Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us for the enCore Energy web call. Brief meeting this morning with the recent news release on some changes at the company. I have today with us William M. Sheriff, Executive Chairman, and Rich Little, CEO. Just an introduction to Bill and specifically Rich, and ask Bill Sheriff to take it away. Please, if you're asking questions, type them in and we will review the questions at the end. Thank you very much.
Hi. Hopefully, there are some familiar faces out there. Bill Sheriff, the Executive Chairman. Just want to give you a little bit of background on what I think is really a team consolidating and team leading move that the board has instituted here at enCore Energy. A few weeks back, I was contacted and asked for my advice on where management should go, and I provided that to the board, and the board had already decided to go in a direction. I wholeheartedly recommended Mr. Rich Little, who they, in a series of conversations, moved to connect with and had what I'd considered an ideal background, and the board agreed. The negotiations were underway, and Rich agreed to join. I want to thank both Rich and the board of directors for both of them asking me to return as well.
I think we've put together a really solid team and had a good team below and ready to move forward. I think this will be a very short transition period. We've got a number of goals that we will work towards. Before we get to that, I want to hand it over to Rich and let him say a few words about himself and his philosophy on management.
Yeah. Thanks, Bill, I appreciate it. Thanks for all the investors that are on the call. Really appreciate your interest. The news right now, I came to the office on monday, really digging into a lot of the details of business plan, looking for efficiencies, ways that we can be more focused mostly on the high return assets and get a handle on what I think the future looks like. As far as any questions and concerns on any of that, I'd ask we hold off. What I thought might be of interest is more about my background since I am coming from an oil and gas background. Because to me, when I was first approached about the opportunity, I was curious what I could actually bring to uranium mining.
When I started understanding what's involved in in situ recovery, I think there's a ton of similarities between the two industries. If you'll allow me five minutes or so, basically to give you my background, I think it'll help. I am trained in petroleum engineering. I graduated from A&M in 1995. I got out of school and went to work for Halliburton Energy Services, focused mostly on what we call completions, which involves hydraulic fracturing. I did that for a few years and then was picked up by one of the consulting companies, Holditch-Reservoir Technologies, which was later bought by Schlumberger. I got a lot of experience doing domestic and global, just around the world, working with different international oil and gas companies, basically teaching them how to frack wells and how to measure their reserves.
One of my clients was a private equity group called Sierra Minerals. They had asked me to come in and help develop a field. It was a green field that they were just starting, so we needed to prove up resources and then put together a development plan that made economic sense. We did that, and within a couple of years, we sold that field to a company called Peoples Energy, which was a utility out of Chicago. They were looking to get into the non-reg business with their cash, and they wanted to get into oil and gas. They didn't have anybody working for them at the time that knew how to operate a field. When they purchased this field, they'd asked me to come over full time, and so I did that. At Peoples, we grew an existing field that I'd started with.
We tested different zones, expanded, and within about five years, Peoples Energy had grown through organic growth through the drill bit and also through acquisitions. We were bought then by a company called El Paso. El Paso, you guys may know, is a midstream or oil and gas transportation company, but they also have oil and gas. Went over there as reservoir engineering manager, then became business unit manager, and then all that was putting a P&L under me, and that was for South Texas Gulf Coast. At that time, it's interesting because a lot of those assets are where we're developing now or extracting uranium. I'm very familiar with the area.
Ironically, five years later, we were acquired by Kinder Morgan, and they spun off the oil and gas company to a private equity firm, that we later listed on the New York Stock Exchange under EP Energy. We continued to develop that. I left EP Energy after roughly five years. I know there's a theme of five years, but when I was at EP Energy, I was the VP of the Southern U.S., and that included the Gulf of Mexico and Texas Gulf Coast and South Texas and the Permian.
We began to focus specifically on unconventional resource plays, and that's probably where we were best at. We sold off our Texas Gulf Coast and our South Texas and the Gulf of Mexico to other operators. Then I became solely focused on developing 180,000-acre position in the Permian. I would call the acreage maybe challenged at best.
It was on the southern basin edge. It was primarily a gas-producing area in a time when oil commodities were trading better than natural gas. We had to learn how to be efficient and focus on how to develop this acreage to be able to compete with the oilier assets, which I felt like we did a really good job on. This was back in 2012. We started doing the development. We drilled over 350 wells. We had central production facilities. We had multiple well pad drilling sites. We had to highly focus our drilling targets. We did our own water recycle. All the things of becoming more efficient. Everybody does this now, but this was cutting edge at the time on how to drive down costs.
