Marcellus, the Anadarko, and the powder. We're successfully executing on our 2026 plan and look forward to sharing our initial 2027 views in November. Let me end where Clay began because everything you've heard today ties back to a simple disciplined model, a premier Permian anchored portfolio, top tier capital efficiency, a fortress balance sheet, and a return framework that delivers cash to shareholders through the cycle. With that, I'll turn it to Clay for closing comments before Q&A.

Thanks, Shane. That discipline model extends to the portfolio itself. Our comprehensive portfolio review is well underway with a single objective, maximizing total shareholder value. It's a top organizational priority, and we're moving with speed and intention to enhance the value of our company by leveraging our differentiated skill set a hot market for quality assets and keeping an eye on the future value creation opportunities we're evaluating every asset through a consistent framework of capital efficiency the scale and durability of free cash flow and strategic fit as i've said previously i expect this exercise to be measured in months, not years, and we're making significant progress, with an update expected this fall. That said, I don't think of this as a one-time event. After its initial reset related to the merger, the evolution of our asset base and taking advantage of market opportunities has been a longtime part of Devin's culture and will continue to be a critical skill. Given the confidence and commercially sensitive nature of this work, as much as I would love to we will not comment on specific rumors today but the takeaway is simple every asset has to earn its place in the portfolio and we are working to maximize the short mid and long-term value for our shareholders when i sum it all up we believe devon is a catalyst rich story we will deliver quickly against our synergy targets updating you quarter by quarter making fast progress on our portfolio review and execution, rolling out a capital-efficient 2027 plan, leaning in to repurchasing shares, and enhancing our advantaged balance sheet. That is a differentiated investment proposition, and this team intends to prove it. Lastly, I wanted to say thank you to the Devin team. Integration is not easy, but every employee continues to exemplify our core values of integrity, courage, relationships, and results. Emerge two proud companies in record time without missing a beat in the field. This is the quarter is your proof. To everyone at Devon, the legacy Devon and legacy Cotera alike, thank you. The best is ahead of us. With that, operator, I'll take our first question. We kindly ask that each caller limit themselves to one question so we can get more questions on the call.

We will now begin the question and answer session. As mentioned, please limit yourself to one question. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Arun Jayaram with J.P. Morgan. Arun, your line is now open.

Good morning, Clay Shane. Clay, I will bite my tongue and won't ask you about specific assets or market rumors for assets under your portfolio review. But what I do think will be helpful to the market is you to perhaps provide the criteria that you and the board and management team are utilizing to identify which assets you view as core to Devin's GoFord portfolio. How does commodity mix between oil, gas, NGLs fit into that as well as tax implications?

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. And, of course, all of that list is on the list and several things as well. We think about it, you know, I think about it kind of through three lenses. First, what's the value of the asset to Devin? How do we think about the inventory? How do we think about our ability to extract value? You know, what's that kind of core base hold position? And then secondly, you have to be very observant in the market. There's no doubt about it. there's some really interested, hotly interested parties in buying quality assets, and we don't want to miss any of those opportunities. So the second view is, what's the market value of the asset? And then third, I think is an important consideration around the strategic fit. How does this asset fit in and enhance what really is a Permian-centric core business? How does it enhance that above and beyond the incredible qualities that we have on our core piece of business. So combine that with the specifics around inventory and capital efficiency and competition for capital, all of those things that you mentioned do play a role in that evaluation. So thanks, Arun, for the question. Good end around.

Thanks a lot.

Okay.

Your next question comes from Neal Mehta with Goldman Sachs. Neal, your line is now open.

Yeah, thanks so much. Clay, I love your perspective on the federal lease sale. That was very helpful commentary, slide six, that kind of walked us through sort of the royalty benefits and maybe why on cost of supply, it's not as high as it optically looked, but how do you think about how you want to approach this acreage? Is this something that gets pulled forward in terms of the timing of how you prosecute it and maybe spend a little bit more time, if you can, talking about, you know, getting the market comfortable with the investment you made here?

Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for the acknowledgement. And what I'll tell you, there's a lot to brag on about the team, but we're not perfect. And I can tell you, we didn't communicate that effectively enough on the rollout. So this is kind of our second attempt. And obviously, there's a whole lot to be proud of on the execution of that. 13 days post-close, I was so incredibly excited to get to the finish line, and successfully so. We forgot to, you know, really kind of nail the communications piece. So, look, we learn every single day. We intend to get better every single day. And this is a better, more fulsome story. Certainly that royalty piece, the undrilled nature of this acreage, the mechanics behind this bidding process, unlike some of the Gulf sealed bid processes, just it truly exhibits the market price reality. and then it's in our backyard. We're incredibly proud of the operational prowess, the infrastructure that we have, the extended laterals, the footprint that we have, and that's why we are incredibly proud to be the rightful owners of this. Now that it's in-house, it has to compete like everything else. The good news is, as you can see from the graphic depicted on the slide, it stacks up at the top of the list. This is our Delaware Basin potential depicted on the left side of that slide in the slide six and you can see where the red bars line up and it's very much top quartile even top decile centric what that means is we're full speed ahead getting the permits uh getting this in the queue and we'll be executing as i mentioned in the prepared remarks very substantially in in the 2027 program thanks our next question comes from betty jung with barclays betty your line is now open.

Good morning and congratulations on a strong first combined quarter. My question is on slide seven and just on the Delaware well cost. What stood out is that now you're already at $800 per foot and that is ahead of some of the additional synergies that you're expecting to capture. So if I could ask, like, where do you see an aspirational target of how that well cost could trend over time? And what you're working on to lower it, what's your confidence level? And also just given the suite of technologies that you're seeing out there, how low could that go over time?

Yeah, thanks for the question, Betty.

It's a fun topic because there's a lot going on there i'll hand it over to blake and get his perspective on this opportunity from a synergy standpoint but also as a dnc the dnc executive leading that effort yeah thanks clay and appreciate the question buddy because there's a ton of work that goes into just a number on a slide out if you don't mind i'll give you a little deeper dive into some of the synergies we're already seeing uh you can imagine it's been a ton of work bringing these two orgs together, but it's also been really exciting. We're gaining a lot of momentum. Our teams are finally getting to look under each other's hood, and we've been operating across the lease line from each other for a long time, and it's leading to a lot of great gains. One of the first things we did is we immediately centralized our D&C team post-merger, and that's already paid a bunch of dividends. The first one I would point to is on the supply chain side. Devin has a fully integrated supply chain team that can bundle or debundle services almost in real time to optimize whatever the current market presents to us. We brought that flexibility to the merger, particularly with our new scale, and also with the legacy Cotera operation, which was more of a bundled model. They've been able to find a lot of value there. The second piece is just sharing best practices and techniques. They like to say there's no secrets in the oil field, but I can tell you every good operator has a few and our teams have got to share some secrets Devon figured out a really clever way to make simul frack more efficient we've been able to extrapolate that quickly across the whole platform so you'll see the number of simul frack wells going up in our program whereas on the Koterra side and a lot of time and energy on long laterals complex well bores four and five-mile wells, four-mile U-turns in the Permian, all that knowledge is being applied, and you'll see our average lateral links start going up through time. And then the last one, which is really exciting, you know, Clay hit on this earlier, is, you know, Devin's really invested a lot of time and energy in AI, and for me, this is nowhere more evident than in the DNC. The way I would explain it is Devin builds a best-of-the-best performance curve with a micrometer. every minute every day across every rig every crew every well every basin constantly searching for best of the best performance and benchmarking against it and these ai tools are just combing these massive data sets looking for the gaps they highlight the gaps they elevate the gaps and the team attacks it it's it's see a gap fill a gap improve performance reduce cost all day every day that's what the teams live and breathe and it's been really fun to uh bring that into the Cotera operations that we've now combined so these are some of the big synergies we're already realizing I can tell you only some of this is in that $800 per foot that we put out that represents wells coming online between now and the end of the year so you can think of that as a 9 to 12 month trailing cost structure behind those numbers the synergies I talked about plus many more are not in that number and as we look ahead to 2027 we're really excited to deliver an even more aggressive cost structure thank you appreciate the color thanks betty your next question comes from gabe dowood with truest apologies your next question

