Okay. Welcome to DNO's first quarter 2023 Earnings Call. My name is Jostein Løvaas, calling in from DNO's office in Stavanger. Other DNO participants will take part from Oslo and America, showing that this company has a global reach. I am the communication manager of DNO. I will share some practical information. All participants in this meeting are muted by the organizer and will not be able to unmute themselves, chat, or share their screens. Present on the call are Executive Chairman, Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani, and CFO, Haakon Sandbø. We will start off with a brief results presentation by Haakon, after which we will open up for questions from shareholders and analysts. The Executive Chairman will also be available to provide answers in the Q&A session. If you wanna pose a question, please raise the tiny virtual hand on top of your screen.
When chosen by the organizer, you will be notified on your screen that you are allowed to unmute, after which you will have to remember to unmute yourself, too. With that, I leave the stage to Haakon.
Yeah. Thanks, Jostein. Hello, everyone, welcome again to our first quarter Earnings Call. The rig that you can see on this photo successfully drilled one of the two NCS discovery wells that DNO participated in for the first quarter, that really provided us with a good start of the year for our exploration program. On the other hand, the quarter was also marked by the shutdown of oil production in Kurdistan for export through Turkey. That started on the 25th of March. I will revert to these points further on the next slides. For the highlights of this quarter, we had a net production of 89,400 barrels of oil equivalent per day, BOE per day.
Kurdistan, it was split between Kurdistan at 70,900 BOE per day, North Sea, 14,800, and West Africa at 3,700 barrels. Now, Kurdistan gross production totaled 94,700 barrels of oil per day, down from 107,800 barrels in Q4. This reduction was mainly due to well workovers and maintenance at the Peshkabir field. As I said, we shut down our production in late March following the export pipeline closure, this also had some effect on the first quarter production. Otherwise, our North Sea exploration success continues with the discoveries in Røver Sør and in Heisenberg on the two first exploration wells this year.
We are clearly building a significant long-term value now with the five consecutive discoveries in the important Troll and Yme area in offshore Norway. As we note here, sorry, for our profit and loss statement, our Q1 revenues were down by 20% from Q4. That was due to lower production in Kurdistan and also from low realized gas prices in the North Sea. With no impairments in the first quarter, our net profit basically doubled from Q4. As before, we maintain our strong balance sheet with the cash balances of $911 million and net cash of $344 million at the end of the quarter. Moving on.
Moving on to the Kurdistan operations, we have sort of scaled back our spend levels in this business unit now due to the uncertainty on the timing of export resumption and also due to delays in payments for previous oil sales. This means that the four large drilling rigs we have used from the beginning of this year will likely go off contract by the end of the second quarter, as we show on the slide. We do however have a rig on standby for drilling of the important Baeshiqa-3 well with a current plan of spudding this well in the third quarter. As we note, the operational spend levels in Kurdistan have been front loaded this year, and in Q1, we had already spent 40% of the latest full year projections.
On this basis, with reduced activity, we will see a drop in quarterly spend levels as shown on the slide. We currently expect that the full year 2023 operational spend in Kurdistan will be around $50 million below the guided levels from February this year. Yet to date, we have carried out extensive maintenance and workovers at our producing fields in Kurdistan to preserve assets and infrastructure and to be well prepared to revert to full production and exports again on short notice. At Peshkabir, the workover program has now been completed, sorry, including changing out six electric submersible pumps or ESPs. Further, we have also completed five wells and spudded three wells in Q1, and these will be completed this month. These eight new wells are split with four wells on each of Tawke and Peshkabir.
I would say that we are clearly taking adequate measures to maintain our production capacity in the Tawke license in anticipation of a resolution on the pipeline closure. At the end of March and following the pipeline closure, we had produced four days of production at the Tawke license into storage tanks at Fish Khabur providing 300,000 barrels of oil in storage net to DNO. Once the pipeline operations resume, we can immediately start our exports from this significant oil storage volume, and then follow up with the normal production as the wells are opened up for production again. It should be noted that the oil not produced during the Kurdistan shutdown represent deferred volumes that will be recovered and monetized as production resumes.
We are moving to the North Sea, where we are, as I mentioned, are very pleased to see that our extensive exploration program is delivering strong results now, most recently with the two discoveries we have had so far this year. Røver Sør and Heisenberg are the fourth and fifth consecutive discoveries at the Troll-Gjøa area following the three preceding discoveries shown on this slide. All in, these five discoveries have provided 50 million barrels of oil equivalent net to DNO in new recoverable resources. Let me confirm, we are of course, really delighted with this strong exploration success rate and with these significant new resources.
