Good day, and Welcome to the CNX Resources First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to Mr. Tyler Lewis. Mr. Lewis, please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to CNX's First Quarter Conference Call. We have in the room today Nick DeIuliis, our President and CEO, Don Rush, our Chief Financial Officer, Chad Griffith, our Chief Operating Officer, and Yemi Akinkugbe, our Chief Excellence Officer. Today, we will be discussing our first quarter results. This morning, we posted an updated slide presentation to our website. Also, detailed first quarter earnings release data such as quarterly E&P data, financial statements, and non-GAAP reconciliations are posted to our website in a document titled "1Q 2022 Earnings Results and Supplemental Information of CNX Resources." As a reminder, any forward-looking statements we make or comments about future expectations are subject to business risks, which we have laid out for you in our press release today, as well as in our previous Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
We will begin our call today with prepared remarks by Nick, and then we will open the call up for Q&A, where Don, Chad, and Yemi will participate as well. With that, let me turn the call over to you, Nick.
Thanks, Tyler. Hi, everybody. I'm going to handle the commentary today, as Tyler just said. I'm gonna break it into two parts. First, let's have a review of our results for the first quarter and talk about some updated guidance looking forward. Then I'll wrap with a couple of comments, and maybe observations is actually a better term, about our industry, the nation and the world today. Starting first with our quarter and our outlook into the future. The CNX, I think, has been sounding like a broken record for at least two years and 8+ quarters running. Today that broken record repeats itself yet again. Fortunately, repetitive music sounds great for ownership. That's because like the string of recent quarters the past few years, we had yet another clean and easy-to-understand quarter.
I'm gonna review the quarter by running down the key components of the CNX Sustainable Business Model or the SBM as we refer to it. You can read more about our Sustainable Business Model and our proxy and our soon-to-be-released Corporate Responsibility Report. I encourage you, of course, to do so. The Sustainable Business Model, it starts with having a compelling why. What motivates us to do what we do? CNX and our employees, we bring quality of life and security to society. Without us, everything stops. Realization of our purpose or that why, it's grown tremendously the past year. The world sees what happens if things like domestic natural gas is taken for granted, or worse yet, if it's marginalized. I'll have more to say on this in a couple of minutes when we get to those observations that I spoke about.
The next step of that Sustainable Business Model is building a non-replicable and a resilient, competitively advantaged business to deliver on that why. In the first quarter, we delivered another quarter of smooth, safe, and compliant operational execution across what is basically our stacked pay, our upstream midstream integrated, and our low cost, actually lowest cost footprint in what's become the most prolific natural gas basin in the world. You take these attributes and you couple them with our programmatic hedge book, you see CNX was able to land our production costs and margins right where we wanted them in the first quarter. That third step of the Sustainable Business Model, that's to generate steady and substantial free cash flow. First quarter saw us post over $234 million in free cash flow.
More importantly, we produced $1.20 of free cash flow per share in the first quarter using the quarter end share count just over 195 million shares. The next steps of the sustainable business model, they start to look to astutely allocate our free cash flow to the right places and at the right times to generate those value-creating rates of return and long-term per share value. Astute capital allocation, it perpetuates our why. We start with investing in our most important assets, which of course is our team. I'm happy to report that CNX, which was the public company regional leader when you look at all-in average employee comp in 2020, it achieved even higher all-in compensation for employees in 2021 at over $180,000 per team member.
We've got some exciting efforts in the works when it comes to human capital in 2022, so please stay tuned as the year unfolds. We're gonna have much more to say about that. Now, the next free cash flow allocation avenue that we consider is investing in our regional communities. CNX was very active during the first quarter on this front. The CNX Foundation is up and running with its governance. It's already committed million dollars to what I think are gonna be hugely impactful investments across communities in need of our Appalachian footprint. The CNX Mentorship Academy, it's rounding the bend to conclude its first inaugural class here in early June. Hard to believe.