actually comes from neil digman with william blair neil your line is now open uh morning And Clay, Shane, Blake, and Dan, and Clay, what 100 days has been for y'all, I want to say congrats. Clay, maybe I'll just take another shot. My question is maybe looking at the portfolio review a different way. Well, I know you certainly don't want to get into the asset specifics. Are you able to say, is there any timeframe you all are targeting for this process, you know, given certainly the market appears to be highly a seller's market today? There's no doubt about that. And I assume that, you know, bids always have a shelf life. So I'm just wondering, is there any sort of time frame around this?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we're exceptionally aware of the market. And I would tell you, you know, every asset has a slightly different market. But one advantage of announcing an across-the-board effort like this is there is no shortage of incoming phone calls. And so every intentional buyer, every JV partner, every bank, everything that you can conceptually think of is certainly coming our way. And so that, as you know, from the first 100 days and the message here is we're not letting any grass grow under our feet. We are moving aggressively, but also thoroughly. I think the only thing more important than speed is making sure that we're making the right decision. and that that is an absolute first priority is doing the right thing first secondly with haste speed intentionality uh and making sure that we're not uh slowing anything down so i have a full you know the organization is coming together exceptionally well the executive team the alignment there is is going uh exceptionally well and i feel like i have the full backing of the board on however we want to move forward and i can tell you it's it's moving forward quite well we just want to avoid the trap of commenting on rumor du jour and so we will effectively stop it there thanks for the details buddy I appreciate it thank you

Neil your next question comes from Doug Legate with Wolf Doug your line is now open Well, good morning, everyone.

Thanks for taking my question. Clay, or I guess it's probably directed to you, Clay rather than Shane, but when you think about the use of free cash flow, you've laid out the story about the $9 billion of debt and so on. And I think you know, obviously, where I stand on this. But I'm particularly interested in what you do with the proceeds of any asset sales. Does that go into a formulaic buyback return of cash? Or does asset sale proceeds get treated differently than operating cash flow if and when they come?

Shane, why don't you take a step?

Yeah, I don't mind doing that. Great question, Doug, and really appreciate it. So, look, and I'm sure you're referring to this anyway, but that is net proceeds. Obviously, the first call we've got on any proceeds from any asset sales would be to fulfill our obligations to the government, pay the tax bite from that. So that would come off the top. On the net proceeds, you know, I think the next question we ask ourselves is, you know, what cash flow and credit capacity has been pulled out of the system? And therefore, if we're targeting somewhere around $9 billion in debt by year-end, 2027, does that target move based on sort of the new complex or complexion of the portfolio going forward? And it may. So we'll figure out what the right sort of next target could be, both in terms of any leverage reduction and or adding to the balance sheet. And then I think the third piece, the one that I think we're highly focused on, in terms of formulaic on that, is, you know, how do buybacks play a piece of that? And I said, look, it's going to be very situational specific, you know, what size asset, what size proceeds, et cetera. And there's an array from on the one side of it, you know, you could see this sort of supplementing an opportunistic buyback plan on another size of proceeds. You could see it maybe stacking onto the base dividend for some period of time, two quarters, four quarters, six quarters to buy back. Or if it's a very large proceeds asset sale, you could see an accelerated buyback program being a part of the mix there. But that's something that is not formulaic at this point. It's something that's subject to conversation with Clay and the team and certainly with the board in terms of getting alignment on that. But I think that whole suite's available, but it's going to be dependent on what the size of the net proceeds after sort of taking care of the obligations associated with that sale would be.

Yeah, here's what I would just add to it, Doug. I think this is a, you know, obviously what an incredible opportunity for us to figure out how do we return shareholders the best. You know, certainly we've made significant progress with the opportunities near term on paying down debt. We like the way our balance sheet looks. We've got a little bit more work to do, but that'll come in time. I don't feel a tremendous pressure. This is certainly a question, and I know you have a firm opinion on this. This is a question and a real active debate amongst our best and most informed shareholders, and we get varying opinions. You know, when I think about kind of a nominal sale and I think about throwing that additional proceeds onto the significant free cash flow that we generate organically as a company, I think about all three options, essentially stacking a little bit of cash, paying down additional debt, and then more aggressively going back and buying more shares. I think I have to be on the table. As I look at our share price today, I can't help but think about what a compelling buyback opportunity that is. And certainly, as I think about the balance of the year, having checked the debt goal for the year, I think you'll see us differentially move towards buybacks. appreciate the answer fellows i might not always agree with that but i appreciate the answer thank you yeah appreciate that doug and like i said respect your opinion and and like i said this is one that we actively debate this is a imprecise um science and and we got a lot of smart people that offering uh offer different views on this so thanks for your perspective always appreciate it your next question comes from john freeman with raymond james john your line is now open Thanks.

