Diamondback Energy, Inc. (NASDAQ:FANG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Kaes Van’t Hof : Yes, no problem. So generally, right, the majority of our capital is going to be allocated to the best zones, co-development. A big development this year in kind of the sale of Robertson Ranches and the Central Martin County area. So that’s where the majority of capital is getting deployed. Certainly, there are deeper tests going on throughout the basin. We have our Limelight Prospect, which covers that those deeper zones, a tariff structure on the eastern side of the Midland Basin, where we’re going to be developing some Woodford and Barnett. Generally, we’re probably going to drill 3 or 4 wells there this year. I don’t think it’s going to be 10, 15 plus, but I think generally, promising results from the deeper zones across the basin and the benefit of our position is that we hold a lot of those deeper zones, and we have a significantly large mineral company that owns mineral rights to the center of the earth forever in all those zones.

So if those zones start getting leased up, it’s a great benefit to the Diamondback-FireBird relationship.

David Deckelbaum : And then third year now of being in relatively a maintenance mode or low-growth mode, have you seen noticeable differences year-over-year in benefits from perhaps improved base declines? And how does decline on ’22 or ’21?

Kaes Van’t Hof : Yes, again, breaking up a little bit, but talking about base declines. I think the base business, obviously, the base decline continued to decrease since being a maintenance mode from 2020. We did add two acquisitions in FireBird and Lario, where they have built a lot of rate very quickly. And so those two deals have a higher decline rate than the base business, but I think we’ve managed that in our guidance and also manage that in how we’re going to complete wells across the pro forma position. So certainly, base decline is coming down, but I really think the best benefit of this lower growth environment is that we can grow per share metrics while not having to change our development plan with every $10 move in oil price, right? The plan is the plan right now. Shale has certainly become longer cycle with these bigger pads. And so, we’re not having to put a stress on the ops teams to move pads around if oil moves $5 or $10 a barrel.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jeanine Wai from Barclays.

Jeanine Wai : Our first question maybe just following up on David’s question there on capital efficiency. Capital efficiency looked great in Q4, and you turned to sales about 55 net wells and you hit oil when your guidance, we think, implied like 73 net wells, so that’s great. For 2023, the number of wells to sales looks a little bit higher than what we would have expected, if we just use the amount of wells you did in ’22 and then we add in the Lario and the FireBird deal wells. So are we looking at that math correctly for 2023? And any color you would have would be helpful since including the divestitures, we still think the ’23 outlook looks conservative, and we’re assuming that the priority is really to beat on CapEx and not volumes.

Kaes Van’t Hof : Yes, Jeanine, I think a couple of things, right? Q4 was going to be a great quarter going into December. We had — obviously, we all had a winter storm here. Diamondback did not announce the winter storm impact, but certainly, the winter storm did impact our production. So going into the last 10 days of the quarter, we felt very good about where we sat and still hit guidance. And therefore, from a POP perspective, we kind of moved some wells from Q4 into Q1 to get a head start on POPs. It’s not a huge capital impact, but it is a number where we guide to first production. So there’s a good amount of POPS in Q1 2023 because we were ahead of schedule in Q4 and feeling good about where we started Q1 this year.

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