Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Saturn Oil & Gas second quarter 2025 results conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After management's remarks, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star, then zero. I will now turn the meeting over to Ms. Cindy Gray, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Cindy.
Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Saturn Oil & Gas's second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Please note that our financial statements, MD&A, and press release have been filed on SEDAR Plus and are available on Saturn 's website. Some of the statements on today's call may contain forward-looking information, references to non-IFRS and other financial measures, and as such, listeners are encouraged to review the disclaimers outlined in our most recent MD&A. Listeners are also cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, since a number of factors could cause the actual future results to differ materially from the targets and expectations expressed. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, unless expressly required by applicable securities law.
For further information on risk factors, please view the company's AIF files on SEDAR Plus and on our website. Also note, all amounts today are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. Today's call will include comments from John Jeffrey, Saturn 's CEO, Grant MacKenzie, our Chief Legal Officer, and Scott Sanborn, our CFO. Over to you, John.
Thank you, Cindy, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. I am pleased to provide an update on Saturn Oil & Gas's second quarter, in which we once again delivered results that met or beat our guidance. For the third consecutive quarter, production was above the high end of our guidance range at just over 40,400 BOE/d, while operating costs were under the low end of our guidance. We also surpassed analyst forecasts across numerous measures in the quarter, including an adjusted funds flow of CAD 109 million and a record free funds flow of CAD 93 million. However, the standout number in this quarter is our net debt, which was at CAD 695 million at June 30, a reduction of nearly CAD 120 million over the prior quarter.
This exceeds the $100 million of net debt reduction that we forecasted during the first quarter's earnings conference call and also came in lower than consensus expectations. As a result, our net debt to annualized adjusted EBITDA fell to 1.3x at quarter end. Saturn continues to prioritize net debt reduction as one of the components of our blueprint strategy. This is demonstrated by an opportunistic open market purchase of our senior secured notes when they traded below par during Q2 and supplemented with the scheduled 2.5% quarterly principal repayments made on the notes. In April, the company purchased $16.3 million face value notes of our senior notes in the open market, which represented an additional full quarter payment. This equals CAD 20 million of hard debt reduction. At the end of June, we completed the scheduled 2.5% debt advertised payment.
These principal repayments, combined with our strong quarterly free funds flow and the impact of a stronger Canadian dollar, all contributed to our significant debt reduction in Q2. With the second quarter being the lowest capital expenditure period due to spring breakup, we generated a record free funds flow during the quarter. The nature of our oil-weighted mid-lifecycle asset base means we can pivot if needed and shift capital quickly and seamlessly. All of Saturn 's drilling locations are adjacent to offsetting production, where we have existing infrastructure and operations. This allows us to ramp activity up or down very quickly. Our well licensing, surface prep, and drilling cycle times are very short. In some areas, we can even go from licensing to bringing on volume in a matter of weeks.
In light of this, we prudently took some extra time during Q2 to monitor commodity prices and the broader economic environment before starting to execute our Q3 capital program in mid-July. Another component of our blueprint strategy is to identify M&A opportunities to acquire low-cost, high-quality barrels that bolster Saturn's footprints in areas where we already have established operations. We aim to transact on assets that can be acquired for two times cash flow or less, or a value that approximates the asset's PDP. This allows us to enhance the upside by capturing synergies, reducing costs, and optimizing the performance of the assets.
During the quarter, we closed a CAD 5 million corporate tuck-in acquisition in Southeast Saskatchewan, which is complementary to our existing operations, provides drilling locations and future upside, and is estimated to contribute over 100% of the purchase price to the cash flow of the company over the next 12 to 18 months. Whether small or large, our strategy is to acquire and integrate these assets that have rapid paybacks and identify opportunities for enhancements. We'll continue to look for complementary packages that can further enhance Saturn's portfolio and drive ongoing value creation. With a discounted market valuation relative to its net asset value, the company has continued to allocate free funds flow to the purchase of Saturn stock through the normal course issuer bid, or the NCIB, and we launched our inaugural substantial issuer bid, or the SIB, in early June.
Buying back our own shares reflects our view that Saturn's barrels are the highest quality and most undervalued available in the marketplace today. Throughout the quarter, we continued to maximize daily purchases under the NCIB, which resulted in Saturn returning CAD 3.3 million to shareholders and canceling around 2 million owned shares. Since Saturn's share price steadily increased following the SIB announcement, including a few days trading above the CAD 2.15 offer price, we only saw 1.6 million shares tendered out of a total of 7 million shares offered, returning CAD 3.5 million to shareholders. The SIB proves beneficial to all shareholders. Since its announcement, our market cap has increased by over $100 million, with significant expansion of our trading liquidity.