Clay, you've previously called the billion dollar sort of synergy target sort of more the floor and not the ceiling. And, you know, in the presentation, y'all did a great job of kind of elaborating and providing a lot more detail on all the various initiatives that are underway, how you're using technology. And I'm just trying to get, I guess, a little better understanding of what's sort of embedded in the billion-dollar target versus what would potentially serve as upside. So things like the surfactant test, the autonomous artificial lift, like are those sort of included in the billion? Is that additional upside? Just any additional color, Clay, you could provide on that.

Yeah, John, here's a little bit of color. And I'm trying to guard against getting too far ahead of ourselves. like these numbers aren't flowing through the financials yet. And that is where the real rubber hits the road. And so before we start, you know, accelerating the billion dollars or increasing the billion dollar target, we want to be real cautious about that, because I think the most important thing about this billion dollars is not just delivering it, but doing it in a way that's credible and very transparent to the to the investors. And so we're going to hold back until we start seeing things flow through the financials, which will be coming in the near quarters before we do any kind of more granular articulation. Certainly, there is upside to the numbers. You know, the first order, as we've got really good experience, we just did a business optimization with a billion dollars. The first order of business is you don't shoot for a billion dollars to get a billion You shoot for a number that's much higher than that because things look, evaporate in time, things get pushed. Sometimes it doesn't exactly fall on the right timeline. And then sometimes things are significantly better than you thought. And so we absolutely have that opportunity today. I mentioned 350 different initiatives. We're already in the process of that. Those things are starting to firm up. You know, got a lot of confidence. Absolutely, when you add up all of the kind of gross potential, it's a number well north of a billion. But we're sticking with a billion dollars. And what I would tell you is the degree of confidence that I have today, as opposed to, say 14 months ago when we were kicking off our business optimization on the legacy Devon side, I feel so much more confident today in being able to deliver this number. We've got the right tools, we've got the teams in place, we know and understand how to quantify, how to hold these numbers with integrity, and really deliver, I think, an outsized product to the investors, and that's absolutely our intention. Thanks, Corey. Thank you, John.

Your next question comes from Josh Silverstein with UVS. Josh, your line is now open.

Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. You had mentioned that the initial 2027 views will come out in November on the 3Q call. I'm curious how you're setting up or how you set up a proper development plan and start allocating capital, knowing you're going through this asset review process. Are there multiple plans you have underway? Are you outlining this based on a view of oil and gas prices? Will capital shift? I'm just curious how you're trying to put this together now, knowing that it's a few months away.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Josh. It's pretty iterative. And I think the advantage of having sophisticated systems that can move quickly is you need to run all the scenarios. And certainly, as we think about asset rationalization and thinking, what will life be like without asset X, Y, and or Z? And certainly, you know, running that through a real-world scenario of how's 27 going to shape up is something that we're doing real-time. And so we have an upcoming strategy session with the board. That's typically the first time we're showing the board kind of the five-, ten-year look. And, of course, in that is their first kind of detailed view of the coming year. That usually gets us pretty close to being able to telegraph, kind of pre-read by November. that was both legacy Cotera and Devin's kind of general best practice and so we expect to to follow up on that again this will be rough numbers this will be kind of a soft guide as we've done before but yeah absolutely doing all of the iterations and then like I said in the prepared remarks you know don't think we just run through the tape and then we're static for the next decade Devin has a long history of reinventing ourselves and thinking about how do we further enhance the portfolio. And so, you know, we've got a real opportunity with this combination. We're going to be very intentional about it. As was mentioned earlier, the market is exceptionally hot and interested because, you know, there's so much public talk about it. We're getting a lot of inbound phone calls. And so it takes a little bit of time to process that and really evaluate, again, most importantly, to make the right decision for shareholder value accretion. So, thank you again for the question, Josh.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Baker with Evercore. Chris, your line is now open.

