Valeura Energy Inc. (TSX:VLE)
Canada flag Canada · Delayed Price · Currency is CAD
15.02
-0.03 (-0.20%)
Sep 22, 2026, 1:55 PM EST
← View all transcripts

AGM 2022

Jun 23, 2022

Robin Martin
Investor Relations Manager, Valeura Energy

Good afternoon, welcome to the Valeura Energy Annual General Meeting. My name is Robin. I'm the Investor Relations Manager. This event is being broadcast live and is being recorded today, June 23rd, 2022, and that recording will be available online later today. We're gonna get started in just a minute, but first, a few housekeeping matters. For those of us here in the room, we've confirmed with the building management there's no alarms scheduled for today, no fire alarms scheduled for today. If we do hear a bell, it's the real deal, and we should evacuate out the conference center entrance, down the escalators, across the street. I'd also like to note for the online audience, all lines will be in listen-only mode, and if you'd like to participate in the Q&A session at the end, please use the Q&A button in Microsoft Teams.

With that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Tim Marchant, Chairman of Valeura. Tim?

Tim Marchant
Chairman, Valeura Energy

Thank you, Robin. Good afternoon, everybody. It's just shortly after 4:00 P.M. Calgary time. I'd like to ask that this meeting come to order. My name is Tim Marchant. I'm the Chairman of the board of directors of Valeura Energy. I will act as chair for today's meeting. On behalf of Valeura, I'd like to welcome you all to today's meeting. I'd also like to welcome those shareholders and others who are listening via this live audio webcast. Before we proceed with the formal business of today's meeting, I'd like to introduce the Directors and Officers of Valeura who are present today. I'd ask that each Director and Officer stand momentarily when I call their name. Sean Guest, Director, President, and CEO, who's now standing. Jim Jim McFarland, Director of the corporation. Ron Royal, Director. Heather Campbell, Chief Financial Officer.

Gord Begg, Vice President, Commercial, and Robin Martin, who you've already met, our Investor Relations Manager. In accordance with the bylaws of Valeura Energy, Jon McDonald of Torys LLP will act as the Secretary for today's meeting, and I appoint the representatives of Computershare Trust Company of Canada to act as the Scrutineers. The notice calling this meeting, the information circular, a form of proxy, and a mailing request form were mailed to all registered shareholders on May the 18th, 2022. The declaration of mailing is available for inspection by any shareholder, and I would ask that the Secretary file a copy of such with the minutes. Regarding the quorum, I've been advised by the Scrutineers that quorum has been met for this meeting. The Scrutineers' report is available for inspection by any shareholder, and I would ask that the Secretary file a copy of such with the minutes.

With that said, I declare that this meeting is regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. For convenience, we've divided today's meeting into two parts. The first part will deal with the formal business of the meeting, and the second part will consist of a presentation by Sean Guest, our President and Chief Executive Officer, on the operations of Valeura, which will be followed by questions from registered shareholders and proxy holders. To facilitate the timely completion of the formal business, arrangements have been made with certain shareholders to move and second the resolutions to be considered. Votes will be conducted by way of ballot, except for the appointment of auditors, which will be voted on by way of a show of hands. The first item of business is the presentation of the 2021 audited financial statements of Valeura Energy and the auditors' report thereon.

The financial statements are available on SEDAR and have been sent to those shareholders who have requested copies. The next item of business is the appointment of auditors. May I please have a motion for such business?

Jon McDonald
Secretary, Torys LLP

Mr. Chair, I move that KPMG LLP be appointed as the auditors of Valeura to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting or until their successors are appointed at such remuneration as may be determined by the board.

Tim Marchant
Chairman, Valeura Energy

Is there a seconder?

Heather Campbell
CFO, Valeura Energy

Mr. Chair, I second.

Tim Marchant
Chairman, Valeura Energy

Any discussion? All those in favor of the resolution, please signify by raising your hand. Are there any contrary votes? I declare the motion is carried. The last item of business is the election of the directors. Valeura has nominated seven directors for election and did not receive any nominations from shareholders in accordance with our bylaws. Accordingly, I will now receive the corporation's director nominations.