As one of the largest acreage holders, we have a very attractive position in the Troll and Gjøa area, which is now clearly an exploration hotspot on the NCS. There have been a string of medium-sized discoveries in this area over the last years. These are good candidates for development and tieback to nearby existing infrastructure. In addition, we are also excited about the remaining seven wells in our exploration and appraisal drilling program this year, of which we have three exploration wells to spud in this second quarter. Such drilling operations are currently ongoing on Carmen, the first of these three wells. We also have a rig now on location to drill Eggen, the next of these wells, to be followed by Litago and later by the other wells noted on this slide.
I go further. This slide now shows the drilling program in more detail. The exploration wells in this program provide a significant 110 million BOE per day net unrisked resource potential to DNO for the full year. You see the details here on the pre-drill volume ranges, and we show moderate to high chances of success on these prospects. With the two new discoveries, we have already added 26 million BOE in new resources net to DNO so far this year. As shown on this map of the seven wells that remain to be drilled or completed as part of this year's program, all but the two of these wells are in the Troll and Gjøa area.
I'd say hopefully look out for further valuation triggers going forward in this program. We'll now move on to some of the finance slides. We saw a $69 million dollar drop in revenues in the first quarter as Kurdistan revenues dropped by $37 million, mainly on lower production volumes. At the same time, North Sea revenues were reduced by $32 million, primarily on the lower gas prices. With no impairments, the Q1 operating profit strengthened significantly to $155 million from a loss in Q4. We also had a reduction of $41 million in our cost of goods sold that came partly from movements in the North Sea over and underlift, and from a lower depreciation.
For the same reasons, we also see a doubling of our net income in Q1 from the previous quarter, despite much higher tax expenses in the quarter. Absolutely, we have much stronger profits in the first quarter. As we move on to cash flow, we saw an operational cash flow of $155 million for Q1, which is pretty good, but it is still down from $230 million that we had in Q4. To explain this decline in cash flow, it should be noted that we have $42 million in negative working capital adjustments in Q1 that came from mainly from an increase in receivables and also inventory in Kurdistan.
We also had a decrease in trade payables in the North Sea. I'd also, like to point out that in addition, the last payments of override in Kurdistan were completed in Q4 last year, and these amounted to $20 million in the last quarter, Q4 last year. Under tax, we paid $43 million in a Norwegian NCS tax installment in Q1, and those were for taxable profits last year in 2022. Now in the second quarter, we will have further tax installments to be paid over $82 million in this quarter for NCS. We had $74 million in asset investments and capitalized exploration in Q1. And these were split roughly 50/50 between Kurdistan and the North Sea.
There was also $6 million in UK Decom, and we saw a net cash inflow of $8 million from Cote d'Ivoire in the quarter. If you add this together, the net outflow for investments is thereby $72 million. Under finance, net cash outflow amounted to $84 million. Those were primarily for $51 million in share buybacks and $25 million in dividends. With these substantial shareholder distributions, cash balances were reduced by $43 million- $911 million at the end of the first quarter. Going to the capital structure, we can still rest assured, our balance sheet strength is very much intact. We have the cash balances of $911 million, and we have a net cash position of $344 million now.
We're also pleased to continue the positive trend of increasing the equity ratio to reach a strong level of 50% at the end of Q1. As you can see, this is up from 37% a year ago, and it has been achieved through retained earnings and debt reduction. Now, noting these positive developments, a recent analyst credit report described DNO as a financial fortress, which is not bad, kind of like that heading. The main point to me is to focus on the importance of the flexibility and the robustness that we need and that our strong balance sheet provides now. We are moving to the final slide and discussing the outlook for this year.
We should note here that until export restarts and the regularity of payment for past and ongoing oil sales is established, we will not be in position to provide any updated projections of the full year Kurdistan production. We do expect a quick ramp-up of production once we start again, and we will revert with the revised guidance when production has resumed. As discussed, we currently plan to reduce our operational spend in Kurdistan by around $50 million this year, and this amount is split on CapEx by $14 million and OpEx by $10 million compared to our February guidance.
On a group level, this would reduce our projected 2023 operational spend from the previous guidance of $640 million to a revised level of $590 million, split roughly with one-third on Kurdistan and two-thirds on the North Sea. The actual operational spend in Q1 was $156 million, and that was split about 50/50 on Kurdistan and the North Sea. As we look ahead for the North Sea, the projected production for this year remains at around 12,000-13,000 BOE per day, and we expect 3,500 barrels BOE per day from West Africa this year. We are otherwise pleased to announce today that we will pay a quarterly dividend of NOK 0.25 per share for the second quarter.
