Parex Resources Inc.

This conference is being recorded. Cette conférence est enregistrée.

All participants, please stand by. Your conference is now ready to begin. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Parex Resources' fourth quarter earnings call and webcast. Yesterday, Parex released its unaudited financial and operating results for the quarter ended December 31, 2020. Like all Pyrex disclosure documents, the complete financial statements and related MD&A are available on the company's website at www.pyrexresources.com and on CDAR. Before turning the meeting over to Mr. Mike Crookston, Pyrex Resources Senior Vice President of Capital Market, I would like to mention that this event is being recorded. The recording will be available for playback on the company's website. Pyrex 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 PARICS assumes no obligation to update or revise this information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. Please note that at any time, participants on the webcast can submit their questions under the Ask the Question tab at the top of the webcast interface, and participants on the phone can press star one. I would now like to pass on the meeting to PARICS Senior Vice President of Capital Markets and Corporate Planning. Please go ahead, Mr. Krukten.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks to everyone on the line for joining myself and the senior leadership team for Q4 and year-end conference audio webcast. We appreciate your support of PARCS resources. On the call today, we have Ahmed Molson, PARCS' new President and CEO, Ken Pinsky, Chief Financial Officer, and Eric Verlin. our Chief Operations Officer. Before we start our Q&A session, Ken Pinsky will provide a brief overview of our financial results for the year-end 2020. I will then discuss the 2021 guidance and outline future growth areas, and Mr. Olson will just provide an introduction of his time in PARACS. Ken?

Thanks, Mike. I'll begin by stating that our priority during the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be the health and safety of our employees, our contractors, and the community's neighboring operations. 2020 was a year of turbulence and uncertainty for companies and industries worldwide. PARCS continues to focus on its key success driving factors of balance sheet strength, return of capital to shareholders, and sustainability. PARCS remains in a strong financial position, exiting 2020 with results as follows. PARCS generated net income after tax in 2020 of $99 million U.S. or Canadian $0.97 per share. Our earnings were down from 2019 due to reduced global oil prices and reduced production volumes. But nevertheless, I was very pleased to report that income for 2020, given the challenges the industry has faced. Further, reporting that income this year very much shows the sustainability of our business in all commodity price scenarios. 2020 production averaged 46,500 BOE per day, And that was attributable to voluntary shut-in production from the COVID-19 pandemic and lower capital expenditures. Our crude oil and natural gas reserves for 2020 were an increase of 18% in the PDP reserves per share and 14% increase in 2P reserves per share. We generated PDP and 2P reserves fund flow from operations recycle ratio of approximately two and a half times. which is excellent considering Brent crude prices average $43 a barrel in 2020. Lastly, our 2P reserve life index was extended to 11 years, which added to our sustainability. 2020 was highlighted by PARCS realizing strong operating netbacks in this challenging commodity price here. The operating netback of approximately US $21 per BOE resulted in funds flow provided by operations of approximately 297 million US That and 2020 capital expenditures of $121 million generated free funds flow of $156 million. We applied our free funds flow to repurchase approximately 10% of our float, or 13.9 million shares. 2020 marked the third year that PARX has renewed its normal course issuer bid or share buyback. Since 2017, PARX has repurchased approximately 34 million shares, returning Canadian $643 million to our shareholders. Let's look at the share buyback along with our business results. Since the end of 2017, our crude oil and natural gas reserves and production have increased materially, our working capital has doubled, we don't have any bank debt, and our share count has been significantly reduced. Pyrex has significant growth optionality and financial resiliency, and we planned it that way. We exited 2020 with working capital of US $320 million, and a $200 million undrawn credit facility. Finally, PARCS has no commodity price derivative hedges in place at the end of 2020 and at present. PARCS will fully participate in the higher crude oil prices we are seeing today. Thank you, Mike, and back to you.