Heather Campbell
CFO, Valeura Energy

Mr. Chair, I nominate the following for election as Directors of Valeura: William Sean Guest, Timothy R. Marchant, James D. McFarland, Ronald W. Royal, Russell J. Hiscock, Kimberley K. Wood, and Timothy N. Chapman.

Tim Marchant
Chairman, Valeura Energy

May I now have a motion for such business?

Jon McDonald
Secretary, Torys LLP

Mr. Chair, I move that the corporation's director nominees be elected as directors of Valeura to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting or until their successors are elected or appointed.

Tim Marchant
Chairman, Valeura Energy

Is there a seconder for the motion?

Heather Campbell
CFO, Valeura Energy

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Tim Marchant
Chairman, Valeura Energy

In accordance with Valeura Energy's majority voting policy, the directors will be elected individually by way of ballot. For a nominee to be elected as a director, he or she must receive a majority of the votes cast in favor of his or her election. If you have not received a ballot, please identify yourself to the scrutineers. I'm advised by the scrutineers that each director nominee has received greater than 50% of the votes cast in favor of his or her election, as required by our majority voting policy. Accordingly, I declare that the motion is carried and that each nominee has been elected as a director. This now concludes the formal business of the meeting. I declare the formal part of the meeting terminated, and thank you all for attending.

Now that the formalities are completed, Sean Guest, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will provide an update on Valeura's operations. If you have any questions at the end of the presentation, we ask that you raise your hand, wait to be acknowledged and to be handed a microphone, and then begin your question by identifying yourself and indicating whether you're a registered shareholder or a proxy holder. Over to you, Sean.

Sean Guest
President and CEO, Valeura Energy

Thank you very much, Tim. Yes, thank you very much for joining us at the meeting today. I'd just like to run you through the status of Valeura and where we're at. It's obviously been an interesting year. Since the last time we had an annual meeting, there's been quite a few changes in the company. I'll take you through those and where we're at today. Okay. I'll just pass over the advisories, again, we take these seriously, at your leisure, please review them on the website. Looking at Valeura and where we're at now, it's obviously been an interesting year. A year ago, we were in the midst of COVID. We just had our asset in Turkey, we were attempting to do some M&A activities.

Really, we've managed to complete M&A, and that's the deal that we announced in April in Thailand, and then actually that we were able to close that deal in July. That's really changed the look of Valeura. It's bringing us the chance at near-term production and growth that we can then combine together with the Turkish asset, which is that blue-sky upside and that. Really what we were looking for with that M&A was the ability. We had that great upside in Turkey, but with some risks there. It was to look for that production, the cash flow, and more importantly, that near-term growth that we could add to that production and cash flow while we still try and move the Turkey asset forward. That's what we've been able to achieve with this deal in Thailand.

The other point I'll note, though, is that while we've now concluded that M&A deal, that's not the end of it, and we are looking at taking on more deals as we go forward. Financially, we're still in a strong position. The number for the cash you see up on the slide there is actually at the end of Q2. Having announced our deal, you can imagine that we have had to pay costs associated with that. We've actually paid for almost half the MOPU purchase price of about CAD 4.2 million. We expect that number to be closer to about CAD 30 million when we come to the end of Q2. The shares remain the same. We have no debt still in the company. What we see with the share price now is, yesterday we were at about CAD 0.56.

That's up about 25% from where we were at the beginning of the year, which is quite positive. I can tell you myself, I was a little disappointed with the deals that we've closed, with announcing the reserve update last week, that we weren't seeing more motion. I do recognize we're really pushing ourselves into some strong headwinds in the market right now. While it's a little bit frustrating, as we look at ourselves and compare ourselves to our peer group, we're number one in our peer group right now in our performance of 20 companies of a similar size. What I can tell you is we intend to be doing more of that as we move through the year. As I said, we've got this deal done, but we still have much more activity as we look forward.

