Laredo Petroleum, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Laredo Petroleum Inc. Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. My name is Kevin, and I'll be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. We will conduct a question-and-answer session after the financial and operations report. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. It is now my pleasure to introduce Mr. Ron Haygood, Vice President, Investor Relations. You may proceed, sir.

Thank you, and good morning. Joining me today are Jason Paget, President and Chief Executive Officer, Karen Chandler, Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer, and Brian Limmerman, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, as well as additional members of our management team. During today's call, we'll be making forward-looking statements. These statements, including those describing our beliefs, goals, expectations, forecasts, and assumptions, are intended to be covered by the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our actual results may differ from these forward-looking statements for a variety of reasons, many of which are beyond our control. In addition, we'll be making reference to non-GAAP financial measures Reconciliations to get financial measures are included in our press release and presentation that we issued yesterday that details our financial and operating results for the second quarter of 2021. We will refer to the presentation during today's call. If you do not have a copy of this presentation or press release, you may access it on our website at www.laredopetro.com. I will now turn the call over to Jason Pagott. President and Chief Executive Officer.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. When I started with Laredo just over two years ago, we rolled out a straightforward business model based on three core principles. Expanding our high margin inventory, managing risk, and continuously improving. Our industry has experienced some wild swings over the last two years, yet we never wavered from these core principles, and our activities during the quarter and subsequently to the close have accelerated our progress. Since we announced our first acquisition of oil-weighted properties in November of 2019, our transformational rate of change has been steep. With the closing of the Subala acquisition on July 1st, in a little over a year and a half, we have acquired more than 37,000 net acres of oil-weighted leasehold and have completely transitioned our development activity over to that leasehold. We completed our first package of wells in Howard County during the fourth quarter of 2020 and and this transition is expected to position us for substantial pre-cash flow generation in 2022, reflecting the capital efficiency of our development program. We increased our hedge position to protect our anticipated pre-cash flow generation, which should result in reducing our debt to EBITDA substantially throughout 2022. We also work with our financial partners to extend the credit facility and pay down the revolver, providing us a path for future inventory growth, which Brian will discuss in a moment. We continue to improve operationally, even with the complete transition of our development program to Howard County. We reduced DC&E costs in the face of increased cost pressures. We were a basin leader in establishing a sand mine on our company-owned surface, which also mitigated a substantial portion of the cost pressure, and we estimate it saves us approximately $200,000 per well in the current environment. The mine has additional ESG benefits of keeping trucks off the road, and because it is a wet sand mine, eliminates the combustion-related emissions associated with drying the sand that occurs at other mines. Karen will also highlight how our wider space wells and northern Howard County wells are outperforming our initial package in central Howard County. We believe our strategy is working. We will continue to follow these core principles that result in our ability to generate substantial free cash flow and build long-term value for our investors. I want to turn it over to Karen for an operational update.