That amounts to about the current rates, about $23 million in total. This will complete the use of the 1 NOK per share dividend authorization that we had from the last year's AGM. For the upcoming AGM at the end of this month, the board is seeking authorization to cancel the 7.5% shares we of the shares we hold in the treasury. That's about 79.4 million treasury shares, and seeking to cancel those. These come basically from the share buyback program that we completed earlier this year. The board will also be seeking authorization to continue shareholder distributions through dividends and maybe share buybacks also on a discretionary basis.
I think that wraps up the presentation part, Jostein, and then I guess we head over to you again to open up for the Q&A.
Yes. I don't see any questions yet. People eager to have a comment from people in the know are encouraged to ask. Tero, you are taking the challenge. I'll have to unmute you or I think you can unmute yourself already. All right, here we go.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, perfect. Good afternoon, guys, and thanks for taking my questions. I have many questions, but I think I'll limit myself to three now. First part is just on the pipeline situation. Just wonder, of course, we're all curious about what you actually know about the situation. How is the dialogue with the parties there, and do you have any kind of expectations or when you will see oil flowing again through the pipeline? That's the first question. Second question is related to the strong balance sheet that you alluded to Haakon. You are now currently at 35% net cash of your market cap, which is very strong.
What do you plan to do with this cash, and what will be the long-term gearing target for DNO? Final question, that is on the Fenja area or the Troll-Gjøa area. Just can you say anything about the timeline for the development of the discoveries you made there? Thanks.
Good. Thank you, Theodore. Bijan, could I ask you please to address the first important question?
Yes. First, good afternoon to everyone on the call. I think there are some not in the European time zone, in the United States and elsewhere, so perhaps it's good morning to them. We appreciate all of you who've joined us. I think we have 120, 130 people on this call, and a number of the names I recognize as individuals or shareholders or follow the company or are analysts, and welcome to all of you. I'm not surprised Teodor's first question has to do with the pipeline. The pipeline issue has been on...
not just on the minds of the companies operating in Kurdistan and the players in the region, but it's become a global issue that's been regularly reported on. It's one of the more, most reported, I think, developments in the Kurdistan oil story the past 10 years or so. I don't have an answer, Teodor, and I don't think anyone does, as to when the pipeline will reopen. I think everyone agrees the pipeline will reopen. You can't keep 400,000 barrels a day of production off the market, and this production is now, as you know, very desirable because it's a unusual development given all that's going on in the world oil market and limits and directional shifts in Russian exports.
We have a situation in which heavier sour crude is quite desirable now and is trading at a premium to its historic levels relative to lighter sweeter crude. This crude is not just a question of the volume of that's off the market right now, but the quality and nature of the crude, there are refineries that are looking for for the Kurdish Blend that we have been exporting as companies and as DNO, importantly, through Turkey. There's a lot of attention being paid to this. There are a lot of moving parts, as you know. Several countries are involved and engaged in various parts of this. Traders are involved. Producers are involved.
The Iraqi budget is in play in terms of its contribution to Kurdistan. Kurdistan's own, of course, issues are very much front and center for the Kurdistan Regional Government, as they are for the operators. There are consuming governments involved in trying to move this along. Turkey is very importantly involved. These moving parts aren't always moving in the same direction. There are different considerations, different challenges and different points of view, all of which has complicated this situation. The companies have not been engaged directly in any of these discussions, although indirectly, we certainly have been because we are impacted very much by these developments.
With the first run up in oil prices following the pipeline shut off, all oil companies around the world benefited. The only companies that were impacted negatively were the Kurdistan players, whose cutoff in production had contributed to the run-up in oil prices and still holds up oil prices globally to some important extent. We've used this time, and certainly DNO used the time, to continue during the first quarter, as Haakon mentioned, more workovers, more drilling. We, the wells we were already drilling and the work we were doing, we decided to continue and complete and to be ready when the exports resume. Beyond that, it's really made no sense for us to keep investing.
We're trying to, of course, preserve our balance sheets and our ability to do more with what DNO has, as you've mentioned, a strong balance sheet and looking at other opportunities as we and other companies always are on the lookout for such opportunities. It's what we're doing is makes sense, and I think at the end of this process, the pipeline will reopen. Exports will move. That and our production, initial production will be higher presumably because the wells have been given a, you know, a long-deserved rest at Tawke and Peshkabir. We should have higher flush production initially some period of time.
