CNX Resources Corp (CNX) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and welcome to the CNX Resources Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Tyler Lewis, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning to everybody. Welcome to CNX's Second Quarter Conference Call. We have in the room today Nick DeIuliis, our President and CEO; Don Rush, our Chief Financial Officer; Chad Griffith, our Chief Operating Officer; and Yemi Akinkugbe, our Chief Excellence Officer.

Today, we'll be discussing our second quarter results. This morning, we posted an updated slide presentation to our website. Also, detailed second quarter earnings release data such as quarterly E&P data, financial statements and non-GAAP reconciliations are posted to our website in a document titled 2Q 2021 Earnings Results and Supplemental Information of CNX Resources. As a reminder, any forward-looking statements we make or comments about future expectations are subject to business risks, which we have laid out for you in our press release today as well as in our previous Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

We will begin our call today with prepared remarks by Nick, followed by Yemi and then Don. We will then open up the call for Q&A, where Chad will participate as well.

With that, let me turn the call over to you, Nick.

Thanks, Tyler. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to keep my remarks brief this morning as we had another simple, clean, easy-to-understand quarter, and our investment thesis remains intact.

If you look at Slide 2 in our deck, the theme that I'd like to highlight once again is that of steady execution, and that's the same thing that we've been hitting upon in recent prior quarters. So for sure, second quarter is another quarter highlighted by successful execution of the long-term plan that we laid out in April of 2020.

The second quarter marks the sixth consecutive quarter of significant free cash flow generation, where we produced $117 million. We used that free cash flow to continue doing what we said we'd do, and we reduced net debt by $89 million and opportunistically bought back $23 million worth of shares at what we consider to be attractive prices. We currently have approximately $215 million left in our existing stock repurchase program.

And as we said in the past, we're going to continue to use the future free cash flow to reduce the absolute debt until we achieve a leverage ratio of around 1.5x, and while we're doing that, if our stock continues to trade at a discount, we'll have the wherewithal to repurchase shares along the way while reducing debt, which is what we've been doing since the fourth quarter of 2020. And we'll utilize both our liquidity and timing flexibly and use that flexibility to adjust the free cash flow allocation between debt pay-down and share repurchase weightings week-by-week, and we'll look at that month-by-month and we'll look at it quarter-by-quarter. What will guide us, it will be the math of the risk-adjusted returns and per-share value, and that's what we'll use when we decide how and when we change our weightings.

Also, in the quarter, we increased our 2021 free cash flow guidance again by another $25 million to $475 million or $2.18 per share. This compares to the previous guidance of $450 million or $2.04 per share.

So looking at the cliff notes version of where we're at. For the second quarter, free cash flow was up, free cash flow per share was up, debt was reduced, share count was reduced, and then for 2021, our free cash flow guidance was raised.

Now let's hear from Yemi.

Thanks, Nick. Good morning. I'm going to focus my attention on the topic of ESG to highlight our leadership efforts as well as the significant opportunities we see for free cash flow generation and per-share value creation in this area.

Last week, we released our annual corporate responsibility report that provides comprehensive look into our unique ESG accomplishments and our strategy moving forward. I want to take a minute today to highlight this company's value and our ESG leadership, not just in the oil and gas space, but in corporate responsibility across all America. If you haven't already, I encourage you to take a deep dive into the full report, which can be found on our website at responsibility.cnx.com.

In a world where, seemingly, every public company is racing to announce a net-zero target years into the future, CNX has not only achieved net zero but net negative status today, and that's highlighted on our Slide 3. We believe this is the first among natural gas upstream and midstream companies. When you look at the amount of methane we prevent from being vented into the atmosphere from the extraction of steelmaking coal on an annual basis, which is approximately 300,000 metric tons of third-party methane, we capture around 7x more CO2 equivalent emission that we produce via our Scope 1 and 2 emission footprint from daily upstream and midstream operations combined.

Additional opportunities exist to further deepen our net negative Scope 1 and 2 emissions profile by continuing to eliminate fugitive emissions from oil and gas operations, making additional investments in coal mine methane abatement for third parties and leveraging our extensive surface acreage footprint for alternative energy and other carbon-abatement projects.

Each of these 3 avenues offer new, exciting opportunities for free cash flow generation and per-share value creation. Most importantly, certain of this tangible drivers of our net negative carbon footprint are practically nonreplicable, and they are unique only to CNX.