Under both the SIB and the NCIB, Saturn has bought back over 11.2 million shares for cancellation since August of 2024, returning approximately CAD 24 million to shareholders and further enhancing our per-share metrics. Over the past several quarters, Saturn has maintained a steady, stable execution of our strategy. We continue to fulfill our promise that the market remains disciplined, optimistic, and transparent. This approach, coupled with the strong performance of our asset base and innovations from our team, provides an ideal blueprint for creating lasting value for our shareholders. I'll now pass it over to Grant to talk through a few development highlights in the quarter.
Thanks, John. In the second quarter, Saturn's volumes averaged 40,417 BOE/d, which is above our quarterly guidance and higher than our analyst expectations. It reflects our ongoing well performance and our tight curve beams.
This strong performance is exemplified by the results to date of our D-Field 50M21 well, which is a two-mile, eight-leg open-hole multi-lateral well that was among the top three best-performing Saskatchewan liquids wells in May. In addition, three of Saturn's Viking extended-reach horizontal Cardium wells ranked in the top 15 wells in the operating Cardium. Since those wells are fully cleaned up, we're seeing reverse declines with production volumes increasing after 30 days. One of these wells was the longest Cardium well ever drilled, over 7,570 m, which successfully utilized an innovative hybrid completions technique that the Saturn team developed. We intend to apply this hybrid completions technique in our other areas, including our Kaybob Montney, where we are drilling the first ever three-mile lateral in the area.
Being able to drill longer laterals while still maintaining the ability to effectively stimulate the toe is key for improving well recoveries and generating strong economics that can compete for capital with our high-return conventional Saskatchewan assets. We are also very excited about the progress made in the company's first D-Field block and waterflood project at Creelman, where we have just commenced water injection. We're modeling an estimated 12 to 18 months in order to pressure up the reservoir before we start to see results, with the offsets providing pressure support for new block and development wells that we're planning in 2026. The Creelman waterflood project includes a new large source well, area infrastructure, and five injector conversions to date.
This is the first stage of a larger multi-year waterflood program over the greater D-Field area, targeting a flattening of the decline curve to support a material increase in the ultimate oil recovery and future book reserves. Investing in waterflood projects today can meaningfully improve our long-term sustainability by increasing recoverable volumes and boosting our reserve values. To use simple math, if Saturn had a field of 100 million barrels of oil in place and we increased the recovery factor of the field from 6%- 20%, it would represent an incremental 14 million producible barrels. Applying our Q2 2025 netback of CAD 36 per BOE translates into an incremental cash flow of over CAD 500 million. This magnitude of impact from the waterflood provides significant and lasting shareholder benefit and value creation. With that, I'll hand things over to Scott for an overview of our financial results.
Thanks, Grant. Good morning, everybody. Saturn posted another robust quarter with a cash flow of CAD 109 million, or CAD 0.56 per share, record free funds flow of CAD 93 million, or CAD 0.48 per share, against the backdrop of an 11% decline in WTI prices quarter-by-quarter and a Canadian dollar strengthening relative to the U.S. dollar. Our operating net back per BOE was CAD 35.84 after derivatives, supported by lower operating costs of CAD 18.28 per BOE and reduced royalty expenses of CAD 7.58 per BOE. Operating expenses per BOE have remained below our guidance range of CAD 20–CAD 20.60 per BOE in 2025, although we anticipate OpEx will trend closer to guidance in the latter half of the year as capital expenditures increase. Saturn exited the quarter with CAD 695 million of net debt, comprised of $569 million .
principal outstanding under senior notes and an adjusted working capital surplus of CAD 69 million, inclusive of approximately CAD 49 million in cash. The leverage ratio now sits at 1.3 times net debt to annualized adjusted EBITDA, down from 1.4x at year-end 2024. As John mentioned, we were able to accelerate debt reduction in Q2 with an open market purchase of CAD 16.3 million U.S., equating to approximately CAD 20 million Canadian of our senior notes when they traded down as low as CAD 86 million relative to par. The significant equity and bond market volatility caused by tariff uncertainty presented an attractive opportunity to purchase our bonds at a discount. Management also participated in purchasing approximately CAD 900,000 of our senior notes, providing another signal of our belief in Saturn's future potential and inherent value.