Thank you for the 2020 overview, Ken. I will now discuss our 2021 guidance. PARCS is in an exceptional financial position, and the company continues to maintain a best-in-class balance sheet with full exposure to 2021 strip oil pricing. As we move into 2021, parks will be focused on repurchasing the maximum number of shares fulfilling the 10% NCIB annual limit for a total of 12.9 million shares. In January and February of this year, we have already repurchased 2.4 million shares. Second, delivering on our capital program of $165 to $185 million. Key components are advancing the VIM1 La Baliza discovery with two new wells, civil works and other infrastructure to further assess the block. Next, assessing and expanding our veranda play, delivering low cost high margin production and cash flow and evaluating opportunities to expand our capital program and deploy a portion of our expected surplus cash flow. we want to demonstrate top quartile ESG performance, which includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, working to improve the social conditions in the communities where we operate, and providing transparency in our governance. With this brief overview, we'd like to introduce you to Ahmad Molson, PAREC's President and CEO. Ahmad joined PAREC following the retirement of Dave Taylor, who will remain an advisor to Ahmad until our AGM on May 6th.

Thank you, everyone, on the call. I'm pleased to have joined Perixx. I appreciate your support for the company. As Mike mentioned, I arrived in Calgary and joined Perixx in early February and have spent the past month meeting staff, shareholders, and learning about exciting opportunities within our portfolio. Hearing both Ken and Mike, probably you could say it was a good timing. My vision for Perixx is to continue to build and strengthen our Colombian operation, the foundation on which Parax was built. Moving forward, we will continue to evaluate new conventional oil and gas opportunities, given the financial, technical, and social access advantages that Parax has developed. We remain committed to being a socially responsible company that generates best-in-class shareholder returns. I believe my experience in successfully applying industry-leading ESG approaches will complement Perixx's existing ESG values and accelerate its transition. I'm excited to assume this executive leadership position and look forward to closely working with our management team and employees, meeting our shareholders, partners, and other stakeholders, either virtually and hopefully in person this year. With this introduction, I would now turn the line back to the operator to start the Q&A session. Operator, over to you.

Thank you. If you have any question, please press star one on your device's keypad. There will be a brief pause while the participants register. Thank you for your patience. The first question is from Travis Wood from National Bank Financial. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yeah, good morning, guys. Mike, you touched on kind of the pecking order of allocating that free cash and the capital allocation priorities. What needs to give to see the CapEx go higher and maybe chase some growth? Or rather, what's holding that back in this type of Brent environment?

Well, there's a couple of things that we need to work through first. One is actually getting access and we're still in a COVID situation, so we need to ensure that we work safely with our community. We are assessing what opportunities that we have that can enable us to accelerate some of that growth. We feel we've underinvested. As Ken mentioned, we only spent $140 million last year, which was less than 50% of our fund flow from operations. So we'd be happy to take some of that cash flow that we have this year, which is in surplus of after CapEx end our share buyback program and apply it to new projects. So we're in the process of doing that now.

Yeah, so we're looking at if we want to accelerate capital, we're looking at exploration and appraisal versus just developing. We like to explore, and as Mike said, we got a little bit behind last year because it

right now okay okay that's that's fair and could you I know it comes up now and again around a dividend just sitting on this much free cash in this type of environment dividends special dividends obviously the number one priority continues to be the buyback as you highlighted but does that come up in in the boardroom at all in this type of environment not really no

You know, we talk to our shareholders all the time, and our shareholders don't bring it up. We get questions from the capital markets participants like yourself about would we consider it, and I think we would consider it at some point. But right now, I think we're happy with returning capital to the share buyback. We have been disconnected. Our share price was disconnected. We fell from where commodity prices had gone, and the operation back in stock but it is something that you know we have a strategy session every year with the board that's in the fall and so typically that and other methods of return of capital get discussed but it doesn't come up all the time that's for sure and so we'll look at it again this fall.

Okay that appreciate that and for what it's worth I think the your investors, our clients appreciate the discipline around the capital. I think one of the reasons it's performing well today is being strict on that CapEx for what it's worth. So thanks for taking my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Next question is from Gavin Wiley, Scotiabank. Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks, guys. Just a bit of a follow-up and then maybe a second question for me on that too is The base capital program that you've outlined in the guidance, how is that spread through the year for 2021 just in terms of kind of a quarterly allocation basis? And then should you put the surplus cash into work? How does that CapEx look in terms of adding into the program? Is that mostly going to be layered into kind of late Q3 by the time you can actually get going? Or is it going to be Q4? And then the last one, is just around the exploration plans for the Llanos Basin. You kind of outlined nicely the middle Magdalena and the lower Magdalena plans, but just wondering if you'd give a little bit more of a description on the Llanos Basin and if any of that excess cash and capex could go to maybe accelerating some activity there. Thanks.

