W&T Offshore, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the W&T Offshore Second Quarter 2025 conference call. During today's call, all parties will be in listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared comments, the call will be open for questions and answers. During the question and answer session, we ask that you limit your questions to one and a follow-up. You can always rejoin the queue. This conference call is being recorded and a replay will be available on the company's website following the call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Al Petrie, Investor Relations Coordinator.

Thank you, Jaylene. And on behalf of the management team, I'd like to welcome all of you to today's conference call to review W&T Offshore's Second Quarter 2025 financial and operational results. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our comments may include forward-looking statements. It should be noted that a variety of factors could cause W&T's actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results or expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements. Today's call may also contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the earnings release that we issued yesterday for disclosures on forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Tracey Crone, our chairman and CEO. Thanks, Al. Morning, everyone. Welcome to our Second

Quarter Conference Call for 2025. With me today are William Wilford, our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Samir Parasnis, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Trey Hartman, our Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. They're all available to answer questions later during the call. So before we discuss the Second Quarter results, I would like to say how proud I am of all the people who've helped make W&T a success since we founded the company in 1983. We've been an active operator in the Gulf of America and a staunch advocate for the offshore industry for over 40 years. Yesterday, I was honored to celebrate the 20th anniversary of W&T going public by ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. We're conducting today's earnings call from the New York Stock Exchange, where I have several media interviews scheduled that will give us a chance to discuss the company. As you will hear throughout the call today, we're continuing to enhance shareholder value through operational excellence and maximizing production across our impressive portfolio of assets. Across the first half of 2025, we've delivered strong operational and financial results. Quite simply, we're executing on our proven and successful strategy that's committed to profitability, operational execution, returning value to our stockholders and ensuring the safety of our employees and contractors. Our ability to deliver production and EVDA growth while seamlessly integrating or creative producing property acquisitions has helped W&T grow during our 40-year history. Some of our Second Quarter highlights include, we increased production by 10% quarter over quarter to 33,500 barrels of oil equivalent per day. That's within our guidance range. Also, we performed nine low-cost, low-risk workovers that exceeded expectations and positively impacted production and revenue for the quarter. I'd like to point out that five of the workovers were performed in Mobile Bay, helping to increase production at this low-decline long-life asset, which is also our largest natural gas field and the largest natural gas field in the Gulf of America. Total lease operating expenses were $77 million, again, within guidance. We grew adjusted EVDA by 9% to 35 million compared to the first quarter of 2025. We've also grown our unrestricted cash to over $120 million while lowering our net debt by about $15 million to under $230 million. Our 2025 Mid-Year Reserve Report generated by Netherlands Civil and Associates showed net positive revisions

