Ovintiv Inc. (DE)

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Inventive's 2026 Second Quarter Results Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. Following 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 a 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 express consent of OVINTIV. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Jason Verheist from Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Verheist.

Thanks Joanna and welcome everyone to our second quarter 26 conference call. This call is being webcast and the slides are available on our website at evento.com. Please take note of the advisory regarding forward-looking statements at the beginning of our slides and our disclosure documents filed on EDGAR and CDAR+. Following prepared remarks, we will be available to take your questions. I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO, Brendan McCracken.

Thanks Jason. Good morning everybody and thank you for joining us. Our second quarter results demonstrate the strength of our durable return strategy and the business we have built. Our future is also looking bright with a boost to our oil production driving more free cash flow, differentiated cost and productivity results, the demonstrated ability to replace our inventory, and ramping buybacks. We have demonstrated industry-leading operational performance through stacked innovation and execution excellence. Our culture, our expertise, and our unique private data set have created a distinct operating advantage. We have materially fortified our balance sheet, bringing our leverage ratio well below one times. We continue to demonstrate our proven track record of capital allocation while delivering superior, durable returns to our shareholders. We are one of the most innovative, efficient, opportunity-rich EMPs in North America and we are very excited to be operating from this position of strength. Both our Permian and our Montney year-to-date results are tracking above type curve and continue to lead the league in their respective basins. This is driving an increase to our full-year oil production guidance, which equates to about 4% growth on a per-share basis, with no additional capital or activity. Our cash flow per share and free cash flow both beat consensus estimates by a significant margin this quarter, and we've returned approximately 63% of free cash flow to our owners through share buybacks and our base dividend. Our net debt was below $3 billion at the end of the quarter, marking the lowest leverage the company has had in over a decade. Our capital structure has been right-sized and our leverage now compares favorably to our peers. Earlier this year, we revised our shareholder return framework to be more flexible. and deliver enhanced returns to shareholders. Our year-to-date shareholder returns total about 45%. For the second half of the year, we expect to be more active in our buyback program, targeting full-year returns of more than 60%. We continue to see a substantial gap between market value and the intrinsic value of our business at mid-cycle prices. With $1.3 billion of free cash flow year-to-date, a leverage ratio of less than one times, and a strong outlook for the rest of the year, we have the capacity to buy back a substantial number of shares and continue to advance our ground game strategy. We have assembled one of the most valuable premium inventory positions in our industry. Since 2023, we've increased our Permian and Montney drilling inventory by more than 3,200 locations at an average cost of $1.4 million per net 10,000-foot location. and we did it without diluting our shareholders or stressing our balance sheet. Our work to build inventory depth means that we have nearly 15 years of premium inventory in the Permian and close to 20 years of premium oil inventory in the money. This expansion has been unmatched by our peers. In fact, over the same time period, most companies saw their inventory life decline. Our goal now is to maintain our premium inventory depth. Through ground game bolt-ons and organic additions Already this year we have essentially replaced the 2026 drilling program in both assets With Barnett locations we've identified on our existing acreage in the Permian And the successful density tests we have executed in the Montney Which converted upside locations into the premium category We have worked for years to design and optimize our approach in order to maximize the returns and value We have deliberately built a culture of relentless curiosity that seeks to create our own innovations, but equally also seeks to learn rapidly from the innovations of our peers. We inform our design and optimization decisions from our expansive private data set, and we've built institutional capability to execute on the leading edge. Our culture, our expertise, and our private data combined together are hard to duplicate. That has led us to our stacked innovation model, where we stack multiple innovations together to create industry-leading results, which defy the broader U.S. shale trend of performance degradation. We've deliberately taken a different approach than many of our peers. The result is that we are consistently one of the highest oil productivity We have over a decade of experience deploying our systematic cube development approach, which means we co-develop multiple stacked zones from a single path. This creates value by maximizing both returns and resource recovery. We also have around five years of experience deploying our reoccupation strategy. We have found that the optimal timing to drill an adjacent cube www.inc.gov.au We can deliver consistent and repeatable results year after year because we have not burned through our highest return inventory, and we have maximized the value of every acre. This means we expect to continue to generate the superior returns we're generating today for many years to come. If our approach was to offer consistent but mediocre results, I think this would be a debate about whether that was the right call. However, generating the highest oil productivity The completion space has been the source of several cost and productivity enhancing innovations such as Simulfrac and Trimulfrac, advancements in stage architecture design, wet sand, profit intensity, and surfactant usage. The implementation of any one of these items often builds on or depends upon the previous implementation of another. Today, our frontier innovations are powered by AI to leverage our extensive private well data set, optimize our technical workflows, and operational execution in real time. We are using this new technology across our portfolio. This has led to faster cycle times, enhanced production, reduced downtime, and significant cost savings. The ability to successfully integrate new technology and innovative techniques across the portfolio is anchored by our deep institutional experience and expertise. It's what enables us to identify, test, and scale innovation rapidly across our portfolio while maintaining cost and productivity leadership. I'll now turn the call to Corey who will speak more to our second quarter results and our guidance updates.