Ovintiv Inc. (NYSE:OVV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Neal Dingmann: Yes. Agree. All that makes sense. That’s certainly to me as well. And my second question maybe for Greg, on the Permian. Specifically, can you address future potential maybe frac hits or needed well shut-ins. It seems to me kind of the plan you guys have talked about even now post deal, that you all have much more minimum level of shut-ins unlike a number of your various peers that are experiencing this.

Gregory Givens: Yes, Neil, thanks for the question. And you’re exactly right. That was one of the value propositions we saw with the acquisition we just closed was you had three companies that were doing a good job, but operating independently. And because of that, they weren’t able to coordinate schedules and they were knocking off wells shortly after they were brought. And what we’ve already seen, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks is that by using a coordinated approach across the entire 180,000-acre footprint we now have, we’ve already seen a reduction in frac hits, which allows us to get the full benefit of all the fracs that were out there pumping today, why not knocking these newer wells off. And we’ll continue to optimize this as we go-forward, but we do feel like that is a big part of the value we are going to be able to bring to this acreage by not having that be a problem.

And some of these new completion designs also seem to be helping on that front as well.

Neal Dingmann: No. Great to hear. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Brendan.

Brendan McCracken: Thanks, Neal.

Operator: Your next question will come from Gabe Daoud at TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Gabriel Daoud: Hey, thanks. Good morning, everyone. Maybe just back to the Permian outperformance. Greg, could you maybe just comment on what exactly you need to see here or how much time and data do you need to collect to start factoring in as our performance on — or in your go-forward guidance. I guess it would depend on what some of these new cubes look like on the new acreage. But curious to hear your thoughts on that. And then could you also just comment on where pro forma Permian production is today? I think at the time of the deal, you pointed to 125,000 barrels a day of oil & conde combined. So just curious if that’s more or less where you’re at today.

Gregory Givens: Yes. So as far as the forecasting goes, as I mentioned, a lot of activity going on in the play today. We are very pleased with what we saw in the first half and those wells continue to hold up. But we are going to be bringing on a lot more wells in the back half of the year. We are going to want to see how that productivity holds up in keeping in mind a number of the wells, over half the wells we are bringing online in the third quarter are going to be wells that — while we are influencing the tail end of the completion, we were not involved in those wells from their inception to bringing them online. So we do believe there’s a little uncertainty there. We want to see how those wells do. We’re quickly incorporating all of our completion techniques into our operations.

So you’re going to see, as we go through the third and into the fourth quarter, a whole lot of data coming in, and we are trying to be thoughtful about how we approach this. By later this year, we should have a much better sense of how well this uplift, not only is impacting our existing legacy portfolio, but the new wells and then how long it’s not just the number of wells that we need to see is the duration, how long this production uplift holds up. So we are looking forward to seeing that. And then as we continue to see that more consistently, we will start baking that into our forecast.