Meren Energy Inc.

Hello, everyone. My name is Nadia, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Africa Oil First Quarter 2023 results call and webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star 11 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please note that at any time, participants on the webcast can submit their questions using the Q&A box on the webcast interface. Please note that this event is being recorded. The recording will be available for playback on the company's website. I would now like to pass the meeting to Mr. Shahin Amini, Africa Oil's Investor Relations and Commercial Manager. Please go ahead, Mr. Amini.

Thank you, Oprah, sir. On behalf of the management, I thank you for joining us today for our first quarter of 2023 results call. I'm joined today with our President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Keith Hill, and our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Pascal Nitterdorf. Keith and Pascal will present the course's highlights and the business outlook before we go into the Q&A session. I would like to remind everyone that remarks made during this session are subject to forward-looking statements, which involve significant risk factors and assumptions and have been fully described in the company's continuous disclosure reports. The information discussed is made as of today's date and time, and Africa Oil assumes no obligation to update or revise this information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. The company's complete financial statements and related MD&E are available on the company's website and on CEDAW. Keith, we're ready for you. Please go ahead.

All right. Thanks, everyone, for dialing in. It's been another good quarter for us. You know, we start these things out saying good news and bad news. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any bad news yet. It's been mostly good news. So I think the most exciting thing is that we are now drilling in both Namibia and Nigeria. So we don't have a lot of results from that drilling to report yet, but the fact that it's taken us some time to get off the drilling and we are now drilling, I think, is a very, very good achievement. Obviously, being as well is not being watched only by our shareholders, but by the whole world, and I think You know, it's probably one of the top wells being drilled in the world this year. So I think that's getting a lot of buzz around it. If people are calling in to try to find if we are going to give any updates on this that isn't in public domain, I'm afraid we may have to disappoint you. That's more for the operator in our department to do than ourselves. But we'll certainly talk about what we can and tell you why we're so interested. The OML 130 drilling intel program is something we've been working on for a long time to get up and running. It took us about a year longer than we wanted, but it's now up and going, and we're hoping to see, by the end of the next quarter, see some results of that campaign. From a financial standpoint, we did declare and pay our dividend last quarter. So, this means in just over a year, we've returned more than $80 million to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. And we will be looking to continue that share buyback going forward, blackout periods from Bemis drilling permitted. As far as where our balance sheet is, again, we're almost zero debt. Consolidated net debt is only $3.5 million. When you look at the cash we have in the bank of $158 million versus the net debt position, we've got a prime of $161 million. So, again, very good standing on the balance sheet. And then we are, of course, the main difference between our money in the bank last quarter and this quarter is we have invested another $31 million in the impact drilling program. We're going to be paying that in two trenches, and we'll ultimately increase our interest slightly to 31.1%. Again, Venus is probably the most exciting well I've ever drilled, and I think if you read all of the things coming in from Upstream Magazine, Orange Basin probably stands just behind Guyana as probably the hottest exploration play on Earth. Again, I will leave it to the operator and to our partner, Impact, to disclose any details. I'll only talk about what's already in the press today. I think one of our biggest promoters is Patrick Pouyonnais, the CEO of block, kind of referencing to their golden block in Angola. I think everybody's very excited about this block. I think you don't find prospects this size very often. So we are drilling an appraisal well 12 kilometers to the north, and we hope to see the results of that within the next 30 to 60 days. That's being drilled by the Thompson Explorer. We've got a second rate coming, the Deep Sea Mirror Well. It should be in Namibia in the next few days, and it will undertake a testing program. this appraisal well, the 1A. But I think that's one of the critical missing pieces is a test rate. You may have seen in Upstream Magazine, there's some reports from the nearby Shell graph well that the test rates there were quite high. And we are hopeful from looking at the Regis Moore engineering standpoint that we see some high tests on that. So I think that's something we need to confirm. The Tungsting floor will move over to the NARA 1 well when they've completed operations in the Venus a big catalyst and a very important well for us to understand how this accumulation is developing. In Nigeria, again, it took us about a year longer than we were hoping to get our rig on the station, but we've got it on there now, and they're doing a drilling program of up to nine wells on Agena and Akpo. It's a combination of production wells and injection wells. And by next quarter, we should be able to report where we are on the drilling of those as well as what the results of those are in the daily production. So we're also shooting a 4D seismic program over in Dena to get a better idea of how we've been draining the reservoir so far to guide us in the future production labs. But so far, the guidance looks good. We're within, I'd say, within the upper part of the guidance range, and we are quite upper edge of that guidance. We still are working on Prairie Way. I think people have, I've seen questions already about people asking about the license extension. I think Prairie Way, it's important to get the license extension, but we are moving forward on that as we speak. So you may have seen reports in the press that most of the issues surrounding the extension have been agreed, which appears to be the case. But I think obviously working in Africa or, as I say, working anywhere in the oil industry, until we have everything buttoned up, we're not in a position to say where we are on that license extension. But I think we're confident that there's a very high chance that's going to be done possibly even before the end of this month. Again, on guidance, we're in the first quarter, in the upper end of that range, and I think we're feeling It will require some of the wells that we're drilling in Ndina to help us stay in that upper end of the range. But I think, you know, particularly Agbomius is performing very well this year. So, I think we're fairly confident that we're going to be able to deliver as we've stated. So, I'll turn over to Pascal now and let him go through our oil sales. I mean, I think we've had a fairly revolutionary change since we put our treating mechanism in place. So, I'll turn over to you, Pascal.