We don't really know when that, how the volumes involved. I think we're doing the right things, and it makes sense operationally and commercially and otherwise to act as we do. Now, what will get the pipeline started up again, as I've said, there are a number of considerations. One of them importantly, is the election in Turkey that is scheduled, the presidential election on the 14th of May with a possible runoff if required a week or so later. I noticed when I got on this call that there's a lot of red behind me. It's a coincidence. The red is the color of the great Republic of Turkey, Türkiye.
That maybe that's a reminder that the importance of Turkey and the Turkish election in the timing of the pipeline. That's an important consideration. I don't pretend that we know exactly what will open the line and when. I don't think anyone knows, but we all know it'll happen, and we're positioning ourselves for that. That's all I can say, and that's I think all that anyone can say. There's been a lot of speculation in the last month or so. It's gonna open three days from now. The traders are involved. They're reaching an agreement. This has been done. That's been done.
We, you know, we've felt that it would take much more and take a longer period of time for all this to sort itself out. It will happen because 400,000 barrels a day is a lot of oil for the market. It's a lot of oil certainly for the companies. It's a lot of oil including for Iraq, certainly for Kurdistan. It'll take a bit of patience. This is deferred production. We have, I think, about 300,000 barrels of oil in storage that we can put on the market pretty quickly. We've said it's important for us as these issues are unraveled and resolved that the normalization of the oil sector in Kurdistan continue.
That'll be a positive sign that if the discount for Kurdish oil disappears because Kurdish oil is viewed as politically and legally less problematic to certain buyers, and some of those buyers have taken advantage to really push down prices. We should see higher prices for the crude, and that'll be very positive. Hopefully, there'll be more transparency and in terms of volumes and value, and that's very important to us, DNO as a company and to other players in the industry as well.
I think, out of all of this will come hopefully a somewhat more normalized oil industry and with greater values and better I think ability on our part to anticipate what we need to do as a company, as investors, and to benefit from the great value we've created over the over many years as DNO in Kurdistan and get more cash into the company. The level of arrears for the companies as a whole, I think are on the order of $1 billion, give and take. For DNO, it's about a third of that.
It's a substantial amount of money, we'd like to see that come into the system, into our system and onto our coffers and onto our balance sheets. It'll make a big difference for us. Obviously, it's a lot of money. Moving forward, if there's better regularity of payments and higher values for the oil, that'll even strengthen DNO even further, at least with respect to our Kurdish operations. Our Kurdish operations are, as you know, very important to us. We're one of the few companies active in Kurdistan that has these other two legs that we're developing. One, of course, in Norway, our home country, the other in West Africa, where we've taken a position and are looking for other opportunities to grow that position.
While this is a disappointment and there's been... we'll have a weaker second quarter than we would like, I think out of all of this, we'll come out a stronger company and with stronger position in Kurdistan, again, coming out of the normalization. At this point, that's all I can say. You know, we're waiting to see what happens next. In the meantime, you know, we're positioning ourselves to hit the ground running when the opportunity finally arises. That could be a week or two. It may be impacted by the results of the election in Turkey. No one knows. I think everyone has one or two pieces of the puzzle that they control or are dealing with.
The whole puzzle itself, it involves a lot of players, and things will have to come together for it to happen.
Okay, if I could comment on the second question then, Theodore. You asked about the balance sheet and the cash position and why, how we would use that going forward, I believe. Obviously, we are focused on maintaining a strong balance sheet as I commented on when I spoke on the slides. It's approved to be important in the past that we do have a very solid robustness in the company for unforeseen, you know, risks or happenings that we should be having adequate protection in terms of extra cash to meet those situations like we're doing at the moment. With the level of cash we have now, there is obviously flexibility to do other things.
We are committed to maintaining a good dividend program. The board is asking the AGM at the end of the month to give more of an open authorization on on dividends than we've had in the past. We have typically had, you know, sort of a fixed kroner amount per share that we can operate within for dividends. We are now going to a more normal industry practice that you sort of open up for a bit more flexibility and discretion on the board level to assess what the dividend level should be. There will be a continuation of the dividend program as one of the elements of the use of cash.
If you think back on the last 12 months, we have, basically, used around, say, $100 million to pay dividends in DNO. We have bought back, shares just over $50 million. Actually, we have, you know, been pretty active on distributing, back to our shareholders, with that sort of amount, $150 million in total. Whether we do the same thing in the coming 12 months, that's again, more discretionary up now to the board if the authorization is given by the shareholders. Otherwise, we are also focusing on organic growth in, DNO through our exploration program with the success now.
