Laredo Petroleum, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Vital Energy Incorporated first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. My name is Abby, 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, and 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 Pigott, President and Chief Executive Officer, Brian Lemmerman, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Katie Hill, Vice President Operations, 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. 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. Conciliations to GAAP financial measures are included in the press release and presentation we issued yesterday, detailing our financial and operating results for first quarter 2023. The press release and presentation can be accessed on our website at www.vitalenergy.com. We'll now turn the call over to Jason Puget, President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks Ron. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us today. Vital Energy had outstanding results for the first quarter. Our wells in Howard County are delivering consistent production Bracket impacts have been mitigated, and we are seeing positive impacts from our multi-year implementation of cutting-edge digital technologies that are improving both base production and our new wells. Today, 74% of our wells are operated by submersible pumps. We are using the combination of larger pumps and artificial intelligence to optimize our wells on an hourly basis and believe this differentiates us in the market. Capital also came in at the low end of guidance, driven by better-than-anticipated efficiencies from our E-Fleet, a short frack holiday due to freezing weather, and a cessation of some of the inflationary pressures we experienced last year. While our program was front-loaded with two frack crews this year, we nearly achieved cash flow neutrality for the quarter and expect to have positive free cash flow for the remainder of the year now that the additional completions crew is released. We recently closed our driftwood acquisition, continuing our run of disciplined, accretive acquisitions to build, scale, and add to our eight years of high-quality inventory. We are active on the new acreage with our first four-well package currently being completed in Upton County. As we have executed on our strategy, we have created value by moving rigs to these new areas, growing production, and testing new zones that have increased our inventory. 59% of our production now comes from the areas we acquired over the last four years. I'm also very proud to highlight our 2022 emissions results. These results represent a tremendous achievement for the organization. These efforts resulted in achieving our 2025 emissions reduction goals for both Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions and methane emissions last year. This achievement sets us up well to advance our more aggressive 2030 goal to reduce the combination of both Scope 1 and 2 emissions to 10,000 metric tons of CO2 per BOE. Vital Energy has the right strategy to create long-term value for our shareholders. We are executing extremely well today, exercising capital discipline to profitably develop our high-quality inventory in a sustainable manner. We are focused on generating free cash flow, reducing leverage, building scale through accretive acquisitions, and continuing to lower emissions. I'll now pass the call over to Katie Hill for operational highlights.