It may not mean anything to this group, but we were drilling 10,000-foot laterals in less than five days, which was just unheard of. That all comes from being really focused on our program and just executing at the top level. I left EP Energy to take the position of CEO at Ajax Resources. Ironically, I was the third CEO there in less than two years. What they needed was somebody to come in and basically do what it is I did at El Paso and EP Energy, and that's just driving down costs, focusing on high return assets, delineating the acreage. In doing that, Diamondback was one of the working interest parties, and they saw what we were doing.
They saw we were driving down well costs and improving overall efficiencies to the point where our acreage that was considered at one time out of the basin, it was on the northern edge, to now compete with tier one assets that were in the center of the basin. They were very interested in that and they needed the inventory, needed tier one inventory. They made an unsolicited bid to buy that acreage, and that was in 2018. Ajax basically bought the assets from W&T Offshore for $376 million, and in three years we sold it to Diamondback for $1.24 billion, mainly because driving efficiencies, focused on the high return assets, but we also proved up two additional zones that they weren't producing in and they weren't aware of. That was a great deal for Ajax.
After we sold it, I looked to set out to do Ajax 2, and I didn't tie myself up with any seed money or any private equity because I just wanted to chase value. The asset that I really kept going back to was a company called Halcon Resources. Very similar size. I guess at the time, well another around 40,000 acres solely in the Permian. Very similar story. They bought it on a single bench thesis. There's multiple benches there to test. There was a challenge in that the assets produced a poisonous gas called hydrogen sulfide, so we had to come up with a solution for that, and we did. One of the few operators that had their own ability to be able to strip out H2S. That was still a costly system, but it helped us to produce the oil and the wells were economic.
The second part of that solution was getting our own acid gas injection facility. There's no need to understand all those details other than the cost went from, call it $3.50-$4/MCF to treat gas, to about $1.38 per MCF to treat gas. Really just trying to, again, drive down and focus on efficiencies. I left that company in April of 2023, and for various reasons, but it was mostly just a misalignment on the next steps, whether it's through acquisitions, whether it's through organic growth. Either way, it was time for me to go. I left in April of 2023, and within 10 days I was contacted by investors in New York that were wanting to buy Battalion and take it private. Of course, I had my view on how that worked and how it would be successful, and we were aligned.
I signed a merger agreement basically with Fury Resources to buy Battalion. Just about a month shy of closing on the asset, one of our major investors wasn't able to come through on the equity, and so that deal fell apart. I kept Fury Resources as an acquisition shell and continued to look for different oil and gas assets. That became challenging with a number of things. Prices were moving around, and Liberation Day caused a lot of concerns on what that was going to do to well costs and things like that. It had been a challenging environment, but opened my eyes up to other opportunities. When I got this call, it made me really think through it and look to see what was going on here. I was really excited about the assets that enCore Energy has.
There's a tremendous amount of growth here, and more importantly, what I cared about was what can I do? What can I bring to the table to help with enCore? I think my ability to focus on efficient operations, my focus on high return assets, and just my experience on getting wells through permitting. We've had to work with permitting, dealing with contracts, long-term contracts. A lot of those things, my experience, I think bodes well at enCore.
I felt like there was a lot I could do here that could help, and there's some synergies between the two industries. I'm excited about it. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm glad that Bill also saw that opportunity, and yeah, I'm just happy to be here. Sorry to be so lengthy, but I felt like that context was important to understand what an oil and gas guy is doing in a uranium industry. I actually think there's quite a bit of similarities between the two.
Yeah, I might just add onto that. For those of you who've been with the company for a while, that was exactly what we had long been searching for in the company is someone with that direct oil and gas comparison because there are quite a few features that overlap. The gas production, you're constantly drilling and need to do so efficiently. Obviously there's a get-it-done quality with Rich that we really appreciate. Obviously an efficiency factor in there where you're operating a number of different areas and really consolidating and bringing down your cost, which is an always present factor that oftentimes is overlooked in the mining and minerals industry.
We're very happy to have him and that reservoir engineering experience all the soft rock geology and engineering that you see in oil and gas fields, especially in the operator skills that cross over into uranium exploration and development and in the roll-front terrain. We're very happy to have him aboard. I'd also like to give you a brief update.