Our Q2 CapEx grew approximately CAD 16 million, which was at the low end of the quarterly guidance range, reflecting limited activity during spring breakup and driving free funds flow, which provided the company with minimal flexibility around future capital allocation decisions. Saturn's liquidity was further enhanced with the renewal of our credit facility in the quarter. With our renewal, we added an uncommitted CAD 100 million accordion feature to our existing CAD 150 million facility, allowing for the expansion of up to CAD 250 million in total. As a result, inclusive of cash on hand, we have up to CAD 300 million in total liquidity. Looking out to Q3, we are expecting capital expenditures to range between CAD 80 million and CAD 90 million, with average volumes between 37,000 and 38,000 BOE per day.
This reflects the minimal capital spent in Q2, along with the delayed start of our Q3 capital program, as we prudently elected to monitor our conditions given commodity price volatility. Thanks again to everyone for joining us today, and I'll hand over to the operator to commence the Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any key. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. The first question comes from Adam Gill with Ventum. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys. Great job on the quarter. A couple of questions for you. First off, you know OpEx performance has been pretty solid since closing the Flat Lake Bantam acquisition in Q2 last year. Is there much more room for reduction, or are we getting kind of to the optimization of the OpEx structure within the current company?
With more size and scale, we're able to grow and utilize the infrastructure advantage we have in a lot of our core areas. That being said, we're pretty comfortable sticking with our guidance of around CAD 20 a barrel. We've been coming in significantly below that lately. We're pretty confident that we can continue to find efficiencies and trim, though I'm not sure you're going to see as big a step change as you have. We're quite comfortable in our ability to meet or deliver in excess of the CAD 20 a barrel that we've gotten towards.
Okay, great. Just on production, you know, you have been outperforming over the last couple of quarters here. Any thoughts on the potential to reduce CapEx and still hit guidance, or is the preference to keep CapEx where it is and have volumes come in higher than expected?
We're pretty happy to be flexible in the context of the markets. If we see oil getting up here in the CAD 70s, I think that's an encouraging sign for us to continue to drill. Somewhere in the CAD 60s or even low CAD 60s, we might alter that a little bit. We do have that cushion, which is great because we have seen such strong performance from our well. We just want to be reactive to the market. I think we're just going to continue to monitor it and we'll add or subtract capital depending on what the market forces are giving us here.
Okay, great. Last question for me. You know, through Q2 and Q3, you've been buying back shares, did the SIB, and also accelerated debt repayment. How are you weighing the two in terms of allocating free cash flow into the back half of the year?
Yeah, it's basically we're just trying to balance opportunities in front of us. When we've seen our bonds dip a little bit on their trading face value, we were able to view them. We'd like to step in and purchase them again. We did that last block at an average of CAD 0.87 on the dollar, which we really liked. Obviously, then we did the SIB given that we were trading below CAD 2. Even here, where we're trading now at CAD 2.60, still well below our NAV, our NAV now almost half. It's still devaluing the stock. I'm still looking if we have excess cash flow to retire as much debt as we can. Kind of balancing all things and seeing what pricing comes in at and seeing what opportunity costs there are in the market. We did that small tuck-in acquisition of that company that we announced.
Even that will return over 100% return in the next 12 months. Just trying to balance all the different uses of capital, but definitely monitoring everything from buybacks to the debt retirement to tuck-in acquisitions.
Okay, great. Thanks for the answers. That's all for me.
Thank you, sir.
The next question comes from Jamie Somerville with RBC Capital. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thanks. If it isn't too commercially sensitive, can you provide some thoughts on the service industry cost trends and the competitive landscape for those services coming out of spring break up and how you're managing your relationships there? You're stressing your flexibility on spending. I imagine you're not fully contracted and committed to spending your 2025 budget. You know, it's always an art in terms of how you manage those relationships. I'm particularly interested to know if you're seeing any differences between Saskatchewan and Alberta in terms of cost trends.
Yeah, I think that's a great question. What we are seeing is, on the first point, we are very flexible. We see oil prices collapse. Within a week or two, we can completely shut down an entire capital program if we felt that was the right move. We do not have drilling commitments and most of our land does not face expiry. We have that flexibility that a lot of companies don't have. Most of our assets are relatively short turnaround, short lifecycles in getting them online. Most of our fields, in a few weeks, we can get production online. It's not like a lot of the deeper basin guys where they have six to nine months pads that they have to drill. Because of some of the softness in oil price, we are seeing prices come in a bit.