An energy company that is carbon negative may seem counterintuitive, but we accomplished this through the same values and priorities that have driven our business and allowed it to thrive in this region for generations. It is important to note that CNX has not changed. On the contrary, the world has changed around us and began prioritizing the ESG-friendly work we have been doing for decades. The methane-abatement operation that led to our net carbon negative status are the same operations we have been perfecting for many decades and that have led to the birth of the company you see today.

So from innovative leadership on the environmental front that has potential -- that has the potential to translate into significant per-share value for our shareholders, let's pivot over to the social front, which is a hallmark of our tangible, impactful local ESG brand. We have led and we are determined to continue to lead our industry and the broader corporate community there as well. That's why in addition to initiatives within the company designed to foster an inclusive corporate culture, we have challenged ourselves with an aggressive diversity target for our internal workforce of 40% over the next 5 years. We will tackle this challenge through strategic to -- sorry, we will tackle this challenge through strategic opportunities to increase the diversity of our workforce rather than one-size-fits-all policy designed to simply meet a target. We believe a diverse workforce yields innovative ideas and important diversity of thought and opinion.

These internal initiatives tie directly to the $30 million philanthropic commitment we have made through the CNX Foundation as well as the Mentorship Academy we are working to establish for young adults in disadvantaged areas. By investing in urban and rural underserved communities and population in our footprint, we'll generate return for the company through an expanded, diverse hiring pool and return for the entire region through prioritization of the empowerment of the most marginalized among us. Encouraging progress in our communities while, at the same time, increasing the local pool of diverse talent is what sustainability means to CNX.

Beyond this signature items of our net carbon footprint and our diversity leadership, many of our tangible, impactful, local ESG accomplishments were a continuation from prior years. We were the first mover in the adoption of an all-electric frac spread, and we recycled over 90% of our produced water. Our employees worked the entire year accident-free despite the operational challenges of the pandemic. CNX delivered family sustaining median compensation level that exceeded over $150,000 per year, top among Pittsburgh region public companies.

Half of the direct reports of the CEO are diverse. We are a large net provider of tax revenue to the local communities and the state governments, long-term focused, optimized and intrinsic per-share value being the low-cost producer of our product and pay-for-performance culture are the guide polls of our Board of Directors and our corporate governance.

Again, I encourage you to review our corporate responsibility report and see for yourself how we continue to position CNX alone at intersection of ESG leadership and performance, low-cost operation, astute capital allocation and profitability that presents the best-in-class option for ESG-focused investors.

Thank you. I'll turn it over to Don.

Thanks, Yemi, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to start on Slide 4. This is a slide we have shown before and compare some of our main financial metrics to the 4 indices listed on the page. As you can see, CNX screens very well across the board.

Slide 5 highlights our cost advantage relative to our peers, which is structural and gives us an advantage versus our peer group. And given that CNX is a low-risk free cash flow annuity that is supported by our low-cost advantage, asset base and hedge book, we believe that we are trading at a significant relative discount in terms of free cash flow yield, which is highlighted on the bottom-right graph. As Nick highlighted, we will continue to pay down debt and reduce our shares under these conditions, and over the past 3 quarters, we have bought back $84 million worth of shares.

Slide 6 highlights our cost structure by quarter. As expected, our second quarter costs were up slightly due to 2 Shirley-Pennsboro wet pads coming online in the quarter. However, as you can see, we continue to expect our full year 2021 fully burdened cash cost to be around $1.05 per Mcfe. Also, I think that it is worth noting, and if you look at our income statement for the quarter, you will see that we had a loss on commodity derivative instruments of negative $539 million. This consisted of an unrealized loss of $529 million and a realized loss of just $10 million in the quarter. We mark-to-market our higher hedge book each period, and with the recent increase in future gas prices, this has resulted in a loss for the period with the vast majority of it being unrealized.

Slide 7 highlights the plan in action. With 6 consecutive quarters of free cash flow generation in the books, we have a high degree of confidence in continuing to execute our long-term, $3-plus billion free cash flow plan that we laid out last year. This confidence is supported by our low-cost structure, hedge book and operational proficiency.

