Liberty Energy Inc. (LBRT)

Investor Day 2021

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Jun 17, 2021

I'm Anjali Voria, the Investor Relations and Strategic Finance Lead at Liberty. It is my pleasure to welcome you all here today, both in person and on the webcast. For those of you in the room, we are so excited have you with us in person for the events of the week. Many of you joined us for a frac site tour yesterday, and we're so delighted that you were able to meet members of our team. And for the rest of you, rest assured, you'll have a chance to meet some of our amazing folks with the events planned for the rest of the week. From an engaging dialogue of presentations today to a tour of the Digifrac equipment out in front of our offices and a happy hour reception to follow to meet our customers and a chance to meet leadership in the Denver oil and gas community. I've been at Liberty for nearly two years, and it's been an incredible journey. Having had the opportunity to work on our transformative acquisition with OneStim, working on the ESG report and changing that narrative and spending time on the road, meeting our folks in the field and touring our facilities, I've seen the dedication, commitment and passion from our employees firsthand. I'm lucky to work at a company so committed, deeply committed to our people, whether it's our customers, our employees, our families, and you'll hear more about that today. So today, we'll get a glimpse of that from the following. First off, we'll kick off with Chris Wright. He's going to talk a little bit about how we view our role in the energy sector and how we create, bringing together the best of the best, giving folks the resources to do what they do best and allowing them to create. Then we'll have Doctor. Lane Wires, following up with how we build value for our customers in the technology Downhole Vision. Next, we'll have Ron Gusek laying the foundation for how we create operational efficiency and the evolution towards next generation equipment. Lastly, we'll close with our finance and outlook with Michael Stock, generating superior returns. We are also so lucky to have Doctor. Steve Koonan with us today. Doctor. Koonan was Chief Scientist in the Obama Energy Department. During our fireside chat, Chris and Doctor. Koonan will help set the stage of why our industry is so critical, truly putting into context the three global energy challenges that you'll hear more about from Chris. And before we begin, I want to share today that today's presentations are unscripted. It's a very personal view from each of our speakers' area of passion. So you'll really get a chance to see the Liberty team in action. We'll have a lot of time for Q and A following both of our technology sections as well as with our fireside chat with Doctor. Koonan and certainly after our finance and outlook section. So for those of you here in the room, don't be shy. For those of you online, you'll have the ability to ask questions on our webcast. A reminder that today's presentation contains estimates, projections and other forward looking statements along with certain non GAAP disclosures. These statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and other factors that may be that may cause actual results to differ. Please take a moment to review the safe harbor statement that is on the screen and available online along with other important information in these disclaimers. And thank you for being with us today. I'd to now introduce our fearless leader, our CEO, Chris Wright. Thanks, Serge. Yeah. Thanks, everyone, for coming and making the trip. It's great to see people in person again. And, look, I think as every everyone in this room probably knows, Liberty for us, it's more than a company. It's a passion. It's a mission. You know, we set out ten ten years ago to say what's the most important thing going on in the energy in the world, the shale revolution. What's the heart of the shale revolution? It's hydraulic fracturing. So we set out to try to create something special. We're humans. We're a million miles from perfect, but we love what we do, and we're driving it hard. And as indicative of that, we put together a report over the last few months that if if if you've seen it, it's a little different than the typical ESG report, but it's straight from the heart. It's it's based on facts. It overviews some topics that I think just don't get talked about enough. But the bottom line in our report, in our company, in our mission, bettering human lives. We feel honored to work in the most important industry in the history of the world. And I say that because our industry is what enables everything else. Every other industry, everything that happens in our lives, energy is the infrastructure of human race and human civilization. We highly recommend reading the report. Couple I hit two points on this in an image. The left, people have seen that photo a lot. Right? That's the Korean Peninsula. You can see the border between North And South Korea. And the difference is and and and if I just show a show of hands, you wanna live sort south or north of that line, I I kinda know how the vote would skew. With the young today, I might not get a 100%. But, and and the image is that lights at night. Right? That means better human life, better quality. And, of course, it's two things here, our name and our passion. The the in the North, why does the North not have any lights? Because it doesn't have human liberty, doesn't have bottom up social organization that allows wealth generation and people to pursue their dreams. And without wealth generation, without freedom, you don't have an energized society, and and and you live a very a very less desirable life. On the right is another part of energy that's not taught nearly enough. This is a national border you can see during the day, and each shows energy access. The modern fuels we produce is green. On the right is the Dominican Republic. Economy doing quite well in the in the Caribbean. This is the island of Hispaniola. You see the beautiful rainforest. It's got a a huge tourist economy, rising quality of life. On the left, on the other side of that border is Haiti. Now Haiti, like the Dominican Republic, gets the vast majority of its energy from fossil fuels, but it still has a meaningful percent of its population that lives like our ancestors live, which means they're still using traditional fuels to cook their meals and to heat homes and huts at night, which means burning wood. And they've as you can see here, Haiti has enormous deforestation problems. So more energy, more wealth doesn't mean worse environment. In fact, it almost always means better environment. So people in Haiti, and again, the third of humanity around the world that still cook their meals and heat their houses the same way all of our ancestors did only several generations ago. This transition to a modern world is quite recent. Wood, dung, agricultural biomass. Two and a half billion people, that's their primary fuel. What's the next step? How does someone get out of energy poverty? Well, for almost 90% of them, there's one next step, and that's to move to a single burner LPG, think think propane burning stove, something we might use for a camp stove or a climbing stove. But it's enormously impactful in the lives of human beings. A, it doesn't have indoor smoke. About three million people die every year from that indoor air pollution. You fix that problem. Women in traditional society spend a little over an hour every day gathering fuel wood. You propane canister, you fill it up, maybe it lasts a week, you get down to the local gas station or distributor. I was in Tanzania recently. There's six companies competing to bring LPG to lift people out of energy poverty, but 85% of Tanzanians still cook with traditional fuel. So liquid petroleum gas made out of NGLs, dominantly propane, is just to me, it's the critical fuel to get at, to lift yourself out of energy poverty. So this plot is eight countries that export propane or liquid liquid petroleum gases, we call them NGLs, over the last ten years. So each bar and those little things, that's ten years of trends. You can see besides The United States, about half those countries have slightly shrunk their exports over the last ten years, and about half have grown them by a hair, not by much. What's changed the game in access for LPG is the surging exports from The United States. What happens when supply goes up massively, price comes down, availability goes up. So The United States shale revolution that produces a lot of natural gas liquids, like, that's sort of the sweet spot of shale. Right? It's balancing between gas and oil, light oil, natural gas, liquids. I I think one of the things to be proudest of in the shale revolution is we are really accelerating people getting out of energy poverty. Energy. Energy. Look. If you read the reports today, you'd think our industry is gonna be gone in ten years. Maybe we're gonna hang on with our our claws for another twenty years. That's the narrative out there. It's since it's simply not sensical. Here's a couple projections, and projections are about the future. We we don't know the future, so take them for what they're worth. The left is OPEC projection on total oil demand globally. It's got 2019. You see that huge drop into 2020, largest drop ever in oil demand. That wasn't a recession or something. Right? That's COVID and shutting down economies and ceasing transportation. Demand for oil dropped 9% last year. Bouncing back, we'll have the fastest year over year demand growth for oil ever this year. And then they they go out to 2025 and then out through 2045. In the OPEC projections, oil demand sort of peaks fifteen years out, and then it sort of plateaus for the next several years. The other projections, if you look at them, they may peak a few years earlier. They may peak a few years later. And then some of them say it peaks and it goes down. But if you look at all those projections, it goes down very gradually. We don't know the future. There's been predictions of peak oil demand for a hundred years. On the right is United States. Where does The US get energy from and where might that go? This is from the US Energy Information Administration. So red is oil, yellow is natural gas, renewables next, coal next, nuclear on top. And as you can see in that, and again, look at the past, look at what's actually happened, look at the future. Energy systems, the mix in energy systems changes slowly. The last two years, we've seen the highest percent, highest market share of US energy coming from oil and natural gas ever. That doesn't sound to me like a dying industry. And the reason for that is coal's market share has shrunk. It's mostly been picked up by natural gas and a little bit from renewables as well. And in these projections out to the year 2050, today, record ever market share from oil and natural gas is 69%. In these projections in the year 2050, US demand for energy has grown, and the and the we're not going away. Here's, to look at energy markets. Okay. Demand for oil and gas is not likely to go away. In fact, it's my guess is likely to sort of grow slowly for the next several decades. But do we need any of it here? Can we just shut down production in The United States? Well, we're not really liked here. Maybe we'll just shut it down. It'll just come from somewhere else. A, that would raise prices up. That would that would hurt people's quality of lives, but is it even practical? So on the bottom of these bars is OPEC's spare production capacity. And global demand is neat for for percentages. Yeah. Look. It's right around a 100,000,000 barrels a day. And so OPEC's spare production capacity got up over 8,000,000 barrels a day a year ago with the cutbacks from COVID. That production is rapidly coming back online. There's probably four or 5,000,000 barrels a day of OPEC's spare capacity at the end of this year, not far from what's normal. And at the top, there's a little dotted line. 25% of global liquid fuel production comes from The United States and Canada, the regions that Liberty operates. Right? This is 2019 data. US, 12 and a half million barrels a day of oil, nearly six and a half million barrels a day of natural gas liquids, another million barrels in there from ethanol, and and you add it up. So the North American production is critical for world supply, not just for supply, a quarter of world supply, but it's critical also for where does technology innovation go, where do environmental impacts get minimized, Where who drove down the cost of oil over the last ten years? I'm the weird oil and gas guy that celebrates that. Oil and natural gas have gotten dramatically cheaper. Those two factors are enormously important to people's quality of life. Here's a plot, hundred years of US oil production data, right, going back to 1920. You see that March up from 1920 to 1970. Think think of The United States in the nineteen twenties. Automobiles are brand new, just really the start of industrialization. Most of Americans at at the turn of the century still worked on farms, relatively low income. Now we have this huge economic growth. King Hubbard, hey. Oil's gonna peak in 1970 or 1971, and then it's gonna roll over because we know how much resource it is. And by just simple logical assumptions, here's the production profile. Well, King Hubbard forgot one thing that that humans are not stagnant technology and innovation. So oil did indeed roll over production at that time. Then the North Slope Of Alaska, deepwater Gulf Of Mexico arrested that decline, actually a modest growth for a little bit. But those those fields have been in in Alaska had been fully developed. Production was at its plateau and then started to decline. Gulf Of Mexico, very strong early on. And then we go into this, you know, twenty five years of declining US oil production. That sort of defines my career right there. I came in just to get the start of that slide and ride it all the way down. And then, of course, humans innovated again. Right? A shale revolution that began in the late nineties with some technical innovations in natural gas originally. We're gonna talk about that in the tech section and then move to oil maybe in 02/2009. I mean, that moves to, you know, that technology moves to US oil production 02/2009. Less than a decade, US production doubles. You can see the blip down there in 2015, 2016. OPEC fought a war against shale, and shale won. But we did have a lot of bankruptcies. It forced improve improvements and lowering of production costs, efficiencies, and innovations in our industry. Stress drives innovation. We may have had some stress the last year as well. Then you see US production continue up. The downside of this incredible success of shale was enormously beneficial for the planet, over a trillion dollars on an annual basis of savings in energy costs, $200 for every man, woman, and child on the planet in reduced energy costs because the shale revolution, but the companies driving it didn't do very well. Right? It's like the .com boom at the start. The Internet was awesome, but so much money went in, so much malinvestment that returns were poor. I think the last few years of investor pressure has got, particularly the producers in our industry, but the industry as a whole, to be more disciplined in how they invest. I think we probably have a better decade going forward with better returns across our industry and just a little more sobriety in how much oil and gas we bring to the marketplace. This is rig count over the last this is just last seven years. Red is the public companies. Gray is the privates. Never underestimate how important and how significant private companies are to US activity and The US production. So we peaked at, you know, in in oil, 1,800 rigs, 2,000 if you threw in the gas rigs. Then, again, the the OPEC war against US Shale, this tremendous drop in the rig count, it bounced back up, only got to a little more than half of where it was before, but US production growth was even faster, just driven by efficiency improvements. And you can see the dramatic drop in rig count. And at the end of that plateau in eighteen, nineteen, twenty, it looked like more activity was gonna be concentrated in the publics. Capital discipline, capital starvation of our industry was growing. The bigger, stronger balance sheet publics were more and more of activity. That was a trend that was going slowly, but that was a trend. Now we have, investor strike that the publics are, this is what we're gonna do, and they're not gonna move it. I think it's fantastic. It's what we need to make the industry stronger. But, of course, private companies are saying, wow. The drilling economics today in shale are the best they've ever been. So, you know, what do you think the privates are doing right now? They're increasing their activity. Fortunately, their access to capital is not tremendous. I don't think we're gonna flood the marketplace with oil and gas, but we are seeing increased activity. The rig count keeps going up. The frac fleet count keeps to trick trickle up. That's driven by the privates. The story you'll hear today is sort of across these things, superior returns. That's essential. You can't have a successful business. You can't innovate. You can't make changes if you don't get strong returns on the on the cash, on the invested capital. You'll hear a lot about that from Liberty Day. Technology is the biggest focus you'll hear today. You're gonna hear two different sections about technology across our platform. Who who is driving it? Why are they doing it? What are the impacts on our customers? Culture and principles, of course, may maybe should be at the top. That that's everything. Right? You only get technology. You only get returns. You only get all that if you have motivated, competent, principled people working hard together. For us, we always say what's what really is the biggest Liberty competitive advantage by far and away is just culture. Because to succeed, you need great people who love to work together, who are not afraid to criticize and challenge what's going on and figure out ways to do it better, and critically have fun doing it. You will go to Happy Hour today, and you'll see the bar in Liberty's office. That's just not because we're big boozers. It's because if you have a company and you wanna have fun, make it fun. ESG raising the bar, that's huge buzz these last few years in our industry. For for Liberty, like technology and digital, that that's that's that's been the plan from the start. So it's not it's not different for us today versus ten years ago, except today, we're public and more people are talking about it, so we wrote a report. Quick snapshot of the company. By revenues, we're the third largest oilfield service company in North America. That's hard for me to accept. Wow. We were just scrappy private company entrepreneurs ten years ago, but things have grown. Punch line, nine nine year, every year we've been in business, our average cash return on cash invested, 24%. Revenue, EBITDA, I think everyone knows that in the frac space, we're the second largest frac company in North America. We are technology nerds. And with our acquisition of Schlumberger, we took on a bunch of great technical professionals and a bunch of legacy IP. So now we have a patent portfolio either issued or in progress of about 500 patents. And and at the bottom left, the cash return on cash invested for Liberty over our history of a decade long is 50% higher than the average for the S and P 500. And we've been in an industry sector that's really struggled the last decade. That delta is much larger to peers in our industry space. And to do that, you've got to have a strong balance sheet because this industry is crazy cyclical. So we've always had a very strong balance sheet, so we're ready for whatever comes. Here's the details on that, cash return on cash invested. And you can see why 24% wasn't flat and boring. You know, this industry is wildly cyclical. We started the company our first year of commercial operations 02/2012. Oh my god. If you had a heartbeat in a truck, you were minting money in 2012. The saddest thing was 2011 was even better, probably the best economic time in in the modern frac industry, but we weren't there yet. We were waiting for our trucks. We were hiring people. We were chomping at the bit. 2011 was just tremendous economics. 02/2012, tremendous economics. Shale activity is flying up. Now supply started to catch up. Things softened meaningfully in '13. Demand kept going ahead. Supply additions slowed down a bit, and and Liberty got a little better. 2014, our bump up maybe a little bit, Liberty getting better, a little bit, the industry a little bit better. 2015 was a miserable year. I think a 100 bankruptcies across our industry. It was a tough time. Everybody pulled in their horns. Activity levels dropped dramatically. Liberty didn't pull in our horns. We actually added an extra frac fleet because we'd already ordered it and committed it to a customer in 2014. We added that fleet. We kept it fully busy, and we had 14% cash return on cash invested in a pretty tough year in our industry. We thought it was a really tough year until 2016 arrived. Right? And then we were only in the Rocky Mountains. Maybe that was that that was certainly a problem. Shale activity dropped by two thirds in the Rocky Mountains, two thirds. Across the nation dropped by about 40%, dropped 66% in the place we did. So that that pond got small quickly. We went from 5% market share fracs in The Rockies to 25% market share in the summer of twenty sixteen. And in that tough time, that's when opportunity strikes and you got to be ready for it. Sangel, what was one of many companies going bankrupt, and as they went bankrupt in essentially an auction in a tough time, we bought their assets. We own six frac fleets. They own nine. We added nine frac fleets at the bottom of that market. We hired a couple 100 people from San Gel, tons of them still with us today in the Liberty family. And that prepared us for as the industry rebounded and we had had that market share, as our customer activity grew, we could bring on that capacity to keep the great customers we had. And you can see the returns that followed from that decision. Well, Kay, things were I think we were in a slow grind down to get capacity out of the marketplace over the last couple of years because of efficiencies. Rigs can drill faster, frac fleets can frac faster. And then COVID hit and added insult to injury, another crisis, and we have the Schlumberger acquisition that we'll talk more about later. And again, a key thing, most important thing in Schlumberger acquisition, a bunch of great talented humans joined our team. Culture, I mentioned. Culture is everything. It's what enables everything else. Just find great humans, make it a great place to work, treat them right, motivate them, and empower them to make decisions. But to talk about culture, I'm gonna introduce to you the guy who's run Liberty operations from day one. When we started with Liberty, there was Jim. And, and after Jim, we built Liberty. To meet my my friend and and fantastic partner, Jim Brady. Thanks, Chris. Good morning, and thank you for coming. My name is Jim Brady. Like Chris said, I'm VP of Ops for Liberty. I am employee number one, so that's kind of a unique fact about me. I grew up in Colorado on a farm, and I kind of always expected to stay on that farm. But I was newly married, not much money, and I needed to make a change. And so I migrated to the oil field, and I I still remember my first day. I loved it. I still love it, and I I wouldn't change a thing. I've been in this business for thirty one years on the operations side dealing with frac crews. I spent seventeen years of that with a major service company and then four years of that time with a smaller service company. I started at the bottom, and at the time, my only desire was to improve my situation year over year. And what kept me going and what motivated me to do well and what made me proud to work and to do what I was doing was the culture. I believe that I strongly believe that culture is just as important as our Tier four DGD fleet or our new e fleet that will be coming to the market soon. Love both companies, but both companies changed, and people just became a number. And I wanted to change that. I met Chris in a pickup truck ten years ago on a location in North Dakota. And we didn't talk about equipment. We didn't talk about how to rig up. Chris knew nothing about either one. But what we did talk about was we did talk about was people and culture and what that should look like. I strongly believe well, I want I want people to believe in what we're doing. I want them to want to work at Liberty. I want them to be proud of this company and to and to make this a career. Tracy and Audrey, who are sitting behind me, are going to talk a little bit about the culture and some of the things we do as far as RSUs, competency programs, bonus programs, different volunteer things we do. But I want to give you a quick example of something I think is unique to our culture and a different way that we think about culture. Every year, we have holiday parties at our local districts. And at those parties, we have a dodgeball tournament. And we have 15 to 20 teams. The guys come up with some crazy names. We have a bracket. It's double elimination. And the cool thing about it is the winners get bragging rights for the rest of the year, but the cool thing about it is we always take a corporate team to these events. And our goal there is always to win that event. But the unique thing is the field guys throw get ball at the executive team, they love it. They love it. And what I think about it's cool is you get a new guy that's never met the CEO, and he gets you to go home to his family and say, hey. I I gotta throw I gotta throw a ball at Chris Wright, the CEO, and hit him in the face, and I didn't get fired. And Chris loved it. And Chris loved it. And I think that's what's what's unique about us. I think culture is just connection. It's how do we connect the bottom guy, the new guy on location to to the CEO, CEO and everybody in between. And to me, that's culture. So that's our culture. We are one team. We want to be the best at whatever we do, whether that's on the dodgeball court or that's on location performing a frack job. At Liberty, we're a family with the last name Liberty, and we will always protect that. And so with that, I'm going to end. And I appreciate you appreciate everybody coming, and I thank you for that. And I'll turn it back over to Chris. Thank you. Jim. Customers, right? You don't have a business without customers. I mentioned before, look, there's we work with the super majors, the biggest oil companies in the world and the small scrappy private entrepreneurs. To all of them, the most important thing about Liberty is our operational prowess, not just efficiency and throughput in the field, but the way we handle every challenge that's thrown at us. Whether it's weather, supply chain problem, customer well issues or whatever, we work all in to be partners with our customers. Bigger companies are hugely interested in ESG and better technologies. That's been awesome for Liberty. That's very high in their priority list. It matters to the little guys too, not quite as much yet. It's moving that way. Our subsurface technology group, and you're gonna hear about that next, helping people optimize frac designs and well spacing. That for the SMID caps and the privates, hugely important, even for the biggest players. That's a key thing. They may have their own big team in that area, but there'll always be some interaction between our team and their team. And to talk a tiny bit about our customers, I'm going introduce a guy I met a long time ago. We've been partners for a long time. He runs Liberty's business developments efforts, Mike McCoby, and he's a football fan too. How are you all doing? Thank you for coming out. Chris said, I'm Mike McCoby. I run business development here at Liberty. And a little background on myself, I grew up in Buffalo, New York. I know there's some New Yorkers out here, but not Western New Yorkers. We're definitely a different breed out there. But I'm an avid, avid Buffalo Bills fan, maybe the most passionate football fan at Liberty. Just a little background on myself, though. I went to University of Buffalo, and I studied environmental science. Like most people who studied environmental science at the University of Buffalo, I was managing a record store about twenty years ago. And one fateful day, I got a phone call from my brother, and he said, I know that the record industry and selling CDs, there's a lucrative future in that for you back in the year February, but little did I know. But he said, I got an opportunity for you. My brother is a geophysicist. He was working for this company called Pinnacle Technologies. And he said, It's a great culture over there. There's great people, and we have a great leader. And he may not be as passionate about the Broncos as we are about the Bills, but we'll overlook that. He's passionate about oil and gas. So I packed up all my stuff, moved out to Bakersfield, California. I flew my wife out at night. So and then took her immediately to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So because then the day after she moved there, she was like, why where are all the trees? I thought there's trees here. So worked there for, I don't thirteen years, but and Jim spoke so great about culture, and you'll hear stuff from Tracy and Audrey here. The culture was fantastic at Pinnacle, but we were bought by a large service company, and we sort of became a number over the years. And the culture and the passion just sort of went away. So in 2013, I gave a call to some of my Liberty friends, and they said, just like when you started at Pinnacle, you're going start at the bottom, you're going to be a field hand, and you got to work your way up or work your way down to sales, as Jim would like to say. But I didn't start in operations at Liberty. I did start at Pinnacle, but I did start. I was the first account rep that Liberty had. We had some sales managers, and the culture is truly special. I can't understate that. It is it's just fantastic at Liberty. And it's not just internal, the culture. We apply the same culture to our customers as well. Being honest, doing the right thing when no one's looking, having these transparent dialogues with our customers. It really is the foundation of how we build these relationships with our customers. And we have very few ex customers. They're partners for life because we come to the table with honesty and integrity. At Schlumberger's OneSim, and he's not shy. And we have a little bit of a trash talking, tease people culture at Liberty, and Shane did not need to be indoctrinated. He took it to a new level. So make sure you meet Shane, Mike's partner in crime and business development. As he said, technology, you're going hear about a lot today. You're going hear about our subsurface engineering, how we help our customers optimize reservoir development, how we build better equipment, safer, cleaner, more efficient operations, how that helps the ESG goals of our customers and of Liberty ourselves. And then technology for business systems. You're gonna hear a lot about computer and IT, all this packed in a short time frame. But to talk about that, so there's sort of the oilfield technology and then there's to run our business systems, access big data, run artificial intelligence. Now I'm going to introduce a guy I've known for a long time. He's been the go to guy in my world for IT because he's so smart and so knowledgeable about this stuff, but so damn fun to be around. So please meet Rhett Rowan, who's going to tell you a little bit about Liberty and Tech. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. As Chris says, I'm Rhett Rowan, and I've been living and breathing data most of my life. I'm born and bred Silicon Valley. And as a result, I consider it my responsibility to deliver the best systems that oil and gas has ever seen. And to that end, I want to talk to you for a moment about big data. Anybody can make a claim that they use big data or have a big data approach, But I'm here to tell you that Liberty was born with a big data mindset. We started collecting our data and cataloging our data from day zero, and that's just one component that makes up our digital backbone. And we have many modules and components of this. There's logistics, there's ERP, HR, real time data, GIS, the list goes on. And all of these are the building blocks that form that foundation. And we not only collect that data, but as you'll hear as the day goes by, we know how to use it. I'm sorry. There apologize. I looked down it again. So we know how to use that data. There is a concept of being able to see these building blocks and do something with them. And you might see many things that seem common today as the day goes by, but we are able to yield uncommon results out of them. And there is a baseball analogy I like to use when I'm talking about data and uncommon results. And that is in 1988, after years of collecting statistics manually, the MLB began to catalog and database all statistics, players, games, teams, for the primary purpose of making broadcast more interesting. Then in 02/2002, Billy Beane in the open days hired a gentleman out of Harvard who's looking at that data differently. They were able to make use of that data to create more on field efficiency because they knew that efficiency was a key important factor when you're the underdog. And it turns out they were right. They changed the way people view the game, and they won games using a big data mindset. And you might ask, how does this relate to Liberty? And it does because like the February and Billy Beane, we have leaders and visionaries who are able to look at the data, find new efficiencies and help us win more games. Thank you, Billy Bean. So Lane and his technical team is gonna talk, right after this section, after a break, about how we use data. The right is the Permian. The colors are reservoir quality. Those bubbles are wells. Big is better than small. That's how much oil it produces. The colors are the operators. It's to take all this disparate data and put it in a format that we can achieve what you see on the left, which is to find out under these commodity prices, these service prices, these geologic conditions, what's the optimal design for you to maximize your return? And we call that Happy Valley. You can do all sorts of things that'll bring a lot of oil to the surface. But what's the best? How do you minimize your cost to produce a barrel of oil or an MCF of gas? That continually changes versus time, but Liberty is relentless in pursuit of that. You're gonna hear next after after lunch, you're gonna hear about downhole mean, surface technologies and equipment. Same philosophy. You gotta collect good data. A lot of people collect a lot of data, but then you gotta see things in that data that you want to address, and you've to use that data to engineer a solution to fix a problem or engineer an improvement or engineer lower emissions. Then you've to build it. We used to build everything external. We might design and engineer and build everything external. We're building more and more things and components and custom stuff inside of Liberty. ESG, as I said, it's not new to us. You know, our first frac fleet drove up on location with a satellite dish on it for the first frac job we did sent to our customers with a and we already had a database of every producing well in the Bakken and a different idea about frac design. We saw some more efficient extraction of oil. The very next year, like our third frac fleet was dual fuel. We knew the industry should go that way. We built a bunch of dual fuel fleets. Took us a while to get customers actually interested in them. They're very interested in them now. We went immediately to containerized sand, those dust sand, I mean, dust, noise, truck traffic, big issue in our industry. Let's attack it head on. We built a quiet fleet you're gonna hear about. We've been a test partner with Caterpillar for the first, the pump electronic manufacturing system, then tier four DGB, which are great engines. You're gonna hear about the next generation of that, which is Digifrac. And you're gonna hear a lot about technologies we added from Schlumberger. Technologies that, you know, we had piece a and they had b, and we put a and b together, and and then we gotta develop c, and then we get to d. But, you'll hear about that. But ESG worrying about our impact and efficiency and having a great social environment to work, not just in Liberty, but in the communities, that's that's not new at Liberty. Every dot on this map is a location of where a Liberty employee works. And you're probably thinking, wow. Is there 40 some states where there's oil and gas production? No. But there are 40 some states where there are Liberty employees that live. We want the greatest humans wherever they come from, and a huge amount of oil field workers come from rural America. That's a place economically has had a rough few decades as as everything spread money, opportunity, health care migrates to cities, rural communities have struggled a little bit. We are very proud employers of thousands of rural folks from across the country. So great humans, great culture. I'm gonna introduce a great human and and a driver of great culture who's been absolutely instrumental in building and supporting the team we have. And, she's just awesome and been here from the very beginning. Meet Tracy Quinell. Thanks, Chris. Good morning. Hi, Chris. Hi. My name is Tracy Quinell. I am originally from Western Pennsylvania. I worked for a competitor for ten years prior to coming to this breath of fresh air known as Liberty. I came here as the director of human resources. So human resources. People. Right? Let's talk about people. We are innately wired as humans to want to feel valued. So let me ask you something. Has anyone ever sent you flowers or balloons on your birthday? Yes? Or have you received a little picture from your toddler saying, daddy is the best? Or a friend just puts their hand on your shoulder and says, good job today. That feels good. We want that for our employees. We want our employees to feel good, and we want them to know that they're valued. So there's a couple of statistics on the screen that I want to walk you through. On the left, where we say we have employee owners, what does that mean? We have employees who get annual restricted stock grants. So that is a tangible piece of ownership in the company. Part of that number is also employees who take some of their four zero one k contributions and defer part of that into Liberty stock. Again, tangible ownership in the company. We want them all to say this is my company. Each person, this is my company. Talking about four zero one k, super important for the future. So we take the time to make sure our employees understand that. These are meetings at 4AM, weeks on end, in the man camps, working around twenty four hour schedules, sitting down with these employees explaining why should you take advantage of this. This is your future. This is the future of your spouse, maybe the future of your kids. And my tagline with four zero one is there's an employer match. This is free money. You'd be crazy not to take advantage of this. Okay. Left side, bottom right. I'm sorry, left side, bottom red block. My favorite. Diversity and inclusion. Those are buzzwords. I'm sure you've heard of them. They're really in the news right now. They're in all the magazines. What does it mean? Diversity. Having people of different genders, ethnicities, nationalities, whatever that may be, we employ them. That's the easy part. Inclusion, that's where it gets more challenging. Do these people have a voice? So this is just a snippet of ours. I chose it because I am in this category. Typically, are very underrepresented in oil and gas, and we try to be different. Almost half of the people at our corporate office are female. We fight to change that. On the right side, we're going to talk about benefits. I get excited about benefits. I want you to be excited about benefits. You have a regular a medical plan, a dental plan, a vision plan. Great. How do we make things different? How do we make that better for our employees? We added some neat things, and I didn't think of these. These came because employees came to us saying, hey, I have a need. My family has a need. Can you help us? The one at the top, we added IVF coverage, in vitro fertilization. One single round of this costs anywhere from $20,000 to $38,000 That is a lot of money. We do not employ a population that has that kind of money just sitting around. So we are changing their lives. We are enabling them to have a family. Next one down, similar, adoption. Very expensive. Whether it's within US borders or not, very expensive. Again, enabling them to have a family where likely that wasn't an option before. So what does all of this mean? Why am I telling you this? We want our employees to be happy. We want their families to feel supported. And collectively, we want them to have a voice in liberty. I want them to know they have a voice. And why? Because happy employees who are supported are long term employees. Long term employees create high service quality, and high service quality creates happy customers. You know, it's a win win. My favorite part of all of this is okay. I'm the HR lady, right? So I want to make everybody happy. I want to I want to make our benefits better. But I have an executive team sitting behind me that fully supports this. It makes my job easy, and it truthfully makes all the difference in this company. So thanks for your time this morning. Thanks, Kirsten. All right. So community is not just inside Liberty, but it's in all the communities where we operate. Look, we chose our name, Liberty, because we want people to have freedom to pursue whatever their dreams are, and we don't want barriers in the way of that. I'll say one thing. I don't if you I just noticed my socks. I wear these socks a lot. ACE, Alliance for Choice in Education. We have over a 100 low income kids, which means they were on free and reduced lunch in the school system in Colorado on scholarship to go to the school of their choice. It's absolutely game changing in the trajectory for these kids' lives. The statistics are compelling. Grab me over lunch and I will regale you with them. But to talk about culture and our interaction with the communities around us, I'm gonna introduce another Ben here from the beginning, makes me look shy, full of passion, and actually an awesome dodgeball player, Audrey Barrios. Thanks, guys. Yesterday, when we were practicing, Chris called me Audrey Carlson, which I've been married for two years. He's still catching up a little bit. But I am so happy that I get to be here and talk to you guys about my passion at Liberty, which is community and culture. And those two things go hand in hand. So our ESG report really does a good job of summing up what our community efforts are, bettering human lives. So that that is translated in what Tracy does, what Jim does, what everyone does at Liberty. We're trying to make our employees' lives better. We're trying to make our communities' lives better. In in doing that, we concentrate on three major corporate buckets we call them. So veteran military services, we have a ton of vets that work at Liberty, which is an awesome stat, education and alleviating poverty. And at Liberty, we realized that these passions, our employees' passions might not necessarily fall into these buckets. So we're about to launch our Love Liberty matching program, and this is going to target the diverse communities that our employees live in. And they're going to be able to follow their passions, and Liberty will support that. So it's not only a monetary match, but we're also going to do a match on service hours. So for example, if I go and volunteer at a soup kitchen, the Denver Rescue Mission, I can turn in my hours, and then Liberty will pay $20 per hour that I work to the Denver Rescue Mission. So we're trying to encourage our employees to get out into their communities to continue to make that difference. We talk a lot about that culture and community and how that how we create that. And we truly feel like if we're building that community inside our organization, that's gonna translate to stronger communities where our employees live and work. So the the idea of Liberty family, Jim touched about it. We're really, really passionate about creating a family. I think Jim said that all of our last name is Liberty. That's weird, but whatever. I'm pretty sure everyone saw Mike, Rhett, and I drink out of the same water bottle. That could be COVID no no, but it also is a a family. But at the same time, our Liberty family, we do stuff different. So one thing that we do is right when our employees turn in a new baby is born, they email Tracy to add them to insurance policy, we send them a onesie. So they get this onesie in the mail. Some of them look like this with best damn frac company on the back. Some of them say new to the crew, but they get a onesie from Liberty. So right away, we're looping them into that Liberty family from when they're first born. We also have a really unique spouse network. So we've developed this spouse network because like what Jim says, it's Liberty family. It's not just our employees. It's our kids. It's our wives. It's our husbands. So on Facebook, we have a closed spouse group. And on that group, you'll see threads about how to get wireline grease out of coveralls if, obviously, they're not using the Liberty greaseless wireline. It's we are collecting recipes from all across our districts, and our team is gonna compile them into a Liberty spouses cookbook. There's community efforts that our spouses lead. So for example, in Midland, we have spouse head heads of the heads of districts in each in each of our districts, and they do an event every quarter. So whether that's a community engagement event or they meet at a trampoline park and everyone brings their kids, we're just trying to create that community around our Liberty family. So one example in Midland on the fundraising, they noticed that the local elementary school had a large sum of lunch debt. So a wife decided to take the initiative, and she raised money, and Liberty spouses paid off all the lunch debt at that Midland at that Midland elementary school. And then when you're in trouble, like, where do you go first? Is you go to your family? And we want people to be able to come to Liberty family. So I'm gonna leave you with one last story that recently happened. We had a we had an employee's wife got diagnosed with breast cancer. And during this time, you know, these these individuals have their husbands or wives gone for maybe two weeks at a time. And she was going to be recovering while her husband was on hitch. And another wife noticed that she was gonna be in a little bit of hardship, so she started a meal train. And within forty eight hours, our Liberty spouse network provided a whole month worth of meals for Shannon and her family to not have to worry about. Now that is something that makes us different. That is something that plays into our attention, and that is something that is is unique to Liberty and our family. So I'm gonna leave you with that. Thanks for being here. Look forward to talking with you the rest of the day. Thank you, Audrey. So key thing there was the individual effort. These are not just things that the company does. These are things the people in the company do. I mentioned 104 kids just in Colorado in scholarship from Liberty. Less than half of those scholarships are paid by the company. The rest of those scholarships are paid by the people who work at Liberty out of their own money who believe in that. Look, governance is is critical. There's a number of our directors here. I highly encourage you to meet them. Our, you know, director of our audit committee, Bill Kimball, is a star. He ran KPMG's he's a managing partner for there. He's the he's also the the audit, lead for DCP, a large midstream company here in Denver. Bill is our lead independent director on the board. Gail Norton is sitting over here. She runs nominating and governance. You don't wanna mess with Gail. Right? Gail Gail was secretary of the interior, I think, for six years, two term attorney general for Colorado, you know, strong, thoughtful, principled leader. And sitting at the same table with her is Peter Dee, who's the chairman of our compensation committee. Peter's also chairman of Oventive and an in a career long executive and entrepreneur in the oil and gas business. And sitting between them is our newest director, Audrey Robertson, who joined us. I think it's been coming up on thirty six hours or something. So she's a Liberty veteran. She's been in the Liberty family literally from when we started the company. So she's in the community. She's involved in all these same efforts, a real leader in her own right. And up at the front is is Simon Ayat, who was longtime CFO of Schlumberger and new new to the team. I don't know if he got his onesie yet, but Simon is new to the team and just, again, tremendously thoughtful leader, loves to engage in dialogue. So please meet and talk to everyone here. And that's gonna wrap up the morning session. The last thing I'll say about the ESG report is if you read it, and if you read it completely, then you just send us a note and you get another free copy, you know, for your spouse or your friends. And then and then you read if someone reads that one, we'll send you another free copy. We wanna get that dialogue and that word out there and send feedback back. You know, positive, critical, negative. You should have said this. This wasn't clear. We want feedback. We wanna make it better next year. Thanks so much. I think we're gonna take about a ten minute break. Angie is going to point that out. We'll take a ten minute break and then we're going to dive deep into technology. But thank you for being here and thanks to these awesome partners I have on the stage behind me and a bunch of new awesome partners you'll see up here later today. Okay. Just very quickly. Thanks a lot, Chris. Yeah. Now that we've had a taste of our business, let's take that quick break. We're going to regroup here at ten a. M. On the dot, mountain time. For those of you in the room, spend some one on one time with our team in the back. We've got several showcases set up here, and you can learn a bit more about our technology tools as we lead into the next session. All right. We'll see you at ten. I'm Gail Norton. I served in President Bush's cabinet during the September eleventh two thousand and one attacks. And I saw how dangerous it was for America to be at the mercy of unreliable countries for our sources of energy. Since that time, I've worked to try to make sure America can supply its own energy needs. That's why I was delighted to be asked to join the Liberty Board of Directors. They not only improve America's energy supply, but they do it with enthusiasm. Shortly after I joined the Liberty Board, organized a rally at the state capital for energy employees. It was for oil and gas folks from a whole variety of different companies. There must have been a thousand people who turned out in support of oil and gas in Colorado. That's something I've never seen before. I've worked off and on with the industry over the course of a few decades, and I've never seen that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of support. The idea of really reminding people what an important contribution oil and gas plays to our families, to our local economy, to the national economy, to the world. There's an enthusiasm here at Liberty that goes throughout the organization. People understand why they're doing what they're doing and how important it is. Liberty has a large amount of employee ownership of stock and so people have a real stake in the country's in the company's success. But I also saw that throughout the company with the people I've met that they really feel They feel like it's an organization that supports its employees. I saw that at the women's summit that Liberty organized bringing in female employees from all over the company and they really felt empowered They felt that they played an important role in the company and that their contributions were recognized It's an organization that has so many great things going for it. I really have enjoyed my time being part of an active, vibrant organization. This is going to be big for the guys that want to take it to the next level. We have about eight students that are gonna do the internship interviews, and then we have four students that are gonna interview for full time positions for when they graduate this May. This is gonna give an opportunity that wouldn't be We don't have a fracking company where we're at. We don't even have one close by. With them being able to go to Shreveport, Louisiana to start this apprenticeship, it's it's really gonna be big for them. So the travel is definitely gonna be definitely gonna be new for me, but I'm up for any challenge. You know, as as I said, opportunities like this don't come but once in a lifetime. For those that are successful today, we're gonna get an offer today, and they'll start work as soon as the summer semester starts. We're gonna sit the students down and basically let them know who got the jobs, who got the apprenticeships, and get them to sign their their letter, almost like a letter of intent or offer letter. So the students are gonna get opportunities to work in our shops doing electronics or diesel task. And so the goal is for them to complete the summer internship and become competent so that whenever they graduate, we can bring them back on full time. Some of these students, the ones that are doing the full time, they'll have a chance to get a $6,000 signing bonus. They'll get ninety days probationary period. At the end of the ninety days, everything's still good, then they'll get $3,000. And then a year later, they'll get the other 3,000. I am extremely excited about the opportunity, and I'm looking forward to going to work. I have worked so hard to get to where I'm at now. And through all the pain and through all the struggle, I finally done what I was set my mind to achieving. I'm definitely looking forward to, you know, increase my, you know, arsenal of tools, you know, because with electrical or mechanical or anything like this to to help me continue my career. And Liberty's got some great opportunities out there to work with some great people who have been out there for years. So I'm just looking to gain as much experience as I can from them and and continue on my education and learning process. It's gonna help me build my build experience I need for the for the program and also, I mean, still still in school for the parent for internship program. That'll help as well. Right, folks. So if you could take your seats, we're ready to begin our next session. Great. Welcome back, everyone. Now let's get into the technical details. Liberty's Downhole Technologies are second to none. In fact, they are really a true differentiator for our company. And with us here to talk about our unique capabilities is Doctor. Lane Weyers with Technology Below Ground. Thank you so much, Angeli. Thank you, everybody, for being here today, and I'm honored to be in your presence. My name is Laine Myers. I'm Dutch, as you can hear from my Heineken accent. I've known Chris Rice for about twenty seven years. I didn't meet him in a pickup truck, but I met him at a Dutch rock conference. And we talked for quite a while and Chris offered me a job about within a week or so of that time. And I knew at that time I wanted to spend my career with a person like himself and with all the persons, including people on the podium here today that I'm honored to work with and who seem to be wanting spend time with me as well. So it's great to be in their presence. Brief introduction, and they'll do their own introduction themselves in a little bit. We have on the podium Mike Meijerhofer. Doctor. Mike Meijerhofer is probably the single important person in the start of the shale revolution. When in a baseball stadium, he talked to a customer in the Barnett Shale and thought he this customer should try a specific design he had in mind. Mike is very thoughtful about those kind of things and a force to be reckoned with on the side of frag design and evolution and the start of why we're all here as part of the shale revolution. On the other side of the podium is Ben Popple. Ben is this engineer who passionate engineer who knows how to frac in very high permeability rock, low permeability rock. Ben knows tip screen out design. And as an engineer, he has also an incredible knack for operations, something that I'm completely missing. So really honored to have Ben on the podium as well. And then Ray Ellis on the middle of the podium, forty plus years of oilfield experience, fracker down to the heart and very passionate about what he does, helping our engineering team in the field with real time analysis and things like that, helping customers get their jobs away. I want to talk about this graph here, a little complicated graph. These graphs all these graphs have colored lines on them. They are that's a specific basin in which we work. These are all the liquid rich basins where Liberty works. And I want to start on the top left. It has a big dollar sign on it, which you see the cost to drill and complete a well over the last decade. That's the time period on all these graphs. That's cost has been reduced by almost 50%. So that's millions and millions of dollars saved by our customers in trying to drill a well. And at the same time, and this is where our technology team comes in with the leaders that you see up on the stage, the bottom left picture I'm very proud of because I think at Liberty, we've been a leader in helping our industry increasing oil production per well. So BO is barrels of oil. You can see all the colored lines are moving up. And in general, over the last decade, we've been able to make wells in shale 100% better. Incredible improvement in well productivity from things that you'll hear about today. So we look at ratio at the ratio of these two and that is what Chris coined as Happy Valley. We want to lower the dollar spent on bringing in a barrel of oil to the surface. This dollar per BOE metric that you see up here, 50% reduction in well cost, 100% improvement in production response, that's 75% reduction over ten years in dollars per BO that we've helped our industry with, right? So we've helped our industry get more competitive. And in return, what Liberty gets is utilization. Now you can see on the right hand side, the big graph shows how that Happy Valley in different basins has changed over time. You see that 4x or sometimes more reduction in the shape of these curves. And again, it has helped our customers become competitive. Now this is not only due to, of course, what we do in the tech team, it's also the operational team under Jim Brady, making jobs more efficient, pumping more a larger percentage of the time and it's also in our tech development efforts trying to make every minute count in our Project fourteen forty effort that Ron will talk about with his team later on today. Repeat of the previous graph I'm showing you here. Colored lines indicate how much more barrels of oil we're producing in different basins. So colors indicate basins on a timescale of about a decade. You can see what I mentioned before about doubling of well production in every individual basin in The U. S, something that we've been a leader in achieving going with slickwater designs in the Bakken early on when nobody did it, when it was tough on the equipment and we adopted operationally to do so. We've proposed lighter frac fluid designs through Ben's team's efforts. Ben will talk about that. In France's DJ Basin, but it's an industry wide effort to go lighter and lighter on the fluids that we're using to get sand down in the well, in the fracture to be a productive conduit for oil and gas production. We've led efforts in cluster design changes, staging design changes and things like that, things you'll hear about over the course of this morning from our experts in the back. One thing I wanted to point out is the graph on the lower end is also production and you can see the colored lines again indicate basins. But this now is production per lateral foot of well that has been drilled, right? So production per foot, you can see initially in our industry, incredible increase there as well. But we're stagnating somewhat on that metric as we're fighting infill well drilling and lower well quality associated with that with the technology that we offer today. Chris talked about Happy Valley. If you're on the left hand side of Happy Valley in the graph here, you didn't spend too much money on your well. Your focus was maybe on well cost. We may have customers that think that way. But then you're ultimately going to pay the price in fewer barrels of oil produced. So your dollar per barrel is high. If you're on the right hand side of this curve, you may have overspent, you overstimulated the reservoir, you spend too much money while you have maybe a good well, you spend too much money doing it. You want to be in the middle of this valley. The middle of this valley is different in different places, depends on the customer, depends on the rock, depends on the area, depends on the timing, depends on cost of services and many, many other things, availability of capital and things like that. But our laser focus that doesn't change is that we want to get our customers to the bottom of this valley and we have the technologies to get us there. Now this is probably the ugliest slide you'll see today. I'll take full responsibility as an engineering nerd to get there. What you see here is our spiral up strategy with the technologies that we have to get our customers to Happy Valley. Now we use legacy data, legacy knowledge from our customer, data from our for our own purposes in frac trends. Chris talked about the early data availability, for instance, in the Bakken. We had Bakken data with the help of our sister company, Liberty Resources, before we were a company and extended it to every major basin in The U. S. And Canada where we work today. So we start with data. Data by itself is maybe pretty dumb. You need to do an analysis of that data, a multivariate analysis, etcetera, to turn that data into knowledge, into actionable items that we can change on location and then create value for our customers and us doing so. Now there's a bunch of different fields here that we typically start on the lower right with customers maybe asking a new customer maybe, what's their neighbor doing and what's working? We can instantly pull out our frac trends data and answer those questions. And then we can move to knowledge run fracture models to see how physically what the sensitivities are of frac models to certain to achieve certain goals. And then move through the value chain by selection criteria for materials that we need, real time evaluation to get jobs away and also then evaluate production and economics. So these gentlemen on the stage will help answer some of the questions that our customers may have. For instance, what are the best materials for the selection that I need to do? Ben, can you and your team help us with that? And he'll talk about that today. I want to talk now just briefly about the value chain in data, data analytics and getting to Happy Valley with just the data portion of it and answering a question associated with maybe what a customer may ask, what's our neighbor doing and what's working? That's this talk. All right. On this graph here, all the dots represent oil production by different oil and gas operators in the Williston Basin in North Dakota. This is from a couple of years ago, but it's where Liberty got started. On the upper side, high production is our points high up in the graph And you can see the red line and the red dots, those represent Liberty wells, Liberty designs that are 50% higher production overall in the first year than any of the other average the average production of any of the other operators in that particular area. 50% uplift, you may say, okay, well, big deal. That is 75,000 barrels of oil in the first year that our customers can monetize in the period of that year. The frac design was maybe a little bit more expensive, but 75,000 extra barrels in the first year. That's hard to ignore. And of course, significantly higher due to frac design changes that we suggested associated with going to slickwater, high rate, high volume and a change in plug and perf design to cater fractures better into the reservoir where we need them, significantly different from the gel low rate, lower volumes and sliding sleeve type designs that are that some other operators practice at that time. Now we've extended that approach. It's just looking at data. We've extended that approach to all the major shale oil and gas basins in North America and can pull this up in a matter of seconds for customers to look at what works, what doesn't work. But it's only data. So then we need to go through data analytics to determine if you look at the graph, there's many different things that change in the frac design that may have resulted in the graph that I'm showing you here. Now we need to understand what are the independent drivers for production response. In this particular case, you see a diagram here, which are the most important parameters that change production response in the Haynesville. State spacing is right on top in blue. That's a parameter we can change. That's a big driver of production response in the Haynesville today. You can see proppant mass is maybe another one. There are some other rock quality parameters that also matter. But what we can change instantly is going into the Haynesville and work with customers to see if we can help them with a change like that, stage spacing. Now that's statistics and that's production. So that's a model to determine what the production response is for a specific well. What we now need to know, and we talked about it before in Happy Valley, is the economic optimum for getting the oil out of the ground from that particular example. So we have our FracTrans database. We do our Liberty multivariate analysis to find out what the independent drivers are for production response in a big picture sense. Then we combine that with our sales team's efforts to come up with a proposal for frac design and the cost associated with that and the variable cost of go to more stages or go to more proppants or other things like cluster spacing changes. We look at the economics of that and combine that into a platform we call Fraconomics. And it's to chase this dollar per BO reduction. Where can we go to the bottom of this happy valley? How can we reduce the cost it takes to bring a barrel of oil to the surface. And that's only the statistical side of things. So there's great data availability in the public domain. We partner with customers to improve that data. I'll tell you more about that in a little case study. But we also need to check how physically how fractures grow and how sensitivities to, for instance, perforation changes, stage changes, etcetera, physically make sense in fracture models and reservoir models. And to talk more about that is Doctor. Mike Thank you, Elaine. Good morning, everyone. I'm Mike Meierhofer, Director of Technology at Liberty, kind of more specifically the subsurface technologies. I'm originally from Austria, and I came over here. I worked for, you know, about thirty years ago. I started my career in oil and gas. I worked for an oil and gas operator on water frac technologies. Then I joined Chris Wright at Pinnacle Technologies. So that was really exciting. We did some really cool and nerdy stuff together. We actually measured how fractures grow underground. And then about six years ago, I joined Liberty here. It's been really exciting to be part of this growth story and working with such talented engineers and individuals. So jumping right into our discussion here, why do we use models and how do we use models to help our customers make better wells and get faster to the Happy Valley? Best explained with a picture that you see here on the left. This is a geologic outcrop of the Eagle Ford Formation. Something you may have seen driving on the highway and not realized, this is actually an oil and gas formation that we usually frac two miles underground and we can't really see what's going on. We actually have these outcrops. This is pretty much representative of what we have subsurface, a 150 to two fifty foot tall section of the Eagle Ford Shale. Imagine now we put a horizontal well that you see here in black into this, know, put the steel pipe with cement around it. Now there's no connection with the rock yet at that point, so we have to put what we call perforations. We have to shoot holes into that pipe so we can actually pump our fluids and proppant through those, what we call, perf clusters. So you'll hear that term a lot in the presentations, these perf clusters, and we create our fracks. The fracks are these kind of squiggly red lines that you see here coming in and out of the picture, typically 200 to 2,000 feet long on each side of the wellbore. We also try to optimize the coverage of this vertical section of our shales or