of 1.8

million barrels of oil equivalent, which continues to demonstrate the strength of our asset base and our ability to maximize value from our fields. None of this included any drilling activity. We accomplished all of this while also returning value to our shareholders through our quarterly dividend. We've paid seven quarterly cash dividends since initiating the dividend policy in late 2023 and announced the third quarter 2025 payment that will occur later this month. Additionally, in the first quarter of this year, we had several transactions that strengthened and simplified our balance sheet, adding material cash to the bottom line and improving our credit ratings from S&P and Moody's. So in January, we successfully closed a $350 million offering of new second yield, second lien notes that increased our interest rate by 100 basis points, excuse me, decreased our interest rate by 100 basis points and together with other transactions, reduced our total debt by $39 million. We also entered into a new credit agreement for a $50 million revolving credit facility which returns in July of 2028. That's undrawn and replaces the previous 50 million credit facility provided by Calculus Lending. We also sold a non-core interest to Garden Banks which included about 200 barrels of oil per day for $12 million and we received $58 million in cash for an insurance settlement related to the Mobile Bay 78-1 well. All of these actions have allowed us to enhance liquidity, improve and improve our financial flexibility. Lastly, in the first half of 2025, we've opportunistically taken advantage of commodity price volatility to increase our hedge position. So we added costless colors for both oil and natural gas, including 2000 barrels per day of oil for July through December 2025 with a floor price of $63 per barrel and a seeding price of $77.25 per barrel. For natural gas, we have costless colors for 70 million cubic feet per day from July to December 2025. This has helped lock in a very favorable price range for a portion of our oil and natural gas for the remainder of 2025. So our ability to execute our strategy has delivered very positive results thus far in 2025, including an improved balance sheet, enhanced liquidity, growing production and EBITDA, all of which has positioned us for success in the second half of 2025 and beyond. At year-end 2024, the company had total debt of $393 million and net debt of $284 million. At the end of the second quarter of 2025, our total debt and net debt was significantly reduced to $350 million and $229 million respectively. Our liquidity at June 30, 2025 increased to $171 million. So CapEx in the second quarter of 2025 was $10 million and asset retirement settlement costs totaled $12 million. For the first half of 2025, our CapEx has totaled $19 million and asset retirement costs were $16 million. We continue to expect our full year capital expenditure to be between $34 million and $42 million. This does not include potential acquisition opportunities. We will remain focused on accretive, low risk acquisitions of producing properties rather than high risk drilling in the current uncertain commodity price environment. These acquisitions must meet our stringent criteria of generating free cash flow, providing a solid base of proof reserves with upside potential and offer the ability for our experienced team to reduce costs. Over the years, we've consistently created significant value on methodically integrated producing property acquisitions. The assets we acquired last year added meaningful reserves at an attractive price and we are now seeing additional production from two fields that were previously shut in, the West Delta 73 and Main Pass 108 slash 98 fields were placed into production towards the end of March and into early April. The fields began ramping up production over the course of the second quarter of 2025. We expect production to continue to increase in the second half of this year from these fields. That'll be seen in our third quarter guidance as well. There was a temporary shut in of production in Mobile Bay during the second quarter due to a pipeline issue that was resolved by June 30th that reduced second quarter production by about a thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day. So yesterday we provided our detailed guidance for third quarter 2025 and reintegrated our full year guidance. In the third quarter of 2025, with new fields continuing to ramp up, coupled with the strong work over the Recompletion Program performance, we are predicting the midpoint of Q3 2025 production to be around 35,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. This is an increase of almost 5% compared to the second quarter of 2025. This is quite remarkable considering we currently do not have any drilling operations. Thus, we're spending minimal capital and our LOE costs are remaining flat. So the third quarter guidance for our cash operating costs, which includes LOE, gathering, transportation, and production taxes, and cash GNA costs is in line with the second quarter of 2025. With absolute costs remaining flat and production expected to increase, we believe that on a per BOE basis, we will see decreases. We also believe that there are more opportunities to reduce our operating costs and find synergies to drive costs lower in the long term. We're always working hard to reduce costs without impacting safety or deferring asset integrity work. I'd now like to talk to you about our midyear 2025 reserve report. In our release yesterday, we reported SEC approved reserves of 123 million barrels of oil equivalent, which was slightly lower than 127 million barrels equivalent at year end 2024. This reduction was primarily driven by production of 5.8 million barrels of oil equivalent in the first half of 2025. It was partially offset by 1.8 million barrels of net positive revisions. We're pleased with another report that has positive revisions, despite drilling no new wells and spending minimal capital in 2025. This highlights the strength of our prolific asset base and our operational capabilities to economically extract reserves of long life assets. We operate about 94% of our midyear approved reserves, which gives us maximum flexibility in controlling our operations during periods of volatile commodity prices. So approximately 44% of midyear 2025 SEC approved reserves were liquids with 34% crude oil and 10% NGLs, and we had 56% natural gas. With the continued strengthen of natural gas pricing and the recent European LNG deals, we believe having a strong natural gas position located in close proximity to LNG facilities will position WT very well in the future. We have long enjoyed a premium over Henry Hub pricing and see that continuing in the future with the increased demand in our operating region. The pre-taxed PB-10 of the midyear 2025 approved reserves using SEC pricing was flat at $1.2 billion compared with year-end 2024. Midyear 2025 approved reserves in PB-10 were based on average SEC 12-month crude oil and natural gas prices of $71.20 per barrel and $2.86 per MMBTU, while year-end 2024 prices were $76.32 per barrel of oil and $2.13 per MMBTU of natural gas. We believe we've built a sustainable group of high-performing Gulf of America assets that will continue to provide meaningful cash flow to our shareholders for many years. So before closing, I'd like to address surety and regulatory updates. In June 2025, we were pleased with the settlement agreement that we reached with two of our largest surety providers, which called for the dismissal of a previously filed lawsuit. This outcome is very positive for WT overall, as we will not acquiesce to unjustified collateral demands made by the applicable surety, and we've locked in our historical premium rates through the end of 2026. We believe the entry into this settlement agreement vindicates our resolve to stand up to our surety providers' unjustified demands on independent oil and gas operators such as WT. So additionally, at the end of June 2025, U.S. Magistrate Judge Dina Palermo recommended denying two other surety companies motions for preliminary injunction, through which they were collectively asked for, asking for full cash collateralization of over $100 million. We couldn't be more pleased with the court's decision to prevent unnecessary and unjustified collateral demands by surety providers. For the past 40 plus years, W&T has met its plugging and abandonment obligations, paid its negotiated premiums, and operated responsibly in the Gulf of America. In fact, we've done more plugging and abandonment work than anybody in the Gulf of Mexico. We demand fairness and transparency for all oil and natural gas producers in the Gulf of America, and will continue to pursue the pending litigation against our other surety providers that have decided not to deal fairly with W&T and other independent oil and gas producers. We have done well over a billion dollars of decommissioning work in Gulf of America, again, more than any other operators down on its own nickel, and we've done so safely and reliably. These are very positive results for W&T and should alleviate some of the uncertainty that has negatively impacted our stock price, despite some positive operational financial results in 2025. So as we've mentioned during our last call, in early 2025, we're certain to directives from the Trump administration, the Department of Interior indicated it will not seek supplemental financial assurance in the Gulf of America, except in the case of sole liability properties and certain non-sole liability properties that do not have a financially strong co-owner or predecessor entitled. Since his inauguration, President Trump has issued a number of executive orders aimed at streamlining regulations and reducing the regulatory burden on oil and natural gas companies, increasing federal oil and natural gas leasing, including the Gulf of Mexico, and expediting U.S. natural gas, excuse me, natural resource development. We're very pleased with these actions. We expect these will positively impact W&T and the offshore energy industry. So in closing, I'd like to again thank our team at W&T for 20 years as an NYSE listed company. As the largest shareholder, I believe we're well-positioned to continue to grow and add value in the second half of 2025. We generated solid EBITDA and raised our cash position to over $120 million. This allows us to continue to evaluate growth opportunities both organically and inorganically. We have a long track record of successfully integrating assets into our portfolio, and we continue to believe that the Gulf of America is a world-class basin that supports value creation. We will maintain our focus on operational excellence and maximizing the cashflow potential for our asset base. So with that, Operator, we can now open the lines for questions.

