Canadian Natural Resources Limited (NYSE:CNQ) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Your next question comes from Doug Leggate from Bank of America.

John Abbott: John Abbott on for Doug Leggate. Our first question is, what are you seeing on gas? And will you maintain your gas growth projections? Or is there anything that would cause you to slow down growth?

Tim McKay : Yes. There is — as you’re aware, there is a little bit of pressure on natural gas prices coming into the summer and maybe partly into next year. So we constantly continue to high-grade our opportunities. So while I don’t see anything materially different, I do see that at the end of this year, we could end up doing a few less gas wells and a few more oil wells. So I would suspect that as we get into breakup here, we will view our go-forward plans and adjust accordingly to always continue to high-grade our opportunities.

John Abbott: Very helpful. And then for our second question is, what are you thinking about as far as how you see the potential acquisition and divestiture market at this period of time?

Tim McKay : M&A, in my opinion, is there’s a little bit disconnect between the buyer and sellers I think. I look too expensive in my opinion, to be in the market. And that’s why we’re focused on just organically growing on a dollar per BOE, we’ve been quite successful. And we have lots of running room in our inventory of assets. So therefore, it’s a good time to sit back, work through our assets and develop our opportunities production cost effectively.

Operator: Your next question comes from Dennis Fong with CIBC World Markets.

Dennis Fong : The first one is just around leverage and term debt. I know the company obviously has a lot of available liquidity and the maturities have frankly already been pushed out given your, I guess, campaign of repurchasing kind of near-term notes. How should we be thinking about some of the medium- to longer-term term note structures as we go forward? And what do you think is maybe the appropriate capital mix or capital structure mix as we think about things going forward?

Mark Stainthorpe : Dennis, it’s Mark. Good question. It’s — when you look at our bonds outstanding today, we’ve got about $11.4 billion of Canadian equivalent bonds outstanding. And we build a maturity profile to make sure we have the opportunity to pay down absolute debt as we knew the free cash flow was coming. So you’ve seen that over the last couple of years, we’ve been able to pay down bonds and sometimes pay them early, as you pointed out. So we do have some maturities here at the end of this year. There’s about $400 million remaining on our one Canadian bond and somewhere in the neighborhood of just over $800 million after the first half of next year. So that gives us the opportunity to potentially pay down that debt and get to a place where your bonds are in that $10 billion sort of neighborhood. So given the net debt sort of level that we’re looking to achieve here, that kind of all goes around to make sense on how you build that capital structure.

Dennis Fong : Great. Great. I appreciate that answer. My next question is shifting gears more to the upside is at Primrose. I know at your Investor Day, you highlighted, we’ll call it, the productive capability at that asset. How should we be thinking about the ability to get to those higher production levels? And how does that interrelate potentially to, we’ll call it, positive data that you receive from your initial pilot on the solvent side of things? And then maybe what are the next steps after you kind of feel more comfortable with the data that you have?