Parex Resources Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Parax Resources Q2 2024 Operating and Financial Results Conference. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. And if you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to Mike Crookton, Senior Vice President of Capital Planning. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to PARX's second quarter 2024 conference call and webcast. My name is Mike Crookton, Senior Vice President at PARX, and on the call with me today are our President and Chief Executive Officer, Ahmad Molson, our Chief Financial Officer, Sanjay Bishnoi, and our Chief Operating Officer, Eric Furlan. Please note that at any time, telephone participants on the call can press star one to submit a question. As a reminder, this conference call includes forward-looking statements, as well as non-GAAP and other financial measures, with the associated risks outlined in our news release and MD&A, which can be found on our website or at www.cedarplus.ca. Note that all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars, unless otherwise stated. I'll turn the call over to Ahmad. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. The second quarter highlighted our portfolio's ability to deliver strong financial results and return of capital for shareholders. I'm pleased to say that in 24, we have delivered an 80% increase year-on-year in free funds flow on strong pricing realizations as well as reduced capital. Part of what's driving our strong financial results is the excellent performance from our base assets at Capistero and Block34. To date, results from water flooding have been encouraging with generally flat production profiles and reduced capital requirements going forward. We are generating significant free funds flow from these core areas. This can be attributed not only to us quality, but to the benefits derived from our pre-investment activity on drilling patterns and facility investments. At Cabastero, we are seeing encouraging results from our polymer injection pilot and are now in the process of designing a full field expansion and formalizing our plan. Building off Cabastero enhanced oil recovery success, we are replicating this approach at Block 34. The initial water flood patterns are demonstrating strong performance and post-water flooding implementation, we expect polymer injection to be a viable option. Turning now to I'd like to provide some high level comments on our performance and then hand it over to Eric to provide more specifics on our operational results and plans for the second half of the year. At Arauca to date, results have underperformed compared to our initial expectations. While we were optimistic at the onset, we have since encountered operational and reservoir challenges as activity has progressed as a block. As a result, we have paused our in-year drilling campaign to provide the team and our partner with time to reassess our results and develop a plan to optimize the field's potential over the longer term. With activity in Arauca pause, we have shifted cable to our capacitors block where we are now drilling a follow-up well to MD941 and at block 32 where we have successfully drilled an extension to the field. These two areas combined are positioning us to partially offset Arauca volumes and drill low-risk appraisal and development wells to add production and potential reserves in second half of 2024. While the third half of the year has certainly presented its challenges, we are targeting to grow production into year-end, look forward to initial results from our 24 high-impact big E-walls, and we'll continue to use our free funds flow to deliver share buybacks and regular dividends. I'll now ask Eric to provide additional details on our operational performance.