Vitesse Energy, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to Vitesse Energy second quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Ben Messier, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin. Thank you.

Good morning and thank you for joining. Today we will be discussing our financial and operating results for the second quarter of 2023, which we released yesterday after market closed. You can access our earnings release and presentation on our investor relations website, and our Form 10-Q was filed with the SEC yesterday. I'm joined here this morning with Vitesse's Chairman and CEO, Bob Garrity, our President, Brian Cree, and CFO, Dave McCosko. Our agenda for today's call is as follows. Bob will provide opening remarks in the quarter. After Bob, Brian will give you an update on operations, and then Dave will review our Q2 2023 financial results. After the conclusion of our prepared remarks, the executive team will be available to answer questions. Before we begin, let's 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 security litigation performance. These forward-looking statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond our control, 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 and periodic filings. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required by applicable securities laws. During our conference call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted net income, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these measures to the closest GAAP measures can be found in the earnings release that we issued yesterday. Now, we'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Bob Garrett.

Hey, thanks, Ben, and welcome, everyone, to our second quarter Q Call. It's going to sound an awful lot like our first quarter cue call, which is what we intend to do. We are a dividend-first return of capital company. To that, we paid a 50-cent dividend, and our board has approved a second 50-cent dividend. So as a dividend-first company, a lot of our ability to pay that dividend, protect our dividend, depends on our deal flow. And our deal flow in the second quarter was excellent. We have very high economic hurdles, and we were able to source a lot of capital deals in that second quarter, and we're very thankful about that. Remember, there is about a year plus or minus lag between CapEx, and production. So first and foremost, we are underwriters. And our underwriting depends on the quality of our data. So I want to give a special shout out to our data scientists who have created and maintain our database, which we call vLuminous. Amanda Bailey and Adam Woodson have done a great job in creating that database, which is democratized over our entire organization. And what that means is that land, accounting, engineering, finance, and even management accesses our data continuously. We want to know exactly what's happening out in the field. We're in over 6,000 wells, and we call those wells the kids in the class. So our ability to accurately underwrite our capital expenditures depends on that data. So I just wanna thank you for jumping on the call. I'm now gonna turn the call over to our president, Brian Cree.