The key thing I really wanted to emphasize again was this point of when we were in Turkey and we had the small gas production there, and while it was good, we had cash flow from that, we did not see any growth potential in that asset. We'd had it for quite a while, but we were not seeing the ability to grow the production and cash flow. We were able to sell that for just under CAD 20 million in the midst of COVID. What we've done now is taken that amount of money that we received for it, and we've now bought these assets in Thailand, which has a field that is ready to turn on 3,000 bbl a day of production, and importantly, have growth that we see, not just in that field that's already developed, but in another field that's ready for development.

We like that story of moving out of an asset where we didn't see the growth. Same amount of money is now taken into something with high cash flow, production, and further growth. That's what we were looking for in the portfolio, was that to really offset the asset we have in Turkey with the high upside potential. For a number of shareholders, it may seem that Thailand's a big step out for us. It's very different, except for the fact that both Thailand and Turkey start with T. For myself, I actually have worked the majority of my career in Asia, as have other members of our management team, and we're quite comfortable in that environment.

When you look at why Thailand, there's a number of factors as to whether you've got a very long oil and gas industry there. A very strong service industry that you can rely on. You've got a strong, educated population. It's a tax royalty system which delivers good returns. The most important thing I feel as we looked at Thailand is, it's a basin and a country where small cap companies have been able to really demonstrate growth and return to shareholders. That's very important for us. The geology is such that you can actually find these, what appear to be relatively small fields, bring them online cheaply, and then continue to grow the production. It's not uncommon in Thailand that you get fields that end up producing five to 10 times the initial reserves that a development plan was based on.

Looking specifically in a little more detail at our Gulf of Thailand acquisition, the first thing is the cost we ended up paying was approximately CAD 3 million, which is really what we were doing, was covering the costs and the asset from the effective date of January 1st. There are CAD 7 million in contingent payments, but we really only have to make those when we're getting that upside. CAD 2 million if we get an infill drilling program on the Wassana field, and a CAD 5 million contingent payment once we develop the Rossukon field, which again, I'll emphasize, can come on, have a peak production of about 12,000 bbl a day. Those are really based on success.

The other element to the acquisition is we also bought the MOPU, which is a production facility on the field, that will greatly reduce the cost of operating and really lower our breakeven cost on this asset. Looking at the highlights there, you've got one field that has been already developed. It just needs to be turned back on, that'll come on at about 3,000 bbl a day. It's got about 6.5 million bbl of reserves from NSAI, that's got a value from NSAI of about CAD 60 million. We have the contingent resource there, some of that is in the Rossukon field, which is a field that's fully appraised and ready for development. As I noted earlier, can come on at a peak production of about 12,000 bbl a day. A lot of good upside there.

Given the price that we're paying and the actual value that we see in these assets and the production, the metrics for this are extremely strong. The reason for this was that we were able to buy this out of receivership. I'll just give you a slide on each of the two assets there, and the first one is on the Wassana oil field, in the license T10. This is a field that has been fully developed already and was on production. What happened was when they had very high lease rates on the MOPU, you can see in the bottom left there, they had very high lease rates on that MOPU and the floating storage vessel that was storing the oil.

When the price of oil dropped during COVID, the field became uneconomic, and the receiver at that time released the FSO to save costs. When the oil price goes up, they had no ability to restart the field. That's really what we're doing. We've bought the MOPU, which is the production facility, to get rid of that lease cost, and now we've bought the assets. We'll go out there and restart that field, which we've said is in Q4. The risks on that we see is quite low. The field was producing approximately 3,000 barrels a day net to us when it was shut in. It was not shut in for any geological reasons or anything. It was shut in due to oil price.

