Murphy Oil Corporation (NYSE:MUR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tim Rezvan: Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. I was hoping to dig in a little deeper on Vietnam. I was wondering if you could provide more specificity on the steps towards sanctioning by year-end. And then if you can maybe give a big picture overview where you stand today, how you think this asset could possibly hit first production in 2025 and how we can expect to ramp? Just sort of updated thoughts based on the latest news. Thanks.

Roger Jenkins: Thank you for that question, Tim, and thanks for new coverage on Murphy and calling into our call today. I appreciate that. Vietnam has been around our business for a long time. We have through COVID and through our reduction in capital, have some things has been on the sidelines a bit. The key change here is that PetroVietnam, which is also our partner decided to approve our field development plan, which has been submitted for sometime. We see this as a, 80 million to 100 million barrel type opportunity. It’s been well tested. It’s very well organized and planned. We have a detailed field development plan that we’ve had for a while. So what’s going on now is we would re-bid all the services there, such as drilling and building of the facilities and then seek to check the economics of that, again, reaffirm that, go to our Board, but that sometimes either in October or December meetings, then we would probably not have first oil there to 26.

We want to work the project into really late early 25, if you will, so we can have ample returns to our shareholders through our framework, which is a key, key focus for us. And it’s not a very expensive development or a difficult development, something we have a long history of doing in shallow-water Malaysia where we built a large business. Also key in Vietnam as we have two very nice exploration opportunities, I actually have more than that, but we’re drilling probably two next year that can hence and make this into a business. Our goal is to make this into a 30,000 to 40,000 barrel a day business net to Murphy in Vietnam. We should have the exploration, lower risk opportunities in the field to do that and looking forward to executing on that.

Tim Rezvan: Okay. I appreciate that context. That’s helpful. And then, if we could take a follow-up on the Murphy 2.0 framework. You have a 2025 notes callable par in mid-August. And I know there’s, some asset sales, not sure on the repatriation status of that. But as you think about retiring debt, how do you measure getting debt retired as soon as possible versus waiting to call that at par because your 2027 and 2028 have our callable site premiums out over the next kind of one to two years. So just curious on your thoughts on when and how you will look to officially get that debt retired. Thank you.

Roger Jenkins: Yeah. Tim, I’m going to let Tom, our CFO, handle that for you.

Tom Mireles: Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Roger. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, generally, the way we think about it, we balance all those factors, whether it’s the maturity date or how the notes are trading and decide are we going to go with calling or maybe open market or tendering. As we look at getting into 2.0 second half of this year, as you point out, we’ve got those 25. Those will be able to call at par just later this month. And so we’ll probably focus on those initially. But if you look at the overall goal of us getting to $1 billion, that’s another $800 million of debt reduction. And between the 25 and 27, that’s about that amount, that’s callable today, 25% is being close to calling them that par soon. So that’s how we’re thinking about it. So we think to get to our $1 billion target, we can take that path.

Tim Rezvan: Okay, I appreciate the response. Thanks.

Tom Mireles: Sure.

Operator: Thank you. And the next question in the queue comes from Devin McDermott with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

Devin McDermott: Hi Good morning. Thanks for taking…

Roger Jenkins: Hey Devin. Good morning. Thanks Devin.

Devin McDermott: Hi Roger. So I wanted to ask on some of the exploration opportunities first and specifically on Côte d’Ivoire. So it seems like there’s two kind of parallel processes here. One is the Paon discovery and submitting a development plan for that and the second would be the seismic acquisition and evaluation of that for the remaining blocks. Could you just walk us through each of those? So for the development plan, what you would need to see ultimately for development to proceed there? And then similarly, the timeline of the seismic acquisition and when you think about potentially, drilling any exploration wells on the other blocks there?

Roger Jenkins: Thanks so much, Devin, for that focus on that. It’s a very good opportunity for us to kind of this opportunity fits a real bill for us and need for more exploration, exploration near success, different play types. Then we have what is our real bread and butter is prior discovered resources of other operators where we turn those into very successful developments with our deepwater ability. It is a two-pronged process on Quan. This is a discovery made by Anadarko a few years ago. They were ample Google. That’s a word I just made up things you can look up about Quan flow rates and different operators. We’re just getting our hands on that data just barely getting our hands on it. We believe it should work there, but it will require commercial terms around gas and ultimately leading to power generation in the country.