Diamondback Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FANG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Kaes Van’t Hof : Yes, Neil, great question. I think we announced two E&P asset sales, noncore asset sales this quarter that I think fit the mold of what the market looks like right now. And that’s assets that don’t compete for capital in our capital plan for many, many years and a little bit of PDP associated with those assets. But generally, a buyer that is looking to develop those assets a lot faster than we’re planning. And so these two deals, the buyers are going to get aggressive developing these two assets right away, which in the capital allocators, it’s just good capital allocation from our perspective. Going into it, we expected to sell more midstream assets than E&P assets. So that’s why we bumped the target, and we still have some strategic midstream investments that are nearing the point where they should be monetized.

Gray Oak, I think, was a great example. We retained all of our commercial benefits of the transaction. We still move our barrels to the Gulf Coast. But just that from a financial perspective, the pipeline was a great investment and it worked, and we monetize it to the partners. So I’d expect more on the midstream side. We did highlight what we have from a midstream perspective in the deck for the first time, but we’re going to be patient and prudent when it comes to selling assets.

Neil Mehta : Yes, that’s great perspective. And then the follow-up is the oil volume guide for the full year was solid. Q1 a little bit softer. So maybe you could just talk about the cadence of production over the course of the year and just how we should be thinking about the path for oil production in particular in 2023?

Kaes Van’t Hof : Yes. Good question as well. I think the plan when we acquired Firebird, Firebird was producing 17,000 barrels of oil a day. We guided to that asset producing 19,000 barrels of oil a day for the year 2023. So clearly, some growth on that asset we’re already seeing, but we’ll see the majority of that benefit going into Q2 to Q4. And then on top of that, obviously, closing the Lario acquisition on January 31, that immediately adds 6,000 net barrels a day — or sorry, subtracts 6,000 net barrels a day from Q1 because we didn’t get to count those volumes in January. So base case plan is to grow steadily from Q1 through Q4, and we got the projects to back that up.

Operator: And our next question comes from Arun Jayaram from JPMorgan Securities.

Arun Jayaram : Travis, you mentioned in your prepared remarks how the company has really optimized its multi-zone co-development strategy over the last couple two, three years. I was wondering if you could provide a little bit more detail around kind of what you’re doing today? I know, on Slide 16, you gave us a lot of great detail on the amount of net lateral footage by zone, but I wanted to understand what you’re doing to maybe mitigate some of the issues we’re seeing from the industry in terms of parent-child interference and impact some delayed targets. And just your thoughts on sustaining the level of well productivity gains that you generated last year into the future.

Travis Stice : Yes. Good question, Arun. In 2018 and early 2019, we were really studying this co-development strategy intently, and the significant observation that we made from our analysis was that essentially, all of these zones talk to each other. And if they talk to each other, which means you actually have pressure communication during the fracking operations, which subsequently also means that you’re kind of sharing the reserves as an individual well is produced that if you don’t get them upon initial — the initial development that when you go back in later, you’ll find those zones have experienced some depletion and that depletion degrades the efficiency of your stimulated rock volume, which ultimately changes the production profile.

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