Okay. Thank you.
I was going to say, I'd like to give you a very brief update on some of the factors dealing with the company. This is not intended as a corporate update, but I know there's curiosity out there, and so I will touch on them. One of our major objectives going forward is to increase our investor communication and cost centers and permitting and communications, I guess, if you were going to pick three. Our projects are, as I hope you're all well aware, very good projects, and with concentration on these three major efforts, I think you'll see a realization of that potential in fairly short order. I will mention that active drilling has been going on Alta Mesa East project, if you recall, that was picked up prior to my departure a few months ago.
We're looking forward to updating you on that in the near future. Updating you as well on the permitting on a number of assets here in the near future. As always I guess we've reinvigorated our M&A approach with my return. As you all know, I'm a big fan of M&A, and I think Rich shares that. I think you've got a pretty exciting next few months ahead for you. You'll be kept very well informed. As for a lot of our investors out there, once we get settled here over the course of the next couple of weeks and get Rich up to speed and get myself back up to speed, we'll be visiting a number of the big cities and the investors in those big cities, and we'll certainly announce that ahead of time, keep those investors notified.
Hopefully we'll be able to meet face-to-face and more importantly, have them meet Rich and get comfortable with that going forward. For those of you rather, that will be attending the Canaccord conference in early to mid-May, we will be there and look forward to meeting some of our investors both long-term and some of the newer ones at that conference. That's really all we had to bring up today. Certainly, the company's not been sitting idly around and been making advances. We're just going to make sure you're aware of them in a very timely manner going forward and do everything we can to cut costs and move this stock back up towards its highs and beyond ultimately.
Thank you, Bill and Rich. There's a number of questions that have come in. I think, Bill, you touched on several of them. I don't know how much you can say at this early stage, Rich or Bill, on Q1 production, contracts. There's a number of questions along those lines. I'm not sure if you want to handle them at a later date or touch on them right now.
Well, I'm going to put off on production. We really haven't had time to delve into that. It is still underway, obviously. As for contracting, I think everyone is pretty well aware of the fact that we had slowed down on contracting last year, and that continues. We are, I would say, fully contracted, and in fact, with permitting situation over contracted this year. Prior to my exit, the board had seen that coming and was able to secure some contracts at favorable prices. I don't think it's going to be a big adverse event for the company.
When management sees issues coming forward and reacts, it's a completely different outcome, even though it may not be what you ideally want. Obviously, you prefer production to fill every bit of those contracts. The heads up proactive approach puts you to where you don't get offsides on those contracts. The contracting issue, while we aren't taking any more now, I can report that there's still quite a bit of activity in the contracting market. Once we get through some permitting, we'll be looking at additional contracting.
Thank you.
The only thing I'd like to add to that, if you don't mind, Bill, is that there was a question about what I might focus on and what objectives. Again, I'm getting my hands around everything. I'll be careful to not speak specifically to the company, but anybody can look at my track record and see what I do focus on is responsible growth, not growth at all costs. I like accretive M&A transactions, and I like responsible growth. When I talk about responsible growth, I'm thinking from an economic standpoint. In my opinion, economics is going to drive everything. I think that's in the shareholders' best value. It's what's best for the company, and so that'll be my focus here as well.
Thank you. There is a further question I would assume for Bill on any color you can provide on what you are focused on for M&A opportunities. I know you've spoken often about the need for consolidation in the sector.
Yeah. Well, quite frankly Rich had spent some time in our operations down south before he joined us trying to get acclimated, and as he pointed out, seeing how to fit in and really value add here, and indeed, he and I spent a fair amount of time before the final announcement as well, and I'd say we're aligned completely in terms of the M&A outlook. We want to stay domestic. We obviously have a long track history of being the acquirer, but certainly we aren't above and beyond being acquired at the same time. We think we've got the team and the staff, and all the way down through operations and throughout the company to accomplish it and benefit from it. We've got certainly a track history of it. At the same time, we certainly aren't taking ourselves off the market either.
Whatever makes sense, I think is the bottom line, and the best for the industry, the best for the companies, and the best for the country, quite frankly. These companies that have initial production, such as ourselves and several others in the industry, in the U.S. in particular, and in other friendly countries, just not quite enough to get the real leverage you need. You need to see a way to get bigger. There's going to be room for two or three of these ISR companies eventually, not six of them or eight or 10. Size does matter. It matters in terms of your contracting. It matters in terms of your financial strength of the company. Your access to capital certainly is cheaper when you're a bigger company with better cash flow. At the same time, we don't have to live and die on that.