I'm beyond excited about what that is all about and how it's ready to welcome, these young men and women into the local workforce, and particularly the CNX workforce. Employees across the company, they're catching the fever to identify and personally participate in and drive a portfolio of investments that we're making across Appalachia. CNX has broken the mold and set a new standard when it comes to ESG performance and things like stakeholder capitalism and what it truly means to focus local. The company's success and the local region's success, they've always been linked, and that's a responsibility that we continue to lead on and embrace. Next, we look to pay down debt under our Sustainable Business Model, and in the first quarter, we paid down $74 million in that debt. Our balance sheet, I describe it as stellar at this point.
It's gonna be getting even better as 2022 unfolds. The optionality that this strength creates, it can be a really powerful thing in an industry such as ours, which I'm also going to expand upon when I talk about those observations. Then the last step of the Sustainable Business Model, but not the least, right, is calling for returning capital to our owners. We've got two ways of doing that, through dividends or share repurchases. Which one we pick is gonna follow the clinical math of risk-adjusted rate of returns in the context of long-term per share value. That approach dictated that we continue to repurchase shares in the first quarter.
We invested over $150 million of free cash flow in share repurchases, buying in over 9 million shares or just under 5% of the company in the quarter at an average price of $16.55. We are thrilled with that result. That's the CNX Sustainable Business Model in action. Yeah, it tends to be repetitive, but we love that kind of repetition. Before I forget, today, we also raised 2022 guidance to approximately $700 million in free cash flow or $3.59 per share using the updated shares outstanding as of April 20. Okay, now that we've covered the quarter and our guidance outlook, let me shift and offer up a few observations about our great industry, nation, and the state of the world.
These observations go to the heart of that why that I spoke about. They impact not just CNX and Appalachian in profound ways, but they also deserve, I think, far more discussion than the limited time we've got today. With the time we've got, let's hit on a couple of these observations. I think 2022 is turning out to be quite the proving ground that's verifying certain realities and exposing certain flawed beliefs. First, let's talk about natural gas supply and how that might be able to grow to respond to increasing energy demand needs, both domestically as well as in places like Europe. There's been a lot of talk about LNG and how U.S. natural gas can save the E.U. by replacing Russian natural gas and providing much-needed energy security during a time of crisis.
At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the energy supply challenges that we still have to overcome domestically. Certainly, I think the industry is doing what it can to increase supply. CNX is a great example where we expect reduction in capital expenditures for the year to be toward the higher end of our guidance range. Every little bit of this is gonna help. There are also some harsh realities that are quite ironic, unfortunately. The domestic natural gas, oil, and pipeline industries in the nation, it can't ramp up production to anything close to the levels that the U.S. and the E.U. is clamoring for anytime soon. That's not because of industry unwillingness. We are an industry or industries of doers after all. It's not because of corporate greed or profiteering as some might allege.
No, instead, it's simply and starkly because policy has consciously and methodically looked to strangle infrastructure investments in the pipes and in the processing and the power generation, and yes, in the LNG infrastructure, all of which are needed to meet the world's energy demand. They're everywhere, these policies I'm talking about that one looks today. Global policies via things like the Paris Agreement and the UN IPCC climate roadmap. You see them in national policies via weaponized regulatory regime in the administrative state. You see it in regional policies like RGGI and some of these dysfunctional regional transmission organizations that are manipulating energy and electricity markets that are leading to really bad outcomes and consequences like those that we've seen in Texas and California.
You also see them in state and local policies such as de facto natural gas development or transmission or end use bans in places like New York and Boston. Unfortunately, these policies have been extremely effective in achieving exactly what they were designed to do, which is to create energy scarcity, run up prices, and not allow the most sensible supplies of natural gas and oil to reach the obvious demand centers. That's why Boston has to import LNG from thousands of miles afar, including Russia at times, instead of taking molecules from Pennsylvania 400 miles away via pipeline. That's why U.S. politicians end up pleading with dictators in Venezuela and OPEC to increase output. Most tragically, that's why the E.U. is energy dependent on Russia. Now, for our industry to solve problems and provide solutions, it unfortunately is gonna take years.
