Northern Oil and Gas, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Northern Oil and Gas second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Mike Kelly, Executive Vice President of Finance. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Diego, and good morning, everybody. We're happy to welcome you to Northern's second quarter 2020 earnings call. I'm joined here this morning with Northern CEO, Nick O'Grady, our COO, Adam Dirlam, CFO, Chad Allen, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Jim Evans, as well as Northern's Chairman, Brahm Akradi. Our agenda for today is as follows. Brahm's going to kick things off, and then he'll turn it over to Nick and team to provide their State of the Union comments and recap for second quarter. After that, we will get into the Q&A session. Before we go any further, though, let me cover our safe harbor language. Please be advised that our remarks today, including the answers to your questions, may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from the expectations contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Those risks include among others, matters that we have described in our earnings release as well as in our filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. During this conference call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted net income and adjusted EBITDA. Reconciliations of these measures to the closest GAAP measures can be found in the earnings release that we issued this morning. With that taken care of, I will now hand the call over to Northern's Chairman, Mr. Buram Akradi.

Thank you, Mike. Good morning. I wanted to lead off today's call to deliver a very clear message on Northern's vision and what shareholders can expect from the company moving forward. In order to properly frame this, first, I would like to reflect on the progress that Northern has made over the last two years. Our net debt to EBITDA was nearly seven times at the start of 2018. It's now only slightly above two times. Our production growth has increased more than two and a half times over the same period. While we have posted the very highest corporate returns in E&P space. When you review Northern's second quarter, the company generated meaningful cashflow and will continue to reduce that despite unprecedented industry challenges. We believe our approach to the oil and gas business is unique in both its strategy and its success. and this was evident again this past quarter. As we look ahead, our board and management team are committed to making it abundantly clear that Northern's financial health is strong and our business model is sustainable in the long run. Our goal is to build a multi-billion dollar E&P company, a company that will have a for the select balance sheet with leverage that is one times EBITDA or less. You may ask, how do we intend to do this? Our playbook consists of two major pillars. One, we will grow our cash flow by investing in high return assets, and two, we will continue to strengthen our balance sheet by reducing debt. In terms of the specific actions you can expect us to take, it will be continuation of what we have done in the last two years, where every move we made not only grew the company but strengthened the company by paying down debt and taking advantage of opportunistic debt for equity exchanges. Going forward, you can expect us to adhere to those same principles. Furthermore, given the struggles that highly levered companies are experiencing in ENT space, we believe the time to accelerate our business model is now. The opportunity set is impressive, actionable, lucrative, and accretive. I believe the company is well positioned for major success in the second half of 2020 and beyond. One final comment as it pertains to the proposed reverse split stock. I am pleased to announce that we have received significantly more votes than needed in support of this split. Over the next couple weeks, we will determine the exact split ratios, but our desire is for a high single-digit stock price immediately after the split. The benefit to shareholders of the reverse split are undeniable. It will enable institutional investors who have wanted to invest in our company but simply couldn't due to internal restrictions placed on the stock trading for less than $5 a share to own the stock in Northern. Two, it will lower our trading cost, and three, it will open the company up for inclusion in additional equity indices. I will now like to turn the call to Nick, but before that, I want to thank Nick and the rest of the management team and the members of the board of directors who have been working incredibly hard during these months, and I am Whatever great things they've done. Nick, to you.