Thank you. We'll now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press stars and one on your telephone keypad. You'll hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Our first question is from Nate Pendleton with Tech with Capitals. Please go ahead.

Good morning. My first question, I wanted to start on policy. With the administration looking for ways to support the industry further, can you share your thoughts on what actions the administration may be looking at in order to incentivize production in the Gulf of America?

Thanks, Nate. Good morning. Yeah, there's a lot of things that the Department of Interior is looking at there. They've already weighed in with regard to local royalties and I expect, and I hope that they will weigh in on further reductions on those royalties. There's the so-called Idle Iron Act, which is kind of nonsensical to me and our company. Why do you need to prematurely abandon these wells when none of the rest of the wells on the platform have been abandoned? This was a policy brought on by the Obama administration to create havoc and essentially make it cost more deliberately. And the idea was of course to get rid of oil and gas companies in the Gulf of America. We've looked at some other things that we discussed with them. I think it's important to recognize that this administration has taken a very strong position in the fact that, yeah, we wanna maximize and utilize our abilities to conserve the natural resource in the Gulf of America. President Trump and DOI have made that pledge that they're going to do it. We're already seeing some of the regulations getting rolled back. There will hopefully be another decision with regard to surety here. Put solidly into writing and we're looking forward to that. Of course, you're aware that we're suing surety providers. Those are just a few. We're very hopeful that this administration gets back to the idea that oil and gas from this very important basin, by the way, the second largest producing basin and the largest by area in the United States.

Thanks, Tracy. That's really encouraging. I'm shifting over to your operations. Implied four-queue production guidance seems very strong at the midpoint. In your prepared remarks, you talked about the increase you expected in Q3. Can you share what's driving that further production ramp that you're expecting at the back half of the year?

Yeah, I'm gonna turn that over to our Chief Operating Officer, William Wilford. He's got responsibility for that basin.

Yeah, good morning, Nate. Tracy mentioned in call this morning that we have a lot of low-cost workovers that we're continually doing in the third quarter, as well as a couple of recompleasions to add to that production. So we also plan on ramping up one of the COXFIELDS we acquired last year as well, to see significant production through the last part of the year.

Got it. Thanks for taking my questions. Thanks, Nate.