The domestic energy industry has been under attack and penned in for over a decade by these policies, and now it will take nearly as long to correct that. That's assuming policymakers wake up to the reality, which is a big assumption, as crazy as it sounds, considering times like these, where common sense tells us domestic energy has never been more vital, and the policies that are designed to stymie it, they've never been more harmful. Now, these policy concerns, they lead to my second observation. Despite the clear validation of domestic energy as an attractive and a deserving investment option, we believe access to the capital markets for our industry is gonna continue to be more restricted. Now, it could be something like ESG investing gone awry, or it could be the Federal Reserve climate stress test on banks, or it could be SEC climate disclosures.
To manage this risk, we believe the prudent course under our Sustainable Business Model is to maintain a debt level and a maturity schedule and a liquidity level whereby we never need to access the debt markets. Fortunately, we reached that point. Our guidance to future free cash flow generation, when you couple it with our balance sheet metrics, it means we've got the optionality to organically delever, to be independent of the debt capital markets. For our industries, the CNX way needs to become the norm until policymakers and capital markets allow themselves to be mugged by the facts. I'll wrap with my third and final observation. The topic is one of sadness. I've been around this industry and company for 32 years now, and I've seen a lot. A free market-driven, innovative, and entrepreneurial movement that disrupted the world with the Shale revolution.
I've seen the establishment of an energy powerhouse with the United States and energy independence if we want it. I've seen vastly improved quality of life and revival of the middle class in an improved environment, including lower carbon intensity from my lifelong home of Appalachia as it retooled itself to take advantage of the Shale revolution. I've been with a company that completely transformed from exclusively coal to now best-in-breed natural gas and midstream. In working with people, of course, who care and who excel and who achieve and who are compensated at the very best levels to be found in any industry. CNX today is strong, vibrant, secure when you look at its future path. The opportunities are mind-boggling from our developing exciting emerging technologies to what we should deliver on shareholder per share value.
My emotion in 2022, I have to tell you, as I said, it's that of sadness because much of what ails this nation and world did not have to be. Putin did not have to be enabled. The Ukraine did not need to be destroyed. Americans didn't need their households to be robbed by that beast known as inflation. And our energy security and our grid reliability, whether it's Texas, California, or Europe, none of them needed to be compromised. Yet all of this happened, and it continues to run rampant, and it's gonna get worse, potentially much worse. Why? Because the full potential of the American energy industry to unleash prosperity domestically and abroad, it's been deliberately handcuffed. Energy scarcity has been manufactured by policy design.
These industries were not allowed basically to become victims of their own success by providing more supply of our widgets so that not only infrastructure and demand grew, but so that supply and demand would balance, so the prices can moderate, so that dictators don't hold the free world hostage. The current state of our energy industry and economy and our geopolitical standing. They are not healthy. Until the health of those improve, we're all gonna pay the price. It's just a question as to what extent. This didn't have to be. How long should we continue to tolerate it? The good news is the Appalachian region has the resources and the know-how and the work ethic to be the fountainhead or the catalyst of the modern energy and manufacturing industries.
We can be a center for skilled labor job creation to help pave a path to middle class access to the region's underserved rural and urban communities. The only thing preventing this from happening is the collective willingness to embrace data and facts over politics and ideology. We should embrace the assets and the workforce and the energy in the Appalachian region to be utilized first in this region and then far beyond. It can make Western Pennsylvania or Western Virginia or West Virginia the true energy capitals of the world by developing and utilizing homegrown resources to build a local energy ecosystem that will cultivate and sustain the middle class for the next generation. These natural gas-based products, they're more environmentally friendly, lower costs, and will be sourced locally in the Appalachian region instead of faraway lands that have extensive supply chains and carbon footprints.