We'll continue that, you know, we've been saying $120 million-$150 million or so per year, in exploration expenditures in the North Sea, mostly in Norway. I would assume that we will continue that sort of active exploration program, with support from our balance sheet. We are in several discoveries now that will be developed over the next few years, so there will be a lot of development CapEx to be funded as well. Many good uses for our cash balances, of course. We have said many times we are looking for, you know, adding a new production quite quickly, especially in the North Sea. M&A is high on our priority list.
We also now have added a new region to our business with the acquisition of the position in Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa. West Africa is also an area that we are looking at actively now for business opportunities. You know, we have some debt maturities coming up next year for our bond, the, you know, '03 bond. We will deal with that, of course. You know, so those would be some of the things I can think of that we would be having use of our cash.
When you think about the innovation tax system, of course, a lot of the exploration and development spending will be coming back as tax refunds, but you need you know, to fund those in the meantime. The, the bank side is less interested in stepping up for some of those financing they, than they used to be in the past. More of that will have to be carried by companies like DNO than we used to do with the more available bank financing in the, in previous years.
All in, Teodor, there's a lot of good uses here, but the main point also is to, as I said, maintain a very solid, good financial strength to being always sure you're ahead of the game and that you can meet, you know, unforeseen situations like we have at the, at the moment. I think, your third question was on, was it the Troll-Yme area?
Yes, that's correct.
Yeah.
Time line for potential developments in the Fenja area.
Bijan, if you want, I will just give it a go and you can add as I go along. As you know, Theodore, this is a very important area now with several good discoveries over the last years. I think the gross discoveries are around 400 million barrels or so, which is very significant, spread across several licenses. We have Equinor as the active operator across the whole area, you know, and it's a priority for them to develop all these discoveries. As such, DNO is working closely with Equinor on those discussions on how do we develop these things. We also have the host operators at Troll and Yme that take active part in exploration here.
Of course, there could be joint development programs with these other companies as well. I think some of the communication here has been that, you know, start development over the next years and target production by the end of the decade, you know, late 2020s. This would be a very important addition to our, you know, organic growth program than with the several discoveries we are now participating in. All in this is really adding a lot of value, I think, to all the companies in this area and to the NCS. Certainly a high priority to develop Troll and this area west of Troll and Yme.
With an alignment it looks like now very closely aligning with the several companies that are active here. I think I don't see any real impediment for, you know, a startup of joint development studies and continued discussions on these and basically getting a field development or an area development program built together by the various companies that are active here as a participant, and participants and operators. You know, very happy with the position that we have. We have acquired our positions here through early efforts by Origo Exploration that DNO acquired back in 2017. They saw potential here early on, and we have also been building through farms and through government license awards in the area.
I think the team has had the foresight and saw that this could be a very interesting area, which it has basically materialized, one of the most important areas now along the Norwegian Continental Shelf. We do wanna do more here, and we are, as I said, looking forward to the remaining five wells that we have in the Troll-Gjøa area for the rest of this year. If we see more discoveries coming along, that will of course add further to our incentives to develop this together with the other companies. I think I'll just round off saying this is a very, very strong addition to the valuation of our assets and the value of the company as such.
Yeah. I think the next one is.
Thank you. yes
...
Let me just add a word or two to what Haakon said. I, of course, endorse everything that he said, but I just wanted to add from my perspective of our shareholders, including our largest shareholders, Norwegian or otherwise, that we're pleased to have been welcomed back to Norway in a sense with open arms. We're Norway's, as many of you may know, oldest, continuously active oil and gas company, the first one to be listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The company moved overseas quite a bit and successfully in Yemen and in Kurdistan, made this decision to pivot back to Norway.
We've been welcomed back, and we've become quite active. We brought back some of the lessons we learned operating overseas, nimbleness, quickness of decision-making, a focus on what we do, through a perhaps a somewhat different lens. I think we're seeing the success of that, of that approach now. We're one of the most active explorers in Norway today. As we looked at the material ahead of this presentation, I think DNO is participating in over 30% of all the exploration wells being drilled in Norway this year. That's pretty significant.
We have a piece of, I think, about a third of the exploration wells that are being drilled. That's a very, very from a position of no activity several years ago to this kind of activity, I think it shows our, both our commitment, our interest, but it also shows how we've been welcomed back home in a sense, both by the ministry, the governmental authorities and by partners. We're pleased to be in the position we're in. We'll continue with our current strategy of near infrastructure, lower risk drilling, but an active, very active drilling program to create value.