reservoirs, right? We're trying to make sure the frac height covers everything. We also try to ensure that the hydraulic fractures don't grow too much above the target zone or below the target zone. For example, in the Eagle Ford Shale, if you grow below into this Buda limestone, you could produce undesirable H2S, for example. So those are the key questions we are trying to answer with our frac models. How do I optimize the spacing between those perf clusters, those orange stars there, right? If they're too close together, it's going to create some problems in our treatment. If they're too far apart, we're not going to be able to drain all the oil and gas in between. When we're sequencing or the frac order of the wells has an impact on how we create that surface area in these unconventional rocks. And then the $1,000,000,000 question for our clients is the well spacing and placement, which I'll get into later in more detail. At Liberty, we have a lot of frac models, and we're really fortunate now to add to this portfolio with the OneStim acquisition, a really world class complex hydraulic frac model where we can really do very interesting modeling sensitivities to deliver kind of optimum frac designs for our clients. On the left, you see kind of a day to day kind of design exercise we do. We look at treatment size sensitivities, how much fluid volume, how much proppant do you need to pump to create a certain length of the fracture, a certain height of the fracture. We also try to answer if we put our horizontal wells in different parts of this vertical rock section. Remember that Eagle Ford picture. How does that change the length and the height of these hydraulic fractures? These are the important things we're trying to answer for our customers. Well spacing in the middle here, this picture, affects frac design. You see the two outside wells pretty close together and the hydraulic fractures are overlapping with each other. That may be waste. The treatment designs may be too large or the wells are too close together. The two wells in the middle that you see here may be too far apart. The hydraulic fractures are leaving oil and gas potentially in the middle behind that gray area, right? We know our rocks are complex, especially the unconventional shales. They have what we call natural fractures. Our fracture designs are affected by that. The growth of the hydraulic fractures are affected by that. So these two pictures on top of each other, you can see the top picture is very complex rock, lots of natural fractures. The picture below is less natural fractures, only in one direction. This is exactly the same treatment design, the same completion design. But on the top, can see the fractures are shorter. They're denser around the wellbore. So you're going to drain oil and gas only from that limited area, whereas in the picture below, the fractures are much longer, penetrate more. Of course, one negative effect of that could be you can hit the other horizontal well, which you see right here next to the well that we're fracking. You could create a frac hit, which is a big, big discussion in our industry, and you can create well interference. Here's an example of optimizing these perf clusters or how many fracs we put in a given segment of the horizontal well, which we call a stage. So in this particular case, we were looking at what if I do 10 fracs per stage versus doing only five fracs per stage. On the right hand side, you see the frac modeling results of that. So what you're looking at is normal to the hydraulic fracture plane kind of along the horizontal well. You can see that if you create 10 fracs at the bottom, your fracs are shorter and less tall than if you do only five fracs. However, since you're doing 10 fracs, what you see in the bar chart on the left, you're actually creating 70% more frac surface area with the 10 fracs than you are with the five fracs at a fairly minimal increase in cost. So these are the kind of sensitivities we do for our customers. The other positive thing here is there's actually less risk of frac hits because the fracs are shorter now and well interference between the wells. Well sequencing, this is kind of the order how we frac wells, a really low hanging fruit, how we can affect the frac surface area and the contact with the rock. On the left, you see what we call sequence one is where this is, by the way, in the Delaware Basin, three wells on top of each other in the Wolfcamp. The top well fracked first, followed by the middle well, followed by the bottom well. Sequence two is we actually start with the lower well, then frac the uppermost well and then frac the middle well. With the Sequence two, based on the frac modeling, which includes the stress interaction between fractures as they grow towards each other, we actually create six percent more frac surface area. It doesn't seem like a whole lot, but 6% more surface area means 6% more production, especially in the early time, first half year to the year. So this is a big impact by just simply changing the order how we frac. So not a lot of cost involved, but a production increase. Another important decision in frac designs is the material selection, specifically the selection of proppants or sand that we pump to keep these fracs open, to keep them producing. One important question in our industry over the last years has been the use of lower cost regional sand. Is it sufficient? You know, it's economically a lot more attractive. And we've done a lot of study on this topic. And we found from all our studies looking at actual production data, at lab data, at our modeling that this regional sand is perfectly sufficient in most of our basins. And this has really affected Liberty's strategic sand sourcing decisions. We talk a lot when we talk about selection of proppants, we talk about a term called conductivity. Conductivity is the ability of the fracs to deliver oil and gas to the well. Think of it as a highway with a certain amount of lanes and a certain amount quality of a road. So you can see on the bottom left, you have a bicyclist, which is kind of the analog to our unconventional oil reservoirs where the oil is just slowly seeping in. You don't need a five, six lane highway to have for a bicyclist, right? If you're in the Gulf Of Mexico, high oil and gas producing wells, you need a large highway to accommodate all that traffic, right? And our lab data in the middle is kind of verifying all that. Yes, the white sand is better, no question, two times better conductivity. But do you really need a two lane highway for one bicyclist? Or is a simple little dirt path sufficient, which is what the regional sand provides at a much lower cost? And the production data on the upper right kind of proves that we don't see any negative impact of running regional sand when you compare well performance in this cum frequency plot of the Eagle Ford oil wells. The $1,000,000,000 question for our clients is well spacing, as I mentioned earlier. How many wells do I need to drill to effectively drain the rock and not spend too much money? If the wells are too far apart, right, then I'm going to leave some oil and gas behind. So we have done this is an example from a gas play in Western Colorado where we did some frac modeling. We calibrated it with microseismic mapping. We imported those results into reservoir models. In this particular case, the customer is trying to get up the learning curve faster before drilling hundreds of wells and learning by trial and error. Can the modeling help us pin down which well spacing scenario we want to go with? So they started with six wells at 1,400 foot wells spacing, which provides really great recovery, but the recovery per well wasn't sufficient to be economic. So we did some sensitivities by taking wells out and the results of that you see on the right hand side is the economic optimization, the final result where you see rate of return at the top, PV-ten per well versus well spacing. And it turns out in this particular area, in this gas play, where you're creating very long hydraulic fractures, 2,000 to 2,700 foot well spacing is kind of the sweet spot. In oil plays, typically, that optimum well spacing is much smaller than that. So this was kind of to give you a quick flavor of what we can do with some of our modeling technologies. I'm available in the breaks in the booth for any more detailed questions and discussions. And with that, I'll pass it on to Ray Ellis and Chris Wright, who are going to talk about real time technologies, how we measure these fracs and then how we optimize how we measure if these fracs that we're generating or designing are actually happening the way we designed it. Go ahead. So as Mike said, I'm Ray Ellis. I'm our Regional Technology Manager in Houston. You can call me Ray. I'm going to talk about some diagnostics, but first, I want to talk about me. I'm the fourth generation of my family to make my career in the oil and gas business. So I've been doing this for a while, and it's really crept into my DNA in a way that's created a very unique blood type. I have blood type C. The doctors just call it crude. So I have and I'm an engineer. I'm an engineer's engineer. I love solving problems. And that's why they picked me, I think, for this is because here, I'm going to give you a kind of where we were and where we are. So what you're looking at is just the dark red box is the reservoir, the light shaded areas are the fractures. On the far left is where we were. That was where we didn't have a way to isolate and control where fractures developed along a lateral. And what that caused is we just went out there and pumped a big old job and just hope that it went where we wanted it to go. We called them Hail Marys or in some cases, we called them Pump and Pray because we pumped a big job and prayed it went where we wanted it to go. But that didn't work. Fast forward to the far right, and that's where we are today. And you can see coverage. You can see how we're covering out the reservoir. Though everything is contributing like it should, which means that our ROI, which I call return on injection, has just improved. Now how did we get there? We got there through diagnostics. We got there through technology and the integration of both of those in our go forward plans. So what kind of diagnostics? Well, we have a whole toolbox, and it's not everyone they're very specific to what we want to discover. So if we want to discover reservoir properties of permeability maybe and pressure, which are very, very integral to how well it's going to perform, we'll run something like the DFIT or the diagnostic fracture injection test. This is a pretreatment test that can be done. If we want to understand unexpected pressures that may occur during a treatment, we'd run something like a rate step down test, which will help us solve those problems. If we're looking for how to determine the dimensions of a fracture to make sure wells are spaced the way they should, to make sure that the fracture dimensions aren't growing where they shouldn't be growing, we'll run something like our WellWatch technology or even microseismic mapping, which gives us dimensions of length and height. And all of these are very specific. They can most of these can actually be done on-site by our tip of the spear engineering teams that are all capable of doing most of these analysis. But sometimes, sometimes it gets a little bit maybe they haven't experienced it and they need another level of expertise. Well, that's where the real time data interaction comes in because we're streaming every one of our jobs live. So now we can tap into remote subject matter experts that can actually assist those guys on location so that we can get results that are timely and that are made to optimize those treatments. So some of this technology is old. Some of it's twenty five years old, but old doesn't mean obsolete. Isn't that right, Chris? So I'm going have Chris help me explain this slide here. Thanks, Ray. I appreciate calling me old, but at 25 years is old, I'm embracing it. So at the start of my career was developing fracture models and a fracture modeling system called FracPro. We use it across Liberty, and it's used widely in the industry today. And then my screw up was the second thing in my career was developing technologies to measure how fractures grow. So if you've been modeling, you predict stuff, you can feel proud unless you get measured reality and then you get humbled repeatedly. We may talk about that over lunch a little bit today about models don't necessarily equate to reality unless you have measurements. But one of the things we wanted to do in analyzing these models was understand the pressure in a fracture. You only can measure the pressure at the surface. So there's friction in the fracture, there's a near wellbore region, there's the perf, there's the wellbore. How do you sort those out? And when pressures change at the surface, which is changing? So I developed or Lane and I developed a test a while ago. We realized these different pressures have different rate variability. So if you cut the injection rate in half, perf pressure goes down by 75%. If you cut the injection rate in half, this near wellbore torturous region, it only goes down by about 25%. So dramatically different rate dependence. And so you're fracking a well and everything's going well, and then all of a sudden you're struggling, maybe your perf the rocks different, your perf guns aren't working, maybe it's the near wellbore tortuosity. You need to know which one it is because they have different solutions. So the step down test that Lane and I developed and published, it's widely used across the industry twenty five years ago, it helps our engineers on location and Ray's tech team to decide things are going wrong. No. It's not that. It's this. Thank you, Chris. So I want to go into a little more detail about a specific technology called FracSense. This is one of our newest technologies because it came about as an integration of our newly acquired wireline group through the OneStim acquisition, where we've taken fiber optic cable, put it inside a wireline and then we've partnered with a company called OptiSense, which they do the interrogation of the fiber as well as the interpretation of it. And it's called cross well strain. But don't let that scare you because it's real simple. In the diagram in the lower left, you can see strain is nothing more than effective deformation or deforming something through stress. So the guy blowing into the horn there, that's stress. He's putting pressure on that. And as he does that, the balloon gets bigger, that's strain. It's changing in its dimensions, right? Well, the same thing happens in the fracture. Stress is all that fluid and proppant that we're putting in there, and that's causing a strain to happen. The rock is deforming as it approaches another well where we're monitoring that well with this frac sense cable. It detects those minute little changes in the deformation. So what that means is that it helps us understand whether we're rightsizing jobs. It looks for that happy valley, if you will. So we got Goldilocks over here, and she's trying to find just the right size treatment. So in the upper part of it, if we see a response that happens too quickly, that means we're too close together or our jobs are just too big. That's she doesn't like that one. So then the one at the lower part of that is if we don't see any response at all. That means either our jobs are undersized or we're too far away. She doesn't like that one. She's looking at that one right in the middle. She's just right. This technology helps us understand that. So we talked a lot about clusters. We talked about the importance of clusters and we want to make sure that every one of these is not only being able to be injected into for the fracture, but we want it to be producing during production, right? So can we control that? Do we have any control over that? Obviously, we have a toolkit with diverters. Diverters are very simple. I would imagine everybody in here has experienced the diversion at one point in time. You take your favorite insulated tumbler, and you fill it with that nice crescent shaped ice that comes out of your ice maker, and you fill it up with your favorite beverage, you snap the top on it, and you try to take a sip, that one piece of ice that always seems to manage to stick sideways, right in that hole and you can't get any out, that's diverter. That's the same thing, only we're not using ice, we're using solid particles that go in there and they block up some of the perforations that are taking too much fluid that we want to divert it away from them into other ones, right? So we have standard diverters. We have unique proprietary diverters called Sequins that add fiber that actually holds them together better so that they're more efficient. We have diverting through pressure, which we call limited entry or extreme limited entry. What that does instead of using the solid material, it just uses pressure, differential pressure. So we size the size of our perforations and the number of them to take advantage of that. And then but what that brings into account is that we need to understand what the size of the perforations really are. If we're going to design for that, that's where in the bottom right quadrant comes in because we now have software tools to help us understand what was published when it was tested in a lab may not be the same as what we get in actuality. And so in this particular case, if we designed our job thinking that the perforation size was 0.49 inches, but in actuality, it was 0.38. That's a 25% difference, which now means that we're going to need more holes than we really are going to have in the first place. So we don't want to make those mistakes. Understanding this before helps us do a better job of optimizing, which now makes sure that our efficiency goes up, which helps us get better coverage, better distribution so that we can find Happy Valley. So I thank you very much. You'll have an opportunity to see me around. I'll be at one of the booths back here, the displays. And I'm going to turn it over to Ben Poppel, who is going to talk about material selection. So Ben? Hey, Greg. Good morning. My name is Ben Poppel. I'm the Director of Field Engineering here at Liberty. I grew up in Western Massachusetts in a small town called Wilbraham and ended up studying mechanical engineering down at the University of Miami in Florida. Worked my way out here to Denver and stumbled into oil and gas. Had no idea anything about it until I got into the field and fell in love with what we do. Fifteen years later now, I'm standing on a stage with some legends of the industry. That's a lot of fun for me. Liberty has been a tremendous home for me, and I got to know a few of you guys out in the field yesterday. If you can't tell, I'm excited about what we do, and I love this company. Part of my job since we started, I've been here since we had one crew, part of my job has been helping select the chemistry that we use to go downhole. And by that, we're gonna talk about frac fluids and the components within them. If you do get a chance, by the way, please, during one of the breaks, go back and you'll see our grocery store frac fluid. What we've done there is found the chemistry we need to create a cross link fluid system at Whole Foods. ESG has been a big component of this for a long time. And from the beginning of our company, we have focused on cleaner, greener chemicals, not just because the government says we need to, because we need to, because our people are out there, my people are out there, and we're concerned for their safety. So Green Select is a program we use to use the global harmonized system, the GHS, to pick some of the safest products out there, and we can compare those products one to another. We're also constantly striving to get more chemistry involved that that will allow us to pump more and more and nastier produced water. Another factor we're looking at in in all of our basins, but specifically in basins like here in the DJ, is our compact chemistry and dry add systems. Compact chemistry is just that. It's generally five times concentrated, so we can save four truckloads to get the same amount of chemical to location. That helps us by not having as many trucks going through neighborhoods and disturbing the local population. My team, engineering team, works very closely with supply chain and our vendors to constantly go after advantage pricing for the commodity side of things. But what's actually more interesting to me is trying to find that rare orchid. And by that, I mean a product that truly is special, something that's a little bit different. Maybe not everybody's using it, but it actually does what it say it's gonna do because there's a lot of snake oil out there, if you will. And the snake oil is not necessarily a bad product, but a product that doesn't live up to its cost. We're also looking for area specific products that will need them. I love analogies, and if you guys were on location with me yesterday, you may have heard me talk about sort of the golf analogy for this. Well, I tell my young field engineers, if you boil fracking down to its essence, really what you're trying to do is take those chemicals and that water and get all that sand down the hole. Kinda like golf. Really simple in concept. Take this little ball, get it a couple 100 yards down that field into a little cup. We have a whole selection of clubs when we do that. And part of our selection of these materials is exactly that. We're looking for the right club to have in our package, in our toolbox, if you will. We have streamlined our process to do this rapidly, and that's been a great thing to bring product to market in in days rather than weeks or months. In that toolbox, we're looking to always have reliability, redundancy, and consistency. Our supply chain team helps us with that tremendously, and you'll actually hear from Greg McKee later on today. I'm very excited for that presentation. We don't just pick products based on the cost or what the vendor said they're gonna they're gonna provide us. We have research grade equipment in our labs throughout the country to test these products. I'm not gonna bore you with all the details right now, but if you have more interest in this, I'm happy to discuss it with you in in the future. Different regional concerns. This is what we call our FracRx program. Once we have those best products, how do we apply them? How do we apply them correctly? You know, if you look on frac focus, you're gonna see that 95% or more of that frac fluid is water. We don't provide the water. Our customers provide the water, and they provide us with a very wide range in water. Even the cleanest water can have fluctuations daily tremendously in pH or TDS, total dissolved solids. And that really will affect, for example, a friction reducer. Our polyacrylamide friction reducers that we use to help transport and proppant and increase our velocity, those salts and that water will degrade that product very, very quickly. If we have very clean and consistent water, we can pump a cheaper product. If we have a more marginal water, we need to use a more premium product, well, which that will actually save money in the long term. Pardon me. We are always looking for product availability to make sure that we can get enough of it to location. This is very important stuff because we don't want our customers waiting on our suppliers for our frac chemistry. Surfactant biocide clay control. We can go into all these different things. It's not really the point right now, but all these different parts of our frac our our FracRx prescription system make up that fluid system and help us get the proppant downhole. Sorry. So for example, here is our FR arsenal, our friction reducer arsenal. We have a lot of different products that we keep stocked in in in line to come through, and we're picking the best products. We're trying to get the best price for them. We're trying to use them correctly so we can get the most advantage from them. And this is this is where having knowledge important, but having wisdom on when to use them is even more important. I love the Miles Kington quote of knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting into a fruit salad. So we're hoping to avoid that and help our customers make the best wells they possibly can. And with that, I'd like to thank you for your attention. And I think Lane is up now, correct? Thank you, Ben. We want to finish up with one last case history to bring it all together kind of in a summary type format. This case history is in Delaware Basin, West Texas, And I'll do this together with Mike Meyerhofer. Just quickly, you've seen this before. This is our Liberty MVA, our Liberty Multivariate Analysis results. The graph on the left, see what parameters independently drive production response, right, that we take from our frac trends database. We subject it to statistical evaluation. We come up with a list of drivers of what drives the success of this frac job in terms of how much oil can we produce in a specific period of time. You see here proppant mass is a blue parameter that affects that significantly. That's the main driver in this particular area. But one thing you have to realize is when we're looking at our data, when we're evaluating data from the public domain, from the Texas Railroad Commission for example in the case of the Permian Basin, the data there is not very good in general. Some key parameters about frac jobs are often missing, especially staging, how much lateral length was put within a stage or how many stages were done within a well to complete it. What is the average rate that we're pumping has great implications for how many fractures we're creating if we're properly catering fluid and proppant to individual clusters and creating the complexity that we need. So a lot of important parameters are often missing in that public domain database. And the farther south in the country you go, the worse it gets typically. So what we have done is to address that shortcoming, we work with partners in our industry with our operators. We basically exchange or we basically tell them we would work for data, right? And in our tech team sense, that is really what we do. We get data to fill in the gaps of what stage count is, cluster count in a well, what was the average rate at which this job was pumped. We get it for hundreds and hundreds of wells maybe within an area that a customer wants to evaluate and we get the best database based with respect to completion parameters that there is around in The United States. And these partnerships, we get the data, we give back the results of a multivariate analysis like you see right here. And it can have a significant impact, same analysis now done with additional data provided by some customers in this particular area and of course also augmented by the data that we have for ourselves, by the frac jobs we have done and that have been done on the OneStim side maybe in the past. So we have metadata for all these jobs, but still, of course, missing stage information, etcetera, can be significantly hamper the results of your production data analysis. Here you see that with this extra data, we now see not just proppant mass as being an important parameter, but state spacing, cluster spacing and proppant mass is now actually the number three parameter that affect design choices. So very important to do the statistics to get a big picture evaluation as a scoping tool of what is important and what drives production. Then we need to take that and subject it to frac modeling and see what the real physical sensitivities are of some of these parameters that we want to optimize for our customers to get to Happy Valley. And Mike will talk more about that. Thank you, Lane. So as using Lane's MVA model, that quantitative prediction oil production versus treatment size or cluster spacing, we take it now a step further. So we do and you have to realize this is big data. So the predictions we're doing here are for hundreds or 1,000 wells, right? This is not one specific area or pad. It is a lot of wells, and we're doing an average prediction here. So our customer here was doing three twenty foot stage spacing, so a segment of the lateral, and was interested to know, should I do 13 clusters or fracs in that stage? Or should I do 20 clusters or fracs in that stage? How would that potentially impact my production, right? And that's what you see predicted here. We see a 9% increase in production when going to more fracs per stage. And that cost of doing that is pretty low. So it's definitely well worth doing that to get 9% extra production. If you look at it historically, in the basin, a lot of the frac spacing was in the order of 50 feet apart from each other. So if you go from the 50 feet to the proposed 16 foot stage spacing, you can increase the production increases 20%. So a substantial production increase by putting more fracs and more clusters. And that's where our industry has been headed, doing that to improve well performance. The next step then, too, is with the statistical quantitative oil prediction model is we can couple it with a cost model, and that's what we term frac economics. So we include proppant costs, fluid, chemical costs, stage costs, water disposal costs even, other fixed costs such as drill costs that are not tied to the frac, and we couple it together in an optimizer to predict what is that Happy Valley, that optimum dollar per BO, if you want to call it like a one year what oil price do I need to pay out the well in one year? That's really what that dollar per BO is. And so what you see on the left here is we were looking at proppant mass or treatment size to optimize that parameter. And you can see the well costs up top, the curve for that. Of course, it gets more expensive as I pump bigger and bigger jobs. We get more oil production and then we couple that cost model, that cost prediction or the cost assessment with the production to get that $1 per BO at the bottom, the green curve. And the Happy Valley in this particular example happens to be at about 2,700 pounds per foot of treatment size with 16 foot cluster frac spacing. Going then a little more detail, so that's kind of the big data. These are scoping studies we can turn around very quickly. Within a day or two, we can do these types of studies. But then we are also our customers want to dive into a little more detail in a specific area, looking at a specific pad and see how do changes in completion parameters impact the production. So here again, we run combination of the frac models and the reservoir models to do production predictions. An example you see here, our customer is interested to know if I increase my stage length or spacing from 200 feet to a little over 300 feet, so basically a 50 increase in stage length, meaning I can pump 50% less stages, substantial cost savings there. Is that going to affect my production negatively? That was the question. And this modeling here shows that when doing that, basically all the production curves overlay each other, which means no impact on production when doing that. So that would be a logical choice. The customer's next question was, can I save even more money? Can I increase the cluster spacing, so do less fracs per stage and save a little money on the perforating that way and also get the same kind of production? Our modeling shows, no, that is not the case. That would not be a good idea here because you would potentially lose 10% of your production in one year, in this particular case, 18,000 barrels of oil for just a little amount of cost savings, so definitely not worth it. And then we do the same thing here in the more detailed frac and reservoir modeling for treatment size, like I showed you earlier with the big data statistic predictions. This is now the more detailed model for a very specific area. In this particular case, we predicted that when you increase that treatment size from 1,500 pounds of proppant per foot to 2,500 pounds per foot, we can increase production by 50,000 barrels of oil. That's very substantial. It's a cost reduction or $1 per BO reduction of 12%. So this would definitely be the way to go to optimize the frac jobs here. So this was kind of to give you a flavor how we can combine big data statistics for very quick scoping studies with a more detailed modeling as well and help our customers make economic completion decisions. And with that, I'll pass it back to Lane for some concluding remarks. I'm stepping in for the good doctor. Okay. And I'm going end just where Lane began, which is the ten years of the shale revolution that it's been in oil. What we've seen is just enormous increases in efficiency. We've driven down well costs. We've driven up well productivity. We've made The U. S. Again a major strategic supplier for natural gas, liquids and natural gas. Now and in the afternoon, today we talked about really optimizing oil production. In the afternoon, you're going to hear from Ron Gusick and the team about operations. How do we make those better, more efficient, cleaner, that helps drive down well costs, shrinks impacts. But before that, before we break, we're going to have Q and A. And normally, if you get up and you talk about physics constrained, big data analytics, multivariate analysis and diagnostic injection tests, you get an audience just pumping with enthusiasm. And usually, there's a race and people get hurt to the microphones to ask the question first. So today, we're glad everyone's staying calm. We have a microphone, and, we have, I think, about twenty five minutes till 11:15 to take questions. We're gonna get questions online. We're gonna get questions in the room. But, yeah, the team behind you, and of course, there's many behind them that work in this stuff, it's hard to overstate the impact they've had in the development of the shale revolution ten years ago. And as you heard from Lane, Lane and Mike and some others really helped launch the shale revolution twenty plus years ago. So fire away with your questions. No questions too technical. No questions too untechnical. Any anything that's on your mind. Angie, see George's hand up in the air. I think a microphone is coming to you. Where's George? Over here. Keep going. So right here. Got it. Thank you. Just what's the receptivity of like if you think about certain E and P operators like to design wells their own way, but clearly, you guys can help operators design better wells. So what's that onboarding process like as you take a new E and P that may have a history of doing it their own way and wanting to be in full control and you guys kind of pushing the MBA model, the frac economics model, getting them to consider some of these factors. Just what's that education process like or that dialogue like