This is a realistic, actionable solution for the Appalachian region that runs counter to other such efforts championed by establishment organizations or by those with ideological goals. Final thought to tie us back to where we started. Despite the challenges noted in my observations, we're gonna continue to embrace our tangible, impactful, and local approach to ESG, which is gonna help us execute our sustainable business model and deliver long-term per share value while advocating for our industry and region. The opportunity is now to reframe and redefine the region's energy utilization and economic strategy that will directly and tangibly benefit local citizens, the local environment, and the entire region. When the why of what we do is so compelling, our path forward is always clear. I'm gonna turn it back over to Tyler now for Q&A.
Thanks, Nick. Operator, if you can please open the call for Q&A at this time.
We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Michael Scialla of Stifel. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, everybody. Nick, appreciate those observations on the industry. I guess, are there any particular things you'd be looking for in terms of policy change that would cause you to rethink the strategy of essentially no growth? Maybe if you could extrapolate that to Appalachia as well. When do you think, if say tomorrow the administration started to move in the direction you think it should, is there any sense on what the timeframe for when Appalachia or CNX in particular could go back to a growth mode?
I think from an industry perspective, it's a great question. The most immediate issue is the policies with respect to what they're doing that deters investment with more of the infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, to basically, as I said, move supply to logical demand centers and settle that out in a way where it basically allows producers to figure out what those rate of returns will be and make capital investment decisions that will span decades. That's probably the biggest impact right now with respect to basin-wide or industry-wide.
Supply responses. They basically need the plumbing to be able to move the supply of the widgets to the demand centers, whether they're global, regional, or local. The biggest, I think, exemplar of that are pipes in Appalachia. We've also got some oil pipe examples as well with Keystone. I think those two immediate examples front and center would be great proxies to figure out how serious entities are about reversing sort of penalizing policies to get some of this infrastructure built.
Got it. I guess now with the stock over $20, you've talked a lot, and I recall you've been asked about your philosophy on returning capital to shareholders, and your choice has been primarily buybacks and I guess complemented by debt reduction. With the stock over $20 now, has that philosophy changed at all to where you would slow down on the buybacks or consider a dividend, or are you still thinking buyback's the best form of returning capital for you at this point?
Yeah. To your point, right, stock price is one of those important metrics and variables when we're calculating the best per share value creation avenues. The philosophy doesn't change, the equations don't change, it's some of the variables. When you update share price, gas forward strips, the free cash flows that basically would be produced from that under our activity set that we've laid out, then you look at things like free cash flow yields and free cash flow per share, what those risk-adjusted returns are. I think at this stage, we are still comfortable following that math, that share repurchases are the best avenue for shareholder returns. That can change, to your point, over time. We're not adverse or against dividends philosophically.
We think, again, looking at the math and the risk-adjusted returns, clearly that the best path continues to be share repurchases vs dividends.
Very good. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Leo Mariani of KeyBanc. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Wanted to delve a little bit more into one of those really that first question. I know historically, CNX has spoken over time that, you know, the multi-year plan was to stay in maintenance mode until there was really a shift upwards in the natural gas futures curve. Clearly, we're at the point in time where the entire gas curve, as you look out a handful of years, has shifted higher. Could that potentially pave the way for a little bit of growth in 2023, or do you think that there's just too many kind of infrastructure and policy challenges to even make that a possibility at this point?
Hey, Leo, this is Chad. I'll take a shot at that. I guess first I wanna make sure it's clear, like, we could grow if we wanted to, right? I think we've demonstrated that by growing roughly 20%, our production by about 20% since 2020. That's not necessarily the only variable we're solving for, right? Certainly, the change in commodity prices changes the variables that are going into that optimization problem. There are many other variables that are in the optimization problem. When we solve that, you know, the result that it spits out continues to point us in the direction of sticking to the plan that we've articulated over the last several quarters, frankly, for the last couple of years at this point.
You know, we love the plan that we're on, and there's a number of reasons why we love that plan. You know, that it provides a predictability and a lot of insight on future operations. It provides our teams a, you know, ample time to prepare and conduct quality control. The steady work provides continuity to crews and equipment, and that minimizes the impact on our plan of a lot of the labor and equipment, call it, issues that some of the peers in other industries are experiencing.