The MOPU, the wells have been maintained, and we do expect that once we get the floating storage vessel out there, we'll be able to bring this back on and get that production back going at approximately the same rate. That's really the step for this year. We're going to recertify the MOPU, which is all the contracts are in place to start that work in July. We'll get the FSO out there, and then depending on when that arrives, we'll really restart that production in Q4. That's step one on this at about 3,000 bbl a day. In next year, we have infill drilling planned because we've got the additional reserves that have been identified already, and we can access these with about five wells first to try and increase that production to about 5,000 bbl a day. Currently that's planned for about Q2.

Again, what we see is we've got about 3,000 bbl a day of production we can bring on, infill drilling next year to take us up to about 5,000 bbl a day. Looking at the other block, which is T6 and the Rossukon oil field, we have about 43% interest in this. That's an operated interest as well. Again, the block expiry is way out there in 2036. Now this field has been fully appraised by six wells. There's actually an approved development plan by the government. It really is ready to go forward into stalled development because the KrisEnergy assets were in receivership. We've come on with this. We've reviewed the development plan.

I've actually been over working with the team for the past four weeks looking at this. We're just doing a revision to that plan because we can believe it can be done at a much lower CapEx, which would really come on next year with an initial drilling program, where you're about 5,000 barrels a day. To follow that up pretty quickly after that with another program to take it to 12,000 bbl a day. Again, those plans are in place and the plans for this year is to really make that final investment decision, to get that work going, and then we'll have first oil from this is planned for Q4 next year. Moving back and just summarizing again our asset back in Turkey, which people who've been with the company for a while will be familiar with.

We drilled three wells into this deep target with Equinor as our partner here. We discovered a significant amount of gas and can really demonstrate that there's tens of TCF of gas in this basin. Really the key we're looking for is to demonstrate sustainable flow. Now, we've done a lot of work on the asset since we drilled those wells, and we've identified the location as to where we should move to next. The one issue we faced was where we drilled the wells and tested them was a very rich, high condensate gas, and that was inhibiting a lot of the gas flow. We believe by moving the best reservoir slightly deeper into what's a dry gas window, we could actually get a better flow from this system. That's really our target here.

The key thing we're trying to do now is to look to bring in a partner on the asset. The one thing we can look at from a year ago is that a year ago, gas in Europe was just over Henry Hub, so maybe about $3. Right now, gas in Europe is trading at about $30, and gas security and gas supply is one of the key issues that is being discussed in Europe right now. You probably aren't surprised to hear then, that this has created much more interest in this asset. We do have a data room open at this time, and we have companies in there.

We hope to really get an offer on that and to bring this to get someone to farm in, and to be looked to progress that, as we move through the rest of this year, so maybe with drilling next year for that asset. Finally, just looking at the milestones that we have and what you're looking at coming ahead is we announced in April that we'd done this deal, and we told you we'd close that in Q2, and we've done that, and we've closed that deal now. Right now we are going through a retendering to try and identify that floating storage vessel. We have a number of opportunities we're just narrowing down now, and we expect to really get that contract in place shortly so we can start to mobilize that vessel to the field.

The work on the recertification of the MOPU, and I'll just comment, this is just a normal, it's done periodically, this recertification. The contracts are in place and the work has started on that already out on the MOPU. Then we'll get the FSO there, then we'll look at starting production in Q4 this year. The exact timing of whether it's early or late will really depend on the timing of when we get that floating storage vessel there. That'll come on at 3,000 barrels a day, and then, as I noted before, Q2 infill drilling, and that should take it up to 4,500-5,000 bbl a day, so almost doubling the production. We then look down to the Rossukon development.

We anticipate making a final investment decision on that sometime in the next three to six months, then taking that development forward for first oil in Q4 next year. Then finally on the bottom, I noted our upside project, so that we've got the Turkey asset where we really hope to get a farming offer there so we can start to progress that. Looking to put that in the scope of values to where we're currently trading with the market cap that we have there of about CAD 37 million. We've got the 2P value that's been certified by NSAI of coming out at about CAD 60 million. We have significant value in that Wassana field development that we'll be looking to progress forward, which really can take us up to a tangible value of about CAD 137 million, and currently trading at about CAD 37 million.

