Murphy Oil Corporation

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Murphy Oil Corporation third quarter 2021 earnings conference call and webcast. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kelly Whitley, Vice President, Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on our third quarter earnings call today. Joining us is Roger Jenkins, President and Chief Executive Officer, along with David Looney, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Hambly, Executive Vice President. Operations, and Tom Morales, Senior Vice President, Technical Services. Please refer to the informational slides we placed on the investor relations section of our website as you follow along with our webcast today. Throughout today's call, production numbers, reserves, and financial amounts are adjusted to exclude non-controlling interest in the Gulf of Mexico. Slide 1. Please keep in mind that some of the comments made during this call will be considered forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. As such, no assurances can be given that these events will occur or that the projections will be attained. A variety of factors exist that may cause actual results to differ. For further discussions of risk factors, see Murphy's 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K on file with the SEC. Murphy takes no duty to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to Roger Jenkins.

Thank you, Kelly. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for listening in to our call today. As you look at Side 2, we'd like to briefly remind our investors of our story as each tenant of this slide remains in effect this quarter and in the future. Our ongoing execution in our three producing areas continues to support our offshore long-term projects. Our competitive advantage of executing in offshore is illustrated by our outstanding progress zone, our Khaleesi Mormont Samurai field, and the King's Key project. We've maintained strong cash flow due to capital discipline that covers our planned spending and debt reductions for 2021, and support shareholders through our long-standing dividend. Lastly, our meaningful level of board and management ownership highlights our personal interest in the company's long-term success. Leading to slide three, Closing out the quarter, we remain focused on progressing our three priorities, delever our company, execute, and explore. We continued on delevering during the quarter as we redeemed $150 million of our 6.875% notes due in 2024. And earlier this week, you saw that we announced the redemption of additional $150 million of these 24 notes to occur in December. Therefore, we have achieved our goal of reducing long-term debt by $300 million this year. I'm even more pleased at our total debt reduction of $530 million, or 17% for all of 21, as we progress towards our long-term debt reduction goals. We remain on schedule for our Gulf of Mexico major projects, including transporting the Kings Key floating production system to the Texas coast ahead of Hurricane Ida with no impact, while maintaining our timing of first soil in the first half of 2022. Our strong execution and capital discipline has led us to be able to reduce the midpoint of our capital budget by $20 million for 2021 down to $680 million. Lastly, we are pleased that the partner group has come to an agreement on the Terranova Asset Life Extension Project and where it will begin in the third quarter. With regard to our exploration program, we completed drilling the non-operated Silverback Exploration Well during the quarter. The well has been plugged and abandoned and Murphy has fully expensed the well. We will continue to evaluate results across our working interest blocks. Looking forward, we're excited to begin the drilling of the Cutthroat Exploration Well in Brazil this quarter and advance our 2022 exploration drilling plans with our partners. On slide four, A third quarter production of 155,000 barrels equivalent per day was comprised of 59% liquids. Hurricane Ida had a significant impact on the industry in the Gulf. We were able to safely redeploy our people offshore five days after evacuation, but we experienced minimal damage to our facilities. We could have restarted production at that time. However, the issues affecting third-party downstream assets kept our production offline longer. with a slow return to full activity. As a result, we had 12,800 barrel equivalents of impact due to Hurricane Ida in the quarter. Even with the storm impacts, our consistent onshore operations and capital discipline placed our net accrued CapEx at 103 million, which was below guidance. We also saw stronger realized pricing, averaging just over $68 per barrel in the quarter, where natural gas averaged $2.77 per thousand cubic feet. Natural gas liquids, also very high, averaged $33 per barrel in the quarter. On slide five, Hurricane Ida hit the Gulf Coast this August as a Category 4 hurricane. Its path put it directly over critical third-party offshore pipeline hubs, onshore terminals, and natural gas processing plants. This unique track, combined with intensity and physical impacts of the storm this size, created devastation and operational loss not seen since Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago. As a result of this hurricane, mercury production for the year was reduced by approximately 4,400 barrel equivalents per day. Fortunately, we have long-standing agreements in place for our temporary shore bases, which enabled us to redeploy personnel quickly and safely only five days after the event, much faster than most of our peers. Also, we were one of the first companies able to resume our drilling following the storm at our Khaleesi-Mormont Samurai project. On the ground, we followed our disaster response plan and quickly activated our incident team, sourcing supplies and arranging transport to deploy the items to our impacted workers so they could take care of their homes and families. Overall, I believe we had an exceptional hurricane response. that put us in the best position possible to resume operations as soon as third-party downstream capabilities were back online. And I'll turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. David Looney, to give a financial update of the company.