I believe the next question comes from Alex Sich of, Goldman Sachs, I believe. Alex, you'll have to unmute yourself.
Yeah. Hello. Hi, gentlemen. Thank you for picking my line. As a disclaimer, I'm a credit investor, and so my two questions pretty much focus on the downside, so apologies for them not being fascinating. Firstly, probably Haakon, I wanted to check with you about the CapEx and OpEx outlook on slide 9. I wonder what assumptions on Kurdistan production do you plug into that bar on the right for Q2, Q4? How do you think it may look like if production remains suspended until the end of the year? My second is on the balance sheet, just following up to the previous discussion.
Is there any level or threshold in terms of net cash position or any other metric you may think of, where you would think about suspension of dividends and share buyback, in addition to CapEx you've already announced to preserve the balance sheet quality? Well, again, assuming that Kurdistan remains disrupted, probably.
Yeah. Okay. The first question was that on the what kind of production levels we have on that spending graph that we have up on the screen now. Alex, was that? What'd you ask about?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. This slide, this 434. Yeah, I'm wondering just how, yeah, what sort of production assumption for Kurdistan you have there and what it would look like if Kurdistan remains shut.
I think, again, you know, we've been very careful there. This is sort of a low scenario for us. Basically, limits to very little production in this period going forward. On that assumption here, if we see that we are opened up again, and we'll probably maybe then revise some of these spending plans for this year and increase them above what you see here. The answer to that question is not a given level of a number of barrels per day, but this is more of a prudent downside case that we can manage very well with what we have in resources. If there is a, as we assume, a quick startup, then, we will then...
We have a sort of visibility on how we get paid on the arrears and on the ongoing deliveries, then we can, you know, carefully ramp up the spending plans again. What you have seen in the past is our ability to be very flexible on the spend levels. If you see that we are taking pretty good measures now in, you know, letting four large rigs go off contract. We can then look at getting some of these rigs back here later on as we are ready to use them again. We also have other things we can do to reduce our cash out in Kurdistan if this is going to take longer than anticipated with the shutdown.
This is really a program that also is focused mostly on the North Sea. When you look at the $590, about 1/3 of that is Kurdistan and 2/3 is the North Sea. In this plan for the year, full year, it's about, you know, $200 for Kurdistan that we have scaled down to. It shows that we can take it down quickly, as I said already. The answer is basically lower low production in that scenario, but it can come up again once we see that we can get paid and that we can export again.
The second question on, you know, I thought it was something about the balance sheet and the minimum cash that we would need at any time. We have a sort of an internal level. We won't communicate too much on exactly where that is, but we have a conservative assumption that once you get to below a certain level of cash balances in readily available bank deposits, so then we would scale back even further. It would be a, you know, a fairly conservative level that we would have as a real good cash cushion to have at any time.
I think that number has been going up and down a bit internally, so I won't to go out and say exactly where we are at the moment. Rest assured again, that we are very conservative in our financial approach. We do wanna have a good balance sheet, and we are actively taking, you know, cost-cutting measures and do whatever we can if it's needed. We've done that in the past, several times. We can ramp up again, quickly, once we have the opportunity to go ahead. If you look back at DNO's history over the last many years, you can see that we have been very, you know, proactive in managing challenging situations.
Then also when we see the opportunity set, going our way again, then we can ramp up. This is the way we have been operating with the, you know, I would say a good track record over many years now. I think I, leave it at that, more general discussion.
Many thanks. Thank you.
Okay. We have, an older friend here, Teodor Sveen-Nilsen. Teodor Sveen-Nilsen. I'll allow you a mic, so you'll have to unmute yourself.
Gentlemen, hi. It's Nick Stefanou from Reddit. It's been a while since we chatted. I have two questions to ask you. The first one is, I guess kind of like upside the second one. I'm really short. Now that the SOMO will kind of like be the entity that will market the crude in Kurdistan, should we be thinking potentially, you know, in the future, a new pricing formula for you that you might have higher realizations? You know what I mean? Because of what I'm assuming now is that SOMO might be able to sell a Kurdish Blend, I would say, at kind of like a more closer to Brent realizations versus what the KRG was selling. That's the first question.
The second one, if I kind of like think of the subsurface, you know what I mean, realities of Kurdistan and more specifically, you know, fractured carbonate reservoirs where what we want to see is kind of like Sorry. the matrix charging the fractures when, you know what I mean, when there's not so much production, which is the case now. I'm just wondering, what kind of like response should we be seeing from the reservoir, maybe, you know, in a two, three months time, or maybe, you know, maybe even before that, if there's not gonna be, you know what I mean, production and there's gonna be some charging, from the matrix?