Slide 8 highlights our balance sheet strengths, and as you can see, we paid down approximately $89 million in net debt this quarter. We have a significant runway and a lot of flexibility before our nearest-term bonds mature in 2026, and we have only approximately $320 million drawn on our credit facilities, which equates to around 2 or 3 quarters of expected free cash flow generation. Given our track record of free cash flow generation, we have a clear path to further delever the balance sheet.

I'll wrap things up on Slide 9, which hits on some guidance updates as well as some information on cash taxes. There are no changes to production and capital guidance for the year. However, we did mark-to-market gas and NGL price assumptions, which improved from our last update in April. As such, we increased our full year EBITDA and free cash flow guidance by $25 million, and as you can see, due to our share repurchases and our increase in annual free cash flow expectations, we increased our free cash flow per share guidance to $2.18 per share.

A few final items with respect to taxes. We currently have a federal NOL balance of approximately $1 billion and an unutilized IDC deductions of approximately $945 million. As a result of these 2 balances available, we do not expect to be a material cash taxpayer during our 7-year free cash flow plan through 2026.

With that, I will turn it back over to Tyler.

Thanks, Don, and operator, if you can open the line for questions at this time, please.

(Operator Instructions) The first question is from Leo Mariani of KeyBanc.

I was hoping you could talk us through a little bit on the pace of activity here for the rest of the year. Notice you had kind of 14 wells that you're able to bring online in the second quarter. Do we see that start to drop off quite a bit here in the second half? And just trying to get a sense, is the low point of turned-in-lines going to be 4Q? And I also was hoping you could help us a little bit with CapEx in terms of kind of matching that up, just trying to get a sense on the CapEx. If you could help us out in terms of how that trends over the next few quarters as well, and anything you can quantify would be great.

Sure. Thanks for the question. This is Chad. I'll get started on that. Maybe Don can fill in at the end if there's anything I leave out. I think what you're seeing in the capital program, remember, we're generally a one-rig, one-frac crew program, right? But we did add a little bit of activity at the beginning of this year to take advantage of some NGL prices. So we added a pad, and what that ultimately ended up doing is it sort of -- it added some capital in the first half of the year and added couple of TILs into Q2. But I think rest of the year is we're back to that one-rig, one-frac crew program. And so it's really just a matter of looking at the guidance numbers for the full year and taking up what we've done to date and then just sort of divide them by 2, which gets you real close to the mark on what to expect in the next 2 quarters on production, on capital and TILs.

Yes. No, just to add on to that, Chad, I mean it's an easy way to think about it, Q3 and Q4 should be fairly similar, so consistent capital and the sort of production between each one of them and, again, sort of can take guidance and sort of see what those numbers are.

Okay. So a number of turned-in-lines is pretty even in 3Q, 4Q. So if we take the guide of kind of 37 TILs and just subtract the first half TILs pretty much kind of gets us there, basically.

Yes. I mean, again, like Chad mentioned, the one-rig, one-frac crew a TIL turning a line 1 week earlier, 1 week late could put you on edges of quarters. But net-net, as far as the numbers, like the capital numbers and the production numbers, Q3, Q4 will be similar.

Okay. No, that's helpful. And then just in terms of your G&A guidance here, noticing on your chart here on Page 6, you guys are talking about full year cash G&A in '21 of $0.11 per annum, but just noticing you kind of came out at $0.15 in the first half. So it seems like it's implying a pretty large second half reduction in '21 on cash G&A. Just any color kind of around that?

Yes. Some of it -- yes, some of it's just mechanical around what kind of rolls through as far as the Q1 and Q2 in regards to how the equity and stick stuff transition across. I mean we're always looking to optimize the business and the company moving forward, but the quarter variability is more mechanical in nature.

Okay. And so the timing of some of the expenses. All right. No, that's helpful. And obviously, you guys decided to accelerate wet gas activity, which seems to have made a lot of sense just given the really high NGL prices. If we continue to see high NGL prices, could we see a little bit more of that later this year in terms of bringing on some of these liquids-rich pads? Obviously, NGLs have done incredibly well.

And then just lastly, in a similar vein, obviously, the '22 strip looks great. Now at this point, would you guys consider something else in maintenance mode for next year?

Yes. This is Chad. I'll start on the liquid side. Not only are we looking at timing of pads and timing of D&C activity, we're also looking at how to optimize our flowing production. Now through the midstream system we own in Southwest PA, where we have a lot of flexibility with where we deliver those volumes. We have some damp Marcellus volumes. We've got some dry SWPA Utica volumes. We have the option to either blend those together and sell it as a dry gas where we can reroute the damp Marcellus volumes to processing and extract NGLs and receive a premium.

