Conocophillips Q2 FY2025 Earnings Call

Welcome to the second quarter 2025 ConocoPhillips Earnings Conference Call. My name is Liz, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. During the question-and-answer session, if you have a question, please press star-1-1 on your touch-tone phone. I will now turn the call over to Guy Baber, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, Liz, and welcome everyone to our second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. On the call today are several members of the ConocoPhillips leadership team, including Ryan Lance, chairman and CEO, Andy O'Brien, chief financial officer and executive vice president of strategy and commercial, Nick Olds, executive vice president of lower 48 and global HSE, and Kirk Johnson, executive vice president of global operations and technical functions. Ryan and Andy will kick off the call with opening remarks, after which the team will be available for your questions. For Q&A, we will be taking one question per caller. A few quick reminders today. First, along with the release, we published supplemental financial materials and a slide presentation, which you can now find on the Investor Relations website. Also, during this call, we will make forward-looking statements based on current expectations. Actual results may differ due to factors noted in today's release and in our periodic SEC filings. We will make reference to some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the nearest corresponding GAAP measure can be found in today's release and on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ryan.

Thanks, Guy, and thank you to everyone for joining our second quarter 2025 earnings with results in Outlook. We delivered another strong execution quarter, once again exceeding the top end of our production guidance range. We reiterated the midpoint of our full-year production guidance, even with the announced agreement to sell our Anadarko Basin Asset for $1.3 billion. And our capital spending and operating cost guidance ranges, both of which we lowered last quarter, remain unchanged. On return of capital, we may remain on track to distribute about 45% of our full-year CFO to shareholders this year. That's consistent. The bottom line, we're operating well, we're delivering on our plan, and we're well-positioned for a strong second half of the year with clear free cash flow tailwinds, including lower capital spending. Turning to the Marathon Oil acquisition, I'm pleased to announce that the asset integration is now complete and that we've significantly outperformed. We added more high-quality, low-cost supply resource. We're achieving more synergies. We're delivering a more efficient lower 48 development program. And we've already announced more asset sales than we guided at the time of the transaction announcement. While these are all significant achievements, we're not stopping there. Given our integration success, which builds upon other successful transactions as well as our recent implementation of a new company-wide enterprise resource system, we continue to drive for improvement across every level of the organization. As part of this effort, we've identified more than 1 billion of additional cost reduction and margin enhancement opportunities. That's on top of the more than 1 billion of Marathon synergies we've already expected to realize. Additionally, now that we've exceeded our $2 billion asset sales objective ahead of schedule, we're raising our total disposition target to $5 billion. Effectively, these initiatives will strengthen our ability to generate strong returns on and of capital and enhance our long-term value proposition. And that's a value proposition that's already differentiated, not only relative to our sector, but relative to the broader S&P 500 as well. We believe we have the highest quality asset base in our peer space. Our global portfolio is deep, durable, and diverse, and we're recognized as having the most advantaged U.S. inventory position in the sector. We believe this advantage will become increasingly apparent as the U.S. shale industry continues to mature, and investors are forced to more clearly sort through what we call the inventory in the U.S. inventory halves. In addition, we're uniquely investing typically in our longer cycle projects in LNG, multi-year free cash flow growth. Assuming a $70 per barrel WTI price environment, we expect the major projects we're currently progressing in combination with the additional cost and margin enhancements we just announced to drive a $7 billion free cash flow inflection by 2029, the consensus free cash flow expectation for the entire company this year. With that, let me turn the call over to Andy to cover our second 25 guidance and strategic objectives in more detail.

Starting with our second quarter performance, as Ryan mentioned, we had another quarter of strong execution across the portfolio. We produced 2,391,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day once again exceeding the high end of our production guidance. In the lower 48, production averaged 1,508,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, averaged 883,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, as we successfully completed turnarounds in Norway and Qatar. Regarding our second quarter financials, we generated $1.42 per share in adjusted earnings and $4.7 billion of CFO. We had a $1.5 billion working capital headwind, effectively offsetting the equivalent-sized tailwind we realized last quarter. Capital expenditures were $3.3 billion, slightly down quarter-on-quarter. We returned $2.2 billion to our shareholders, including $1.2 billion in buybacks and $1 billion in ordinary dividends. We've returned $4.7 billion to our shareholders, about 45% of our CFO. Consistent with our full-year guidance, we ended the quarter with cash and short-term investments of $5.7 billion, plus $1.1 billion in long-term liquid investments. Turning to our outlook, for full-year production guidance, we have narrowed the range and reiterated the guidance midpoint, even after adjusting for the Anadarko sale of approximately 40,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, which is expected to close at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Our capital spend and cost guidance ranges, both of which we reduced last quarter, are unchanged. We now expect our full-year effective corporate tax rate to be in the mid to high 30% range, excluding one-time items, lower than we previously guided due to geographical mix. And we now expect a total full-year deferred tax benefit of about half a billion dollars, primarily reflecting the positive impacts from the one big beautiful bill.