Laredo Petroleum, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Laredo Petroleum Incorporated first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. My name is Amanda and I will be your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will be conducting 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 Pivot, President and Chief Executive Officer, Karen Chandler, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating 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 will 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 will be making reference to non-GAAP financial measures, Reconciliations to GAAP financial measures are included in the press release and presentation we issued yesterday that detail our financial and operating results for first quarter 2022. The press release and presentation can be accessed on our website at www.laredopetro.com. I'll turn the call over to Jason Pigott, President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Ron. Good morning and thank you for joining us today for discussion of our first quarter results. We performed extremely well in the first quarter, continuing the momentum we generated in 2021. First, total oil and total production and capital were in line with guidance as the teams continue to execute our investments in Howard and Western Glasgow counties. Second, we generated free cash flow of $23 million and consolidated EBITDAX of $222 million. Third, we reduced leverage from 2.1 times debt to EBITDA at the end of the year to 1.9 times at the end of the first quarter. We also continue to move forward on our initiative to achieve responsibly sourced gas and oil designation for a portion of our production, which was awarded in April. Laredo now has 31,500 VOA per day attributed to a gold rating, which is required for oil to be considered responsibly sourced. We're the 1st Permian operator to receive trust well certifications. In addition to delivering on our projections in the 1st quarter, we have positioned ourselves to further deliver on our value creation strategy for the remainder of 2022. We materially increase liquidity as the value of our assets support a 38% increase in our elected commitments as part of the redetermination. We worked with our service partners to lock in 85% of expected drilling, completions, equipment, and facility spend for the remainder of the year, and we anticipate achieving our leverage target of 1.0 times by the first quarter of 2023 at current commodity prices. These successes support the objectives of our near-term strategy to utilize free cash flow to pay down $300 million of debt in 2022, equivalent to approximately $17 per share on our current outstanding share count. This amount of debt repayment would achieve a leverage target of 1.5 times by early third quarter and 1.0 times by the first quarter 2023. Our commitment to leverage reduction supports the opportunity to institute a program to return cash to shareholders by early 2023. Mighty prices have been exceptionally strong, and the industry is experiencing significant inflationary headwinds. We continue to drive efficiencies to offset the inflationary pressures and secure longer-term pricing where we can. Work of the team has enabled us to maintain our projection of greater than $300 million of free cash flow in 2022, despite increasing our capital budget to approximately $550 million and seeing our operating costs increase by approximately $1 per BOE. We remain intensely focused on executing on our strategy to accelerate value creation for our shareholders and delivering our objectives in 2022. We'll now have Karen provide an operations update.