Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NASDAQ:CHK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nick Dell’Osso: Well, you got a couple of questions embedded in there. And I think the answers won’t be surprising to anyone. We like the basins we’re in. We like the assets that we’re in because we know that they are at the top of the heap for natural gas supply and demand fundamentals and delivering against that supply and demand fundamentals for many years. So, we’re happy being in the Marcellus and the Haynesville. We’ve been asked over time, would we look outside of those basins. And my answer there is our non-negotiables are a high bar. If you wanted to apply those non-negotiables to a place we don’t operate today, that bar is even higher. So, we continue to say that is an unlikely answer for us. But we do like where we operate today, and we think that we have a competitive advantage to be in both of those basins.

Doug Leggate: Thanks Nick. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

Nick Dell’Osso: Great.

Operator: Our next question will come from Zach Parham with JPMorgan. You may now go ahead.

Zach Parham: Thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to ask on the outperformance in the Haynesville. You’ve outperformed your guidance each quarter this year. You increased the 4Q guide looking at state data, well productivity seems to be trending positively. Can you just give us a bit more color on what’s driving that outperformance in the Haynesville and how sustainable you think that is going forward?

Josh Viets: Good morning Zach, this is Josh. We’ve been really happy with the way the performance has showed up in the Haynesville this year. And of course, going back to last year, we knew we had some bottlenecks within the midstream. And so we’ve done a ton of work over the last year to really shore that up. And largely, what that’s been attributed to is simply working with our midstream providers to introduce additional interconnects between gathering systems, helping support treating capacity expansion. And so those are things that are just simply will be sustainable through the years, and it’s allowing us to continue to mitigate midstream induced downtime. So, we’ll continue to work with our midstream providers to allow that to improve over time.

Well productivity has been strong through the course of the year. We’ve seen some modest increases in well performance. One of the things that’s actually allowed us to do is to delay the second frac crew that we’re bringing in. We’ve allowed ourselves to push that back by a couple of months. We’ll bring that second frac crew back now in the middle to late November, which allows us to preserve some productive capacity as we head into early 2024.

Zach Parham: Thanks for that color. And then just one clarification on 2024. You talked about $1.6 billion in CapEx, assuming that additional Haynesville rig comes back in the second half next year. Does that include the spend on the momentum pipe, which I think is around the $100 million next year?

Nick Dell’Osso: Good question, Zach. No, that does not include momentum. We’re trying to just give you a number to think about our regular way E&P business.

Zach Parham: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from Umang Choudhary with Goldman Sachs. You may now go ahead.

Umang Choudhary: Thank you. Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I would love your thoughts on the 2024 macro outlook for natural gas. And to follow-up on Doug’s question around your our activity levels in the Haynesville, you plan to add a rig in the back half of the year. Any thoughts or any color you can give in terms of where you think the spending level would be your production outlook would be for the year?