We've got the assets and the team to build generically. I guess I'd say a renewed focus on M&A, while at the same time really digging down and tightening the belt and moving the operations forward as well and developing our own pipeline, and of course, permitting is a big issue with that.
You touched on the permitting side, and I did think that was another item that was pretty key between the two organizations. I will say that just from my quick review, it looks like on oil and gas that the state is much more in tune with doing oil and gas permitting. It's significantly faster than the uranium permitting, from what I can tell. In my mind, we've got some educating to do that will hopefully help speed up the process. Right now, I just think that there's a lot of unfamiliarity on the permitting, so that's probably one of the biggest unknowns we're dealing with right now. Nothing that can't be solved. I just feel like we're just a few years behind oil and gas on the efficiencies there with permitting.
Absolutely, that is incumbent on the company to help work with the regulators and bring them along and bring them up to speed. They certainly have had far more industry experience in oil and gas in Texas than uranium over the years, and especially over the last 40. We're quite active in Austin and will continue to be so.
Thank you. I'm going to ask one last question and allow both of you an opportunity. It's sort of a merge of several questions. What are you seeing in contract pricing? Where's that headed? Domestic uranium and the recent developments with the Defense Production Act, where do you see things going? I'll allow both of you a chance to answer that.
Bill, if you'll let me answer first because I think you'll give a more fulsome answer on the commodity side of things. When we talk about contracts, the first place I go is more on the operations side. That is exactly what I'm looking for as far as efficiencies on the drill side, on the production facilities. I think that there's some synergies that we could bring from oil and gas into this that could result in better contracting on the ops side. I don't think that was getting exactly what your question is, but for the uranium, I feel much more comfortable having Bill answer that question than me. I do see a number of efficiencies that can be created on the operating side.
I think there's several service companies that would like a chance at doing this because there's been a ton of consolidating in the oil and gas industry and without an increase or even holding flat of the overall activity, which means overall there's more service companies available than might have been in the past. I think that translates into better costs on the ops side. I mean, you can take it away for the commodity.
Agreed. I would say one thing, obviously even during my hiatus here, I've been actively watching and monitoring the uranium market and what you can gather publicly from contracting, and I think I could sum it up by saying it's healthy, it's steady, it's got a slight positive bias. It's not frothy in any way. Consistent might be the one word I would tag onto it. It's not buoyant or runaway or really even any indications that that's going to happen imminently. At the same time, the long-term supply-demand metrics for it just continue to build, and the progress in all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle continue to build as well. Again, we're seeing a major emphasis in terms of funding and government assistance and that sort of thing on the enrichment, on the downstream, the enrichment and conversion end of things.
Quite frankly, that's where it needs to be. There's far more uranium out there than there is available enrichment and conversion capacity. These bottlenecks for the Western world and the U.S. in particular are key, and that's where the money is going and welcome, at least from my viewpoint. Our time will come in terms of that, and you touched on the DPA, Defense Production Act. I know there's quite a bit of activity there. There's a subgroup set up to go after that, and largely at the behest of the Department of Defense, as well as the Department of Energy, and a lot of collaboration going on there. I'm not going to get into any details because I'm a little behind the curve on that. I'd rather provide you with a firmer update.
I can tell you that many government agencies are indeed moving as quickly as government agencies can and maybe even more so than anyone's accustomed to make sure that they do secure domestic U.S. production, and certainly the utilities, our customers, are supporting that in every way they can. I think I still maintain we're in the batting practice. The real game, if you will, hasn't begun. Good time for course corrections if you have to have them, and certainly we're going to take advantage of that. We've got a good, sound foundation.
I don't think we could have any better leadership right now, and got a great team, so I look forward to bringing further updates and I'm sure Rich will as well, and getting out on the road and seeing everybody and telling them exactly what we're doing and when we're doing it, as best as we can with disclosure regs. With that, I think we'll sum it up, and like I say, look forward to seeing you all.
Yeah. Thanks again for your time and interest.
Thank you.
Thank you both, and thank you everyone for joining us today. This has been recorded, and it will be available on the enCore website. If you have any further questions, please reach out to info@encoreuranium.com. I thank you, Bill and Rich, for your time, and for all the attendees, thank you as well. Time is valuable, and we appreciate yours.