We went to tender here and it started with the second quarter. We are seeing service companies get more aggressive with their pricing. Most services on the drilling capital side are relatively fungible between Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Saskatchewan, moreover, when you're seeing more of the operating up-cost services, you are seeing that they're a little less fungible. You're seeing some prices there come in a little better, but in terms of drilling and completion, lots of that equipment can move relatively easily between the two provinces. That being said, we are seeing prices come in a bit, which helps. I think that's just a reflection of everyone's kind of pulled back on their capital a bit. I think everyone's just reacting to the uncertainty in the market. We are seeing some prices come in. I don't know, Doug Duggo here, our exploit manager, what are we seeing?
3% to 4% to 5% reduction?
I think that's well within the realm of possibility. They're definitely willing to work with us. That's something that we've been very strategic about, how we planned and scheduled our developments, to try and make us an operator that they like to work with because we try to bring in rigs and keep them working pretty full time. That helps us with some of our leverage in terms of getting decent prices. We're certainly not expecting an increase from what we would have seen in Q4 and Q1.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
The next question comes from Abhishek Peatwardhan with Sculptor Capital. Please go ahead.
Hey guys, good job on the quarter. Given how well you're performing, how well the wells are performing, how much more evidence do you need before you get credit for a better type curve?
Type curves are being adjusted every year. They're constantly being moved up and down. For example, if you look at our Viking, you notice that three years ago, we were 40 to 50% above the type curve. You know, two years ago we were 20%. Last year we were about 5%. It's not that our wells are getting worse, the type curve just keeps getting adjusted up. The performance is relatively similar across those three years. Within the margin, they're always being adjusted up and down, kind of given the locations and given the offset pairs. Doug, do you have any comment on type curve?
Again, it's something we got to be mindful of too. There's nothing certain in this business in terms of deliverability. We do have a bit of risk built into some of those curves as well, which should play out kind of the average risk over the course of a longer period of time. While we do see some good outperformance, we are cognizant of that and are certainly strategizing towards delivering wells that meet or exceed our type curve. Some of that too is making sure that we can be pragmatic about what we promise to the market in terms of the deliverability of these wells. We are continually looking at that. We do make continual changes to our type curves and look at each drill individually on what our expectations are for that drill. That's kind of our approach to type curves.
I think the word you're looking for might be sandbagging it, but that's all right. That's one thing we, you know, we always want to over-deliver, under-promise, over-deliver. That being said, our type curves do adjust up when we do consistently come in over. That's just it. We don't want to over-promise at all. So far, you know, we've been a combination of lucky and good. To date, you know, we're pretty happy with the direction of our type curves creeping up and our consistent ability to come in over those still.
Got it. Your guidance for CAPEX for the third quarter, how does it track versus your full year CAPEX guidance? I think it was CAD 300 million.
In Q3, it was Q3, right? Yeah. Q3 will certainly be one of our more intense quarters in terms of activity. We are planning to drill 21 wells over the course of the quarter here. Again, that's strategically important to us. It is also the cheapest time of year to drill wells because you don't have to heat fluids. It's a little easier. People work a little quicker when it's warmer outside. Getting around, it's just generally drier. Building pad sites is cheaper. You'll see us definitely have a pretty, pretty strong quarter in terms of our activity. Those 21 wells that we plan to drill over the course of the quarter there would indicate that.
Yeah, our CAPEX is always weighted the heaviest in Q3, second in Q4, third in Q1, and almost nothing in Q2, as we've just seen. The inverse of that is always true with your free cash flow as well. If you look at Q3 and Q4, those are going to be your lowest free cash flow quarters. Q2 will be your strongest, followed by Q1. That is just given the drilling season, given breakup here in Canada and the fields that we drill. I think a lot of people just have to keep in mind. I know in the past we've got questions, especially after Q3 and Q4, saying, "Hey, where's all this free cash flow?" Now in Q2, they're seeing all of the free cash flow. We don't want people to think that they can analyze that over the year either.
There is a seasonality to this, and that our capital and free cash flow are inversely related there.
There's also a piece of the flexibility that we offer with the wells that we target. I think we can be a lot more selective about when we do this to take advantage of that seasonality with the market. Whereas you're drilling big monthly pads, you have to just be steady, continue. You can't really stop operations for weather.
Right. Following the logic that you just mentioned, 3Q being the highest CapEx quarter, your guidance is CAD 80 million- CAD 90 million. If I just extrapolate, and it's a rough math, but if I extrapolate that, I think you'll end up less than CAD 300 million.
Between that and Q4, I believe we're on track to land somewhere around that CAD 290 million range. Again, with our guidance number, I think we got it to CAD 305 million. We are seeing some prices come in again, that 3%- 5% better. We are looking, we are internally guided to spend a little less than the original guidance number. That's just given some of the cost savings that we have seen. Right now, I think we're still on track to about that CAD 290 million- CAD 295 million range.