Just want to kind of like, get an idea of the response we should be seeing in production ?
Let me tackle those as best I can. First, on the SOMO issue, you're absolutely right. SOMO in its own sales historically has had greater realizations than Kurdistan has had for the reasons related to, as I mentioned, the legal and the political risk that certain buyers thought that Kurdistan oil represented, although that was probably carried to a bit of an extreme. There was a lot of money made by traders trading Kurdistan oil. One of the reasons perhaps that SOMO wants to be more involved is to sort of manage the whole
Process so there isn't a lot of disconnect between the same crude being sold by different sellers. We fully expect that the SOMO prices, if the current plans as have been discussed, fall into place, will mean higher prices for the crude. Now how that price is then shared between the companies and the other players, remains to be seen, but I fully expect that we will see higher realizations, and that's a, that's a, that's a positive. We have not been involved in those discussions at this point.
I expect at some point we will be, but we view that as positive, not just in terms of realizations, but as part of this larger normalization of the oil industry in Kurdistan. All that's positive. With respect to how will the fields respond after this rest period, however long the rest period is, as I mentioned, it's likely that it'll be some flush production coming in, but we don't know the exact amount of it. I think the theory as you described it is correct.
One would expect that some of the oil that's not been produced will leave us with higher production rates should we decide to open up the wells more fully. We have some discretion as to how much production we're gonna put on the market, and some of that discretion is driven by the arrangements, the pricing, the transparency, the payments of arrears, and payments of moving forward, re-regular payments. We have some say in that, in how that is done. We wanna make sure we don't damage the any particular wells or reservoir.
Expectation, at least in theory, is that there will be initially for some period of time, it could be days, it could be weeks, there will be additional oil available should you want to pull it down. Now, some oil may go off in some other directions that may not be as easy to tap. But on balance, I would think that our ability to put more oil in the markets is greater once we open up. And how incentivized we are to do that and how hard we want to pull will depend in part on how successfully we are able to monetize that crude, and those decisions will be made by us and also by, of course, by our partner, Genel Energy.
That is our partner in the Peshkabir and Tawke fields. That's a conversation to have. It's at this point, again, it's, maybe it's not the priority issue we're concerned with, but we'll have to face that decision at the right time.
Understood. Thank you. Mm.
Okay. I think, well, we have questions from two people that will be the last ones, I think. First, Tom Eirik Kristiansen here at Pareto Securities, he had some problems with the sound on his computer, so he sent me a text message. The first one, first question might be partly covered already, but I'll read it to you. "Is there a risk of reservoir damage due to the shut-in, or is this only a positive for the field in terms of pressure buildup and supporting it?
Initial production once resumed, do you expect to be able to resume production in line with previous levels, or will it take some time to get back to the 100,000 barrels a day? A new one is: Post-resumed question exports, what do you need to see on the payment side from the KRG before you will increase activity to previous levels? Will this be a gradual process with a track record of several payments needed, or do you expect to lift investments to the previous level immediately?
I think the first part of that question we've already addressed. There's some uncertainty because this is all things that are happening in the reservoirs and the wells below ground. We have less visibility of what happens below ground than we do of what happens above ground, where we do have a bit more discretion. The second question is of course the more important one. We see this as an opportunity to create greater transparency in the marketing arrangements and payments, and more predictability in payments, but transparency in pricing towards the normalization of the industry in Kurdistan, which short, medium, and long term is in everyone's interest.
Both Kurdistan's, Iraq's overall, our interest, probably as well as Turkey to the extent Turkey has an important role in the movement of these crudes, so we don't end up with these situations where that created this problem in the first place, the arbitration, and that was results were announced in March leading to the shutdown as those issues have to be resolved. Above ground, we'd like to see normalization. Normalization means not just transparency of arrangements and pricing and costs, but payments according to the production sharing contracts that we have.
We and the other oil companies have production sharing contracts, of course, with very strong rights, and latitude. We have, while SOMO is part of these discussions, as we understand it, we'll be involved in the loadings at Ceyhan in Turkey on the Mediterranean. The companies under the contract are free to sell to whoever we want under whatever arrangements we wish to make. There's a time when these, the pipeline was closed during the ISIS period. We were selling it to local, the local markets, the local small refineries, topping plants. While they were small, some of them only a few thousand barrels a day, DNO was putting 120,000 barrels a day into the local markets, and it was cash and carry.
