Liberty Energy Inc. (NYSE:LBRT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Chris Wright: Look, I think the general working life of these diesel pumps is 10 years that’s rebuild. There’s a lot of maintenance goes on after that, but pumps that are more than 10 years old. The technology is obsolete. The cost of maintaining and run there so they’re generally falling away. You may see a 12-year-old pump out there. There’s some – there are some stuff really hanging on. With digiFrac, we definitely expect meaningfully longer life than for a diesel engine. It’s just simply – the engine life on our banks, Ron maybe 2x.

Ron Gusek: Or time between rebuild is probably 3x, Sean. So we’re going from maybe somewhere in the 20,000, 25,000 hour range to a time between overhauls of maybe 84,000 hours is the nameplate number for that Rolls-Royce engine.

Sean Mitchell: Okay.

Chris Wright: And the thing you should think that they – that’s more reduction in capitalized maintenance along the engine of the life of the equipment. The life of the equipment might be longer, that’s great, but really what it does. It affects the annualized capital maintenance and brings it down.

Sean Mitchell: Absolutely.

Chris Wright: That’s for keeping it yes we want to deliver a better quality pump, a better quality fleet at lower long-term costs.

Sean Mitchell: Got it. And then of digiFrac in the Liberty portfolio?

Chris Wright: That’s going to evolve with time. I believe we’re there or we’ll certainly be there at having a solution that’s ultimately cheaper and better. So if you’re going to build, you’re probably going to build what’s cheaper and better. But our build pace is going to be, as Michael said, dictated by the marketplace, but it’s going to be slow and gradual. It’s got to make sense – and you got to have compelling economics, you’ve got to have a willing to allocate ex amount of capital there. So our fleet probably slowly migrates to all whatever is cheapest and best.

Sean Mitchell: Thank you. And then maybe one more, just I think earlier in the call, this was mentioned, but I don’t know that we got a clarification, just sand facilities and any efforts to expand capacity there or – of your existing facilities and/or your desire to build new ones in the current market?

Chris Wright: Look, the key – sand is a key ingredient for frac. That’s our focus on sand. We’ve got to keep our fleets and our customers’ wells on time and without interruptions to operations. So yes, we’ve invested a little bit in debottlenecking, increasing our throughput in there. We’ll make investments to what it takes to secure that Liberty’s operational performance and deliver to our customers is the best in the industry. That’s what drives our decision-making there.

Sean Mitchell: Okay, thanks guys, appreciate it.

Chris Wright: Thanks appreciate that.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Chris Wright for any closing remarks.

Chris Wright: Thanks, everyone, for your time today and interest in this business. Liberty and our industry as we demonstrated networks, matter and sorry about the problem with the phone network, we’ll prevent that from happening in the future. Everyone, have a good day. We look forward to talking to you at the next call.

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

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