Yeah, I mean, for context, about 1% of capital expenditures (CAPEX) is spent in the first half of the year, the residual will be spent in the second half. All in, that's approximately CAD 300 million, consistent with guidance. No change at this time.
Got it. Out of the cost outperformance in the second quarter, how much of that from a dollar per BOE perspective came from carbon tax, carbon tax waiver?
I'd have to say the carbon tax savings we've seen are on the Saskatchewan side. So far, we haven't seen it come through on the Alberta side. Again, how do you really quantify the savings to our service companies? In part, there's a bit of a slowdown and a bit less money being drilled. That obviously causes some of our providers to get a little more aggressive with their pricing. Lots of our costs from carbon tax will be flow-through costs from fuel and other things like that. It's just hard to exactly quantify. I would say, you know, we are looking at somewhere in that CAD 15 million- CAD 20 million a year range savings from carbon tax. The balance being from using our size of scale and that infrastructure advantage we have in our core areas.
Between those two things, you know, we are fairly positive that we'll be able to continue to beat on the operating side.
How much visibility do you have on that? Is the carbon tax waived forever? Is there a deadline?
Yeah, Saskatchewan, Scott Sanborn of Saskatchewan came out and they have eliminated that carbon tax out of the province. I'm not sure if that eventually gets reversed, but in the current form and the current guidelines from the government, this is being eliminated in all forms. What we're seeing here should be permanent, obviously barring any other geopolitical issues to the province.
Got it. Thank you. That's it for me.
The next question comes from Michael Zuk with Athena Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Just a quick question from my side. How should investors view the company's appetite for acquisitions given the current debt load with CAD 300 million in liquidity and your equity currency up 24% month to date? Thanks.
Yeah, again, over the last four years, we've looked at 140 different acquisitions. It really has to be the exact one to fit. It has to be accretive. It has to be able to help us achieve our deleveraging over the next few years. There has to be something that we know that we can increase production and value on. All the while, how we've been able to buy all of our acquisitions are the metrics we generally use: two times cash flow, less than PDP on strip. There's a number of things that we've looked for before going after an acquisition, which is what makes some of these smaller ones very appealing to us. You've seen us do a Creelman acquisition last year, as well as a couple of smaller ones this year and last year.
I think that is what we're going to be more focused on, the smaller tuck-ins that although might not be material in the aggregate, we're increasing drilling locations. We're able to get it in our core areas. Again, it's a constant battle of, are our dollars better off retiring debt? Are we better off to buy shares? Or can we do a small tuck-in acquisition that is accretive at the end of the day? We are constantly balancing all of those aspects. Why we were kind of so aggressive here in the last quarter or two is we did find ourselves with upwards of CAD 100 million of cash, not really a productive asset for us.
If we can use that to retire debt, buy back some shares, and look for those right tuck-in acquisitions, that'll just be something we continue to do to balance liquidity and balance the opportunities that we find in the market.
Do you have a bias right now in terms of using lower leverage on an acquisition versus your equity capital, or is it case by case?
Our shares are highly undervalued. I think a lot of the response that you're seeing in the market on the other side is also because of our rapid deleveraging. We're pretty happy with both of those things being true. I think the shareholders want to see that leverage continue to come down, which is great. I also think that until we can get our share price a lot closer, or if not in excess of our PDP now, which should be around that CAD 5 a share, at that point we'd be a lot more comfortable issuing shares. I think that would more appropriately represent the value that we see. However, in the meantime, you're continuing to pay down debt. If we do do an acquisition, you know, does it solve for, is our debt materially lower in the next few years than it otherwise would be?
These are some of the things we look for before pursuing an acquisition or buybacks or other sort of distributions of cash.
Last question from my side. Are you seeing better deals in certain areas of your three core areas?
No, we're not actually. In fact, quite the opposite. We've seen some assets. I think we've said this publicly before. We looked at an asset in Southeast Saskatchewan, quite a number of synergies with it. In fact, we looked at it, we submitted a price somewhere in that 2x range, 2.5, and it went for 5. I think there are some additional dollars creeping in. U.S. private equity seems to be backing a couple of management teams now, which is probably a good thing. More interest, more capital coming back to the space just means our asset base that we currently have is worth that much more. No, we are seeing asset prices creeping up in some of our core areas. That's a great thing for the industry, and that's a great thing overall. The assets that we have just become that much more valuable in the marketplace.
We've definitely seen asset prices creep up over the last 12 to 18 months.
Okay, thanks for your time.
Thank you.
Since there are no more questions, this concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.