Vitesse Energy, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the VITAS Energy first quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The 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, Investor Relations and Business Development. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning and thank you for joining. Today we will be discussing our financial and operating results for the first quarter of 2024, which we released yesterday after market closed. You can access our earnings release and presentation in the investor relations section of our website. We will file our Form 10-Q within the upcoming days. I'm joined here this morning by Vitesse's Chairman and CEO, Bob Garrity, our President, Brian Cree, and our CFO, Jimmy Henderson. Our agenda for today's call is as follows. Bob will provide some opening remarks on the quarter. After Bob, Brian will give you an operations update, including some additional information on the recently announced near-term development acquisitions. Then Jimmy will review our first quarter financial results in updated production and CapEx guidance. After the conclusion of our prepared remarks, the executive team will be available to answer any 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 Securities Litigation Reform Act. 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, net debt, adjusted EBITDA, net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio, and free cash flow. Reconciliations of these measures to the closest gap measures can be found in the earnings release that we issued yesterday. Now, I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and CEO, Bob Garrity.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for your participating in today's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Management at Vitess is committed to the dividend as a vehicle to return capital to our stockholders. To sustain this return of capital strategy, we must have a very economic return on capital invested. We continue to spend capital in a dividend-supportive manner, which led us to raise production and CapEx guidance for 2024. We are sharing the fruits of this labor with our stockholders by increasing our second quarter fixed cash dividend to 52.5 cents per share to be paid in June, an increase of 5 percent over the first quarter dividend. This is really a harvest of the really economic deals we have done starting in the second half of last year and continuing into this year. We continue to look at near-term development deals and larger asset acquisitions that would bolster our dividend. So far this year, deal flow has been healthy. As Brian will describe, we have agreed to acquire additional self-sourced, highly economic interest that will allow us to invest over $40 million of CapEx incremental to our original projection. When we find these highly economic acquisitions, we will take them down. We do not have a fixed budget. It's all opportunistic. We will continue to pursue all of these opportunities that meet our strict economic parameters. Before I turn it over to Brian, I just want to compliment everyone on our team at Vitess. We are all rowing the boat in harmony. We bust our ass every day to allocate capital in a way that supports our dividend, which is really the dividend belongs to our shareholders. So with that, I'll turn it over to our president, business partner, Brian Cree.