Ovintiv Inc. (DE)

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aventiv's 2023 Third Quarter Results Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Members of the investment community will have the opportunity to ask questions and can join the queue at any time by pressing star 1. For members of the media attending in listen-only mode today, you may quote statements made by any of the OVINTIV representatives. However, members of the media who wish to quote others who are speaking on this call today, we advise you to contact those individuals directly to obtain their consent. Please be advised that this conference call may not be recorded or rebroadcast without the expressed consent of OVINTIV. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Jason Verheest from Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Verheest.

Thank you, Joanna, and welcome everyone to our third quarter 23 conference call. This call is being webcast and the slides are available on our website at ovento.com. Please take note of the advisory regarding forward-looking statements at the beginning of our slides and in our disclosure documents filed on CDAR and EDGAR. Following our prepared remarks, we will be available to take your questions. Please limit your time to one question and one follow-up. I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO, Brendan McCracken.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Our team delivered another quarter of impressive outperformance against our targets. We'll get into the details in a minute. But first, I'd like to start with the steps we've taken to prosecute our durable return strategy and ensure that Ovintiv is set up to create shareholder value. We believe a deep premium inventory is one of the three key ingredients to generating durable returns. And over two years ago, we recognized that the industry was likely to consume quality inventory at a rate much higher than it was replenishing. Fast forward to today, and that has definitely turned out to be the case. And the growing recognition of this deficit has been a motivator for the deal flow we've seen recently. We have moved against that broader industry tide and have both deepened our premium inventory and demonstrated our ability to generate superior operational and financial results to create value for our shareholders. We pioneered cube development to make the most out of the premium resource we have captured. We have continued to innovate to drive down costs and boost productivity. We have consistently converted upside locations to premium inventory by investing into organic appraisal and assessment on the acreage we already own. We closed over 200 highly accretive bolt-on transactions, and we made a significant step change with our Permian transaction earlier this year. Since 2021, we've added over 1,500 premium drilling locations to our inventory. We accomplished this by following a rigorous process to allocate our capital, and as a result, we accretively grew cash flow per share, free cash flow per share, and maintained a strong balance sheet. Another area of intense focus for us has been consistent execution. Although much of the market's focus this year has been on our Permian outperformance, Each basin in our portfolio is contributing to our total outperformance. Across the company, we continue to innovate and find efficiencies that reduce cycle times, lower costs, and deliver leading well productivity. From production to capital to per unit cost, we once again beat our targets and enhanced the capital efficiency of our business. Our production beat in the quarter was driven by portfolio-wide well performance and excellent operational execution to efficiently turn in line our wells. I noted earlier that consistent execution is key to our story, and I'm proud to say the culture of innovation here at Oventa remains alive and well. Greg will touch more on this later, but our latest Trimal Frac innovation is unmatched in industry today. and setting the leading edge efficiency frontier in the Midland Basin. Our strong execution has accelerated our wells online and is pushing 2023 production higher and stabilizing us at our 2024 run rate and free cash flow sweet spot sooner. We previously guided to a second half 2023 oil and condensate figure of 210,000 barrels a day. Using our Q3 actuals and the midpoint of our Q4 guide, Our second half production will now come in at about 219,000 barrels a day, or 9,000 barrels a day above our original guide. Finally, we've again raised our full year 2023 production guidance, our second raise since we closed the acquisition back in June. We've also narrowed the range and reiterated the midpoint of our 2023 capital guidance, despite bringing 15 to 20 more wells into 2023 from our program acceleration. Our third quarter results speak for themselves. Our team brought on 116 net wells, 16 more than planned, with 15 of those coming in the Permian. Our base production also outperformed, thanks to the work done by our teams to moderate decline rates. I'll now turn the call over to Corey to cover our financial results.