Comstock Resources, Inc. (NYSE:CRK) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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But we’ve still got some things that we’ve got targeted to put to work out here in the field, it’s going to get the cost down. We feel considerable amount. And then the one thing I want to emphasize is we’re drilling single wells here. So when you look at the cost up in the core, everything up there is a multi-well pad. Either 2 or 3 well pads. So you’re getting 6%, 7%, 8% less cost, just via a multi-well pad versus these down here are single wells. So that alone is driving our cost up a little bit. But Jay is totally right. I mean you’re looking at EURs definitely potentially double what we have up in the core. And then the cost is going to — we’re going to make a lot of improvements on that going forward in the future.

Miles Allison: I think, Charles, the really answer is, if our borrowing base is reaffirmed for that $2 billion. So the 17 or so banks that support us, I mean, they looked at that. I think Quantum has looked at it. I think where we are right now with where we’re going, we see a lot of clarity and some of the confusion that we had 2 years ago when we first drilled the Circle M. Some of that is easing off. And as we drill the wells, they will tell us what the EUR is, and then you’ll see what the real cost to drill and complete these wells are once we’ve had to get enough sample set and that will be months down the road, but we’ll still report to you the results on a quarterly basis, which have been really good.

Operator: And our next question comes from Jacob Roberts from TPH & Company.

Jacob Roberts: Happy Halloween.

Miles Allison: That’s right. offer fall on Halloween.

Jacob Roberts: That’s right. On the Quantum partnership, I’m curious if you could provide your view on what the cadence of spend would have been if Comstock were entirely responsible. And then just on that comment on Slide 15 that this will reduce capital outlays. Are you able to comment on how we should be thinking about 2024 CapEx relative to 2023? Is this going to be offset somewhere else and kind of maintain the same level? Or should we be expecting kind of a lower number?

Roland Burns: Well, we started that with more rigs. Talking about the CapEx. At the beginning of this year, then we’re going to be starting out next year at. So we would — and we think, overall, service cost and drilling rates are down a little bit. So we — there’s a lot of signs that point to lower capital. And then we’ve made investments in the midstream before this partnership and now the partnership will kind of take over that responsibility. The build out of the Western Haynesville midstream is going to be phased in. We’re not going to build it all on day 1 to handle a huge volume. It’s going to be layered in over a 5-year period based on the well results that we achieved. We have quite a bit of capacity now because we acquired a base system, and we made upgrades to that this year.

And so we have a great kind of — great starting toolkit here. And then what we’ll do is we’ll start to add additional treating capacity, additional gathering lines as we need them as we build this out. So I think next year, the spending for this venture is probably between $100 million and $200 million. So that would have been part of our base CapEx, and so now we’ll kind of be funded from this other source.

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