SilverBow Resources, Inc. (NYSE:SBOW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Neal Dingmann: No, I’d like to hit it. And 2 more, if I could. Just on hedging. You guys continue to be in a better financial spot. Just thoughts on the — future curve is quite still quite good for gas. Are you looking out to ’24, even ’25 to put more gas hedges on?

Sean Woolverton: Yes, yes. No. Yes, definitely, as we think about ’23 and concerns on ’23’s volatility on gas, we feel very good about being essentially — totally insulated to lower prices, but still exposed to — if gas prices move higher because we have a lot of collars. So right now, the strips below our floors on our collars, so we are asymmetrically exposed to the upside. Longer term — and we kind of like to think about our reserve report from 2022. If you look at the ’22 prices being very high, $6, $90 oil, but more specific to $6 in the — 75% of our reserves being gas, it demonstrates really the underlying value of SilverBow with a value of close to 5 billion. So as we think about upside, we’re very bullish on oil long term, that being end of ’24 into ’25 — or excuse me, very bullish on gas in that period.

So to your question, will we be hedging out? It’s in contango, but we think there’s more upside. And so similar to what we’ve done this year, we made a call on oil and have left ourselves some exposure to oil. Probably, we’ll look to continue to bolster ’24 hedging on gas, but we’ll be — we’ll stay open on ’25 plus just because we’re very bullish on gas starting in ’25.

Neal Dingmann: Okay. And sorry, but not just one last one just on M&A. I know — look, I know you guys are always looking for creative deals, but is there opportunities just for little bolt-ons or just some trades as you continue to do that? I’m wondering how active you are on that these days.

Sean Woolverton: Yes. No, good question. I think we’ve seen a flurry of larger-scale deals in the Eagle Ford over the last 6 months. We were an early mover more on probably some smaller-scale deals and feel like that still is a niche for us. And what we’ve seen — and we kind of have a longer-term view and really worked the map hard. But as our footprint has grown, the opportunity set to do more bolt-on deals, do JVs to drill longer laterals, to do small offsetting acquisitions, that opportunity sets just continued to grow just with a larger footprint. So that’s really where our focus is in the near term, and we think it adds a ton of value kind of being strategic from an industrial logic standpoint to build on the position that we already have.

Operator: Your next question is from the line of Charles Meade with Johnson Rice.

Charles Meade: I wanted to push a little bit more on some of the same topics that Neal was asking about. The 15:1 ratio you cited was — is really helpful, I guess, coordinate. But to elaborate a little bit more around that. So we’re looking at a strip of oil, which is, call it, 75. So that would suggest that at $5 Henry Hub, your oil assets would be about the same — equally attractive as your natural gas assets. But does that mean that we shouldn’t expect you to took back to natural gas until 5? Or does it mean that some of your best natural gas stuff may start to work back into the picture at, I don’t know, How should we think about the — how the curve is going to look in that regard?