We do that analysis really on a daily basis and try to optimize that existing production stream to extract as much cash flow as possible. Certainly, NGL prices are up, but so are gas prices. And so to us, it's really -- it's about the relative spread between NGL and gas. And so we have moved some volumes -- some incremental volumes to processing to take advantage of that frac spread. But the -- really, the strength in gas has really kept us from going further all in on that move. Local gas prices have sort of recovered and are very strong, and we continue to sell a lot of volumes -- blend volumes in selling those dry outlets.

On the D&C activity we're adding incremental or shifting activity to a wet play, it's a lot of similar math. We look at all-in sort of risk-adjusted rates of return on where we want to spend our D&C capital. We have additional wells that we can go back to in Shirley-Pennsboro and take advantage of strong NGL prices, but we have to look at the returns of that activity relative to the returns that we have on our base dry gas plan that we have in Southwest PA.

And so we're looking at that. There's a couple of factors the price will continue to move. Certainly, the cost structure of each opportunity is relevant, but we're looking at how to optimize the schedule going forward based upon how commodity prices are changing. I think your second question -- yes, you had a second question on...

Yes. I was just trying to get at, do you look in '22 and if gas stays really strong at $350, do you guys still want to stay in maintenance mode just due to the prioritization of debt pay-down? Or is there a chance to maybe do a little better than maintenance mode if gas is really strong next year?

Yes. And I think a lot of times the way we've sort of talked about this is and we think about it in terms of like more production sculpting as opposed to just purely, call it, additive work. So if you look across the forward strip and the way we've talked about it, the forward strip moves up meaningfully, I think you can think through things like that nature. But as far as like period-to-period seasonalities or just 1 year, yes, we'll try to squeeze as much production as you can into the kind of high price points, but that's more just, call it, trying to get things on the line a little bit quicker versus a little bit slower. But sort of net-net, not looking for brand-new activity really just trying to pull things up a little bit or, like we've done in the past, if it goes the other direction, we'll delay things a little bit to just try to get that front 6 months of production into the best pricing environments that you can.

The next question is from Zach Parham of JPMorgan.

The last several quarters, you've used a majority of the free cash flow to reduce debt but also bought back some shares. Can you just talk about what else you'd need to see to get a little more aggressive with the buyback? In the past, I think you've talked about a 1.5-turn leverage target. But with your hedge book, you've really locked in a lot of the future revenues to get to that level. So are you still waiting on hitting that target before getting more aggressive? Really, just any color you have there.

Yes. And I think we've talked about this a lot historically, and we've gone more aggressive historically in certain quarters. And as far as what we'll do going forward, there's a lot of different factors that will impact that. And I think to your point, I mean the more -- call it the closer you get to the target and the more forward visibility and the cash flows that are sort of locked in, the more you could lean into things as opposed to others.

We've recognized that gas prices are very unpredictable. Our equity still sort of trades unpredictable whenever our free cash flows are pretty much locked in. It's kind of always been puzzling to me personally. So we're trying to be, call it, thoughtful and prudent and do both at the same time. The weightings will vary by quarter by situation. And net-net is the balance sheet and the debt keeps coming down, you get closer to the target, and clearly, you have more ability to push more towards shareholder returns as the balance sheet gets closer, both just mechanically as of like the quarter we're in, plus the cash flow certainty that we have forward keeps growing, too, as we layer in hedges.

Got it. I guess one more for me. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing on local basis and your exposure there? And if the MVP pipeline is further delayed, how do you see that impacting basis within the basin?

Yes. Thanks for the question. This is Chad again. So certainly, MVP timing risk is certainly very relevant in in-basin pricing. We sort of saw the regulatory challenges that were coming along with that pipeline. I don't know, at least a year ago, we got aggressive on the in-basin hedging back in -- I don't know, last year, coming into the beginning of this year, we got pretty aggressive on the in-basin hedging we got.

Generally, as part of the programmatic hedge, we try to keep basis and NYMEX pretty locked -- in lockstep matched up. But we saw sort of the risk coming with the MVP and potential tightness in the in-basin market, and so we leaned into the in-basin hedging program and got out ahead of it, while that basis price was fairly -- was pretty good. And now we're sitting at a point where we're over 90% hedged on in-basin pricing exposure through the end of 2024, and we continue to layer on additional hedges beyond that where we see attractive opportunities to do so.