You're welcome. The next, pardon me. If you have a question, please press star then one. The next question is from Jeff Robertson with Water Tower Research. Please go ahead.

Thank you, good morning. Tracy, does resolution of some of the insurances and bonding issues for WNT have an impact on how you approach acquisitions? And then secondly, do they have an impact anywhere on the balance sheet with respect to liquidity?

Oh, absolutely. Jeff, I mean, the sureties were in collusion with one another to artificially suppress the company by virtue of demanding full collateral. It's kind of like your car insurance. If you have a car, your agent calls you up and says, gee, Jeff, you have a $50,000 insurance policy on your car. Would you please send me $15,000? In fact, I demand that you send me $50,000 so we can cash collateralize your account. And by the way, I'm going to increase your premiums as a result. That was the alternative that was given to us, except it was a lot bigger nominal dollars for us is around $250 million of collateral demands. And we had to sign this indemnity agreement with these companies. They all read virtually identically that you had to provide cash demand within a very, very short period of time, maybe 10 days to two weeks. And that if you didn't do so, that you were in violation of their policy. Well, several of them got together and they all called it about the same time for $250 million, which by the way, just happened to be the market capital company at the time. I thought that that was pretty unfair. Obviously they were all doing it at the same time. Seemed collusional to me, so we sued them. And as a result, it threw the surety market into quite a bit of disarray. The idea, the very idea that you need surety is kind of preposterous to us. The government, in spite of all the bankruptcies that have taken place in the Gulf of Mexico, the government has never ever called a bond, even though they demand it. They demand that surety, but they've never called it. Well, the reason that they've never called it is because the lease form itself calls for joint and several liability. That means that anybody who's ever owned the, that ever held a record title interest is jointly and severely liable up to 100% of the obligations. So the government never had that situation. They would just go back to the predecessor title and demand that they take care of those obligations. We've had to do that ourselves. Others have had to do that. It's always been the case. That is what the lease form says. So the government's idea that we need more surety is obviously preposterous, because they've never called one single damn surety demand. Not once. So it's gotta be a farce. It was put in by the Obama administration, further exasperated by the Biden administration. It was wholly designed to put oil and gas companies out of business.

Tracy, do you think that resolving those issues will have an impact on M&A activity in the Gulf? Oh,

you bet. Yeah. People will have to figure out a different way to do that assurance for other companies. It'll be part of the sales price. People aren't going, companies aren't going to stop selling properties. They use those proceeds to put into different projects that will in fact create more value for them. We will take those properties, the ones that we get, and make them more valuable, because we'll lightening focus on that. So yeah, the surety part of it will definitely undergo a great deal of change, but I think it's for the better. The obligation, the joint, several obligations are never gonna go away, even though there's been a lot of talk about that, that needs to be the case. The reality is that the government has no obligation to do that, and it's highly unlikely that they would ever change that. Why should they? There's no reason to change it. But it will have an effect on companies like W&T and others, and we'll just have to figure out different ways to do things.

Excuse me, a question on your reserves of the 1.8 million DOE of positive revisions. Can you provide some color as to which properties contributed there, and was any of that related to performance on the Cox acquisitions versus how those properties had originally been booked?

Yeah, go ahead, Wade. Yeah, thanks, Tracy. Yeah, it was some of the additional increase in reserves was based on better performance of some of the Cox assets, as well as some of our own assets. We did some optimization projects to further increase and increase the life of our mobile bay asset as well, so that added significant value as far as from a reserve standpoint.

Yeah, I'll add to that a little bit. I mean, we're still working some of these properties and finding different things that we can do with, not only with the facilities themselves. Young Mr. Cox left them in terrible shape when we acquired them. They weren't doing the maintenance. They weren't maintaining properties in what we would have considered to be a safe manner. So we've had to spend a bit more money to bring them up to our standards, and I think that's certainly affected some of the cash flow near term. But long term, I have a lot of high expectations of these properties, and we're getting there. Production at West Health is 73, and main paths, one of the ways, are all coming up as we speak.

Thanks, Tracy.

Thank you, sir.

As there are no more questions, this concludes the question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Tracy Crone, Chairman and CEO, for any closing remarks.

Thanks, operator. Again, we celebrated 20 years as an NYSE listed company yesterday. I'm expecting another 20 years. I would certainly like to be around for that. So with that, just all of our shareholders, watch what happens next. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be exciting, and it's gonna be profitable. Thanks so much.

This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your line. Thank you for participating, and have a pleasant day.