Nicholas Olds: Yes, Paul. Just to reiterate, again, we’ve got a significant deep and broad, long lateral inventory across the assets. Just mentioned previously, the 80% of Permian inventory is 1.5 miles or greater, and the 60% greater than 2 miles, and we continue to see more and more 3-mile laterals and are very — we’re seeing good results coming out of the 3-mile laterals, both from our 2022 program, as well as 2023. So we continue to see increases in that space. Our teams continue from a BD standpoint and a land standpoint, look at core opportunities. And this is not only in the Permian. But as Ryan just mentioned in the Bakken, we just finished up some trades there to allow us to drill some 3-mile laterals in the future.
So we’re increasing the portfolio of long laterals across all 4 assets. The thing that you had talked about related to how far can you go, I’ll just step back, the 3-mile laterals that we’re seeing over the last couple of years are performing well. We’re very encouraged with the results. You want to make sure you get contribution across that entire lateral length. As we would think about going further longer lateral lengths, I think you mentioned 4 miles, there’s a trade-off. You can potentially drive down and improve cost of supply. And then also, you have to look through the lens of operational risk, because that operational risk is also, oddly, in development drilling, actually drilling the well, but also future workovers. And so we’re looking at that in the future, but I’ll leave you with the fact that the 3-mile laterals performed extremely well, and we’ve got a very deep inventory of long laterals, as I mentioned earlier.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Josh Silverstein with UBS.
Joshua Silverstein: Ryan, I appreciate the comments before on the return to capital thoughts for next year. I was curious with the added debt from the Surmont transaction, how you might think of additional shareholder returns versus this year or that want to build cash, or pay down the debt there.
Ryan Lance: Yes, I think we’re in that planning process as we kind of think about next year and all those moving pieces. So I say it looks to me like at this 10 seconds, commodity prices are kind of very similar to where we were coming out at the end of last year coming into the beginning of 2023. So I think that framework around total return as a starting point is pretty good for 2024. We’ll just have to see what commodity prices are as we go forward. And we have a plan, and Bill can address that, to kind of pay off the pay off debt as it comes due over the next few years. That gets us down to our original target of $15 billion in gross debt, and we can continue to do that. And I think if we had a very large up cycle to the price commodity price, we might look at adding more cash to the balance sheet as well. So I think all 3 of those are in play as we think about, what we do over the course of each quarter as we go into next year.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Sam Margolin with Wolfe Research.
Sam Margolin: I guess I wanted to ask for an update maybe on the Venezuela process. It’s come up in prior calls and the process is advancing. And I guess, specifically, I want to ask about a scenario where the assets that aren’t strategic to you get returned or surrendered to creditors, and what might be the path forward from there because it’s a large claim, and it’s material. And it seems like it will be a good outcome for you, but might require some actions in the aftermath.
Timothy Leach: Yes. Sure, Andrew. It’s Tim. But yes, we’re in a process with the Venezuelans right now. They also have a considerable amount of money through both our or ICSID and our ICC claims, approaching over $8 billion. They own some, on the full judgment on the ICC, they still owe us $1.4 billion, $1.5 billion. So we’re pursuing that pretty aggressively. I think we’re watching the progress closely. Clearly, the U.S. government has provided a lifting of some, if not all, of the sanctions here, waiting on results of what the Venezuelans do on the other end for free and fair election. So that may create a bit of an opening. But this is a long process, but we’re pretty committed to doing everything we can to make sure we get our money out of Venezuelans that they owe us. And that’s what we’re focused on.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Neal Dingmann with Truist Securities.
Neal Dingmann: My question, you get on this a little bit, just on M&A specifically, why I appreciate your earlier comments about any assets needing in the 10-year plan. I’m just wondering, is there a preference for, when you’re seeing things shorter longer-term cycle assets? And just also curious on how you view valuations of some of the recent public deals.
Ryan Lance: Well, certainly, the way we look at it, Neal, is we like a global, we like a diverse portfolio. We like it to be balanced. I think we’re mostly focused on what’s the cost of supply to make sure it fits our framework around that, and that any asset that you bring into the company, make sure it compete for capital on an ongoing basis against a pretty rich, deep, durable, long life and a lot of inventory sitting in the company today. So as I said, it’s a pretty high bar. I don’t know quite how to comment on the recent deals that have been done. Those are transactions. Those are really good companies that were bought. Clearly, they have good assets. we’re pretty familiar with them. We’ve watched them for a long period of time, and they’re good companies with good assets. Transactions were, in a part of the cycle that’s, little frothy and probably at a higher mid-cycle price than we would ascribe to them, I guess. Maybe that’s all I should probably say.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Scott Hanold with RBC Capital Markets.
Scott Hanold: I was just kind of curious, does consolidation that creates larger peers in the Permian impact the competitiveness of comps development and positioning. Specifically, if you look at services and midstream capacity, as you kind of move forward on your — kind of 7% growth CAGR over the next decade plus?
Ryan Lance: I don’t think we see a huge issue there at all, Scott. There’s a lot of operators already in the Permian Basin. And it seems like the service side of the business has been accommodating all the activity that we have out there. There’s been periods of tightness on certain categories. There’s been, there are certain services that, by and large, we don’t think it’s going to be a big issue for us going forward. The advantage of being one of those large operators in the basin is, you get the attention of the service companies because they know you’ve got a program that’s durable. I know you got a program that has some link to it. They know you’re not going to be whipsawing them around. And those are the kind of customers that they want to work for. And then those are the — so they tend to work with us, and so we don’t see any exposure to the current consolidation trend in the Permian, and it’s going to continue. No questions. So more probably needs to happen.
