Antero (AR) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Motley Fool Transcribing, The Motley Fool

Thu, April 30, 2026 astatine 11:46 AM CDT 34 min read

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DATE

Thursday, April 30, 2026 astatine 11 a.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

• Chief Executive Officer — Michael N. Kennedy

• Senior Vice President, Liquids Marketing and Transportation — David A. Cannelongo

• Senior Vice President, Natural Gas Marketing — Justin B. Fowler

• Chief Financial Officer — Brendan E. Krueger

• Vice President, Investor Relations — Dan Katzenberg

Full Conference Call Transcript

Michael N. Kennedy: Thank you, Dan. Good morning, everyone. I would similar to commencement my comments by praising our operations squad for their occurrence during wintertime tempest Fern. Their quality to execute 100% uptime connected our operations passim the tempest is an awesome achievement. As highlighted connected Slide 3, our team’s efforts and beardown pricing helped america present 1 of the champion quarterly results successful institution history. Also arsenic highlighted connected the slide, we closed connected the HG acquisition and the Ohio Utica shale divestiture. The HG acquisition added important production, currency flow, and astir 400 1000 nett acres and 400 drilling locations to our halfway West Virginia Marcellus position.

Importantly, the acquisition volition thrust firm currency costs down $0.30 per Mcfe, which lowers our breakeven outgo and drives borderline enhancement. Turning to the integration of HG, we are importantly up of schedule. We precocious turned successful enactment our archetypal HG pad. This six-well pad located successful the liquids-rich country has 110 1000 full lateral feet, oregon mean lateral lengths implicit 18 1000 feet per well. Notably, this pad has 1 of the highest nett royalty interests astatine 89%, further enhancing its complaint of return. We expect the pad to nutrient $150 cardinal per time and stay level astatine these levels for rather immoderate time.

On the acquired assets, we person already achieved operating synergies of $15 cardinal to $20 cardinal and are present forecasting implicit $80 cardinal for the afloat year, outpacing our archetypal people of $50 million. Once we closed connected the acquisition and took power of operations, we recovered incremental cost-saving opportunities, which see drilling and completion plan changes, h2o handling optimization, and benefits from our economies of standard that are driving faster-than-forecasted synergies. Our archetypal 4th accumulation was a grounds 3.9 Bcfe per day, 13% supra the year-ago period. This accumulation maturation is expected to proceed done 2026 with full-year accumulation of 4.1 Bcfe per day, a astir 20% summation from 2025.

Turning to the right-hand broadside of the slide, our quarterly fiscal results were highlighted by our quality to seizure important premiums to benchmark prices. These precocious premiums, combined with our operational performance, generated escaped currency travel of $657 million, the second-highest level successful our institution history. We utilized this escaped currency travel to accelerate indebtedness simplification pursuing the HG acquisition. At the clip of the acquisition announcement, we had targeted escaped currency travel disposable to money the acquisition from December done the extremity of the archetypal 4th to beryllium astir $500 million. We exceeded this people by $250 million.