I think the big third factor is, I think as I already pointed out, you know, there's only a certain amount of capacity and only a certain amount of local demand to consume the gas that's produced right here in Appalachia. When you know, either local demand begins to increase or the ability to export more molecules out of Appalachia begins to increase, we're right here ready and prepared to be able to increase our production along with it.
The only thing I'll add on top of that, Chad, is we look at this on a per share basis production just like we would free cash flow. If you look, you know, 5% reduction in our share count in Q1 equates to 5% growth in our production per share. As Chad mentioned, there's two types of growth in our mind. There's one, sustainable, consistent growth year after year for a decade. With that, you need line of sight of gas demand of being allowed to do what it could do. In the meantime, volatility is gonna be the name of the game.
There's gonna be price swings up and down that are largely completely unpredictable because of the call it the fragility of the supply-demand balance and the inventory kind of situation that we have. We'll try to optimize and kind of grow here in the edges and the fringes year by year, like hand-to-hand combat decisions. If there's line of sight to be able to do it continuously over long periods of time, you need to see line of sight on consistent demand growth to kind of take that approach.
Okay. That's very helpful. I guess just wanted to follow up on one of the comments that Nick made. I think I'd heard correctly that y'all said you're kind of maybe pointing towards the high end of CapEx in production guidance in 2022. Maybe if you could provide just a little bit more on that. I would assume maybe that the activity set hasn't changed in terms of the plan, but perhaps the wells are continuing to come in strong, which is why the production would be towards the upper end, and maybe inflation is also pointing to kind of the higher end of CapEx. I was just looking for a little bit more, you know, color on that.
Then just anything you had on, like, cadence of capital spend or turn-in lines for the year. I saw that there weren't any turn-in lines in the first quarter. Do you have more of a second quarter and third quarter weighted, you know, kind of turn-in-line program and spend. Just anything you can kind of tell us would be helpful.
Yes, I'll start. You know, I've kind of said it before, like the drill cadence quarter to quarter and stuff like that, it's not something I pay much attention to. Just you know, getting these pads online, and the re-rate of returns are phenomenal. Really, mostly what's happening is Chad and his team keeps getting better in the efficiencies and the line of sight we have on being able to go faster. You end up like that's been most of our growth. If you look at the growth you talked about before, it's just our factory is moving faster now. If you get through one pad faster, the next pad starts sooner than you know, vice versa. That's
Chad calls it the accordion, but we have the ability to kinda, you know, move. If we're moving quicker, you can kinda get on to the next one faster. Now that has like the ripple effect that is putting us towards the end that Nick talked about here. As Nick said, it's a good thing for the shareholders, for the nation, for everybody to kinda get some more gas out of the ground here this year.
Maybe just a little bit more color on capital cadence and production cadence. If you look at the current guidance and the midpoint of our current guidance, you know, and divide that by four, we're basically exactly where we're at on Q1 production and Q1 CapEx. So, you know, ±1%. I think that just illustrates, you know, how consistent our plan is and is becoming. It's just you know, there is chunkiness. The paths are large. When you bring a new pad on, it does bring a surge of production. But over time, over multiple quarters and multiple years, I mean, we're really solving for a very consistent, very predictable de-risked sustainable business model.
I mean, it's gonna be chunky. It's almost impossible, like Don said, to be able to bracket it quarter to quarter or even year to year sometimes, depending upon exactly when these pads come online. We really are solving for a very consistent sort of steady state execution plan.
That's helpful for sure, guys. I just wanted to also ask on cash taxes. Just noticed that in 2021, y'all did not pay really anything on the cash tax or current tax line, but saw you paid about $8.6 million in the first quarter of 2022. Wanted just to get a sense if that's more of a one-off or do you think you're gonna start to have to pay, you know, state or federal cash taxes more material this year or next?