Hey, thanks. Clay, we'd love to, you know, some great detail around the Delaware Basin and the slides. We'd love to just get a sense of how you think about optimal scale there. Obviously, you know, it's bigger today, but just in terms of the forward opportunity set and just any thoughts around, you know, potential use of proceeds to Doug's question just around further scaling up that position.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Chris. You know, if you're going to be the dominant player in any basin, I can't think of a better basin than the Delaware Basin. From our asset footprint, from the infrastructure that I mentioned, you know, all the way through there is just so much value creation. We're looking at deeper horizons. We're looking at improvements on, you know, the gas opportunities. We have an incredible gas opportunity there. How do we truly optimize the value creation from that? There's so much kind of synergistic opportunity upside from having a dominant position there. And of course, it is one of the least developed, kind of least mature among the spectrum of the great domestic resource play. So we love that position there. How do we think about additional bolt-ons. You know, I certainly talked about the focus on trades, the focus on additional bolt-ons, you know, any additional opportunities, we're always evaluating. But, you know, as always, we have to be very critical about what we bring in. We're incredibly proud, you know, of the federal lease sale. I think we've done a much better job of articulating the why behind that. And so you can kind of get an idea of there's the bar. You know, we find an opportunity like that, you bet we're going to be aggressive and add incredible value to the portfolio.

Great. Thanks.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Scott Gruber with Citi. Scott, your line is now open.

Yes, good morning. Clay, you know, leveraging AI is obviously a core pillar in your operational strategy. The services industry has also been touting their AI-enabled offering. So can you discuss your AI strategy between in-house development versus third-party sourcing? How has that evolved as you continue to push AI deeper into your operations? And how are you working with the services industry on the intersection between the software and the hardware to really squeeze the most used set of AI?

Yeah, thanks for that question. You know I love me some serious AI. And I love talking about it. I'm a huge champion, but look, a little bit of our secret sauce is Trey Lowe. Trey's got a strong operational background. He actually worked for a major service company for quite a while. He's a distinguished SPE lecturer. He understands our business as well as anyone in this organization, and he happens to be a self-proclaimed technology geek, which I love all day. So, Trey, why don't you tell us a little bit of your perspective on the question from Scott?

Thanks, Scott, for the question. We love to talk about what is happening here in this space. Clay mentioned it several times. We see technology as an advantage for the company. It's a differentiator. It's a place where we lean in. We've invested in our data sets for the better part of a decade, really building that foundation and making them accessible to all of our employees and trusted. Whenever OpenAI launched ChatGBT about three years ago, Devin leaned in really hard and and started applying AI across the entire enterprise and really focused on empowering our employees. When we announced the merger, we really ended up with the best of all worlds, in my opinion. And the places where Cotera had invested heavily around the use of AI and machine learning model for well prediction and helping us with our capital plans married up really well with where Devin had invested, which was really heavily in the operational side of our business, production, drilling, completions, and some other subsurface workflows. And so all of those systems are zippering together today, and it's going to put us in a great place. And we've seen it already, you know, reaping dividends for our teams that are working through the integration. What just a year ago was taking us a couple months to create new tables. tools, now we're doing these things in two days. And we see it in the results. We tried to give a flavor of what we're seeing through synergies from these AI tools, things like the closed loop AI gas lift systems that we have and the smart gas lift systems. We're able to scale these things at a pace which just honestly we've never seen in my career previously. And on those specific applications, back to your original question, those are partnerships in many ways with some of our providers that are helping us with some of the puzzle pieces to put all these things together. But the real secret sauce is empowering our employees with the gas lift system we went from just a few months ago only having a few wells running automated, fully closed loop. And then in March, we had a couple hundred wells, and now we're at 1,000. And we know in the Permian Basin alone, we've got well over 2,000 still in front of us. And in fact, just a couple weeks ago, we applied this to the first set of legacy Cotera wells.

And so just the pace at which we can move is unprecedented we're seeing great results out of all those things and that's just an example but across the board whether it's our legal team our production team we're seeing the same sort of acceleration of ideas and innovations and and we're going to see it flow continue to flow through to the uh to the bottom line yeah and it's got one thing i would just add it's been incredibly fun for me to see our new coterra side of the family you know really get unleashed on some of these tools and you know the the jaws on the ground the eyes wide open the you know leaning forward saying I need access to that now has just been really encouraging and exciting in affirming of the work that we've quietly been doing kind of under the radar so great synergy opportunity and look forward to talking more about it in the coming quarters I appreciate the call thank you thank Thank you, sir.

Your next question comes from the line of Neetan Kumar with Mizuho. Neetan, your line is now open.