The next question is from Neal Dingmann of Truist.

Can you say -- you mentioned about potentially this buy more stock back. Could you talk about what discount you need to do so?

Yes. As far as -- I mean we haven't given any public guidance on exactly our buyback plan. So we've been buying back shares. We bought back about $85 million worth of shares over the last 3 quarters. And to Nick's commentary out of the gates, I mean where we're trading, you can expect us to continue to do 2 things, pay down debt and buy back shares. And clearly, as we've said before, the higher the free cash flow yield, the more you -- the faster you want to do it, and the, let's call it, balance by quarter we will change by quarter. But net-net, the ability to do both and not do both sometime in the future, but returning capital to shareholders today, I think, is fairly unique relative to a lot of folks, and like you can expect that to continue going forward.

Yes. Great answer to that. I was just trying to determine quarter-to-quarter so how do you decide which way to go because you do have a great free cash flow.

And then just one follow-up, maybe more for Chad. Just on you mentioned earlier about taking advantage over the year about NGLs. NGLs continue to be quite high. Obviously, you've got a great footprint to be able to do so going forward. Could you talk about would you do more pads on that length? I'm just was kind of looking at some of your maps out there and know that you have certainly availability to do so.

Yes. Tried to touch on that a little bit earlier, and sorry if I didn't quite get it all clear. But when we look at that, we look at the -- we have to look at the return of that next pad in a wet area versus that next pad in the dry area. And with gas prices -- with the gas strength and the ability to hedge that gas price for multiple years, the first several years of that new pad production, when you look at the risk-adjusted rate of return, when you look at those 2 opportunities, strong gas market with the ability to hedge and a strong NGL market with less of an ability to hedge, a lot of times, the sort of -- the scale still lands in favor of that dry pad.

But we're looking at it continuously. As the prices and the forward strips evolve, we update our numbers, and we shuffle the schedule around accordingly to bring forward the best risk-adjusted rates of return first.

The next question is from Noel Parks of Tuohy Brothers.

I have a couple of things. I was just curious, as you're talking about your first half activity levels and taking advantage of NGL prices being stronger, and I guess I'm thinking in sort of a bull case for gas. I'm curious about just service availability in the basin and whether we are in any consumable danger of having any capacity issues. I guess I'm sort of wondering like what's the frac spread spare capacity out there as far as high-quality, effective crews and equipment.

Yes. When you look at rig -- like current rig deployment, Lower 48, current frac crew deployment Lower 48, we're roughly 1/3 to 1/2 below prior peak. So that's -- it's still good crews, still good rigs available. I think there's lots of availability of crews, equipment on down the supply chain, whether you talk about sand or chemicals or even labor, it's fairly readily available to be able to deploy incremental activity.

And then Noel, with our position on the rig and frac program that we've laid out, we're in great shape with respect to being contracted and covered on the cost of those services. So we don't see any pinch points with respect to our ability to continue to execute like we have.

Great. And my other one, as ESG concerns continue to become more and more on investors' minds, I'm curious, for the private operators around you, do you have any sense of sort of the state of their work on or investment in working on their methane emissions? Unfortunately, that is one area where even the really conscientious companies risk being tarred by the brush of sort of the worst factors out there. So just wondering about any insight you had on that.

Yes. I mean it's hard to kind of tell about private companies, but like you said, the ESG umbrella is widespread right now. Everybody is working towards it. You just get nuggets of information on a few private companies here or there working to reduce their Scope 1 or Scope 2 as well. But obviously, you can't form like a very clear picture as to what they're doing. It's hard to tell because, again, because they are private there is only one way interacting with them and probably sharing ideas, that's when we get some insight as to what they're doing.

I do think that the regulatory environment is moving in a direction where, obviously, the rigor and the stringency of methane emissions is only getting tighter. So to a large extent, that's not a secret, of course, within the basin. I think many of the different operators, private or public, are trying to develop plans and operating plans and processes that will be ready for that. But like Yemi said, it's tough to gauge individually and company-by-company.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Tyler Lewis for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining us here today. Please feel free to reach out if anyone has any additional questions. Otherwise, we look forward to speaking with everyone again next quarter. Thank you.

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