Yeah. Whenever we, I guess, as you recall, or maybe recall, we laid out our initial seven-year plan back in 2020. We kinda guided to, you know, the $3+ billion cash flows at the time and kinda talked about being material cash taxpayers like after that. You know, fast-forward, prices have gotten up. We mentioned in 2021 that, hey, that might be a little bit sooner since you're making some more money. Generally, rule of thumb, it's almost like once we would cross that, you know, $3+ billion threshold, that's when you could be in a zone where you could be a material cash taxpayer. And obviously, it depends on what you do with the free cash flow between now and then as well. That's.
You know, you'll see some here and there with just, you know, alignments of how the NOL is on the federal level and the state level and the IDCs and how we balance all those. We're solving for kind of minimizing it across a longer timeframe. You'll see some noise, but until we get past that rule of thumb I just gave, you won't see anything material.
Okay. It sounds like really not much here for the next handful of years. Thanks.
Our next question comes from Neal Dingmann of Truist. Please go ahead.
Can you hear me, guys?
Yeah.
Yep.
I just wanted to ask if you could talk about cadence a bit?
Neal, are you there?
Mr. Dingmann, your line is live and open. Just a quick reminder.
Operator, can we go to the next one, please?
Yeah. Just a quick reminder, if you have a question, please press star, then one. Next question comes from Noel Parks of Tuohy Brothers. Please go ahead.
Good morning.
Morning.
I was interested to hear your comments about essentially steering clear of the debt capital markets for the longer term. I was curious, do you or do you not sort of see us with maybe two different windows ahead where especially now with everything looking positive for nat gas fundamentals, it's more like the old days where you know demand is rising, we're seeing it in the strip against a backdrop of tight supply. It seems to be a time, especially since interest rates haven't gone where they ultimately go, where it's not necessarily the worst time to be financing with debt.
In contrast to when we get to that point when, you know, we're on a sort of a declining demand trajectory for gas when, you know, alternatives become cheaper and take up more of the energy pie.
I think your description is accurate if you're looking at just the objective analysis is accurately represented with what you just said.
Okay.
We're in a world right now where when it comes to capital markets, the objective data are not reigning supreme. Our fear, our concern is that will continue to have less and less prominence with respect to, you know, rates, access to capital, cost of, et cetera. That's why from our perspective as a low cost producer and a free cash flow generator, coupled with the balance sheet metrics you've got today. Talking balance sheet metrics, it's not just absolute debt or, leverage ratio. I'm also talking about maturity schedule, liquidity, those types of things.
We've achieved a position where we basically take free cash flow generation, and when we're looking at the opportunity to allocate between debt and shareholder returns, we can have very, very healthy levels of shareholder returns and also manage our debt in a way where we never would need to access the debt markets and the capital markets. That if the, call it, the ideology does reign supreme over the data, the metrics, the facts, we're in a position where basically that Sustainable Business Model is self-funding. That's a great place to be.
I hope that your description does end up being the situation that the entire industry finds itself in moving forward, because that would not just be good for the industry that we care about, it would be good for the nation and frankly, the global economy. There are troubling signs, as we said, that we've seen from a whole bunch of different entities and regulatory authorities that are sort of blinking to us that access or cost of capital when it comes to debt markets is going to be incrementally more difficult moving forward.
Great. Thanks for the clarification. I was also wondering, you know, with the Ukraine-Russia situation and just the shock that's causing in commodity markets, to my mind, it sort of muddied the picture as far as where the industry is headed as far as seasonality and consumption. I just wonder, kind of now with the benefit of hindsight, do you have any sense about what we learned about whether, you know, about how much or how little heating season, you know, domestic seasonal factors are gonna play in pricing going forward?
Well, I think the question boils down to how much does export sort of adjust or affect the seasonality of domestic natural gas prices, right?
Right.
When you look at exports as a function of total, you know, annual consumption, you're looking at roughly, I don't know, 10%-15% of U.S. production is subject to that export market. It has maybe on the margin, reduced that seasonality a bit, but it's still wildly subject to the fluctuations in our weather, whether that weather shows up. A lot of the seasonality is ultimately driven by, you know, how much storage is available.