with the E and Ps? And do you where do you run into resistance from them in terms of as you're trying to change their well designs? So I'll start and let others chime You know, look. For the for the smaller guys, they know about Liberty. They know about what we're doing. They're they're enthusiastic. Man, here's all of my data. Here's my plans. You know? How can you guys help? For bigger guys, we know what know about you guys, but we got our own team and let us go. But after a while, using, well, maybe you can take a look at that. And here's our database of wells in the area, but yours looks different. So sometimes it's slower and it can get involved in different areas. And of course, think about it, it's rarely talked about publicly, right? Somebody's got the new generation frac design, they're changing the world, that's our customers. It's their decision. We're the support team behind the scenes. We never want to take credit. We never talk about in a specific thing what we do for any of our customers. Their wells, their money, we're just the support team behind. But I would say it's the I would say we do a lot that you don't hear about. I can maybe add a little color to that. Maybe the easiest step in point for a customer in a new relationship is the database, right? So it's very accessible. We can, in a meeting, evaluate in this area for this formation what does the production response what does it look like, what seem to be drivers or how is that production response dependent on a variety of different parameters. By just selecting and filtering, we have hundreds and hundreds of plots available that we can look at of maybe how that seems to be working. And then for some customers, that may be the very end of it, just kind of get a second opinion of what does the data tell you. But then for a lot of customers, it may also be, okay, let's dive into the statistics. Can you do a multivariate analysis with that? This is something that Mike and his team take maybe a few days instead of just a few minutes and sitting in a meeting room as opposed to just looking at data. And from that, it may snowball into, okay, well, let's run these model sensitivities. And Mike can maybe tell you more about that. But the database is a very low step in threshold to engage a customer. I'll add a tiny bit more color. So very early on in the Bakken, we hit every well in the Bakken and its productivity. Know, and if you looked at IPs or thirty days, the data is distorted by chokes, you got to do ninety day or one hundred or something a little bit longer. But we built a database of every operator. You know, every operator in the basin, average well quality, then a same graph, but corrected for reservoir quality, and it was shocking to us. Most people had no idea. Oh, at least we're the top five or holy shit. We're really over there? You know, I'd say our industry was a little bit slow in diving into data. And then when people did, if you just download the public data, there's so many different things that just the raw data is often relatively corrupted. So it's a fair effort to get a database that's you have the key parameters that reasonably represents what's going on. But, you know, at the beginning, there's a lot of low hanging fruit. As you get further along, it's harder. I I knew I knew we were getting accepted when one of the things we did in the Bakken analysis. I just heard my Bakken was the first one. Right? There's, you know, there's reservoir thickness and pressure and processing, all those parameters. But if you looked at well performance, one parameter, water cut, the percent of the production after the first ninety days that was water versus oil captured like 80% of rock variability downhole. So it's just like, wow, there's a huge metric. And I remember I walked into a few customers' office and there were giant maps of the Bakken and their acreage on water cut. Thanks a lot. Yes, we're looking at things this way. So it's yes, it's different. It's behind the scenes. I think it's important. And then and I think recently, one of the things I've observed, too, is that we have customers in certain basins, and some of those are actually fairly larger operators that are moving into new basins where they hadn't worked before. They bought some new acreage. They actually turned to us first knowing we have this database to help them get up the learning curve there. Hey, can we look quickly at your database? What do you guys see there? Kind of as a starting point of the conversation. And then that actually leads to often more work that, hey, okay, you're doing this. Can you do also a quick frac model for us, do some sensitivities? So it's kind of a lead in to start the conversation, the dialogue with not necessarily a new customer, but a new base, and we're working with that customer in. I see Makar was next. A couple more at the front, and Ange, I'm sure, has got him coming online. Yes, we do. Syed, ATP Capital Markets. You mentioned that the optimal well spacing in gas basin was about 2,270 feet. Is that for Haynesville or Marcellus, the same, both areas? And then if you could talk about optimal well spacing for the Midland and Delaware Basins where there'll be So yes, this was one particular area, this Mancos Nile area in Western Colorado, where the fractures are very long. The rock is very easy to frac there. So I didn't mention it in detail in the presentation, but these fracs are growing. We measured with microseismic 2,000 feet away from the wellbore, extremely long. We don't see that a lot in many other areas, right? We have done I mean, I have done in my past study life Marcellus, shale wells as well, written some SD papers on that. And in the Marcellus, we were studying a well spacing of about 1,000 feet, and we definitely could see there was some well communication at that distance. And we did some studies with that operator. That was probably ten years ago, way back. Probably to relax that to 1,200, 1,300 feet. I don't know where this is right now. We have not done any specific studies recently in the Marcellus Trail, but that is something we are going to work in here pretty soon. And I think we're going to do some of those studies as well. So it's going to be different for every basin and the type of treatments you're doing, it's going to be different what kind of well spacing you want to target. Thanks. It's Ian MacPherson with Simmons. There was a slide here where you illustrated the journey from very incomplete well coverage yesteryear to nearly perfect well coverage today. What proportion of twenty twenty one wells are actually that perfect? Or is that are you highlighting just the best where or is there still a lot of runway to bring the entire drilling program across the resource base into that level? Okay. So the focus has been so concentrated on clustering and cluster efficiency and trying to optimize that, When I did a search on publications in the last five years, there's been over 300 publications specific to cluster efficiency. So that means that as an industry, everyone is focused on that. Now can I say what percentage of the wells specifically are achieving that? I couldn't put a number on that. But I can tell you that, that is by and far the largest focus right now of operators is turned from that from like what is the best design necessarily when they're getting into a full development plan to how do we optimize that cluster efficiency to make sure we're getting the best coverage possible. So mean, I would say it's the majority. I mean, than a certain percentage, I couldn't tell you. But it's still more a grayscale, of course. It isn't was bad and now it's perfect. I remember, I think Liberty was one of the first papers on clusters. I think Liberty and EOG were the early people maybe four years ago pushing this idea. And at that time, we looked at a typical well and maybe even just coverage within the clusters you shot, maybe 60% was typical. And with some improvements we made, you could get to 85% or 90%. So it's not 100%, and there's probably a lot today that's still 60% or 70%. There's still the average has drifted up quite a bit, but it's a long way from, oh, it's perfect and done now. Watch just aren't that cooperative. Think we have a few more in the room. We'll stick with those for now. Tricia Curtis with PetroNerds. And I'm compelled to sort of bring the macro into this because you did an amazing job. I mean, it's 70 WTI today, not quite 72. But that being said, things are really exciting. All these private operators, which are disproportionately growing in your rig count chart, I think we can agree with that. And you guys do an amazing job explaining the tech side of really I think really getting to the minutiae of clusters per stage and all those efficiencies. And my question is, how do you move the needle with all those private guys into penetrating with that? Because the 50,000 barrel uplift that first year is great, but with all the other pressure pumpers, and we know there's a lot of competition in this space and pressuring on margins, and you've talked about it in your earnings call, Chris, how do you compete with that? And how do you get those private companies to see we have this amazing value, and we can bring you up 50,000 barrels in that first year? And are they listening? Tricia, absolutely. They're small companies. They're not public, but they're run by smart, sharp operators. So privates have always been great customers and long term partners of Liberty. So we look now, we're a big company, but we must be better matched with the big guys. Not at all. Business base today is pretty representative of percentage wise, it's pretty representative of the actual activity. So I met Tricia years ago, and I wanted to meet her because listen to the name of that company, PetroNerds. I was like, I got to meet that gal. What great name. And she's been diving into data, not so much micro data at the frac level, but what is well productivity, what's going on in these basins, what's going on around the world. So a fellow follower of the data. Great. Do we have more questions in the room? Because we certainly have some on the webcast. Oh, you have? Okay, one in the back there. Dan Cooks from Morgan Stanley. So I guess just kind of a broad question for me, kind of concerning all of the work that you've discussed here and all of the technology. Where do you see the most runway for efficiency improvements moving forward? And what do you think is kind of more reaching a plateau and maybe it's certain basins that you guys could do some more work or better customer adoption? Take it any direction you want. Where's the most opportunity and what has you guys excited? Well, Dan, I'll start and then I'll open it up. But even way back in my pinnacle days, twenty some years ago, there's sort of this outsider view, oh, well, once you get a few data sets there, now all right, we understand the Marcellus. Let's get a few data points here. And it really isn't like that because, a, these rocks are just way more complicated. You know, the other reservoir thickness is the same. Well, there's faults. There's different clay contents. There's different reservoir pressures. And once you start to produce the rock, right, the big issues now in all the reservoirs where people are producing is when you go drill these Permian wells that offset wells, even if they're a a drilling spacing unit away, right, they've been producing a lot of oil and gas out of the pore space that changes the effective stress on the rocks. It changes the rock properties. So it's sort of a continual evolution. If you just have this is our design and we're going to stamp it out for the next five years, that never turns out to be the right answer. And I'll open it up for anyone else for the biggest holes we found for opportunities. So I'm one of the few that had an opportunity to spend a lot of my career in vertical wells where you only focused on typically one target. And so all your efforts were on designs, and you were trying to optimize those designs. Now that we've turned those wells horizontal, we have multiple targets that we're trying to make sure that we're bringing in. We still haven't optimized. What's the best way to configure wells? What's the best way to space those wells? What's the best way to sequence, as we talked about earlier, our fracture treatments to take advantage of getting the most fracture area within that pad that our operators are working on. And we still haven't figured all that out. And so I think there's still some room to grow in some of those areas of how many wells or how should they be stay wine rack, as we call it, some in this layer, some in this layer, which what sequence should we pump those jobs? There's still some optimization that can be done there. I can maybe second that. I think as an industry and with our technology development, we've done, I think, quite a good job in understanding what we need to do at the well level to create this diversion and create, at the well level, proper coverage of the reservoir. But maybe not far away from the well, we don't know exactly what, of course, happens. So I'm very excited about maybe more diagnostic technologies that can be used on a larger scale to see what happens between the well. And we know we've done a pretty good job at perforating intervals and clusters and making them all contribute. But what happens hundreds of feet away from that well? Can we say more with diagnostics, more with other types of tracer or DNA type technology to understand how wells communicate with each other after we're done and then learn from that in the process. I'll throw out another area, maybe open it up to Ben. In that Ben hit quickly on water is not water. All the water we frac with is very different, very different. And there's pushes. Like there's a new basin development we were involved in where there's no freshwater used at all. All of the water that's used for frac comes from an underground aquifer. It's used, and then when they produce it all back, it goes back into that aquifer. Now it's got brine water with some increasing oil contaminants or oil stuff in it. It's a great way to dispose of stuff deep underground. But just today, recycled water, some smaller percent, that's likely going to grow. So we're going be fracking with very different cheaper waters, not touching fresh water, but all different things. And then Ben wants to make certain fluids with certain properties, but he's had variabilities of different qualities of fresh ish water. He's gonna be fracking more and more with water that isn't even close to fresh. Yeah. Some of the waters we see out there are you you wouldn't even identify it as water. Black. I mean, can't see through it. It is black water. We can things to treat some of that, and we can select different chemicals to actually use the water as it is. But, yeah, there's a lot of things we can we can advance in that world. Well, I wanna take a few questions from the webcast, so let's let's start with that quickly. Keith Mackie at RBC asked, can you talk about how you monetize your vast sets of data and analytical tools? So great. So and there's a thing, and now I'm thinking of the tech companies and all that argument. How do you monetize your data, right? If you have data on credit card transactions and what people buy, that data is by the big data companies. It's sold so they get the right ad for you to appear at the right time. We our model is very different. We do not do that. We have a database. I should say we don't what we do maybe you could say is analogous. We have this large database, I would say by far the largest and most robust, meaning accurate database of all the unconventional wells in the country. So we get it from public data sources, but lots of people scrape all the public data. That's just a thin layer to start to build our database. But then we know the producers, we know the operators, we know how many stages they used and what the cluster spacing was. Well, we can put that in. Then there's proprietary things that they don't want shared with anyone else. And so we're very careful. They will give that data to us because if we have that data from them and from their neighbors, we don't tell their neighbors what they're doing or what they're doing to their neighbors. We keep that data proprietary in the bowels of our database. But we get everyone get the benefit of the insights, the analytics that come out of that data. But we don't sell that database to other people. We don't release all the details we have about all those wells to anyone. But we do release the analytics or the results that come out of it, And we do release pieces of it. Like Lane said, if people say, hey, what what's the production data of all the wells and reservoir thickness? There's a lot of this data that that is no problem to share publicly. We just have it in an easily more easily accessible format. We share that. These view data, viewers so people can look at production and performance and all that. So I would say, Ange, we never directly sell the data or even really the data services. For us, it's just part of this broader Liberty ecosystem package. If you're our customer, we're your partner, and we're going to do everything we can to figure out how to improve your production economics and help you understand why are things going weird, what's going on wrong there. So it's all just packaged. It's not an individual business line, and we have no intent of doing that. Too much proprietary nature about it. Perfect. Perfect. Let me take another question here from Chase Mulvehill at Bank of America. Ultimately, the industry is now focused on maximizing free cash flow. Do you have quantitative models that actually predict the optimal well and field design that would result in a highest free cash flow and or NPV? And are you seeing accelerated adoption from private E and Ps for your subsurface diagnostic technologies? They're maximizing free cash flow is really about maximizing how much you spend to drill wells today. And, you know, you want to maximize free cash flow, drill a small number of wells and drill all your best locations right now. So I'm not sure if, you know, that one parameter that anyone is is focused on maximizing just that one parameter. Certainly, that parameter is higher and higher in investor focuses. It's an important one. But, no, we we generally bring the the guts of well cost production profiles, production performance, and then we'll work with the customer. Do you want to maximize the the return, the rate of return on that well? Do you want to maximize the net present value of your whole field development? So we'll work with people on what is it that they're looking to maximize. But but it is to my knowledge, it has never been, you know, here's a five year time period. Can you figure out how to maximize? Because my problem always is that it's a time period. I want to maximize free cash flow to time infinity discounted back to today at some changing discount rate. So does that drive customer stickiness? I would say the ability to say we have the data, we have the analysts and we have the tools to figure out you what you want to optimize, absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. That's great. Do we have any more in the room? Otherwise, I do. Wait. Is one in the back that I what and, Waqar, I'm going to go to somebody else just because you've got one so far. And it's far enough at the blinding lights. I can't tell who it is. Hi, it's John Morris, U. A Ventures. It's not clear to me how you get rewarded at Happy Valley. Is it just customer stickiness is the reward? Are you able to charge more? And how do you quantify whether you're getting a return for your shareholders based on the technology and data you're collecting? So John, the short answer is it is customer stickiness and customer desire. We get a Liberty pricing premium because if you were an operator, think candidly, it's better to have Liberty a partner than to have someone else as a partner. And those two things are really valuable. If you have excess demand for your particular service, it helps us keep a more efficient calendar. It helps us there are two customers, they could be the same size and they'll pay you the same pricing, but one of them is going to be efficient and run faster and tell you their schedule way in advance. That's a much more valuable customer. So we want to so it's a differential thing to make people want to work for us more and help them increase their profitability. We don't get direct value in the way you were inferring. I'll tell a story very early on when we showed this database in the Bakken, and we showed a very large well known operator to everyone. Hey, if you made this change, you could increase your well productivity by 50%, and it'll increase your well cost by 10 or 12%. If that's true, that's going to be awesome. You're going to be our frac company. But how do I know it's true? I gotta spend that 12% and then and then maybe it isn't. And we we actually went back to them and said, we'll give you a money back guarantee. If if we increase your well cost by 12% and we don't increase your productivity by more than 12%, we'll give you about that extra frac cost. But if we increase it by 30% or 40% or 50%, we get a piece of that. And, of course, all that communicated to a customer was, well, they really believe in what they're doing. Never mind. Don't want the insurance. We'll go ahead and do it. And that has been our experience. There are people with low quality acreage. They're trying to figure out. We get offers there all the time. Hey, if you'll bring your frac, we'll give you x percent or whatever. But when people have a high value asset, they know the returns are good. We would love nothing more than to partner with them to have some risk capital and share some of the upside. But those deals that sound so logical, they're very rare, very rare in the really good rock. I wish that wasn't so. They're not never, but they're pretty rare. Well, that's great. We're running a little bit out of time here. So we're going to take a quick break, regroup at 11:30 Mountain Time. For those of you on the webcast that have asked lots of great questions, I want to make sure that you know we are we do have a live stream here, and we will get to those questions in the open forum as well later this afternoon. Definitely keep them coming. We haven't forgotten you're out there, and we'll continue back here at 11:30. Please do grab your lunches if you're here in the room from the back. Thanks. Hi. Tracy Quinell from Human Resources here. At Liberty, when it comes to people, we're different, and I'd like to talk to you about why. First, we treat people like adults. And I know what you're thinking, super easy concept. Why isn't everyone doing this? Right? But we take the time to truly embrace the diverse backgrounds and skill sets and thought processes of our employees, and it is amazing what we get in return. We ask our employees to be participators, not spectators in our march forward, Active participators. Next, we constantly ask what can we do more for our employees. And in the benefit realm, we already have a fantastic benefit package, but we wanted more. So we added some neat benefits like adoption assistance, IVF coverage, unlimited amount of times, and hearing aid coverage. It's those little things that really make a difference to our team. Third, we believe in people, and we are a second chance employer. You'll hear more about this from Chris shortly. But in a nutshell, we get it. People mess up. We all mess up. But that doesn't mean that you can't have a wonderful successful career, and we're willing to support employees in doing that. Lastly, our field employees are so important. We are cognizant as an administrative and executive team that without those employees who work in extreme heat, extreme cold, long hours away from their families, without them, none of us have a job. So we try to always be very aware of taking care of our employees. That first employee who has just started entry level, no experience in oil and gas, take care of that employee. That employee makes a difference, and that's what makes Liberty better. Liberty was an early adopter of ban the box. Imagine growing up in a low income community, perhaps in a violent household with no advantages in life. The crowd you're around is rough, and you make a youthful mistake as so many do in those circumstances, and you go to prison. You pay your time. You reform yourself. You come out to have that life you wanted from the start. But you can't get a job. You can't get a job for the simple reason that you were incarcerated and you had made a mistake. That's not right. That's not fair. That's not the Liberty Way. Someone comes out, they wanna build a better life for themselves, their family. We're all for that. At Liberty, we care where people are going, not where they came from. Hi. My name is Michael Twomey, and I have worked as a compliance manager at Liberty Oilfield Services for the past seven years. And I'm Andrea Twomey, and I've spent most of my career in the oil and gas industry and spent five years at Liberty Resources. Together, we have been part of the Liberty family since 02/2011. Andrea and I have been married for ten years and have been trying to have children for most of that time. About three years ago, we decided adopting a child was going to be the best option for us to grow our family. Adoption can be a difficult decision. It can also be a long and sometimes complicated process. It can also be extensive. Shortly after we decided to pursue this route, Liberty had also announced this adoption assistance plan to help assist families financially. In September, our daughter Lucia was born. She's the greatest joy of our lives. Yet the adoption process doesn't stop there. There are follow-up home visits, and our court finalization process took seven months after she was born. This was a time of excitement to have a child that we waited so long for and also time of stress as we worked through the long, complicated legal process, not to mention spending three weeks in the NICU as our daughter Lucia was born six weeks early. The last thing we wanted to worry about were the bills that we now owed for our adoption. And thankfully, Liberty was there for Taking the focus off the finances that deter so many families from adopting and add to the overall stress, we were able to focus on our daughter. Thank you, Liberty. This has been more than a career for us. It's been a family. Hi, guys. I'm TJ. And I'm Molly. We're the DeVries. I am the district maintenance manager here in Henderson, Colorado. I have been with Liberty for a little over six years now. I started out as a field mechanic and worked my way into the current position I am in now. Molly and I met in middle school, actually Mhmm. And made it all the way through high school, never dated each other. Mhmm. Couple years later, we reconnected. Eleven years down the road, here we are. Not long after we got married, which is in 2015, we wanted to start a family right away. So but that didn't work out so well. We did we had to do lots of fertility treatments. They never found anything wrong. It just didn't work out. So long story short, our option was IVF, and now we are expecting a little baby boy in July. So without the amazing benefits of Liberty, there's no way we would have a little miracle. So thank you, Liberty. Yeah. Healthy baby boy, July 24, future Liberty employee. So Yeah. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Came out that Liberty was going to acquire the OneStim division, I think there's a little bit I know I was a little bit surprised and shocked. But, you know, being a part of the Wireline product line, I'd actually had the opportunity to work across from several Liberty frac crews during my field career, and I had nothing but absolutely pleasant experiences knocking out jobs with them out in the field. So I think all in all, it was just kind of a roller coaster and a a flood of emotions emotions when we first heard about it. But, you know, after about twenty four hours and the dust had settled, I think a lot of those nerves and emotions had calmed down, and I was just ready for I'm looking forward to the next adventure that this is going to bring. Working at Liberty has been fantastic. I never saw myself working for another service provider in the oil and gas industry, but I do feel very lucky that we were acquired by Liberty. It's been really awesome to see two teams come together and just work with a bunch of people that are extremely friendly and open minded and just wanna bring you right into the family to not only be the best damn frat company, but the best damn wireline company that we can be. I think the the best thing about working at Liberty and what I enjoy the most is the people culture. It's really neat to see people come together with teamwork and innovation and no matter how big or small an idea is that you might have, if it's going to help company culture or performance or keep our people safer, it's gonna be implemented. And I just think that drives people's teamwork and ability to work together and overall drive for the employee at the end of the day. And I think Please take your seats. Our program will begin in five minutes. Director of strategic business. So five years ago, I was in a meeting in an impromptu conference call, and we were told that Sanjo was ceasing operations, and our equipment was being sold to Liberty. This is a company I'd only ever known as a competitor, and it was quite a shock. Well, when you go into these situations, it's pretty scary. You don't know what's gonna happen. You don't know if you're gonna have a job. You don't know what's next for you. And from from the very first meeting with with the executive leadership team I have, the folks that came and visited in Houston, we were welcomed with open arms. We were embraced, and and we felt like we were part of the team day one. Immediately, my wife, Allie, and my son, Brooks, were welcomed into the family. She was interacting with other spouses in the company and Liberty employees as well. My son, Brooks, was given a onesie that said new to the crew, that's exactly how we felt as well. Prior to Liberty, I was an organization that was very layered, process driven and with a lot of structure. Coming over here, it was a freeing experience. Employees are empowered to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company. You can make your own way and have opportunity to succeed professionally, that's such a wonderful feeling. The opportunity to contribute to a place that values their people and allows them to succeed professionally is so rare. It's part of what makes Liberty special and why we're the best damn service company, period. All good. Great. Welcome back. So what is climate science? How does the science shape our view towards energy, towards energy access? The two men on stage here need no introduction, but let me just share a little bit about our guest today, Doctor. Steven Koonan. So Doctor. Koonan is a leader in science policy in The U. S. He served as the second Undersecretary for Science at The U. S. Department Of Energy in the Obama administration. Prior to that, Doctor. Koonan spent five years as Chief Scientist at BP, where he played a central role in establishing Energy Biosciences Institute. Doctor. Koonin was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology and served as the Institute's Provost during his tenure. He is currently a university professor at NYU, and he holds a BS in physics in Caltech and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. So with that, I will turn it over to Chris. Thanks, Ange. And look, the idea for this is truly just a dialogue. There's no rehearsal. There's no scripts. Steve doesn't know what what he's gonna ask, and heck, he might be shooting arrows at me as well. But I wanna start out the one thing I do wanna do is I wanna start out and have Steve tell us his story. You know, we're I think he's a tech nerd like me. Where'd you grow up? How'd your how'd your career unfold? Sure. I'd so I grew up the eldest child of three family, middle class or perhaps even lower middle class in Brooklyn, New York. From a very early age, I was fascinated with science and how the world worked, measuring things, and, had the benefit of one of the extraordinary public schools in in New York, Silasen High School, which focuses on science and math. Had a great time there. And because it was the late sixties, it was the time to go to California. And and so, I went to Caltech, not only because it was in California, but also because, it had a reputation as the hardest science and math school. I know we share an MIT heritage, but I like to think about Caltech as the best fifth of MIT. I know both institutions very well. And four wonderful years at Caltech, graduate school at MIT, did a PhD in theoretical physics, nuclear physics, then back at Caltech on the faculty, teaching graduate students and doing research. In the course of my time there, I supervised about 30 or 40 PhD students, wrote lots of papers. And about in the late eighties, I started to get a taste for the input of science to practical matters. And as you may know, this is what physicists do. So one of my mentors once said, a license a degree in theoretical physics is a license to poke your nose into anybody's business. And physicists have done this for a decade, I'm sorry, centuries or so. And so I got interested and exposed to national security matters. Both DOD and the intelligence community did a lot of consulting with a group called Jason, which is a group I'm still involved with, and saw how you provide technical input into non expert decision makers. They, you tell the story transparently, complete the these are the options, these are the risks, and so on. About that same time, I was asked to be provost at Caltech and learned about running large organizations, roughly a half a billion dollar budget, leaving apart JPL, which is a NASA lab that Caltech also runs. And and I think after about nine years of provosting, I got kind of bored with that. It was a lot of fun, but, you know, you've been there, you've done that, trying to move on. John Brown asked me to come be chief scientist at BP. I said, I don't know anything about energy except that it's conserved. And he said, don't worry, you'll learn. And I like to joke that I was for a couple of years the highest paid graduate student on the planet as I learned the energy business. And that was just great. They didn't need me for oil and gas, but I did, I think, help them learn how to think about the bigger energy picture and move them into some interesting alternatives in renewables, particularly bioenergy as as was mentioned in the introduction. After five years of that, my wife says we gotta get back to The US. London is just a little bit too