Good morning, Shane and Clay. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to focus on something you are doing versus what you might do in the coming weeks or months. So you talked a little bit about in your presentation about surfactants, and recovery factors is a big focus for the industry right now. I was wondering if you could provide some more color on what have you tested, has it been localized to the Permian or have you tested in other basins, and just some of the things you're doing on that side of the house.

Yeah, thanks for the question. This is John. We've tested surfactants most broadly in the Permian Basin up to this point, and I think there's a distinction here we want to make. We've tested it both in the completion phase of our operation, but also the production phase of our operation. I think what Clay highlighted in his prepared remarks and what we highlighted in the deck was around the completions, and that's pretty exciting work that we've done to date. It's a fairly small data set up to this point, but I would emphasize that 90% of the wells that we trialed with surfactants had material uplift. We saw north of 15% at 180 days, so we're extremely excited about that technology. You heard Clay mention that we're going to scale that beyond 50 wells in the very near future. I would tell you that we're putting pressure on the teams to pump it in all the wells and tell us why we shouldn't pump surfactants and really treat that more as an exception. One thing we didn't talk about in the deck was the production phase. And so within the Delaware Basin over the past year, we've been active also pumping surfactants in the production phase. This is typically between six months and two years into the productive life of a well. We're also seeing uplift here. The results are a bit more variable. We see certain zones that perform better than others, but what I would generally say is we're seeing positive uplift here. So this is also yet another program that we're planning on scaling in the Delaware Basin, looking at going to 20 jobs a month. And, you know, beyond the Delaware Basin, we've got plans to expand that as well. Looking at the year end, we're looking at the Williston Basin. But to the extent we continue to dial in our chemistry and have successful results, you can see us expand that even further.

Thanks, Matt.

Our next question comes from the line of Philip Jungwirth with BMO. Philip, your line is now open.

Thanks. Good morning. With additional Permian egress starting up, how's the new Devon positioned in terms of takeaway remaining Waha exposure? I assume this should be a nice actual tailwind for the pro forma company next year. And then you guys have always been really good on the marketing side, just wondering how you view market concerns that new gas pipeline capacity in the Permian could push some of the basis weakness to major hubs in East Texas. And do you think there's enough takeaway for gas to flow further downstream to LNG? And generally, how are you positioned here?

Yeah, Philip, well, I'll take that one to start off. Listen, yeah, we've been very pleased to see the recent Kendrick Morgan expansion and the impact that's had the second quarter is obviously a tough quarter on Waha. But going forward for the balance of the year, you know, we remain positioned well, you know, Between firm takeaway capacity and in our hedge position, we've got over 70% of our production either hedged or down to the coast, and we feel good about that. We've got additional egress coming in later in the year and in the first half of next year on Black Home, and so we're excited about that. So next year, again, we would hope to be in that same level. Some of that 70% is financial hedges that will roll off, but we do have some in 27 and will continue to build. It's a big issue. It's something that's not just a near-term issue for us and for the basin. It's one that Devin has been pretty forward-leaning into, and I think as we think into the future, you know, it's an issue that's not going away. So we'll continue to think about, you know, sort of multiple phases of ways to deal with it. One, it could be additional egress. Two, through the financial hedging opportunities that we've got. And three, you know, we'll potentially look at continued opportunities in basin. For example, the CPV project that we've got coming online in 28 for $115 million a day that's going to be priced against ERCOT West, you know, should give us an advantage pricing relative to in-basin pricing. So we will continue to look on it. Yeah, your final question on, you know, how could this impact downstream along the Gulf Coast? You know, absolutely. I mean, we're super excited about what's happening with LNG and power development. But, man, the industry has been really good at sort of meeting against those demands. And as LNG export capacity and supply ramps up, you know, look, it could create more volatility in the long run. You know, we're not immune to weather, and we haven't added any storage in a long, long time in that part of the marketplace. And so, yeah, it's a big issue, and it could cause greater volatility in the future in some of that Gulf Coast pricing.

Yeah. Last thing, just to wrap on that, Philip. I mean, what I would say is anytime this is a this is saying that Greg Horn, our guy who runs all our marketing for the company, he says, look, where you see a challenge, if you can identify it early and the position that we have, the upstream position that we have can turn that challenge into an opportunity. So, yeah, there's interesting challenges out there, and every single one of them, we look through the lens of how do we turn that into a real opportunity for us to create incremental value from this incredible resource and world-class position that we have in the Permian Basin. So thanks for the question, Philip.