Over the last several years, as the consumption of natural gas has grown by roughly 80%, there's still the same amount of storage and the same amount of infrastructure available to move the gas around in different periods of the year as the demand locations change that there was when half as much natural gas was being used. You know, LNG has certainly maybe on the margin sort of affected it, but the reality is fundamentally across this nation, we lack the storage and the infrastructure to be able to moderate out the seasonality caused by winter weather.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Our next question comes from Mr. Neal Dingmann. Please go ahead.
Sorry about that, guys. Let's try this again. I was just asking on cadence. It looks like to me your plan appears to be pretty steady, you know, just on a go-forward basis, and even second half vs first half. I'm just wondering maybe, you know, if Chad or you or Don or somebody could comment on that.
Yeah, I think that's fairly accurate. I mean, I don't think we have any more detail beyond that to give.
Okay. Just maybe, Don, for you on the marketing mix, my second would be just on kind of on a go forward. Do you anticipate much change there? What I'm getting at is TETCO M2, will that continue to be the largest route followed by sort of the TCO Pool? Or, you know, do we anticipate on the marketing side any sort of changes coming there?
This is Chad. We really don't expect to see any changes in our market mix over time. I mean, on the margin, the marketing team is constantly looking for, you know, short-term opportunities to move gas to different markets, to different, you know, receipt points that gets access to different pipelines where there may be, you know, changing demand for natural gas. They're optimizing it on a daily basis, monthly basis, weekly basis, and they're doing a phenomenal job down there.
On a go-forward basis, on a longer-term basis, you know, just like we've been doing for the last several years, we'll look at, you know, long-term FT opportunities, access to other markets on an economic basis, and whether or not, you know, potential long-term commitments to firm transportation that gives us access to other markets justifies making that long-term of a commitment to a transport option, and whether or not that market premium will be there over the long term.
Great. One last one, if I could. I really like that you guys continue to break out that acreage and undeveloped location update. I was talking with Tyler a little bit on that. I'm just wondering, could you maybe talk or give a little more detail on that? Again, you guys give some great detail on that, and I'm just wondering, you know, I guess the natural question is obviously now that prices have, you know, taken off so much, you know, how do those locations look, you know, sort of at this level vs, you know, when we're back sort of at the, you know, two handle? Maybe if you could just talk about not just numbers there, but, you know, kind of the maybe color around the totals there, if you could.
Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it's a clean way to just show folks what we own, and you can kind of see it cut in both ways, right? There's development every year, and there's also some leasing every year, just like we've kind of said, it's just normal course for any Appalachian company. You know, I think of our areas like we've talked about the four areas, the Southwest PA, Marcellus and Utica, and what we call CPA, Marcellus and Utica. You add it all up, there's like 350,000 undeveloped acres. Our consumption rate is 6,000-7,000 acres a year. You know, you got the leasing. The leasing of a few thousand acres here and there every year.
You net all that together, there's a tremendous amount of, you know, acres to be developed at CNX. Like we've talked before, our cost structure kind of makes every acre better. If a peer is next to us with a, you know, $0.40-$0.50 gathering charge, and we're drilling ours at a $0.05 kind of OpEx for our midstream systems, it just kind of gives us a pretty unique and pretty cool advantage in all of our areas. They all worked really well at the, you know, old strip and kind of $2 in-basin price, like you said, and they work even better, all of them, at the current strip that we have out there.
It's pretty wild looking at the math of like how much how quickly you get your, you know, investment back from, you know, drilling a well or drilling a new pad. Feel very good where we sit. We're always looking at trying to, you know, figure out ways to create more of anything and everything, especially free cash flow. Feel good where we're at, but we're always working every part of our business and, you know, buying, selling, swapping, trading.
Great details. Thank you much.
This concludes our question and answer session. At this time, I'll now turn it back to Mr. Lewis for any closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for joining this morning, and please feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions. Otherwise, we'll look forward to speaking with everyone again, next quarter. Thank you.
Conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.