much for me to take anymore. Steve Chu, my friend, became secretary of energy, and he said, come help out. I did that for two and a half years, which is our longest time for a senate confirmed appointment. Help guide the government in its investments in energy technologies, and also push back within the department against secretary Chu. Nobel Prize winner has a lot of confidence and a lot of knowledge, but Steve needed somebody in the department to challenge him a bit on the technical issues. A lot of fun doing that. And then I went to NYU to start a center on big data for big cities. So it was very interesting to see how big data is being applied in in your organization. Did that for six years. You know, there's a famous physicist in the early twentieth century, Leo Szilard, who's famous for having drafted or written the letter that Einstein sent to Roosevelt to get the Manhattan Project kicked off. And Szilard was quite a character, if you read the biographies. He had his own 10 commandments. And the ninth one is something like reinvent yourself every six years unless you become captive to the environment that you're in. And so I've taken that to heart. After six years of starting the Center for Urban Science and Progress at NYU, I stepped down and am now just a professor, teaching alternatively climate and energy courses at the master's level to MBAs and engineers. So that's a little bit about me. Personal life, I've been married to the same woman for forty five years. We have three grown kids. And apart from my professional life, my real dream job would be playing lounge piano somewhere in a bar. All right. Maybe the Liberty bar and happy bar. Okay. So, Steven, in my case, you've got company Pinnacle Technologies I mentioned. We had some technologies for mapping the motion of fluid underground. So the national labs came to us twenty plus years ago, said we're gonna do these demonstrations sequester CO two underground. Can you measure that? We need to see if it stays underground. So this is potential new business line. I'm just starting a shale gas company, and while coal to shale, this is like a golden opportunity to lower greenhouse gas emissions. So for business reasons, I almost drove into the study of climate change twenty plus years ago, thinking, hey, this is gonna be a big deal. It's gonna be awesome for two of the businesses I'm in, but I wanna understand it. And pretty shocking, my road along that path and my interactions. But way more important, mine didn't mine didn't result in a book. Yours resulted in a book. But talk us through that. You know, we're you're a rational technical guy. This is sort of a technical issue with a lot of trade offs. Tell me your view on climate change, and and why is it not aligned with the general view, or is there even a general view? So increasingly, and particularly in the last year or two, you hear many politicians, increasingly people in industry, finance, and certainly NGOs talking about the existential climate threat. And in fact, a couple weeks ago or a month ago, the secretary of defense said this is the biggest threat that the country faces. And when I listen to those people, and they, of course, use the science to justify what they're saying. The science is absolutely certain, said ambassador Kerry. President says we're gonna follow the science. I listen to all of that, and I'm thinking about the movie The Princess Bride, where one character, Vizini, keeps using the word inconceivable. And the main character, Inigo Montoya, says, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. And I'm thinking the science does not say what these people think it says. And I can guarantee you that essentially none of them have read the government or UN assessment reports. Maybe they've read the summaries for policymakers. Otherwise, they're getting it from the media. And when you really read those reports, the picture you get is very different than the popular and political dialogue, both in terms of what's happened with the weather and climate, over the last century and also our ability to project what might be happening in the future. Let me give you just some surprises that you'll find when you read those reports. Over the last century, heat waves are no more common today than they were in 1900 across The US. And the warmest temperatures, despite the heat wave we're having now across the Southwest, the warmest temperatures across the country have not gone up in more than sixty years. There's not a year to year variability, of course, but climate is a thirty year average of things. Another is that there is no detectable influence on hurricanes from human forces over almost a century. Think about that every time you hear the coverage of hurricanes on CNN, for example. Another is that the projected impact of warming of, let's say, six degrees Celsius. That's four times the Paris goal. If the globe warms six degrees by the end of the century, the economic impact on The US would be a few percent of the GDP, and the same is true for the world. Those statements are not my science. They're not my spin on the science. They are what's there in the report, although sometimes buried in the report. And you've got to read them carefully. And my goal in writing the book was to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and circumvent this long chain of information that goes from the research literature and the data to the assessment reports to the summaries to the media and let people see, of course, with references exactly what those reports are saying. And why don't the scientists that are behind these reports I visited them and speak with them in universities. Why don't they speak out more? If if say we were in another era. Say we were working in theoretical physics, and we had a certain model of how, you know, how a particle behaved, and then everyone said something dramatically different about it, wouldn't wouldn't you speak up and say, hey. That's not what I said. That's not it. And and in theoretical physics, as you know, people do that. Yeah. And that's part of the sport is to both challenge and rebut the challenges. The problem here is that the subject of climate is, first of all, not as clear as theoretical physics, and so it's much more difficult to establish truth and falsity, in part because we have poor observations, complicated modeling, limited data, but also because it strikes at the heart of human existence, the changing climate degradation, allegedly, of our environment. If we responded to it as some people would like, it would entail massive changes in society, and we can get on to those, I hope, in a while. But there's a lot of peer pressure to take look. I wrote this book. Alright? Published among Everyone's gonna get a copy of the book signed by Steven. They're they're we held them till after lunch. They're on the back. I tried to stick to exactly what's in the reports. K, and just tell people, here's what the real science says. And I've already gotten trashed in ways you would not believe by some reputable scientists, some of whom used to be friends, actually, in the media. Because I think there is a narrative that people are trying to enforce, in order to stimulate action, and any deviation from that narrative, is punished. And I'm far enough along in my career, and I've got enough experience giving advice and portraying science to nonexperts. I really don't care. I'm just trying to get the truth out there. Because I think it will result in better societal decisions. Absolutely. Now you worked, for five years in London at BP when when that was beyond petroleum. So five years, world top scientist. Where's the beyond petroleum future? I I read the analysts in our own industry telling me the energy transition is happening faster than we thought. And, oh my god, we're gonna be out of business in ten years. I I can't believe the stuff is written by analysts in our own industry. But what what's your view on that? May is is it hard to redo the world energy system? What you really let's talk about the goal first. Okay? If you really wanna reduce human influences on the climate, we need to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to stay below one and a half degrees of warming. We've already seen one degree of warming. Or by 2075, to stay below two degrees. And when you look at the growing demand for energy due to the development of most of humanity, as you nicely outlined, this morning, and you look at the fact that fossil fuels, particularly coal and gas, are the most convenient way and reliable way of satisfying that demand. And right now, we have no alternative to oil for mobility that's viable. We can talk about electric cars in a little bit. And given the time scales that you have to do this transition with, I have said in the book, it's practically impossible. We are not going to do this, right, given all those competing tendencies. Now the administration has put forward some bold plans for decarbonizing The US, and we can talk about those in a bit as well. But even if The US went to zero, The US is only 15% of global emissions. And so whatever reduction we manage to make would be wiped out by a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world. I don't see how this is gonna happen. Right? And we're gonna be using fossil fuels at least till mid century, and I would say very likely till the end of this century in significant ways. What and you're looking at energy technologies. What was the most promising thing that could grow market share in world in the world energy system? Are we talking from a technical perspective or from an economic perspective or from a psychological perspective? Because as you know, people's perceptions about energy technologies are really important as well. Right. Well, that leads to government subsidies and investments. But ultimately, I I don't think that's enough to drive meaningful additional energy. So so I guess the balance between it's got economic prospects that may attract some capital, and and thirty or forty years from now, it may have many percent more market share in global energy. If if the world places a lower priority on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and we know that more than half the world is still just trying to get energy, never mind where it's coming from, I think it's gonna be gas. Coal has got its own downsides, but gas, gas, gas, particularly here in in The US for reasons you all know much better than I, gas is wonderful. We can talk about its climate impact in a minute. That's an interesting side note. But, if we care, you've got to electrify the transportation system. Can't produce enough biofuels, I think, to satisfy the demand. And you're gonna have to make that electricity emissions free. And, yes, wind and solar are wonderful, but for every megawatt of wind or solar you put in, you gotta provide backup in some way because the electricity grid has to be extraordinarily reliable. And the only way right now to provide that backup is through fission, or eventually if other storage technologies get to be, economic and scalable. We're not there yet with those at all. So we gotta build nuclear. Alright? Yeah. And we haven't built a nuclear plant in this country in twenty years. We've got a couple trying to build big ones. But when I was in the department, I think many people have a lot of optimism that small modular nuclear reactors will be beneficial both from an economic point of view and, of course, reduce greenhouse gases. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently considering licenses or at least looking at designs for, I think, two small modular reactors. I'm a huge fan of nuclear. And and so you've worked inside the government, and you advised the government. Do you think the political climate can change that we can see nuclear get some growth in the next ten or twenty years? I do. And and here's why. And and this is maybe a more general comment about the climate energy scene in The US and in Europe. The policies that are being proposed and regulations, and you can look at the Biden administration's plans, would entail rapid and large scale transformations of our energy system. And by nature, I think you said it, energy changes slowly. It takes decades. And there are good reasons for that. The facilities last a long time. We need reliability in the systems. You know, it's not just a windmill, but you need the whole system that integrates that windmill together with the other sources of power. Similarly, you can't have automobiles without having the right kind of fuel and so on. So these are systems that have to change, and they have to be extraordinarily reliable. If you start monkeying with them too much, too rapidly, you're gonna lose reliability, costs are gonna go up. You're gonna reduce consumer choice because I won't be able to buy an internal combustion engine in this country after 2035 if the regulations come in. And you're gonna degrade US geopolitical stature because we will be more dependent on imported oil and perhaps even imported gas again than we were before the fracking revolution. And and so I think as this starts to bite for ordinary consumers, there's gonna be pushback. And we've already seen it, the yellow vests in France, the backing off of the UK government for mandatory installation of heat pumps, and other protests about electricity and fuel costs around the the world. And so people are gonna ask, I predict within about three or four years, tell me again why we're doing this. And there's gonna be a much greater scrutiny of the science, which I as I write in the book, I think is solely needed, and a much greater look at the efficacy of the policies that are being proposed. So just give it a couple of years and, we'll be back to injecting some rationality in both the climate and energy discussions. Fantastic. Yeah. Say Switzerland just voted down a carbon tax in Switzerland. So, yeah, that that my perspective has been as energy gets more expensive and less reliable, that'll be the start of swing back. So, Steve, does that go further? Do people do we ever get a public discourse about honestly what we know or even project about climate science? That's why I wrote that section in our ESG report. I I talked to politicians. I talked to climate activists. They they they never engage in even understanding the basics. Yeah. And and you had a point in your book, when is the public gonna, you know, some meaningful percent of the public be aware of the fact that if we met Biden's goal of a 30% that would no chance of that happening, but say we get 30% drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, net zero by 2050, net zero for the rest of the century at presumably enormous cost. The benefit, right, is seven one hundredths of a degree cooler, immeasurably small change at the end of this century. Yeah. Like, the benefit doesn't the cost we see is is is high, and and people may push back about that. But is everyone gonna be discouraged about the benefit? Yeah. I well, the the numbers are what they are, and I'm pleased, and and I think you were unusual in the oil and gas business of laying it out, as you did in the ESG report. You know, I I could sense you mentioned Smill in there. I could I could see Smill's thinking in there as I think if people read my book, they will see it as well. Just factual, logical, don't try to extrapolate too much. These are the numbers. These are what they imply. And now let's talk about what we should do. Alright? And Yes. I think there are a lot of people who are receptive to that. As I've gotten feedback from the book, from many scientists who are not, or engineers who have not looked deeply into climate, or people who've been responsible for running some of the large named universities, we shall not talk about names. They, you know, the response has been, thanks for writing this book. I had not realized many of these things, and I've now got the basis on which to ask smarter questions for the people who are pushing us to go in this particular direction. So I think that's what we need to do. We're not gonna win over everybody, but we've gotta stand up for a factual, logical discussion. And frankly, I think the oil and gas industry, particularly the big ones, have been remiss in some of the legal proceedings I've been following and so on in standing up and challenging the science with here's what actually the data says. And so why are you so concerned about sea level rise? But it's been only going up at less than a foot a century for the last hundred years. And the projections that you're making are just so wildly discordant with experience. So please explain. And I think we need more of that kind of discussion. Yeah. I agree with you. Very disappointing to see our industry not do that. Everyone accepts the narrative and then shows how they're part of the solution. Yeah. So in the again, the book, I I and, again, in lines with Vaclav Smil, this fantastic probably the best energy thinker in the world. And he writes a ton of books. They're very nerdy, but they're just sober, and he's very smart, and they're very good. But he doesn't have a wide audience. I mean, your your book's gonna outsell probably all his combined. But but with your book and and and your background and credentials are just so perfect to speak to this, are you getting invitations to speak at the national labs, at universities? Who wants to engage with you and who who doesn't want to be talking out loud? So so I I just back on Snow for one second, and then I'll answer that. I wanted to do for climate what Snow did for energy. Okay? And maybe make it a little bit less nerdy, as you said. So there are some anecdotes in there about my experiences and so on. Yes. So, I'm hoping to do a large number of talks at universities, think tanks, and public forums, over the next year. I've got, I did just a couple weeks ago a talk at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Right. By the way, the National Labs, which are a wonderful complex of research institutions, is with both, you know, non defense or non national security, but also national security research, they need to get smarter about climate because the secretary of defense and the ODNI, the director of national intelligence, has said this is a major threat. So let's apply the same rigor to analyzing climate and energy that we do to other national security threats. So national ads, I did one at Livermore about a month ago. Great reception, wonderful questions. I'm not sure I won many people over, but the book is there. I've got let me not name the particular universities yet since they haven't been announced. Yep. But universities in the top tier of this country's higher education operation. And I hope to get on the stage and tell the story a bit, but then ask some of the experts who are at these universities, you know, how come it says minimal economic impact that but you're still either saying yourself or tolerating others to say that there's a climate crisis and we've only got ten years left and so on? Where is the scientific establishment pushing back against the inaccuracies in the public dialogue? Yeah. So disappointing. And so so, Steve, let's talk about that. I I think I think in our original dialogue, we shared this same view. One of one of my problems with the the the sort of climate mania is it's pushing kids in school away from science. Because it's this authoritarian enforcement of orthodoxy. That's not what science is. So talk to us about the science versus science. Science. You know, I mean, the assessment reports so for those of you who don't know, the UN puts out every six or seven years a big report assessing the state of the science and making recommendations to policymakers. The next one is due out this summer in the July, early August. The US government is mandated to put out a report every four years. The next one will come out in 2023. And activists and people who want to move the country and the world in a certain direction, and, you know, they have perhaps legitimate reasons for wanting to do that, use these reports and particularly the more inflammatory statements in them, as a vehicle for saying the science is settled, it's been peer reviewed, etcetera, etcetera, and there's no reason to challenge it. And of course, that's a wonderful stepping stone then to teaching or convincing non experts and young people that, hey, the world is gonna end in in a decade, and we had better do something. I think that's really immoral. And it's immoral in in several ways. Of course, discouraging young people, absolutely. But also, it tarnishes science. And we can talk a little bit about the COVID examples where this kind of thing is also happened or happening. But it also usurps from the public. We are a democracy. The public really needs to know what the science actually says. And if organizations obscure that or hype it, then you're usurping from the public the right to make fully informed decisions about how much risk to tolerate, how much economic growth you want to balance against environment, North South equity, geographical equity, all of those values things that you have to weigh with the science. And then finally, we've got so many other problems in this country right now, and placing this one, which is frankly a vague, distant, and uncertain threat at the priority, at the top of the priority list, really, incurs so much opportunity cost that I think it incur as I said, it's just immoral to be representing the science as more certain than it is. Yes. And so do you hear, like, you spoke at Livermore, again, no details, right, did they engage in this dialogue of the science versus science? No. Because the audience was all scientists and engineers, and they understood exactly what I was saying. I gave them the references and the reports if they didn't know it. You know, page three twenty seven in the IPCC report says no detectable human influences on tropical cyclones, hurricanes. And were they not aware of that? Most people are not. Even at those NASA labs? Yeah. Because most of them are not involved in climate science. Some of them are. One of the premier to give you an example of how much the dialogue has degraded, and I'll use names this time, Ben Santer Yep. Is a senior climate modeler at Livermore. And he is, I would say, his public face, a foremost defender of the faith. Yes. And when one part of the lab invited me, the Center for Global Security Research, because this is a national security issue, and it was announced, then immediately wrote an article, I think, in the bulletin for atomic scientists. He said, when I retire in September, so that's a few months away, I will have nothing more to do with the lab because they chose to give a platform to this I don't know if he used the word denier, but it's probably that he did. Yeah. And I'm just quoting what's in the reports. Alright. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. Alright. And I I think the way to fix that is by educating fellow scientists and engineers who've not looked at this. They will then have the ammunition to ask the right kinds of questions. And also, we'll see how the information flow has been corrupted, by the media and the public dialogue. Yes. Yes. I think in the way you've done it in the book, if you present logically the facts and not you know, there's as I say, you never wanna be the anti Al Gore. We just like, I've spoke at universities a number of times on climate change. And, actually, the reaction's incredibly positive. Yeah. You know, there's a small number of activists that, you know Do do you have demonstrations for your talks? And anybody saw it? For my testimony in front of the climate crisis committee. Oh, you I Extinction Rebellion held a funeral for the Earth when I showed up. And I I think of all these college kids in these black suits. I mean, they get all the girls dressed in black and faces painted white and the lipstick, and they were holding roses for a funeral for the earth as I walked in. But for climate change talks, maybe the news doesn't get out enough. I find the reaction, pretty pretty positive. Yeah. You know, because I think, you know, 10 or 20% of people, they don't care about the facts. But most people, just they've never heard anything, but it's really giant problem we have to act. If they see the data and then they realize, yeah, no one actually showed me the data on the other side, and you showed me the data, most of them, I think I think they're very open to getting a more realistic perspective. I think the public as a whole probably is. But we just don't have the avenue to engage with them. You know, politicians have taken about half of the public, maybe more than half, have taken this up as a cause celebre. And I think that's another part of the problem. I I quoted the book, and I think it's a very powerful quote, from H. R. Mencken, who was a journalist in the early twentieth century. Very pithy remarks. And one of his quotes is that the purpose of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary threats so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety. And whether it is, climate, whether it is immigration on the other side, or whether it is COVID, and that's an evolving and somewhat more complicated story, I mean, you see that playing out. Alright? And somebody's gotta just stand up and and say, you know, stop that nonsense because here are what the facts say. I mean, we you you just you said we saw it with COVID too. Right? You remember the two doctors in Bakersfield talking about it, and their video was taken down. Yeah. I did a bunch of panels, business panels here, some with our governor here in Colorado, and I just talk about the numbers. But it was the same thing that you the the everything in life to me has a cost and a benefit. We wanna find things where the benefits are much greater than the valley. The valley. Right? Okay. But on climate, the the the we we we sometimes talk about making the cost smaller. We never mention the benefits, of course, because there isn't much there. But in COVID, it was the same way. You know? There was the fear of people dying, which, of course, is very real. That's a big cost. But there's a there's a cost of what we were doing too that also involves human health and economic well-being and all that. And I, yeah, I was this weird guy in polite company talking about stuff that Yeah. What what well, how and then was the world always that way? When we were kids, was it that way? No. I I think the media have heightened this. I think the Internet, because so much information is now available, a lot of it bad information, that, I think it has heightened it. And, again, I I think people are well, no. Let me let me just go back to this trade off for a minute. We saw that in COVID in almost real time. You had the governors and many other people clamoring to open up the economy, acknowledging that there were risks. And you had the public health people saying, here, you know, if you do that, people are gonna die. Well, yes, some people are gonna die anyway. And you have to set that balance. And I would fault the Trump administration for not promoting that kind of dialogue and making those choices kind of evident. They were very confused in in in what they said to the public. But you did have Fauci on one side, and then you had the economists and the business people on the other side. Eventually, we sorted it out. I think things are better now because we've got the vaccines and and cases are going down. But it is a great analog to the climate discussion where there are costs to reducing emissions, not only internal costs, but as you again mentioned this morning, the 3,000,000,000 people in the world who don't have adequate energy. And the detriment of of conventional wooden dung being burned. So there are costs. I think part of it also is that the young people are looking for a greater cause. And they've taken this on, the protection of the environment and local environment, obviously, pollution, plastics, etcetera. But also, they've taken on the global climate as a great challenge. And I wonder if we couldn't redirect them somehow to improving the lives of the three or 4,000,000,000 people of whatever cut you want to use Yeah. Who don't have adequate energy. I've been a board member of environmental group for a good chunk of my life. I'm an outdoor wilderness guy. We're a wealthy society, so we can Yeah. We can do these great things. But I think the interest in what would have been environmentalism when you and I were young is so different today. Like, kids today, I see you know, see the protesters without, They have no idea that Earth the air in Denver is just monstrously cleaner than it was thirty or forty years ago. So it's mostly global. It's mostly climate change. And so to me, yeah, I think it's less tangible. But I I I do think most of it is it's it gives a meaning in life. You know? The planet is gonna die, and I'm gonna fade to save it. And then there's these deep demons that are I'm fighting against. But that I mean, yeah, it seems to have a very strong emotional appeal with no data or facts. Right. The people don't even bother to learn them. I think it just sort fits. Right? And so Yep. Society is playing with it. It's it's like, you know, one of my friends who's both a physicist but a great historian, also a student of history, it's like the Crusades. You know, if you look back in medieval Europe, the king mounted a great army of people to go off to the Holy Land at great cost, but also with uncertain and distant and probably unachievable goals. You know, I think the cure to a lot of this, and you've certainly been involved with that and I have as well, is both climate literacy and energy literacy. And things that are accessible to people not only at a technical level where we talk numbers, but also at a more visceral level. And I'll put in a plug. You probably know Scott Tinker. Yes. And Scott's films, both Switch and Switch On. Yep. Switch about the energy system and Switch On about energy poverty, I think are really good for people who aren't quite as numerate or quantitatively thinking as we are. Oh, Scott does great sound. And he's he's all around speaking. He's such a kind, generous yeah. He's very credible, a huge fan and and supporter of of what Scott's doing. And so, yeah, maybe just other ways to spread it. Again, as as we both said, a little disappointed in our own industry engagement of that. And then I think of reporters. Right? Energy reporters tend to write about energy, and they tend to write about climate. Right? So there was some interest in this report that we released. I've done three interviews with major print publications. Yeah. And what was shocking to me, two things. One, all three of them were like, why did you write this? You know? It's Why? Everyone's saying that. Why why did you write this? And then the I got that right up front from all three, and then the most disappointing thing I learned pretty quickly was none of them had read it. Well, I read the summary up front, and I glanced through it. Yeah. You know, I'm like so what are the takeaways? To me, it wasn't like five bullet points. Right? You and your books are more in-depth. It's right. If you're gonna credibly make a case, we try we gotta put some data out there. We try to make it as digestible as possible. But if the press that writes on these things won't won't read that I don't know if if it when you read interviews of your book, did they have the people read your book? Some have. Most not. And certainly, the people who criticize me have not read the book. I know that because I asked one of them, did you read the book? And he said no. But what they do instead is to criticize what was written in a review of the book, which, of course, is necessarily a less precise and nuanced than what's in the book itself. It's crazy. It's just completely crazy. Did you, when you put out the ESG report, how many people said, oh, it's just your own self interest? You're in the business, and clearly, you have an interest in perpetuating fossil fuels. So I haven't got that feedback yet because I'm betting those people haven't read it. You know, obviously, the first win in our industry. It has spread. I mean, I've heard from some politicians and some people in cultural things. Feedback to date has been the feedback today has all been positive, but it's just because I think there's gotta be negative feedback. I'm just not hearing it. I I'm dying to get some or hear that. I did write it partially for the general public. You know? My, you know, my wife's sister, you know, who's got an issue, which was trying to be digestible enough but full of enough data and pointing to enough references that hopefully would make you scratch your head. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think, again, I come back to trying to educate our fellow scientists and engineers, because they will understand. I'll tell you one anecdote, which is in the book. I was invited to give a talk now about six or seven years ago. It was shortly after I had written a Wall Street Journal op ed, which is the first time I came out with my skepticism in 2014. And it got 2,000 plus online comments, all positive. Basically, I was saying, our understanding is not what you think it is. And so I gave a talk on the basics of that at some top 10 university with a primo life earth sciences department, shall remain nameless. And as I'm getting ready to go give the talk, the chairman of the department says to me privately, you know, I agree with just about everything you wrote in that report, but I dare not say it in public. Alright? And so we've got to crack through that. I think if the energy transition starts to impact people directly in the way that it will, then more people will be encouraged to speak up. Also, we've got to break so so I am deeply involved in the National Academy's report writing process. For those of you who don't know, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine are an objective adviser to the government. And they do studies on all kinds of things, tobacco use, COVID. They've been very instrumental in advising the government, but also, of course, on energy. And they recently put out a report on pathways to decarbonization written by 20 people who understand energy. But almost all of them, and I'm gonna say all, but I haven't checked one or two, of the people who wrote this report have no experience in the real energy business. They've never had to provide electricity twenty four seven or fuels at a low cost or extract gas out of the ground. And so it's all an academic exercise to them. And I don't think have any sense of what the disruption will be if we go down too rapidly, this pathway of decarbonization. I have friends in another part of my life who ran big utility companies in metropolitan areas, names you would know Yeah. In the East Coast, West Coast. And they're, you know, every bit as responsible as everybody else. But they look at the plans and they say that just isn't gonna happen for both technical and economic reasons. So I think we're going to eventually get real about this stuff. And and and and my last question with that, you know, I look at The United Kingdom, and you lived there five years, right? I there was they harmed a lot of people. They've made energy expensive, but they've almost completely deindustrialized the nation. And where are they today? Both of the major parties are on the climate crusade. So so my worry there is well off people. The cost of energy is not as important. They've always got reliable energy. Hey, it feels good. And that the people that are not so politically powerful or even visible in the politicians' eyes are getting crushed. And in The US, I think that's a more vocal population. I hope we get a pushback sooner. But it's very disheartening to me to see to the extent to which the the birthplace of the industrial revolution has deindustrialized its country, impoverished the bottom half of the population, and they're still charging on. Yeah. And it's crazy. And maybe, you know, you talk about the de industrialization. That's worth a remark also. A theme when I was in the Obama administration and now again in the Biden administration is innovation. The invention of new technologies will improve the economic prospects of the country. What people forget is that there's a difference between where a technology is invented versus where it gets manufactured, whereas where it gets deployed. And, yes, The US is great at inventing and demonstrating things, and I'm all for us doing that with low emissions technologies. But unless this country becomes a premier manufacturing venue, and that's cost of labor, regulation, cost of energy. Unless we do that, we're not gonna reap the full economic benefit of any of this. Yes. Yes. Why don't we open it up? I could I could have this dialogue till till happy hour, but why don't we maybe maybe turn the turn the lights at hand. Why don't we open it up, and we've got another fifteen minutes or so with Steve. And I'd love to hear questions from anyone in the room and online, but we got to reward the people that made the trek here first. So anybody have a question for Steve? I see one right there. Sky, to your left or the mic. Over here to the left. Microphone is coming. I think that's Frank under that hat. Thank you for being here. I think you made a good point about the politicians' payoff and how they can create some drama and then leave people out of it. Good point about younger people and how they just want something to rally around. What's the payoff for the guy that wrote that said that you were a denier? What's the payoff for the poll for the scientists that should know better? What do they get out of this climate activism? I think it's several things. When you're an academic, you become fully invested in your work. And if you have made a twenty year career on trying to quantify and mitigate the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, it's pretty hard to turn around. And but that's true in all fields of science. As somebody said, you know, paradigms change only by one funeral at a time when people drop out of the field, the older people. The second is there are a good number of young people in the field who've gone into it with the expectation that they're saving the planet. And the third is that there is, of course, funding and fame and prominence associated with it. So, I think all those are at play with the academics. We have a couple of questions over here. Thank you. Roger Read, Wells Fargo. Question I have for you. You mentioned when this starts to bite, I guess, as one of the ways to phrase it, people may start to push back or people who could, should know better will start to speak out. I mean we are starting to see issues with the electric grid, California, Texas. I mean are those the first signs? And I mean how bad does it have to get before people actually you know, change their tune on it, I guess? I I think, you know, beyond Texas, I would add the Colonial Pipeline hacking, not because it's got anything to do with the energy transition, but it makes people realize how important reliable energy is to the functioning of society. We can go into the causes of, why California is having so much trouble or why Texas had the trouble that it did. It's not only renewables, but it's failure of regulation to build a capacity market, for example, in Texas. But I I think as more energy incidents happen, people will become, as I said, more sensitive to the importance of energy and will be less willing to tolerate a rapid large scale transformation. You know, I think a real turning point also will be when you won't be able to buy an internal combustion engine, flatulence, or more generally, enteric flatulence. Right? Yep. The methane comes out from cattle as they digest cellulose. Wetlands. No. I'm sorry? Decomplants. Wetlands. Wetlands. Right. Just generally dams when you flood and dry out tremendous sources of methane. So if you really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you got to deal with those non energy things as well. And the world hasn't really talked much about that. Last couple of questions here. We've got three minutes left. One up front, Peter, and then your second. Dick's up. I don't know much about this, but I talked to these experts who say that the cost of electric car, when you look at the oil and gas that goes into the pieces of an electric car, What are the real economic consequences of building an electric car? So there have been extensive studies on this. You can talk about what the situation is now versus what it might be in five years with better battery technology and so on. But the total cost of ownership, which is what is being measured, lifetime, fuel, maintenance, and so on, it works out to just about the same for electric. I'd tell another story. So I'm in the Department of Energy and trying to help formulate the technology strategy, and we ran a workshop for the public on vehicle fuels. And at one point in the workshop, I had proponents of vehicle efficiency and internal combustion engines, biofuels, advanced biofuels, hydrogen, electricity, and, CNG. And they're all up there saying, government, if you just provide the fueling infrastructure, we will be able to make the vehicles of the future. And I reminded them, you know, that we can only support maybe two fueling infrastructures in the country as a whole, just from practical economics. And an interesting squabble ensued between those five different parties. Alright? So to zero thought of the costs are the same if you include the uncertainties in the projections. There are advantages, though. An electric car runs on electricity. The price is pretty stable because we have multiple sources of them, and so you reduce that variability in gasoline cost. The maintenance costs for an electric vehicle are very small. You don't have the lube changes and tuning and so on that you have to do. It's pretty quiet. On the other hand, you have all these sort of customer experience downsides, of the vehicle. So I think it's eventually going to happen, but it's going to be a lot longer than thirty years for that to kick in, at least in The U. S. So there's trade offs, of course, always. Happy Valley, find the Happy Valley. I learned that phrase. It's good. Very good. That's great. We are right on do we have one more question? We'll sneak one in and we'll close it out. Thank you. My name is Joe Brooker. First and foremost, thank you for this book. It's fantastic. I've referred it to 100 friends now. And a guy with your stature, your experience, your bona fides, we need a guy like you and thank you for writing this And Chris, thank you for bringing Doctor. Coon in here. This is something all of us have to read and understand. And I've read it, full disclosure. And I wanted to tie in on the methane factoids you provided, not to be too geeky here. But I was wondering if you could just take a minute because I've tried to synthesize what you've written and share with folks that I talked to. I'm one of the few oil and gas professionals that live in Boulder County, Colorado. I have a challenge ahead of me. But as Chris said, people are thirsty to know more. I've given more lectures on hydraulic fracturing on my back porch from folks from all over the country who appreciate it to the point where when I'm asked the question, my wife says, Oh, God, here it goes again. Sorry. But my but what I hoped you could spend a little bit of time and share with us and help me as I go out and spread the word is your Chapter two is something like Humble Human Influences or something like that. It was very impactful to me to see data because we live in a world where facts matter. We are on oil and gas well sites pumping fluids at high rates and high pressures. And if facts get messed up, people can die. What I appreciate about your book is it gives us facts to go out and speak to people about. So if you could take a minute and help me synthesize my messages as well and hopefully others in this topic of humble human impacts or influences, that would be very helpful. Thank you. So humans influence the climate in several different ways. But the two that are most relevant here are the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly CO two, but also methane and nitrous oxide and some more exotic stuff that's not so important, and aerosols. And the greenhouse gases enhance the ability of the atmosphere to intercept the heat that's coming off the planet. The planet really runs by absorbing sunlight and then radiating almost an equal amount of heat back into space. That has to be balanced to within better than a percent. And the atmosphere helps warm the planet by intercepting some of that heat and reradiating it before it finally gets out of here. We add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and it improves the heat intercepting ability a little bit. Only 1% what we've done to date. And you might ask how can a 1% thing make a difference? It does because the temperature rises we're talking about of a few degrees are 1% of the temperature of the earth if you measure it in Kelvin, which is the right way to measure it from physicists. But there are many other influences on the planet beyond the aerosols and the greenhouse gases. Variations in the solar output, long term cycles in the climate system. El Nino was the most famous example every couple of years, but there are longer ones that last seventy or eighty years. And untangling all of that to understand what the response is of the planet to rising greenhouse gases is the challenge. And it's really tough. Right? Because it's a chaotic system. It's got long term cycles. We have poor data both in time and space. The ocean is where climate really happens because it's the long term memory of the system. We have terrible ocean data at depth. It's starting to get better with floats. So it's really a challenge. And anybody who says, I know what's gonna go on, is just to quote one number which is in the book, there's a number called the equilibrium climate sensitivity, which is how sensitive is the climate to doubling c o two. And that number is uncertain. In the last IPCC report seven years ago, it was uncertain from one and a half degrees to four and a half degrees. And the current generation of models, it's like from one and a half up to six degrees. So the models have gotten even less certain as they've gotten more sophisticated. So this is a tough job. It's a great scientific problem, but I would not want to be making trillion dollar decisions on the basis of this. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Round of applause for our wonderful guests. Thank you so much, guys. We'll take a quick five minute break and be back at 12:40. Thanks a lot. Thanks, guys. Thank you. What a great session behind us. Tough act to follow, but we've got the right man here. Up ahead is our technology above the surface. How do we spend every single minute of every day talking about how we do things better, operational efficiency, best in class technologies, and I'm going to let Ron take it away. Thanks, Angeli. Good afternoon, everyone. Hope you enjoyed that lunchtime conversation. Certainly a tough act to follow, but really appreciate Doctor. Koonan being here with us. But there's a reason they put us after lunch. We've got some pretty exciting stuff to share with you. If you like big trucks, large engines and things that go boom, that's what we're going to talk about today. So lots of exciting topics that we're going to touch on. Of course, all at a very high level, we just don't have the time to dive into the details. But certainly, team that we have here will be available, first of all, for questions afterwards, but of course, for the rest of the day if you want to really delve into the details about any one of the topics we are going to touch on. My name is Ron Gusick. I'm the President of Liberty Oilfield Services, and pleased to be here with you this afternoon. A little bit about myself. I'm a transplanted Canadian who found my way into the oil industry a little bit by accident as well. I'm a mechanical engineer by training. I grew up with a dad who was a carpenter, a grandfather who was a farmer and loved all things mechanical. So it was kind of natural. I ended up in the engineering world, originally in heating, ventilation and air conditioning, but then a little bit by accident found my way into oil and gas about twenty five years ago. And I've spent my career in that space since then. Had the opportunity to travel much of the world, Russia, The Middle East and Asia, and see operations there. But very, very excited to be back with a team that I've known for a long time. Chris and I have been partners for, I guess, almost twenty years now, and so thrilled to be with the Liberty family. I have a great team up here today with me. Of course, in an organization where you play volleyball or dodgeball competitively, you got to bring a big bench to the table. And so if we're going to take on those subsurface guys, I brought a bigger squad with me. And so they're all going to introduce themselves, but just quickly, I'll run down the line here so that you know who's coming. So starting way over here on your left, my right hand side, Chris Buckley, Roy Ani, Marshall Thurston, Zach Thornton. Moving over here, Robert Henderson, Terrence Getsch, Kirsty Ross, and Greg McKee. And together this team is going to tell you a lot about the work we're doing in the surface technology space and also in the supply chain that helps to support that. I want to set the stage for you a little bit before we delve into that though. For those of you who are familiar with the Liberty story since back in the IPO, this is a slide you will have seen four years ago when we started down that road. And it was a slide we used to describe how it was that an oilfield services company arrived at a profitable bottom line. You can see there are four variables up there that really sum up the picture for us. And I've highlighted three of those in red because really those are the variables that fit into the story we are going to talk about this morning or this afternoon. Utilization, first of all. The number of days that we have an asset out on location doing what it's supposed to be doing. And so that's contingent on a number of things, of course. First and foremost, demand for Liberty's services. We want to set the standard such that an E and P company that we work with wants us out there not only for this job but for the next job and for each and every job after that. And that requires that we deliver a very high level of service with the best available technology to support that. Throughput, what we accomplish every day that we are on location. And I'm going to talk a little bit about Project fourteen forty. Fourteen forty minutes in a twenty four hour day, our goal of course to pump each and every one of those. That's what we get paid for. And so to the extent we can be perforating wells or pumping a fracture treatment and doing so minute after minute after minute, that ultimately drives our top line revenue. And so we continue to work on ways to squeeze more minutes out of the day to find a way to avoid that nonproductive time and instead be doing what it is that we're out there to do every day. We're going to talk a little bit about how technology plays into that. Price, we don't have a lot of control over. The market is what the market is. As Chris has said, ideally, we obtain a little bit of a liberty premium for being who we are, But the market generally sets that, and so we're not going to spend time on that today. We are going to spend some time on cost of service. One of the great things about this incredible transition we've seen in the oil and gas world is the ability to drive down the cost of achieving what we used to achieve decades ago for much, much higher numbers. And as a result, you've seen the economics for wells in these unconventional reservoirs get better and better and better or maybe more successful with a lower price of oil. And ultimately, that determines our profitability as an organization. We track every minute of every day since we started this company. Since the day we rolled our first frac fleet out, we have measured every minute of every day that we have been on a location. And we do the same thing in wireline services world as well now. And the reason for that is it's impossible to fix a problem if you don't truly understand what the problem is. If we're not out there measuring what it is that we're doing every day, understanding the reasons why it is that we're not pumping, that could be a liberty issue. It could be an issue with an asset that we put out there that's causing us downtime. That could be a third party issue in the form of water transfer or wellheads or something like that. If we don't understand those issues, if we don't measure them, if we don't understand the opportunity that we have there or the opportunity cost that comes with not dealing with that issue, then we're not tackling the right problems. And so we've been a data focused company in all kinds of regards. You heard that this morning from the subsurface team. It's no different from a surface standpoint. We have to collect that data. We have to understand that data to develop the strategies we have that ultimately lead to the technology developments you are going to hear about this afternoon. And then one last piece to the puzzle, and really a great example of that is the team represented by Chris sitting at the end of the line here, ST9. And so for us, one of the frustrations that we ran into and have run into in the past in the industry is that we're not always very fast to get a problem fixed. We recognize there's a problem and we know what the problem is, but it sometimes takes a long time to get all the way around this circle to collect the data to do the engineering and to ultimately get that implemented in the field. And so we have worked very, very hard as an organization to change the speed of that cycle. You heard that from Ben when he was talking about chemistry this morning. We think no different than about that when we're talking about the surface side of things. This idea that if we find a problem, if we find a way that an issue with a valve or a seat or a fluid end or a power end or any other asset that we have out there on location, that we need to move quickly on getting that fixed and getting that solution out in the field because we reap rewards immediately on that. And the whole idea behind the ST-nine vertical integration, the addition of that tremendous team to the Liberty platform was to do exactly this. It was to achieve that rapid innovation cycle that allows us to identify, correct, and ultimately implement a solution to a problem very, very quickly. Now I said I'm a mechanical engineer by training. I spend maybe less and less time every year doing engineering, but the team that sits here on the stage is kind enough to let me stick my nose into these things because it's something that I love to do. It's truly a passion of mine is to understand all things mechanical. And so I'm going to start things off this morning talking a little bit about one particular piece of our world. I'm going to call that from water tank to wellhead. For those of you who've been out on a frac location or certainly familiar with the science and as we talked about this morning, we really have one goal and I thought Ben summed that up very, very simply, which was to take that sand over there, that chemical over there, that water over there, blend those into a mixture and pump them downhole. And while that all seems very straightforward, there are, of course, a huge number of intricacies in that. You heard about the downhole ones this morning. We're going to talk a lot about the challenges that come with doing that from a surface standpoint this afternoon and some of the things that we're doing to make that better. One of the single largest problems comes with just the material that we pump. Sand, by its nature, is incredibly abrasive. There's a reason we use it for taking paint off of stuff. There's a reason we use it for cleaning metal. It is a very, very good material for eroding metal. And it does exactly that when we are pumping it out on location. When you move granular material like sand, especially very, very hard material like sand at high velocities through a piece of pipe and particularly introduce corners to that 90 degree bends, it is going to wash away some of that metal. And so that comes with, of course, some challenges for us in that we require that metal to contain the fluid, sand and chemical at very, very high pressures in that transit from the pumps where we elevate it to that pressure all the way to the wellhead where we start to pump it downhole. Now if you look at the picture on the left hand side of the screen there, what you see is the way that we have traditionally moved fluid. You see three wellheads there, one red, one white, one blue. And going up to those are what we call the candy canes. You'll see maybe five sticks of iron going up to each of those wellheads. Because the job design that we pump today has evolved to this world where we pump huge amounts of fluid at very, very high rates, we need a lot of pipes to move that through. And I liken that to moving traffic down a series of city streets. So this is before the days of freeways now. And because we move so much fluid and because we move it at such high velocities, we had to put a lot of city streets between the pump and the wellhead itself. Now we have to check all of that iron. We have to make sure that it's not wearing out. We have to make sure that it's for use out there, that it's able to contain the huge amounts of pressure that we are using to inject fluid down the hole. And so you can imagine with that picture on the left, all of that iron that you can see there, of course, lines continue down onto the ground and then back towards where our pumps are. And you can appreciate that if those wellheads are spread out, that's a huge amount of iron that we have to rig in. I don't know if you can see them there, each of those sticks of iron is connected together by a hammer union, effectively a threaded connection that we have to put together. They happen about every eight or 10 feet or so. So that's a lot of connections on there. And we have to inspect all of that iron every three months. That's a huge amount of iron that we have to take away and get inspected regularly. There has to be a better way to do that. And so what you can see in those other pictures is where we are migrating to certainly as Liberty and maybe more so as an industry, and that's just something called monoline. This is effectively the freeway for moving frac fluid. And so we have these very large diameter pipes now. That stuff's about seven inches in diameter versus that smaller iron you see there might be three or four inches in diameter. And what you can see is that we only run one line now all the way from the pumps to the wellhead and then it's divided up by a series of valves there. You can appreciate that dramatically reduces the number of connections that we have on location. That dramatically reduces the amount of iron that we have to inspect on an ongoing basis. The velocities through that are a lot lower and as a result, the erosion rate is much lower. We expect a dramatic reduction in the cost of maintaining the iron that we have on each and every one of our fleets. And certainly, if you do the quick math, we're running 30 some odd fleets out there today. That's lot of pieces of pipe we had to inspect. And so this has been a huge step forward. The other step forward that we're making, our goal of course is to get rid of, we call them chicksons, but they're basically the 90 degree corners that are out there on location. We like to get rid of those. When fluid has to go around that corner, sand runs into the far end of it and that's the most likely place to wear out a piece of iron. So to the extent we can get rid of those, we are doing that. And so in that bottom picture, you can see there that hose you can see with the red donuts around it, that is actually a high pressure flexible hose. So that's a hose that's capable of withstanding 15,000 psi of pressure. That replaces what used to be a rigid line between the pump and the manifold, the pipe that collects all of the fluid together and ultimately directs it to the wellhead. And so what you'll see across the Liberty fleets is transition over we've been underway on this transition for a little while, but certainly ongoing now across all of our fleets to monoline that big large diameter line and these high pressure flexible hoses with the goal of making things much, much safer and much more cost effective for the team out there. That high pressure hose there, when we want to inspect that, it's as simple as looking on the inside of The hose changes color as you begin to wear away the inside. So with a quick look inside, if you can see a certain color, it's time to take that hose out of service. That's much, much easier than inspecting wall thickness on a piece of metal. Plumbing sand through a pump. We go through valve seats and fluid ends like there is no tomorrow. That's a regular story in the oil and gas industry, of course. Fluid ends maybe twice a year per pump. And so if you think 30 some odd fleets times 20 pumps a fleet times two fluid ends per pump per year, you come to a really large number of fluid ends very, very quickly, primarily worn out as a result of the abrasive fluid we pump. We change the valves and seats in a pump probably every two or three days. And so at 10 valves and seats per pump times 20 pumps times 30 some odd fleets every three days, you get to a really, really big number of valves and seats. The ideal scenario for us is we do not pump sand through a pump anymore. And we've been working hard on that problem. I would say personally, been struggling to get over this challenge for about fifteen years now. At Liberty, we've been in a partnership for about seven years trying to address this very challenge. We've had a partnership with a company called Energy Recovery over that time to do so. This piece of technology is out in the field today. It's been pumping on one of our fleets in West Texas for a number of jobs now. We've overcome all of the technical hurdles to achieve this result, to actually not pump fluid through a pump anymore. This device I liken to the revolver in a six shooter chamber. It's basically just a cylinder that goes around and around and around with a series of ports through it. We inject high pressure water in one side, low pressure sand and fluid in the other side and the energy is transferred from the clean fluid stream to the dirty fluid stream over and over and over again as this device rotates at a little north of 1,000 revolutions a minute. Because it is not as complicated as a pump, we can make it out of much harder materials manufactured out of tungsten carbide. So the wear rate for it, we believe, will be dramatically lower than it is in the stainless steel we make a pump out of. And so it's our hope that if we can make this technology economically viable, that it will a solution to the wear and tear we see on our pumps. And that is truly what the question comes down to today is the economics. Of course, we've not stood still on the pump side over that last seven years. We've gotten dramatically better at making valve seats and fluid ends as well. And so the economic proposition has changed over the time we've been developing VorTeq. But that is truly where we are today and I guess by sometime this summer we will know the economic trade off of one versus the other, whether it makes sense to continue to wear out valve seats and fluid ends or it makes sense to implement VorTeq on location and ultimately change that point of wear from one place to another. The last thing I want to talk about very briefly is a partnership on the wellhead side and this goes back to this whole Project fourteen forty idea. We have a dance on 99.9% of the locations we work on today between frac and wireline. We go back and forth between those two services as we go from perforating setting a plug and perforating a well to actually fracking that well. And we do that back and forth between each of the wells. That comes with some operations that have to take place between those things. That operation takes maybe five minutes today for a very efficient crew out there to switch from going from a wireline operation to a frac operation and then vice versa. And you can imagine if we could eliminate that five minutes of well swap time, if we could go directly from wireline, directly to frac and directly back again with no time lost in there, that's time available to us to do what we get paid to do every day, which is either perforate or frac a well. This technology here is a partnership with a wellhead company that allows us to do exactly that, to eliminate that time between swaps. And in a place like the DJ Basin where we might pump 20 stages a day, if you can get rid of five minutes a stage, that's an available one hundred minutes of time for us to be doing something else with, something that is revenue generating. The graph that you're looking at on the bottom right hand side there actually shows two the operations on two wells, the red well and the yellow well. And you can see at the start of that graph, there's actually a little bit of a delta in time between the start of pumping on the red well and then the start of pumping on the yellow well. But you can see as we move to the right hand side there, those two lines are actually butted right up against each other. We go from a situation where we're pumping at pressure on the red well to pumping right away pumping at pressure on the yellow well. And that's solution that this wellhead partnership brings to the table for us, but one that opens up opportunities for squeezing more minutes out of each and every day. So I'm to take a seat now. I'm going to turn things over to Zach and Marshall. We have a huge amount of equipment out there. We need to do a huge amount of maintenance to keep that equipment up and running. And Zach and Marshall are going to spend a little bit of time talking to you about our maintenance program and what we're doing there. Thank you, Ron. Good afternoon, everyone. Like Ron said, I'm Zach Thornton, Director of Maintenance. I've been at Liberty nearly two years now. I've been familiar with Liberty for quite a while before that. So in my prior life, I've built frac service equipment, worked for an OEM there in Oklahoma. Many of you all may know who I'm talking about. But through that, I had the opportunity to see a lot of different of our competitors now, my customers at that time, sit down, talk with them, see their maintenance programs, see how they spec that equipment and really be intimate in that first six, twelve months of that equipment's life. Through that, I was really able to see the differentiator for Liberty. Liberty cared about it a little bit different. They didn't look at a down market as, hey, we're going to change our spec. They stood by their disciplines. They continue to work towards that end goal and get to a standardized product and continue to take care of that maintenance day in, day out. So for me, that's why I got over here, been able to continue that road, I believe. There was a really good pavement in front of me already for it, but it's been an awesome journey for me to see that. So hopefully, can give you a little bit of insight into our maintenance group today, kind of what we face on a day to day basis, but got to make it quick. So if you've questions, hit me up. I'd be glad to talk about it in more depth. Here we've got a basic frac pump. This is one of our quad frac pumps, 2,500 horsepower unit, very standard. Blue box is around the radiator. Green box, the engine. Red box, transmission. And then the orange box, that's the pump. That's where the majority of our money is. Ron described the 10 valves, five plungers and a pump. Lots of moving parts. That's what all these items have in common. They all have moving parts. Movement often equals maintenance. So this is what we're looking at. Any time, we'll have 15 to 30 of these on location in today's time frame. We've got about 1,200 of them in our fleet. So how do we get through that quickly? We'll use a combination of equipment, people and then data. So a few of the things that really set us apart, I believe, on the equipment side. So we've got a couple of pictures here. They're on the upper right corner, we've got a service truck. If you go out to a frac location, I'll challenge you to find a service truck nicer and more equipped than ours. We're always looking to increase that time between when the shop leaves when the unit leaves the shop and comes back to the shop. One way to do that is to build perform better and more maintenance on location. That truck allows us to do a lot of that. We've got a welder there. We've got a crane. We've also got employees that can use those. They're not just there for looks, and we use them day in and day out. In the bottom there, you see a test stand. This is something we've just we've got nearly at all of our locations now. In fact, we're finishing up the last location this next month. This test stand enables us to give a full test on a unit before it goes out. We don't have to worry about, well, we were only able to run that unit at 8,000 psi, Therefore, we weren't at full load, and there was a problem on that unit when it gets up to full load. So we can do that test now will do about 160 barrels a minute or 15,000 psi and gives us the ability to do it in a scenario just like they'll face in