Our next question comes from Gabe Gawood with Truist. Gabe, your line is now open.

Thanks, Operator. Hey, everyone. Clay, maybe a higher-level question for you. Just since the deal's closed, stock's been a little bit of an underperformer relative to your new large cap peer group. I think we would all agree there's a pretty big value proposition here moving forward. I'm just curious, what do you think is – what do you attribute that maybe underperformance to? Is it – do you think the market's become impatient around asset sales? Do you think maybe they're not fully recognizing the free cash deliverability of the pro forma or the synergy capture? would love to maybe get a little bit of color from your perspective on what you think the market's missing here. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks for the question, Gabe. It is not lost on the team that we are underperforming, and that is a clear focus. And hopefully messages like this today on the progress that we're making, the objectiveness we're moving forward, the aggressiveness and the pace that we're moving with. I think the challenge right now for the investors, and my view is there's a lot of money kind of sitting around the hoop waiting to jump in. They're looking for a clear direction. And where do we go from here? Is Devin go forward more of this or less of that? And as I said, I would love to kind of telegraph that. I think it is the right thing to do for value optimization to make sure that we allow those processes to run. We have not historically telegraphed where we're going to move to. We really believe that the value creation opportunity and keeping those cards a little closer to our chest is the right move for the shareholders. In the short term, there's a little bit of pain. We have to deal with the rumor du jour, and that's pointing investors into a different direction every day. I completely understand why that can be confusing to the investor. What I would tell you is we've met with at least 100 investors all over since the close, And what I get is a lot of encouragement. Make sure you're doing the right thing first. Make sure you're thinking about value creation and don't just rush into a quick high, sugar high, on a quick decision. So that's the approach we've always taken. That's the approach we'll continue to take, but it's not lost on us. We've got time constraint, and every single one of us, certainly including me, feels the pressure of our share price, and we want to perform for our shareholders for the ultimate value creation, which is doing the right thing first. So thanks for the question, Gabe.

Our last question comes from the line of Scott Hanold with RBC.

Scott, your line is now open. yeah thanks um you all have made some early stage investments and in some equity you know equity investments and have several of these equity interests with that that have turned some pretty good value you know for everyone a few others just kind of curious on on your strategy with some of these equity investments and are there other opportunities you all are looking at yeah thanks scott yeah we've had some home run opportunities and again i'll go back to the earlier line of where others see challenges, we see opportunities.

We want to be known as a company that's always open for business. You've got a creative idea kind of bringing our way. As I said earlier, we're operations focused. We're technology forward. We're an energy powerhouse. And so that when you open that aperture just a little bit, you know, things come your way. The water bridge opportunity, the Fervo opportunity, some of the investments we've made on the midstream are all of the mind that we know our skill set. We know what our position, meeting our portfolio, how to leverage that. And it's turned into some huge value-creating opportunities. There's more of that coming. I think those opportunities can turn into even further value enhancement. You know, as we think about the current position that we hold, you've seen us buy a couple of quarters ago, buy into the cotton draw midstream. We kind of bought out a partner there. At the same quarter, we were exiting our Matterhorn position, so the answer to the question if we're a buyer or a seller, it's yes. We are in it for creating value for the shareholders. You'll see us continue to do innovative things. That's kind of core to our DNA, but don't think of any of these assets as something that we have to hold on to. Matterhorn, as an example, the real objective there was getting the pipe in the ground, making sure that we had the takeaway capacity as an enhancement to that investment. We went ahead and owned an equity stake. That was a 5x return on that equity stake. We still kept that critical takeaway capacity and made a very, very nice return in the process on the equity position. I would do that every day. Those are just phenomenal enhancement to our existing Delaware position. What I would tell you is that opportunity only comes our way because we have such an amazing position in the Delaware. So, leveraging that to not just how do you get the best return on this next well, but thinking about this world-class positions in this world-class basin and how do you lever it into more and more opportunities. I think there's absolutely more of that to come. So, thanks everybody for the questions. I tell you what, let's, Dan, maybe you can wrap us up.

Yeah, I'd just like to thank everyone for their time and great questions. If anyone has follow-ups, please reach out to the team. We look forward to catching up over the next quarters. Thanks again for your time. Thanks, everybody.

Today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.