California Resources Corporation (NYSE:CRC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Mark McFarland: Eric, it’s Mac. I just want to echo what Francisco said. And I think that the key to this year with the 1.5 rigs is to reduce uncertainty. So this is a plan based off of permits in hand. And as we go forward, if the circumstances change, we’ll consider those. But right now, after going through last year, several different rig lines, of rig lines, we wanted to put forth a plan that stabilize and then maximize the cash flow, as Francisco said, for the year.

Operator: We have a follow-up question from Leo Mariani from ROTH MKM.

Leo Mariani: Just wanted to follow up very quickly on the separation of the 2 businesses. So you clearly talked about laying some groundwork here and understand there’s preliminary steps involved here. But it sounds to me like you guys are pretty much intent on eventually getting these businesses separately. Do you envision potentially the carbon management business being a separate public company sort of down the road? Just trying to get a little bit more color around what the vision might be on the separate businesses here.

Francisco Leon: Great question. I don’t know if I will answer it very clearly because we were working on a lot. And we are focused on maximizing the value of the company. I would tell you, Leo, that if I look at the reserves of the company, and if you look at the PDP value of the company, and then I look at what we think is the value of carbon management, we don’t think it’s there reflected in the stock price. So we’re going to take the steps to unlock that. But in what form and what the time line is, we still need to work through that to make sure we have the optimal outcome here.

Leo Mariani: Okay. I appreciate that. And then just on hedging, just given sort of the — at least for now kind of a less focus on less capital, would you guys anticipate doing less hedging with less forward CapEx? How are you thinking about that?

Francisco Leon: Yes. So we talked about in the past a lot of the hedges that we had in place were put there when we went to bankruptcy. And those hedges are starting to roll off. So we’re seeing the benefit, in particular in ’24, where we don’t have a lot of that impact of the bankruptcy hedges. We think there’s an amount of hedging that’s needed in this business to be able to guarantee the returns as we invest on a go-forward basis. We’ll continue to assess where we are. We’ll see how the year progresses and how the market is behaving in terms of oil. But, at this point, we feel ’23 is adequately hedged, and we’ll see what — as the year progresses what we think of ’24.

Operator: And this concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Francisco Leon, for any closing remarks. Please, Francisco, go ahead.

Francisco Leon: Great. Thanks, everybody, for listening in. I look forward to seeing a lot of our shareholders next week at the various conferences, and thanks for tuning in.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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