Thanks. Let's just answer the exploration program first. We have on our line, of course, our Senior VP of Exploration, Ryan Fowler. Ryan, would you like to give a little bit of color on the exploration program in the Llanos Basin, please?

Yeah, sure. Can you guys hear me? You can. Okay, perfect. Hi, Gavin. You know, we have a number of projects in the Llanos Basin that are working forward, and they're actually spread all the way from the north to the south end of it. None of them are sort of reaching the key access point right away. We have two exploration wells that are in the program for 2021. We'd like that to be more and we're working towards that. But a lot of our land base in the Janos now is new blocks that we've acquired since the 2019 bid rounds started up again. And so our access takes a year or two to really get moving on those blocks. And so we're going to see that ramp up really more in 2022. But we do have a couple of shots planned for 2021. Yeah.

And then we have our exploration, of course, in our VIM1 block coming up. And as the Reagan moves off of Veranda here in the next month or two and goes to the VIM1 block to continue exploration, following up on our lab laser discovery.

Yeah, we have significant appraisal programs in both VIM1 and Veranda, as you said, in the lower mag basin and the mid mag. And those are real technical catalysts for us this year in terms of things like adding capital, as was mentioned by the last questioner.

Yeah, potentially. Okay. Gavin, you mentioned capital spend, the profile for your model. You can basically think of it as around $50 million a quarter. And then we always leave ourselves some optionality for Q4, where we tend to have success. Sometimes we like to add additional capital to build on that success.

And just the final question was just on the, if you can deploy some of that surplus, is that mostly going to be in Q3 or Q4?

That would be correct. If we were going to do that, we would talk to the market about it, and we would give you timing as to when we would deploy that, yes.

Appreciate the color. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Once again, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad if you have a question. Next question, Al Stanton, RBC. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes, good evening, guys. I think we're all just looking for the same information in slightly different ways. It sounds, Mike, like you put in a slight CapEx upgrade to $200 million just then. So can you split that also between DevEx and expiration? And then also, one of the things I was just looking at the documents today or this morning, and, you know, you've got $420 million of CapEx for 2Ps. You've got 170 million of exploration commitments, half of which are suspended. So that's only 80. I mean, they sound like big numbers, but you could cover them with 2021 cash flow. So can we go right back to the beginning and go, what are we waiting for? Do you need to get in country to see what the opportunities are, whether they're inorganic or organic? I appreciate, you know, it's the new chief executive officer. hasn't been to the assets yet, I'm assuming. I'm assuming no one's been in country for a year. So, you know, in terms of the logistics, you know, do we need to get, you know, COVID passports or whatever we have in Canada and progress down to Bogota and then pull the trigger? Or do you need a bigger cash pile? Or are you just not seeing the opportunities you want?

Hi, Al. I guess you're saying why you're so disciplined. Well, we are disciplined. That's the way it is and that's the way it's always been. It's got nothing to do with us going to Bogota. We've been working in Columbia for 11 years. We have 300 folks down there. We have daily communications with them. We love to go to Bogota and work with our staff in person, but we can get along quite well using virtual. We are just being thoughtful and prudent. and working through our portfolio and looking at what things we'd like to do and what would add the most value, as opposed to just rushing off willy-nilly and spending money. We tend to like to invest money. So that's the comment back to you on that. In respect of capital, you made one comment about Mike gave a rough, generalistic, it's approximately $40 to $50 million a quarter, i.e. our capital programs even throughout the year. We're still in that guidance that we gave originally, which is $165 to $185 million in capital. That is our official guidance for this year. If we change it, we will tell you about that at that time, and we'll give programs and justification for that. So, you know, we've given you a little bit of color of what we might want to do, what we're working on, but we don't want to go into any more detail than that right now.

Sorry, what's the split of the 165 to 185 between exploration and development?

Yeah, so when we released our budget in November, we released it based on a $45 deck. I think Brent at the time was around $42. It was effectively about a 65% development, 35% expiration.

Cool. Okay. We'll sit and wait. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions registered at this time. I will turn the call back to Mr. Crookton.

Thank you, operator. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in PAREX and your continued support of the company. For further information, we invite you to visit our website or contact myself. Thank you very much and have a good day.

Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time. And we thank you for your participation.