the field. The people side. So we've got a number of mechanics, as you can imagine, field and shop. And getting those to all work together as a team and getting them the right tools to do that. That equipment I just shared is some of that, but we also have an incredible training group, and that's getting enhanced. We do a lot of in house hands on training. Most of our training programs are tailored to be 80% hands on, 20% more of the school workbooks, that side of it. That really gives our guys a hands up, and they don't necessarily have to call back in, find a vendor, really go through those details. The last piece of it, the data piece. And that's really what Marshall is going to tell you more about. His team looks over the data piece and pretty much the most exciting piece of maintenance right now, to be honest. Here you go, Marshall. Thanks, Zach. I'm Marshall Thurston. I grew up with an interest in engines, mechanical things and pretty much how the way things work. And I went to engineering school and soon after found a home at Liberty, where I was able to pursue my interest in combining a lot of these things, and it's been great. Since I've been here, we've greatly expanded our overall data collection, data points that we collect on equipment, different things. And a lot of that's through the development of custom applications for collecting data in the field on the conditions that our equipment is going through or failures they experience. Also with integrations across our different platforms, data integrations with third parties, different things like that, they've helped us really build a portfolio around our data that we gather on our equipment. Furthermore, we've also expanded our equipment telemetry that we're receiving. So receiving second by second data from our equipment that we can use to add to that digital portfolio and really generate some value through targeted maintenance models. You'll see an example of that in the bottom right here, the screen, where we look at engine oil pressure over an extended period of time. The value of that, you've got sensors on an engine, great. You see when it gets to low oil pressure, but at that point in time, it might be too late. You might already be on your way to a catastrophic failure and significant damage could have occurred. Versus the way that we model this, we can see these things, signature events in this oil pressure before the failure actually happens, which allows us to coordinate with our operations and maintenance group to take a look at this piece of equipment, pull out of line before there's a catastrophic failure. Obviously, that helps a lot with our job placement and helping that crew to perform the best without having something that stops them in the middle of what they were doing. So huge benefit there. In addition, it's got a huge benefit to Liberty in that it saves us a lot of money. Replacing a brand new engine, very, very expensive. But if you can pull it out, it might still cost you $30,000 to fix it, but it's a lot less expensive than replacing that component from the start. This particular model has been in use and has shown great opportunity for us and ultimately can save us up to 1% of our operating expenditures through this engine model alone. Taking that a step further, we can take this model, this digital portfolio we've developed and kind of work it together into what we like to call digital twin or a virtual equipment health representation. And ultimately, what that is, is that's a series of these maintenance details combined with these targeted component models that can predict these failures. You expand it, not just engines, look at transmissions, power ends, the cooling system, different things like that, and you build up this portfolio that really represents the health of that equipment. So obviously, there is great application, like I mentioned, real time alerts to our maintenance team that can pull units out, coordinate the job, keep customers happy with that and the flow of things. But even further, we can deploy these models to our equipment firmware. And the benefit of that is, say, we're seeing, hey, component is not healthy. It's it's getting close to failure. We're working to coordinate, you know, with the job to pull that out of line, take a look at it in the shop. But say our model is saying, listen, this is going to happen sooner than than we're going to have an opportunity to do that. We can, through the firmware deployment, place operational limitations on this equipment. So that transmission can't handle speed above a certain level. We won't allow it to do that so that we don't cause a catastrophic failure that would actually cause issues with job placement quality. So overall, really exciting thing that we've been doing and working on and has a lot of growth potential. That's the end of my slide there. I think we're going to turn it over to Kirsty here for another discussion. Thank you all. Appreciate it. Hi, everybody. My name is Kirsty Ross, and I'm the gunshot manager here at Liberty. My background started in engineering, and I've spent the last ten years working in the wireline business. And I know you've had a lot of opportunities to hear from engineers speak today, but I'm the one that gets to talk about guns and explosives. So if you're not aware, our gun shop is where we assemble most of our explosives and our guns that we send to location. If you've never seen a perforating gun, please feel free to join me in the back after the presentation. I brought some guns back there to play with if you're interested. So the first thing I wanna talk about in our wireline business is in line with the recently released ESG report. And in that ESG report, Liberty talks about the goal of environmental excellence. And we have two key factors in our business that strive to meet that goal, and the first that I want to talk about are our electric wireline units. So our electric wireline units provide us long term sustainability, improved market share and profit for both our customers and our business by using a minimum of four eighty volts of electricity to power our hydraulic winch and our air supply. Now this not only reduces noise pollution and eliminates the diesel emissions, but it dramatically reduces the amount of maintenance needed. And with less maintenance costs and less overall downtime related to that maintenance, it decreases our cost and improves our profitability on each time we utilize the units. Now the second factor towards that goal is our streamlined cable. This is our coated streamlined cable that works in tandem with our easy load pack off to hold back pressure against the well as we're using that cable to run-in and out of the hole with our perforating run. So as you can see, before and after pictures, the pictures to the left and the pictures to the right, this pack off combined with this coated cable eliminates the need for any sort of a grease injection to hold back pressure against the well as we're operating. The picture on the left is what you might see in a piece of equipment look like if there was a grease injection being used to control the pressure of the well. The picture on the right is what every single one of our locations look like today. All of our trucks have been outfitted with a streamlined cable. Now the next topic I want to talk about is FracSense. And as you may have heard from Ray's previous presentation in the subsurface portion, FracSense is Wireline's recent partnership with OptiSense. And this partnership allows us to use unique fiber optic technology to get acoustic sensing and temperature sensing that allows us to not only optimize fracturing, but it allows us to get microseismic monitoring services as well as a production flow of production flow profile for our customers. Now what is a production flow profile? That means that later on, after a well is already flowing, we're able to use this technology to answer the question, how much of what is coming from where? Ray also talked about perforating clusters. After a well has been perforated, we definitely wanna help our customers understand which clusters are providing the most oil or the most gas or the most water. And with that information, our customers are able to make better informed decisions about their flowing wells. Now the next slide I want to talk about is our additional case hole wireline capabilities on top of perforating. So I wanna direct your attention to the top left. This is a a normal cement bond log. It's a way that we are allowed to evaluate casing and the cement behind the casing to confirm zonal isolation. Now the way that I like to explain how these types of logs work is think of ringing a bell. And then think of taking that same bell and putting your hand next to it and trying to ring it again, and you're gonna hear a thud. Right? That thud essentially represents what cement would do to the behind, like, behind the section of casing to confirm that it's sincerely sealed off. Right? The next log down towards the bottom left is another service that we can provide. It's a casing inspection log. And what we do is we use a multi finger caliper tool. And what these tools do is we can extend fingers and then drag those fingers up through the well, and that allows us to determine any sort of deformity inside of the casing to provide our clients with the feedback that they may need on any issues they may be having with their wells. We also offer leak detection and fluid dynamics information. This may be needed for any regulatory reasons before you plug and abandon a well or before you shoot a tow prep, before you shoot in a well for the very first time. Now I wanna get into the bread and butter of what we do. What we do is perforate, and I wanna talk a little bit about the market trends that we see for our customers. Increasing the number of guns per stage. Over the last ten years, the number of guns we shoot per stage has dramatically increased as well as the number of stages we shoot per well. We see a reduction in the number of shots per gun. We see the limited entry perforating design that Ray also talked about in the subsurface section, and we see oriented perforating. So all of these trends offer unique challenges that we need to be able to combat. So some of those challenges are longer gun strings, more guns in a string, more avenues for failures. We're arming those guns. Optimized shaped charge gun cluster configuration in a variety of clustered configurations. Longer gun streets also are difficult to orient. So the solutions that we have are modular gun systems that come factory prewired or factory preloaded. They reduce the need for a difficult interaction on location. We can optimize our gun lengths by the required number of shots. For example, if we have a six shot gun and we only need three shots, we're gonna use the length of the three shot gun. We're not gonna add any extra length to the tool string that doesn't need to be there. We also have capabilities for orientation up to and including internal gravity orientation. This means that we can deploy a gun based on gravity. It's going to orient those charges inside of that gun to allow us to shoot in the direction we want to shoot. So now that we've talked a little bit about the market and what we see from our customers, I want to talk a little bit about our reliability and our efficiency and our performance in that market. So as you can see from the picture on the right, the number of guns we shoot before we see something happening dramatically increases. And the number of failures we see are decreasing. Right? And we can attribute that trend to new technology, knowledge sharing between our family of gun shops and field crews, best practices and standardization, and also close failure investigation with our customers and our suppliers. Now if you look at the pictures on the bottom, the picture on the bottom left is what you might see of an old conventional gun system. You can see a lot of wires, a lot of Scotch locks. It takes a lot of human intervention just to arm that gun. And when I say arm, I mean take the detonator, put it in the gun so that it's ready to run-in whole and you're ready to shoot it. Now the two pictures on the right are some of our newer technology guns. Some of the new technology we get from our suppliers that may be pull and play or plug and play. I like to look at the middle picture because it always reminds me. I have a four year old son, and every time I buy him a toy and it comes with batteries preinstalled, everybody realizes that to get the batteries to work, you have to pull out the tab. Right? And it's almost the exact same thing with this gun system. All the engineer has to do on location is pull out this tab. It disrupts the interruption between the detonator and the gun, and it's ready to go. All they have to do is screw it together and put it in the hole. Similar scenario with the picture on the right, instead of pulling, this is just plugging the detonator in, and, it's ready to go. This improved technology, as you can see, is dramatically decreasing the amount of failures that can happen when we're arming. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So I have two more slides. The last two that I want to talk about are related to the digital arena, Wireline's digital arena. And this relates back to what Ron had mentioned previously about Project fourteen forty, tracking every minute of every day, and Wireline is no different from that project. So what we do is we have live data tracking and business systems for all of our field locations and all of their operations. We also have it in the gun shop. All of our guns that are assembled and shipped to location are also tracked, and we're able to we're able to understand what's happening in real time. So some crucial metrics that we use in wireline to understand what is happening and to measure efficiency are things like what is an average amount of stages that a crew in the Permian Basin can shoot. If we know what an average amount of stages we can shoot is, we understand the characteristics of the basin, we can better project what jobs we can price out in the future to make sure that we stay profitable. Other information that we take and that we use is information on gun systems. If we know that a gun system is failing at a certain rate and we know that we pay a certain price for that gun system, we wanna make sure that we're optimizing the data that we're using to be using systems that are failing less and are also cost effective. Okay. So this is the last slide that I have. It continues in the digital arena. And this is a unique combined real time data operation visibility with FRAC. What this means is that today, we're able to project frac statistics and wireline statistics that are happening downhole real time to our customers. This means that real time without having to pick up the phone or call anybody, our customers are able to see what the downhole depth is, what the downhole tension is, you know, what the pressures are, what speeds are we running at. And they're able to see it in front of them real time so that they can make decisions quickly. And we as a business as well can utilize this data, see this visibility as well and make decisions for our own operations. Now Liberty has had a metric that they've calculated over the last ten years, and that's about six minutes per frac stage can be attributed to downtime as an industry standard or as an industry measurement over the last ten years. It's our job in wireline to make sure that we're keeping frac running and that we're reducing that six minute average against that stage. And I think that, that combined with these real time operational tools gives us that unique edge to capture extra market share and be the preferred client sorry, be the preferred operator moving forward. That's about all that I have. I'm going to pass it on to Robert Henderson to talk about digitization. Thanks, Krista. Hey, good afternoon. My name is Robert Henderson. I'm a chemical engineer by training. One of the couple of threads you'll hear today kind of repeated throughout is frac uses a lot of chemicals. We use a lot of sand, and boy, do we got a lot of equipment. And so Terence and I are going to talk about some tools, some systems and some softwares that we use to increase efficiency on location and to treat our equipment better every day. How do we get better? So the first system that we'll talk about is SonicStrap and that deals with chemicals and the measuring of chemicals. And to do that, I want to tell my Liberty story. And so we got to go back about eight point five years. I was pestering Ben Poppel there in the back. You've seen him up here on stage earlier. I was like, yes. I I really do want a job here. I I do wanna work in Williston when it's negative 20 degrees outside. Yes. Just give me a chance. Put me in, coach. I'm ready. And so the first thing he tells me when I got hired on is if you want to do this job well, you have to understand how to be a frac hand. You have to respect the operators. You have to respect their job, and you have to understand that and be able to do your job well later. So, okay, sounds good. So you get out to location, there's different stations, we'll call that that, as you kind of go through your learning curve to figure out how to do certain things. So we've got the big three, we've got water, we've got sand, we've got chemicals, we've got each one for a different piece of equipment. So I'm going to focus on chemicals. So I get to this chemical trailer and I was talking to this guy, and he's like, okay. You see these chemical totes here? Your job is every time you hear somebody call over the radio, give me a strap here, give me a measurement. Your job is to go stick a ruler in this, look at it, look it up in this chart, convert that to gallons, write it down on a piece of paper, and then once you get done with this line, we'll repeat it over the radio and tell tell the guy in the band so he can make sure our chemical pumps are are are going appropriately. Was like, alright. You know, I wanna be a good frac unit. I'm gonna wanna do this. And so for two weeks straight, you know, I heard this. I did this. You know? It takes a while to get good at, get it efficient. But halfway through the hitch, I was like, is there a better way to do this? Like, there has to be. Right? And so I'm telling this story because I think it feeds into the innovation at the edge, which is something that differentiates Liberty and focus on continuous innovation on projects like that. So I looked up online, and I ordered a sensor online. I went to Radio Shack when Radio Shack used to be a thing. I brushed up on some some old coding skills that I hadn't pulled out in a while. I went to our fab shop who mechanical geniuses, awesome guys. And we put together this prototype. And so the next time I showed up on Hitch, they're like, what's that? And I was like, you know, it's something so that we don't have to do this anymore. And so that was a prototype. We tried it out, and it was able to measure faster, more accurately than any human could, basically pitch that to the execs and they're like, yes, we should definitely do this and basically bootstrap that and send it all throughout the company. And so that made us that much more efficient. And what this is, is the extension of that, but to our larger vessels. And the big point of this is we don't want to put somebody back there with a stick, climbing up ladders when there's a better way to do it. And it's coming out very soon, very excited about it. The second thing is, in 2014, we shifted to containerized sand. Great. A lot of benefits reaped from that. I think dust, noise, truck traffic, all those things, very true. But we start asking ourselves the questions of, is there a better way to do this? I like asking that question. What can we do to improve here? And that's something that's fostered within Liberty. And so we started asking the question, what would the ideal proppant system be if it was based on PropX's PropB's that's a highly reliable containerized sand solution? So we're like, does it need people? Does somebody need to open the vessels themselves? Or can it automatically open it applying some sort of higher level clever automation? And so do we need people to manipulate it on the fly or can we have the equipment do it itself? And so the Mantis proppant system is the answer to those questions. It's the next generation of a higher intelligence for our high throughput proppant system, and it's a partnership we have and are working through with PropX, and they're hoping to test that later this year. And I'll turn it over to Terence to talk about some other parts here. Thank you, everyone. So my name is Terence Getsch. I grew up in Iowa, not knowing anything about oil and gas. And when I studied chemical engineering, fellow chemist, at Iowa State, I, for fun, don't know why, thought it would be cool to learn computer coding. So I, you know, embraced the computer nerd that my family and everybody else that knew me as a thing that I love. So, know, WellSite automation or the softwares that I'm going to show you, Uber for Sand, the pump Iris and as well as the StimCommander pumps are very near and dear to my heart. So Uber for Sand sounds exactly what it is. So in the world of these thousands of trucks of sand delivery and the fact that the overall logistics is very scarce, what helps your suppliers or that Greg will talk to, what what helps them do their job better? Well, what helps them is visibility. They can see, as you can see on the screen on the right, where they're at, what we have coming next. We're not just going to order a bunch of trucks and have them sit there and wait just in case. And the reason we do that is that allows the suppliers that we work with to get more runs, get more money earned in the day. And that really means a lot to these owner operators that own their own trucks. So it helps us reduce our overall, detention as well as it's a win win for our suppliers. So that's Uber for San. Then Pump Iris, to kind of stick with, we've been talking a bit about like a car analogy, right? So what is Pump Iris? So I don't know if you guys remember about three or probably actually five to seven years ago, they came out with this thing on cars where when you stepped on the brake and came to a stop, the engine shut off and everybody panicked the first three times, especially they rented a car. And they didn't know why. They didn't know why that was happening. Well, it was a it was a fuel enhancement. Right? This is very similar to that. Right? However, if you just kill the engine that you're running, you're probably gonna boil the, the turbos, and you're gonna have a lot of other issues that Zach won't be happy with me about. So we need to let them idle for a little bit, but we don't want to have them idle for an unnecessarily long time. So we have this prescribed where it will shut down and then turn back off. And then on the flip side, back to Williston where Robert originally started, where he's saying put me in coach at negative 40 degrees, not real good for the equipment if it just stays shut off. So the technology has the ability to say, oh, wait, getting too cold, let me turn myself back on. And then that's okay idling because what you don't want to have is all the equipment froze, and shut down. So this reduces idling by 29% and reduces, fuel, cost by about 100 and, $1,000 using about $2.5 diesel cost. The last one, Stim Commander pumps. So what is Stim Commander pumps? Well, to liken it to my car analogy again, just think you're trying to control or run these big massive pumps, right? So if you're driving a car or you see a car driving down the road 25 miles an hour in first gear, what happens? It's extremely loud. It's using way too much fuel. And number three, it's probably, most likely, not very efficient, right? So you to make sure that all the equipment are going to run as they need to. So how do we fix that? Well, we create this program that's very much like an automatic transmission, except for it shifting all 20 pumps at once. So what this system is going to do is it's going to take the shifting out of the operator's hands so that they're not trying to control 20 pumps at once. So what does that allow us to do? Well, that allows us to pump the stage generally a little bit faster. So like 15% faster on stages, what does that do? That allows us to come back to more stages in a given day to the fourteen forty project that we're trying to get to. And then the last piece, I guess, failed to mention is while you are driving the car incredibly infuel efficient, the software has the ability to modulate to the proper fuel economy. So it's going to adjust the equipment so that it runs at the best fuel, best bang for your buck. And I'll hand it back to Robert for the last Frac X. Cool. No, I appreciate that, Terence. So finishing up here, frac kinetics, the control system, it's one of the things that we're excited about. It's partially through the acquisition of OneStim and partially through our continued technology alliance with Schlumberger that we're acquiring this. It's basically the operating system of the frac van. And it's brand new, it's sleek, it's very efficient. And so and it's ready for field testing. And that's pretty much everything you'd want is that one is new with modern technologies. It's proven. It's sturdy. It's ready for field trials. It's efficient with data, and it's ready to go. So thank you. Thank you, everyone, for your time. Greg McKee, director of supply chain. I've been doing this supply chain gig now for ten years in all field servicing. Five years, I've been privileged to be at Liberty. Five years before that, like Ron, I came from behind the maple curtain from Canada originally. Then I heard about this freedom thing and thought I'd give it a try and come on down to The US. But but, you know, the first five years of my career, I got called the annoying purchasing guy a lot. And it was always purchasing guy, get me this, purchasing guy, get me that. And then I came down here, started working with Liberty, and I started you hearing this thing, supply chain, the thing I've been talking about for a long time. And why is that different? Why is that important? Well, when you look at a supply chain like this, when you look at the things that we need to do to make ourselves efficient, looking at proppant, last mile logistics, rail logistics, chemicals, fuel, maintenance parts, you name it. It's more than just purchasing. Purchasing being a purchase order desk is just taking a need and go ahead and executing it. But we need to figure out a way to be truly efficient from end to end to be the best supply chain we can be and to support our customers. So in a nutshell, I went from being the annoying purchasing guy to the annoying supply chain guy. How do we truly do this? Integration. Integration is key. And that's internal integration and that's external integration. When I talk about internal integration, I'm talking about our operations team, our sales team and our engineering team. First off, operations. We need to understand what happens out boots on the ground, understand what really makes us successful as a company. We can't just call it in. We can't just think we're centralized that we've got it all figured out. Boots on the ground is what makes us tick. The next is sales. Having strategic conversations with the sales team, not just looking at a calendar or a design or a piece of information we're getting and saying let's go. It's talking to them about what does the customer really need, what is the short term and long term strategic vision here of that customer and go ahead and build our plan. The next piece is engineering. You heard Ben Poppel talk about it quite a bit, how our teams are really integrated together to make sure we're finding the best products for our customers. What's important there is supply chain team, we need to understand what we're buying, not just go ahead and buy it. All these things come together for us to plan for fracking and not for a flat procurement. We've to plan to be able to be nimble and tailor our supply chain to this flexible nature that we're in. Everything is changing every day, and we have to make sure we're integrated with our internal teams to do that. Next thing is our vertical integration. We've got some great partners that we brought on in the Liberty family, ST9 being one of them, Freedom Proppant, our newly acquired sand mines down in West Texas. So at ST9, 95% of our pump based assets we're getting from them and roughly 50% of our local sand now in West Texas has been provided by Freedom. Why is this important? This allows us to have stable costing in all markets and also assurance of supply in ups and downs. We can work with them. We're integrated teams together to make sure that Liberty is successful for our customers. The last thing with SD9 is having direct access to their technology advancements first. First and quickly. We can be first to market with these new age products and get them to our customers right away. The last piece, external integration, our supply partnerships. This is something that I'm extremely passionate about and I think kind of sets us apart from other companies. Is our partnerships with our partners, with our suppliers. Lots of times there's the old school way of the partnership game. It's the I'm the customer, you're the supplier, you do what the customer says. Today, I've got the stick, so I'm going to go swing. You've got to reduce prices. Then they've got the stick. They're going come beat us up and bring prices back up. That doesn't help us be efficient and successful long term. That's a short term way of doing things. So we find partners that we can streamline our supply chains with mutual efficiency. So a good example of that is, let's take sand. Sand will look at what is that grade split that makes that mine efficient, whether it's they need this much twentyforty, this much thirtyfifty, this much 100 mess, whatever it might be. And we plan our forecasting and our order frequencies to help them be efficient. We do things like ninety day weekly rolling forecasts. We try to get those with an 80% accuracy. Now it's a changing market. It's tough to do that. But it takes great people and great information to do that. Next thing is our thirty to forty five days when we get closer, we like to do the 95% accuracy. This allows our suppliers to stabilize their operation, to reduce their costs and in turn give us consistent costing and reliable supply. We've seen through that stabilization, we're getting somewhere between 10% to 15% lower than market rates on average. For a little bit of strategic automation, some things that we're doing on logistics front. My view is would be a bad supply chain if you weren't always looking at ways to get better, get more automated, get more efficient. I'll briefly touch on from a logistics standpoint and some automation standpoint what we're looking at. I like to say we're developing artificial intelligence to support human intelligence. This idea of no touch, complete automation in a logistics model for proppant and chemicals today, I think, is unrealistic. We're not in a segment long haul type model. We've got things that change every single day. So we've to find automation that we can utilize to enhance what people are doing. So it's utilizing origin, destination, carrier information, all this information we already have, putting it together in the system and providing it to the smart people to make decisions and to execute on. So we are still relying on the people out in the field to give us the information needed so that we can actually react to what's happening out there and then use that information to adjust the plan to be proactive. So ensuring reliability and cost in an inflationary market. We all know the trucking market is a little crazy right now. It's going it keeps getting tighter and tighter and going up. These type of things allow us to get better control of that. The last thing is our procure to pay process we're looking at. That's utilizing this data from things like this logistics software to drive automation in areas that we're doing way many touches. People are touching it way too many times. Things like purchase orders, receipt, invoice matching, utilizing the data we have, bring it together and automate those things, automate the 80% so we can have smart people focused on 20%. So supply chain to me, I like to say, is like one big puzzle. Every single day, we got all these different pieces, whether it's that we're trying to balance, whether it's quality, cost, technology, got to be flexible, but you better be stable, all these things that don't really come together easily. So how do we make that happen when one day we have all the we don't have all the pieces we're trying to put together, another day we don't have the picture. Day after that, we've got the picture, but then sales comes kicking into the office and takes that picture and gives us a brand new one and now we've got to start over again. I was going to kick, but I was afraid to pull something up here. But so to me, the only way that you can do these things, the only way that we can truly solve the puzzle is the people. You've heard that all day today, the people, the team, it's the most important thing. Too many times in large growing supply chains, people try to get siloed. They try to put all these segmented teams together to handle supply chains. So you've got one team that's doing purchase orders. You've another team that does short term forecasting. And these guys maybe do some execution and these ones do invoice and then wait, I got to get these guys back into It's too you lose all the communication. You lose the things that let you be nimble and work with this environment. So what we do is we find the right people, we give them the right tools, we give them the support and put them in a goal driven environment. So we mean by that goal driven, we have a goal together that we need to set, we get wide parameters, we're not confining them to a stringent process. We have a goal, be you and to accomplish that. We empower them to have ownership of cradle to grave. So somebody will have their own area. They'll become the expert in it. They'll see everything from that talking to sales, working with the supplier to get pricing in line, doing the short term planning, the long term planning and seeing that all the way through and monitoring every single day the success of the job and updating our suppliers, operations, whatever it needs to be to make sure that our plan is successful. They become true experts in this. And I find when I've looked at some of the models of people doing that siloed approach, we can have one person do it, four people are doing it that siloed approach because they are owning it. They