationally and on a standalone basis delivered 4% production growth year over year, which was above the high end of our full year guidance range. We showed strong performance across the entire portfolio. delivering 5% growth in the lower 48 and 3% growth in Alaska and international on the same basis. And we delivered a 123% preliminary organic reserve replacement ratio in 2024. Our three-year average is now 131%. We also enhanced the portfolio. We closed the acquisition of Marathon in late November which added high quality, low cost of supply inventory to our portfolio. And we remain confident that we will deliver more than $1 billion of run rate synergies by the end of 2025, over half of which is included in our capital guidance. In Alaska, we opportunistically exercised our preferential rights to acquire additional working interests at attractive valuations in Kuparik River and Prudhoe Bay units. We progressed our global LNG strategy through additional regasification and sales agreements into Europe and Asia. And as we announced this morning, we're making solid progress on our planned 2 billion of asset sales. We have agreements in place to sell non-core lower 40 assets for approximately 600 million before customary adjustments in the first half of 2025. We continue to deliver on our returns-focused value proposition. we generated a trailing 12-month return on capital employed of 14% or 15% on a cash-adjusted basis. We returned $9.1 billion of capital to our shareholders, representing 45% of our CFO, consistent with our long-term track record and well above our 30% commitment. Now looking ahead to 2025, we remain confident in the plan that we outlined in our third quarter call, to deliver low single-digit production growth for $12.9 billion of capex. In the lower 488, on a pro forma basis, we plan to reduce capital spending by over 15% year-over-year, while still delivering low single-digit production growth. This is primarily due to expected material synergy capture associated with the acquisition of Marathon and significant drilling and completion efficiency gains. We also expect to grow production in Alaska and Canada. And we are doing all of this while continuing to invest in differentiated, high return, longer cycle projects. Now on these projects, we're making steady progress across the board. We expect 2025 to be the peak year of our long cycle spending at around 3 billion, followed by a steady stream of project startups from 2026 to 2029. Once these projects are all online, we expect $3.5 billion of incremental CFO from NFE, Port Arthur, NFS, and Willow, all combined at $70 WTI, $10 TTF, and $4 Henry Hub. And that leads to roughly $6 billion of incremental annual sustaining free cash flow relative to 2025. Shifting to shareholder distributions, This morning, we announced a target to return $10 billion back to shareholders this year, assuming current commodity prices. This consists of $4 billion of ordinary dividends and $6 billion in buybacks, positioning us to execute on our objective to retire the equivalent of the shares issued for the marathon transaction within two to three years, even with lower WTI prices than at the time of the announcement. So in conclusion, once again, I'm proud of the accomplishments of the entire organization. Our portfolio is well positioned to generate competitive returns and cash flow for decades to come. Now let me turn the call over to Bill to cover our fourth quarter performance and 2025 guidance in more detail.