We see significant upside in the stock just with these assets that we're looking to develop here, and that market cap is also about the cash flow that we expect from just the Wassana field without the infill drilling. It can deliver about CAD 9 million a quarter. We believe we're undervalued, and there's significant upside potential. Just in summary, we have the high value, tight production, which we're looking to bring on, and we're very pleased to see the reserves increase last week on that when we announced it. We are looking at further growth in the region as well, further M&A activities. We expect to move on those. The tight gas play, which really brings us that large potential upside in the future to try and progress that further.

With that kind of brings us to the end of this part of the presentation. At this point, we'd welcome any questions. For anyone in the room, please feel free to just put up your hand, and we can ask the question. For those who are in MS Teams, you have to use the question app within there, and then Robin will read out the question for you. Thank you very much.

Robin Martin
Investor Relations Manager, Valeura Energy

Sean, if there's no questions from the room, we have had a couple of questions come in from the online audience. I'll just voice them here. First question is on the Rossukon development, and the viewer is asking, "When can we expect to hear about Rossukon FID? And also, will it be developed under the existing development plan, or will you go with the scaled-down version as you mentioned in your acquisition announcement?

Sean Guest
President and CEO, Valeura Energy

Yeah. We're still working exactly the plan, with our partners, and we'll work that also with the regulator. Oh, sorry. You gonna bring it back to me?

Robin Martin
Investor Relations Manager, Valeura Energy

Yeah.

Sean Guest
President and CEO, Valeura Energy

Okay. Yeah. With our partners and with the regulator. The plan that was submitted was for a full production platform. That CapEx on that was looking at about CAD 180 million-CAD 200 million gross, right. Where we have about 43% interest. We believe by going down with a scaled-down MOPU development, like we have in the Wassana field already, that we can reduce that CapEx number down to something in the order of maybe CAD 60 million, which is obviously significantly less. It can still yield the same amount of production with a phased drilling. As a small company, we think that's a better way to go. That work is still being done technically, but we expect to kind of have that done, and as I said in the presentation, be able to make that decision in three to six months.

Robin Martin
Investor Relations Manager, Valeura Energy

Okay. We've got another question here. Are you still evaluating additional acquisitions in Southeast Asia? What type of financing would be necessary in that regard?

Sean Guest
President and CEO, Valeura Energy

Yeah. Yes, we are still looking at other activities. Obviously, we announced this one deal, but we weren't just looking at one deal, so there are other deals that are going on in parallel. We do have an advantage of having completed this deal now. As a corporate acquisition, it came with a number of tax losses, and as we look at other assets, that does give us a bit of a leg up as we value other assets in the region. What we liked about this deal was that there was no debt required, and there was no dilution to shareholders in this case. We believe we're going to be able to do other deals without having to dilute shareholders. We see that debt is available, in the market, and we're obviously looking at that as we look at other opportunities.

Robin Martin
Investor Relations Manager, Valeura Energy

Next question is on Turkey. Can you provide a time estimate on closing the data room in Turkey and receiving final bids?

Sean Guest
President and CEO, Valeura Energy

Yeah. I think I noted that a bit, that we'd really hoped that we would have something kind of in the summer. I think we're going to be a little delayed on that. One of the reasons for that is actually the companies that come in really depend on the amount of time they take. If you do get large, major companies in there, they tend to do very fulsome reviews and want to really go through all the data in a lot of detail. We're finding that the reviews are taking a little longer, but we really want to make sure we give people the ability to have a look at that asset and make decisions on coming in.

I think probably it'll be as we go into end of Q3 or towards Q4 that we'd be able to get something done there, assuming that we've got offers.

Robin Martin
Investor Relations Manager, Valeura Energy

Sean, there's no more questions from the online audience, unless anyone in the room has further.

Sean Guest
President and CEO, Valeura Energy

Okay. Thank you very much, and thank you, everyone, for their time. With that, we'll bring the meeting to a close.