They'd show up with suitcases of cash or currency in Dubai or in the field, and we'd deliver the oil. Those opportunities are still embedded in our contractual rights and are a fallback. We haven't gone that route yet because we expect this issue to be resolved, and the best pricing and the best net backs, the net price at the wellhead, will be highest in a sale through Turkey to Ceyhan at SOMO prices than it would be if we truck this oil long distance. If the pipeline issues aren't addressed and resolved, we have alternatives. The oil will flow to refineries. It's like water going down, downhill. Water flows downhill. It'll find its way down, and our oil will find its way to markets. The DNO and the companies, we're being patient.
We're waiting for the issues to sort themselves out. We think they'll sort themselves out in good time, in good order, and end up in a better result for us. You know, if we're still sitting here three months from now, then there's no agreement on how the oil is gonna be moving, then that means we've, we haven't been doing our job and finding another way to move the oil. We will find another way to move the oil. This is not the first time we've had this situation. I think Haakon referred to that in Kurdistan. There have been a number of times where there have been challenges. When I first became chairman, I think 10 years ago, the question on everyone's mind was, you know, how will the PSC survive?
Will these be converted to Technical Services Agreements? How are you gonna move the oil? What are you gonna do, and how are you gonna get paid? I always said that I've full confidence that we ultimately will get paid in Kurdistan, and we have every time. One way or the other, we've gotten paid. The last time the arrears are paid, importantly, by our taking on the government's share, 20% share of the Tawke license, which proved that to be a, I think, a good move both for the government. They didn't have to be out of cash. It proved the right move for us. We had more production and better pricing and ended up with a better result than had we gotten the cash at that point.
I'm confident these issues will sort themselves out. This time it's a bit more complicated because more countries are involved, because the arbitration and the politics, the election in Turkey, and, you know, the elections coming up in Kurdistan. It's a bit more complicated. At the end of the day, I think these issues resolve themselves. It's in everyone's interest. We're talking about a lot of oil, a lot of money, not just to the immediate players, but to the global markets. The, you know, the dynamics of markets and politics and economics and the industry will not allow this oil to sit there indefinitely. We won't let that happen.
Okay, next.
We shouldn't. We have a duty under the PSCs to move the oil. It's not just a right. It's in a sense, it's an obligation. We'll make it happen. The timing, though, will have to be a bit more. As a company, we're being more patient about letting some of these issues sort themselves out. If they're don't get sorted out, we'll then get more involved.
Okay. Last question I believe is from Sander Solberg Nilsen of Fearnley Securities. Sander, please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Hi, all. Two quick questions. First one partially answered, but could we potentially see any NCS projects mature into investment decision this year, either in the Troll area or potentially Brage? The second question is, how would you look at North Sea production for the reminder of the year? In light of the first quarter production, the full year guidance now seems somewhat conservative. Can you please give a comment on that?
Haakon.
Yeah. Was the question, Sander, was whether you would have an investment decision on either the Troll area, was that, and possibly Brage by the end of this year?
Yeah. Correct.
Well, I doubt you will get that as quickly as of the end of this year. I can speak a bit on the Brage discussions. We are having very good cooperation with OKEAN now. DNO is the operator on Brage, and we are exploring and going with, you know, potential build-outs towards the Brage area now with OKEAN. We think this has been a very good discussion, fruitful discussion. There will be, I think some sort of decision point along the summer, whether we proceed with the plans here. I would think that it's maybe a bit too optimistic or early to think that we'll have a full investment decision.
There will be some decision gates along the way before we get there. Believe me, we're having a lot of good alternative discussions on how do we do this differently from previous thinking. I think we've seen some good progress made on that. I cannot really commit to that we would have a decision by the end of this year. As for the other big area, that's I think also a bit too early to expect a investment decision by the end of 2023. The there's a lot of, you know, parties involved, and they're big investments and, you know, things to be I think more matured before we can get to that point.
Just from the DNO point of view, it could be that the operator on most, many of these licenses, Equinor, has a more aggressive plan. We, you know, we, at least I, you know, without speaking for the operator, I wouldn't think that that would be possible by the end of this year. I would, then, refer you to the appropriate operators to discuss with them what the possibilities are with that question. I think, I'll leave it at that for now.
Okay. With that, we've been talking for more than an hour. I guess the interest out there is big. If there are some press questions and so on, I think we can deal with that afterwards. With that, I think we'll close this meeting. Thanks for participating, and see you again later.
Thank you, everybody.
Thanks.
Thank you.