MUR - Murphy Oil Corporation. (MUR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-01-25 14:49:05 ET

Murphy Oil Corporation. (MUR)

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

January 25, 2024, 09.00 AM ET

Company Participants

Kelly Whitley - Vice President, Investor Relations and Communications

Roger Jenkins - President and Chief Executive Officer

Thomas Mireles - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Eric Hambly - Executive Vice President, Operations.

Conference Call Participants

Arun Jayaram - JPMorgan

Neal Dingmann - Truist Securities

Leo Mariani - Roth MKM

Paul Cheng - Scotia Bank

Charles Meade - Johnson Rice

Timothy Rezvan - KeyBanc Capital Mortgage

Roger Read - Wells Fargo

Neil Mehta - Goldman Sachs

Presentation

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. And welcome to the Murphy Oil Corporation Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Kelly Whitley, Vice President, Investor Relations and Communications. Please go ahead.

Kelly Whitley

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us on our fourth quarter earnings call today. Joining me is Roger Jenkins, President and Chief Executive Officer along with Tom Mireles, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and Eric Hambly, Executive Vice President, Operations.

Please refer to the informational slides we have placed on the Investor Relations section of our website as you follow along with our webcast today. Throughout today's call, production numbers, reserves and financial amounts are adjusted to exclude non-controlling interest in the Gulf of Mexico. Please keep in mind that some of the comments made during this call will be considered forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. As such, no assurances can be given that these events will occur or that the projections will be attained. A variety of factors exist that may cause actual results to differ.

For further discussion of risk factors, see Murphy's 2022 Annual Report on 10-K on file with SEC. Murphy takes no duty to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements.

I will now turn the call over to Roger Jenkins.

Roger Jenkins

Thank you, Kelly. Good morning everyone and thanks for listening to our call today. As we turn to slide two, I'd like to highlight Murphy's ongoing focus on our priorities to Delever, Execute, Explore and Return throughout 2023, with another strong year of production and excellent execution, we achieved our $500 million debt reduction goal for the year and have reduced debt by $1.7 billion since the end of 2020. We produced 186,000 barrels equivalent per day for the year with 52% oil volumes.

During the fourth quarter, we began procuring equipment for the Lac Da Vang field development in Vietnam and production resumed at the non-operated Terra Nova field offshore Canada with wells scheduled to ramp up production through the first quarter of this year. In the Gulf of Mexico, we acquired an 8% working interest in the Zephyrus discovery for $13 million in the fourth quarter. For the year, we achieved 139% reserve replacement with preliminary total reserves of 724 million barrels equivalent and approximately an 11-year reserve life.

In exploration, we were named a paired hybrid and 8 exploration blocks in the Gulf of Mexico federal lease sale 261 held last fall. We also continue preparing for our 2024 planned exploration wells in the Gulf and Vietnam and advancing seismic reprocessing projects in the Gulf of Mexico and Cote d'Ivoire....

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