Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NASDAQ:CHK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Nick Dell’Osso: The pipeline is on schedule as originally contemplated to come online in the fourth quarter of 2024, project has gone really, really well so far. We are very pleased with our partnership with momentum here. And all that has happened is just the timing of the cash calls has changed a bit. The total budget hasn’t changed at all. So we are thrilled with this investment.

Nitin Kumar: Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator: The next question comes from Umang Choudhary with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Umang Choudhary: Hi, good morning and thank you for taking my questions. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the macro. You highlighted being disciplined to the changing natural gas conditions, focusing on free cash flow and conserving your undeveloped inventory for better pricing. What flexibility do you have in your service contracts to respond to changes in gas prices? And maybe you can touch on what you are hearing from non-operated partners in the Haynesville to recent gas price shifts?

Josh Viets: Good morning, Umang. On the service side, we are absolutely exercising flexibility in the first half of the year with dropping 3 rigs throughout in the first 6 months of the 2023 calendar year. We have a lot of flexibility on the frac crew side. We are going to be flexing between 2 and 4 frac crews throughout the course of the year. Only one of those is actually under a longer term contract, and that’s less than 12 months remaining on that. We do have some longer term rig contracts, but we do think that we’re in a pretty well position to manage those as we work through the course of the year. And to date, we’re not really going to incur any incremental penalties on the rigs that we’re dropping. It’s a pretty modest amount.

But that’s something that will continue to work as we go through the year. As far as non-operated rigs, we are starting to see some signs of operators pulling back activity, specifically in the Haynesville. It’s been primarily showing up on the €“ with the privates to date. We are continuing to see new ballots come in the door from some of our non-op partners. And so we’re going to continue to monitor that activity. But we are expecting operators to start pulling back with the weakness in the gas pricing we see today.

Umang Choudhary: Got it. That’s really helpful. Maybe a quick follow-up, I mean if you look at EIA data, they show that more than 600 Haynesville drilled and uncompleted wells currently. At what price levels do you expect these drilled and uncompleted wells to be turned into sales, both for you as well as for the industry?

Nick Dell’Osso: Hey, Umang, it’s Nick. I’ll take that. When we look at that, we don’t believe that, that DUC build is anything more than the working inventory DUC build associated with the rig count growth over the last couple of years. And there’s always a little bit of inefficiency for the industry when a bunch of rigs were thrown in. So we think cycle times probably slowed down a little bit. But when we take the total DUCs and we move off the DUCs that are probably more mature, the DUCs that are aged, and so they’re not likely to get turned in line. And then we think about how many rigs have been running and what the cycle time is and how there’s probably been some slippage in that cycle time with increased activity, we think this is really probably the working inventory.

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