are the one stop shop for any issues out in the field, any issues with sales, we can get that to them quickly. Obviously, that creates a lean headcount and allows us to scale with the market, which is very important in supply chain. We should always be lean and mean and find ways to do better. So I know extremely high level. I can talk supply chain all day long. I'm almost at my time already. But be around. I'll be at the happy hour. And any questions or anything you need, happy to answer some more because I truly believe we have the best damn supply chain team in the industry and I'd love to talk about it. Thank you. Thanks, Greg. Hi, I'm Roy Ani. I'm the Director of Research and Development here and mining as well. We picked up a couple of mines. With the OneStim acquisition, we got two sand mines. And so I'm happy to be looking over those as well. So I'm one of those displaced rural people that Chris was talking about earlier. I came from a farm in Montana. Like Jim Brady, realized that the farm really wasn't going to support me, and I had to make a better plan. So in high school, I went to see my guidance counselor, Dan Sims, saw Dan. And Dan was a small school. My graduating class was 11. And so Dan was our, football coach, our librarian, bus driver, and guidance counselor. So I said, Dan, I I gotta make a plan here. And so he took out a chart, and he said, okay. Good at math. No social skills. Roy, you're an engineer. So I went to engineering school and graduated, got out and and got a job with Boeing. I was pretty excited. It was all very exciting. Stealth bomber. I I was gonna be a hydraulics engineer, or I I was one actually. And so I got I got over there. I got my queue clearance, but I'm not queuing on. I wanna make that clear. Went on to underground mining. It's a long story. Kind of, I don't know, fell off the airplane and landed in underground. And then went to Africa and was doing some mining in Africa and wanted to get out. Chris reached down into Africa and pulled me into the oil field, I've never been so grateful. So I'm going to talk to you about a few of the things that we're working on in R and D. This was this is our quiet fleet. This is a massive success story for us. We launched this project in 2014, commercialized it and launched the first fleet in 2016. And it was was a a massive engineering effort with some pretty notable failures. Our first prototype turned out to be the world's biggest subwoofer, actually made it worse, which I I didn't tell Chris or anyone. I just said, hey. It's going really well. But the thing that what happened was we launched this in 2016 and oops. Go back up. It doesn't matter. Launched in 2016, and it was it was a massive success. We we had the first flight fleet, and some three years later, we had in the space in eight fleets operating. And our competitors copied us and put a couple to work as well. So that basically in in in this part of Colorado, virtually every fleet operating today is a is a quiet fleet. And it and it did a couple things. It it helped our customers out, but it also helped us out as well. You know, these fleets are so quiet that hearing protection isn't required. It makes communication better. It's less stressful to be out there working. So very proud of that. But why did we do this? Why did a farmer turned engineer and an upstart fracking company develop this technology and the big companies didn't? And it's kind of what Robert was talking about, because we have a bias for action and we're problem solvers and we have a management team that really supports us. I remember going talked to Chris and and everybody in the management meeting. I said, think we can make this quieter. And he said, let's do it. And, we made the prototype, and I said, you know what? I think we can put fire suppression on this and make sure that our fleets are safer. And he said, let's do it. You know? And and so we did it. And that's one of the hallmarks of Liberty is we're doers. So I never really, when I went to work for Boeing, I really wanted to be a a thermodynamics guy. Right? And, I got there and and I took the job in in with self farmer, but my I felt in my my heart I was a thermo guy. And so I said, is there any way I can transfer in to the thermal department? He said, yeah. All you have to do is get a PhD from MIT. And so I they were actually looking, I guess, for more of a Chris Wright's, not the Royannis at Boeing. But in the oil field, what's the saying? Even a even a crow is an eagle among sparrows. So in the oil field, I'm a thermal guy. And I really relish what we've done with emissions and everything else. This is what they've done, the reductions in NOx and PM. You can see at 2,000 tier ones, the big block and that little tiny block is what we emit today. You know, with with engine efficiencies, basically, we do is we take we take hydrocarbons and we oxidize them and we get carbon dioxide and water. And, you know, there's a lot of talk about emissions and how to how to reduce them, and that's all thermodynamics. So I'm excited about that too. But what we when we saw this electrical, these first fleets come out as turbines, you know, I was asked time and again by our management team, should we be chasing these turbine driven driven electric fleets? And I said, they're too big, they're too inefficient, and they don't make us better. And that's what Jim Brady, our VP of ops, constantly asks, will this make us better? And we really didn't see a technology that would make us better until we acquired ST nine, Chris' company, and he had a meaningfully better electric pump. And just we started we developed that. We we got a prototype out. And then just on cue, gas reciprocating engines came along. And gas reciprocating engines don't have the methane emissions. They're meaningfully more efficient. And now we're getting ready to marry these two technologies together and come out with a an electric fleet that makes Liberty better. And so very proud of that. Chris is going to tell you a little bit more about the pump side. My name is Chris Buckley, and, you can tell by my accent. I'm I'm not from around here. I actually live in Houston, and everybody says I I come from East Texas, but Far East, all the way in The UK. And when I left school, I had a different feeling than everybody else. I came from a place called Stoke On Trent in the middle in a relatively poor area. Not many people had much ambition. And so when I left school, was a machinist. I was a machinist for ten years. And then eventually, I I went back to night school and got all the through to my masters and, that's kind of how I got into the system. A bit late, but I really appreciate my upbringing and my grounding and my knowledge that I learned from machining. Eventually, ended up working for a couple of larger companies, looking some after some of the divisions and I eventually realized this big companies has lots of politics and didn't really like politics, didn't like how fast they developed technology, didn't like the cost structure. And so I left the company. I was there in five years this October, and we set up ST9 with a plan to develop technology faster and make a difference, and that's what we did. So ST9 is, as Roy pointed out, is a solely owned entity of Liberty now. And then you might say, Chris, you don't like big company politics, why do you now work for the second largest well service company in the industry, right? It's because Liberty doesn't have politics, right? We just get stuff done. And that's where I really relish. And so I'm going to talk to you about Digifrac. Digifrac is the first purpose built electric frac pump. Our competition will tell you, hey, we've got electric frac pumps. No, you don't. You have mechanical pump, but you just got a big ass electric motor and that's how you're driving it. That isn't purpose built. It's driven efficiently. So our engineers came up with this idea and you can see the motors, the gears, the drivetrain, everything is integrated into the pump. And what you do is you have a higher power density than anything on in the industry. You have the technology, you can control it better. And it also has seven throws. We heard Zach talk around early on about, quintuplexes, five throws. Our competition will badge a pump. So we say you have Chinese horsepower, you have badged horsepower and you have real horsepower. A pump will actually do, right? And this pump has 40% more capacity than anything else on the market. So but when you actually run it, we can place or the target is to replace two pumps with one of these. And we've been on trial. We've done it in R and D. She's gone through a suite of tests. She'd been out in the field. Just last week, we tidied up a test out in the Permian. We did a three well pad. We had no issues. We had great feedback from the super major we pumped for. And so it was pretty cool. One thing that Roy talked about is emissions. When we talk about emissions on this unit, we're going to power it with gas reciprocating to start off with. 25% less emissions on the pump. So you've got controllability, you've got the size and then you've the emissions reduction. This thing is the whole package. It is just the best in the industry, okay? So when we talk about power, how else can we power it? People talk about powering from the grid. The Liberty engineers all got together, and we've made a system now that can run off batteries, it can run off grid power and it can run off gas reciprocating or a combination of those, right? So it really is the best in the industry. And I have one more slide. So how does this fit in to full electrification? We've talked about electric wireline. And one thing that came actually from the Schlumberger acquisition was an electrified back end. Chris and Ron and Roy knew that we were developing the front end. And so when you look for synergies when you make acquisitions, this is one of the sweeteners that we could take the back end that was already developed, we take the front end that we were developing, so now we have full electrification all the way from wireline to pumping down the hole and, I think that's it. So the pump at the bottom actually is is downtown. So when we walk back up to the Liberty offices, she's outside, and and she is absolutely gorgeous. You know, she is just a a beautiful thing. First fleet, everyone says, hey, when are we going to go to market? Everybody else is saying they're going to market. Our first fleet will be ready for Q2 next year. So we're doing really well. So I can answer questions later on. I'll be hanging around the dish frac, and then we'll also be doing having beer upstairs on the 20 Third Floor. Okay. Thank you. Well, you've heard from so many of our folks, and we have so much to talk about. There's an incredible amount of passion in the room, and we're running low on time. So I'm going to open it up for one question. And what I will say is let's hold all of our questions after this one question until our open forum after outlook. So if anyone has a question in the room, happy to take it. I have a few online as well, but we'll take the questions in the room first. What would be the cost of the ST-nine crew? So the question was, what is the cost of DigiFrac? Thank you for that one. I actually missed that one. To be honest, sorry. I was going say we'll come back to that after our outlook, if you don't mind. Is there anything else in the room? Oh, I'll sit back down then. Is that okay? I better answer it by the time you said that. It is cost neutral with Tier four final. That's the target that Ron has set us. And we're basing much on target, where everybody else is typically about 30% more expensive than Tier four final. We'll take one more in the room, that's okay. So Ron, within the spirit of 14 '40, what's your average hours per fleet now? And what would how would that have compared a couple of years ago? And how close can you get to twenty four hours as an enterprise going forward? That's a great question. Fourteen forty, obviously, an aspirational goal. There have been a few times in our history where we have done that. We've had a fleet pump for thirty eight hours in a row, I think, continuously. So it has happened. Today, I didn't talk about that graph, but I did show a graph that showed maybe the last four years, we're up about 10% as a total average over the course of the day. Of course, we have days where we hit thirteen hundred plus minutes north of twenty two hours a day, but averaged across our fleet. You're still talking about something in the 60% of a day range. And so there's a massive opportunity there for us to get to closer and closer and closer to that fourteen forty. But that's up probably 15% in the last five or six years. All right, guys. We'll close-up right here, and we'll be back at two p. M. Mountain Time. Thank you, guys. Our name Liberty comes from celebrating the growth in human freedom and opportunity that created the modern world. We want to expand opportunity and liberty to those in our communities that were born less lucky than we were. One example of that is ACE scholarship. We provide almost a 100 scholarships for low income kids, and the change in life trajectory from ACE scholarships is simply phenomenal. But we're trying to take people born in different situations, different opportunities, but their hearts are the same as us, their dreams are the same as us. We're just helping them find a school that fits for them, sets them free to live fulfilling wonderful lives as we've been blessed with. I recently had the opportunity to volunteer at the Houston Zoo. Our our job was to help the carnivore team shovel sand. We did Houston Meals On Wheels. I was a part of the Habitat for Humanity. It was a really good event. We were out there building homes for the entire day. One of my favorite parts about my job is being able to work with communities where Liberty employees live and work. Partnerships is a huge part of Liberty's success, Whether we're partnering with employees, vendors, customers, or communities, relationships matter. So when I came in for my interview, the first thing I noticed on the in the lobby was the television, the streaming pictures of all the community involvement. Power lunch is a great opportunity. You just go to a local elementary school and you read with a third grader. It's a chance for them to work on their reading comprehension, but it's also an opportunity for you to get out into the community. Got an email about junior achievement and they needed volunteers. And so I volunteered and we teach them about community, we do games, about running your own business and money management, energy and how that kind of fuels the world. Liberty has been involved in MS one fifties for the last eight years. It's for a great cause, trying to raise money to help eradicate multiple sclerosis. Any event that they can do in spandex, I'm all for. My job provides me the unique ability to go out and engage the community through kind of some of the things that I enjoy are the interactive exhibits we build for energy day, kind of to allow the community to see and feel the software that we use, getting to interact with these kids and be a positive influence in their life is very rewarding. Yes. You should go. Yes. You should be involved. I know that they look forward to having us there. So happy and proud that I can be a part of those those events. I'm proud to be part of an industry that invests in our community, and Liberty is at the forefront. All our employees in are an integral part of of the communities that we live in. All of these efforts are centered around expanding people's opportunities, expanding their liberty for wonderful lives. America, a land of promise. Our founding fathers conceived this unique country on one revolutionary truth, that we were created equal with certain inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The freedom to choose has always been at the heart of our story. When our founding fathers grew weary of tyranny and religious oppression, a great man rose up to fight and form a new nation, one that established a new standard of freedom and opportunity. It was and still is what makes America exceptional. On the monumental shores of Ellis Island, countless hope filled dreamers set foot on this land of opportunity and began their journeys toward a brighter future for themselves and their children. America became known as a place where hard work and determination were rewarded with promise and prosperity. Our story is not perfect, but our commitment to those founding principles is unwavering. Time and again, throughout our history, great men and women have risen up, often at great risk We're willing to be beaten for that schools should no longer be segregated by race. Or the desegregation of public schools. Sadly, nearly seven years after this landmark case, our schools are more segregated than ever, this time by poverty. In many impoverished communities, the local schools have devolved into failure factories with children receiving diplomas they can't even read. Years of failed federal programs have only reinforced what many great leaders have come to know as truth. No amount of government funding can bail a family out of poverty. Enough is enough. It doesn't have to be this way. Through partnership and accountability, ACE is giving impoverished students a chance for success, giving families the freedom to choose a school where they can grow, dream and thrive in a healthy academic environment, where expectations are higher and bright minds ascend beyond their economic confinement. Most importantly, ACE of this country, you are a red line into a specific school. And if that school is not gonna work for you, then you're stuck. Odds have been stacked against you in a way that doesn't align with America's founding values, that if we are all created equal, we should also be given an equal opportunity in this country. And today, that's much more about education than ever it was. Educational choice is an enormous civil rights issue. It's the number one civil rights issue of our time. Because of a legacy of poverty, these kids are still not actually free to go to the school of their choice. So how can we say that we've lived up to our promise of freedom if education being the driving force for prosperity and upward mobility is tied to your zip code, and your zip code is tied to a legacy of slavery and poverty. This is the jackal that remains. Our founding fathers had a remarkable vision to make this land of opportunity economic chains that limit opportunity and grant students and families a future rooted in our nation's most foundational value, the freedom for everyone to choose. This endeavor is not for the weak of heart. It is the most urgent fight of our times. The liberty bell of individual choice must not be silenced. Welcome back. This is our last session of the day. We'll follow-up with some Q and A. But very quickly, we've got Chris Wright and Michael Stock to give you a brief overview of our integration, where we are in the market and our outlook. Go ahead, Michael. So just going with the story. I'm another one of those transplanted country kids that somehow ended up in Denver. I'm from a small island just off South Texas. As you can tell by the accent, how I got here was via Silicon Valley. I was working for a small company down in Silicon Valley, you know, running sort of object oriented op operating systems. I was doing finance there, so I didn't know how to program. Run by another guy who was relatively inspirational, Steve Jobs. It was the place he started up after he left Apple, and then we went back. So I know a little bit about working for inspirational people. I will say, I'm not sure which one is smarter. I know which one is nicer, and that would be Chris. But he's a great guy. But another person you would walk through walls for, and that's the difference. That's what happens at our company. A little bit just to wrap up for the two sessions. Thanks very much to our team. Wonderful overview of technology. You know, as Ron pointed out, the Liberty Way, how understanding the economics of the service business is simple but complex to execute on. And I think the team have done a pretty good job of showing you how we do that. On the subsurface technology, why do we invest in technology? It's not just because it's cool. It's cool. But it's not because it's cool. It's because it adds to our bottom line, right? It drives higher demand for our services, higher utilization of our fleets, Integrating, understanding the subsurface with operations improves our throughput, and integrating engineering with supply chain reduces our costs. The same thing on the surface, as Ron so eloquently put. It really is project fourteen forty affecting the biggest thing that affects our profitability, which is our throughput. But service excellence from Jim, high quality fleets, that drives demand for Liberty services, which keeps us highly utilized. And obviously, reducing cost is a major part of being profitable. So it's a key thing for us. So just wanted to say we love technology. As Chris would say, we're tech nerds, but we do it for a reason. A little bit on acquisition. I know you want to hear an update on the OneStim acquisition. It's going very well. We've made a great start. There's a lot more to do. It's a wonderful thing. But it starts with people. You know, we about 1,300 new members of the family joined us on January 1. And the really, the key thing was as soon as we announced this deal, we focused on the people. Chris, Jim, Lane, the day after we closed this deal, they flew down to the Permian. They were shift changes. They were in warehouses. They went to South Texas. They met a fleet somewhere in the middle of the Mid Continent. They went to the Haynesville. You know, then they went to the Bakken, see our fleets. They talked to all of the Liberty people, all of the Schlumberger people who are now gonna be become Liberty people to tell them about the company. Now these are people in the field where you're talking to the service operators, the guys that run the blenders, the guy that works in the field at minus forty at 2AM, and there's the CEO of the company going, you are the most important person. It's for you that I work. They've never heard that before. So it starts with that. It starts with the Liberty mission, evangelism, about what we are, the culture, and then keep going. We are one team, and we've got now we've to maximize the efficiencies. That's an ongoing project. It won't change five years from now. But regarding the integration, it started well. We integrated the maintenance teams to support wireline, red fleets, blue fleets, everything under the sun. They're all central. Central warehousing, central management operations, central G and A. Technology. I will touch on this very, very briefly because you've heard about two hours about this. But the key thing is we started with integrating our digital backbone across everything, evaluating the technology we received, looking at the best of breed, looking at the best way to implement all the technologies going forward. And over the next eighteen months, we will continue that technology rollout. Operations, obviously key. This is Jim. This is Ron. This is Project fourteen forty. This is about the people. But really, it is focusing on fleet automation, which a lot of the work that had been done by the ones team, by Terence and his team before he came over, bringing that over to our bringing that over to Liberty, looking at what we want to implement, integrating that with the people, and making it efficient. Again, we've started again, it's about making sure you understand what you've got, making a clear plan, communicating it clearly, and then executing. As I think people said, the one thing Chris so eloquently said, liberty is about doing. You know, we're not a lot about talking. This is probably the most talking any of us are gonna do this year. Operation so equipment. Obviously, we we talked about We deployed the ST9 pump parts across the whole fleet now. That's a key, capturing that margin, reducing that cost, getting that sort of sustainability, introducing and completing the training programs that are the same. We're going to have enhanced asset base as we start moving more of their Tier two dual fuel upgrades, Tier four upgrades, and now coming with Digifrag. That a key part of that, and I think Robert, who's one of the most humble and greatest engineers I know, undersold is what those guys are doing on Frac Cat X. This operating system brings it all together, whether it's a Digifrac pump or a backside or a traditional piece of equipment. It's all but one unified control system that this can work everything in our in our organization. And that's a key thing. That's a key thing. When you talk about libertization, that's how, very differently a little bit to San Joe, we're gonna be able to do the libertization of our operational fleet, make it plug and play for a lot less money than we did when we did those last nine fleets. And that's a key part of the fact that we've got better as an engineering company and that focus, that focus on innovation. A couple of small ones here. Facilities. As you know, we required a lot of facilities in the deal. We've about 17 facilities, about 1,400,000 square foot of warehouse space, 700 acres of land. That's not including the sand mines. We've evaluated the overlap. We've looked at different facilities, how we're going to use them, identified a number of them, and I think we're going to probably get somewhere between 25,000,000 and $35,000,000 of asset sales over the next two years. And that will depend on some rebounds in certain markets. We will not sell. We'll wait if some of the certain markets have to rebound. Overhead, annualized G and A. We've really doubled the size of the company and added approximately 20% to our twenty nineteen gs and A load. That was key. Now we achieved the majority of that right at the beginning because a lot of the G and A support, corporate G and A support for OneStim was centralized in St. Schlumberger, so that did not come over. But we're still focused on getting better. We're automating. We're spending a lot of time in the next eighteen months automating a lot of the places, as Greg told you. We're double touching a lot of things where we can kind of continue to grow without adding people and being having people spend time on that 20% that adds value and get rid of the time they spend on the 80% that doesn't. And over the next eighteen months, I think we're going to we actually are going to be working on some of our sort of fixed overhead in our districts to be able to make that more efficient as we grow. Capital equipment monetization. Zach and his team have done an amazing job, but they acquired a lot of equipment. A lot of it's still under evaluation. But up until now, we've actually identified about 70 to a $100,000,000 of reduction in maintenance expense and offset for capital expenditure, things like dry ad units and sort of dry chemical handling that Greg alluded to. And that will be reaped between now and the end of twenty twenty three. A small amount of asset sales, which I will assure you that anything we sell that came across, we will sell internationally. It won't be staying in North America. And with that, I'm going turn it back over to Chris at the moment for an update on the customer integration. Thank you, Michael. Look, one of the first thing we did when we announced this deal was head to our own facility here in Colorado. We had jumped we all jumped on a plane to Midland, as Michael said, and we turned around all the facilities. But the very next morning as we're driving from Midland, from the Permian to the Eagle Ford, my phone rings. There's a guy I haven't talked to in fifteen years. And he said, you're not gonna take my frac fleet away, are you? And I sort of recognize his voice. I'm like, why would I do that? So he was a longtime Schlumberger customer. He'd had the same fleet for three years, was super proud of it. It keeps getting bigger. So I said, of course not. We're not gonna mess up what you got, but we are gonna try to make it even better. He said, awesome. You know, we're gonna bring some new Liberty technologies, and we're gonna add stuff. And on all the legacy Liberty customers, it isn't like, oh, we're gonna stamp them all red now. There are things that Schlumberger did better than us. There's things we did better than them. So we're doing is slowly figuring out, hey, the best things the blue team did, put them on the red fleets. The best thing the red fleets do, put them on the blue fleets. So it's very much a team effort. And I will say the most important thing we got from this deal is a bunch of high end passionate committed committed people that have, as you can see, joined right into the Liberty family. Someone asked me in the Brent restroom, you haven't said who's from Schlumberger and who's from Liberty. We haven't even thought about that. But, yes, there are people here that two years ago were dressed in blue and today are dressed in red. But today, it's just all liberty. One team, one family. Pricing opportunities. If we can bring something extra, a little extra technical sizzle or whatever that can add value to customers, we can we can move pricing on that. Of course, we have pricing opportunities across all of our fleets. Right? We're coming out of a tough background market. You know, pricing today was set when oil was 20 or $30 lower than it is today. So that's moving up. We added new basins. Look significantly, two very significant ones. The Haynesville, you know, second the second of the two awesome shale gas basins we have in The United States and the one that's right near the Gulf Coast markets and export markets. So Haynesville has been just a tremendous addition. Western Canada, Western Canadian sedimentary basin, fantastic basin, different settings, different technology. Liberty's thrilled to be a significant presence in both of those. We're also in Mid Con now, and we've got a toehold in the Northeast in wireline, but we've been in extensive dialogues about frac. And, of course, frac will arrive in the Northeast when it makes commercial and partnership sense for us to do that, but that's coming. Huge additions. Vertical integration, Chris, English Chris. I call them smart. There's Chris and Smart Chris. Smart Chris with ST nine, you know, they they joined us maybe three years ago as a team. And what it was was a a step up in technology. How are gonna make power ends and fluid ends better? How are gonna make frac fleets better? And we're gonna vertically integrate our supply chain so we can get higher quality, take competitive advantages and and control over our costs. Well, wireline and sand mines are exactly the same thing. The critical dance partner to frac and complete a well on location is wireline. And now we have a liberty right out of the gun, super strong wireline business, thrilled with that. Sand integration, you heard the tech team talk about. Meyerhoffer, and I think Lane made the comment like it's it's arguable, would we have a shale revolution today if not for Mike Meierhofer? So when you're at the Austrian guy, when you're at happy hour today, buy that guy a beer. So we realized that that for almost all unconventional development, that low permeability sand, you know, works and it makes economic sense. So now we've got a very large presence, a vertical integration of sand mines. Two of the biggest and best sand mines in West Texas are now Liberty Mines. Market conditions. No no surprises here. Right? Imagine how bad things were a year ago. Right? We went from 03/2025 frac fleets to, like, 40 frac fleets in six or eight weeks. Just a dramatic collapse in the industry. But Liberty is a partnership company. We talked to all of our customers. I talked to the CEO of every one of our customers, and I'll tell you, every one of them was incredibly sincere and kind and told us exactly what were they're thinking, apologizing about shutting down a frac fleet. Look. We we we get it. You know? Storage is filling up, prices are collapsing, and differentials blew up. Like, a a major company called and said, you know, we're gonna run through it and called me back two later two days later, they get their own transportation. They sell their own crude shipborne. He said we're gonna net $3 at the wellhead for next month. It just makes no sense. I'm sorry, Chris, but, know, we're gonna we're gonna shut in our wells so we can't keep fracking wells, but we will again. And here's what we're saying publicly to the marketplace. Here's what we'll probably do. People were open, candid partnership mentality. We value that. The question was how do we monetize Happy Valley? I'll tell you, a huge part of that is trust. We gain this trusted partnership with our customers. When we push them to do something, they know it's not because, well, this product has a higher margin than that product, so we want to sell it more. They know when we push something, it's because we believe it will be better for them. That trust allows us to roll out new technologies faster to have people embrace Liberty ideas because they know we're doing it with their best interest at heart. So and remember the frac market in q one of last year, it was tough then. 320 frac fleets running in q one of last year. We were the only frac company that reported a net profit in q one. Everyone had positive EBITDA, but below depreciation expense except for Liberty. So we've been you know, market peaked in in summer twenty eighteen and was sort of sliding downhill. I thought a necessary downhill. Too much oil, too much gas, too much service capacity. We've we've been too good for our own good, so we were pushing that stuff down to grind supply and demand into line. COVID has just sped that up, sped that up. So, yeah, we had a 175 frac fleets running in q four of last year. We're probably a little over 200 now. Heck, we'll probably be mid two hundreds. And, it's not that the publics are breaking their capital discipline pledge. It's just that the privates are saying drilling economics are awesome and, hey, we're gonna do a little more activity when you work with us. One thing that's happening as well is we're sort of getting two frac markets. Right? There's sort of legacy equipment frac market and then there's next generation frac fleets. They're not only lower emission, better for ESG profile, but if you can run your frac fleet off natural gas instead of diesel, it's a lot cheaper. So we're really getting, you know, an increasing swing to next generation frac fleets. The supply demand market is tighter there. Pricing is better there, and legacy frac fleets in a different situation. That market is also getting better, but it's a different market. It's not as good of a market. Michael's gonna talk about the difference between these frac fleets and the road back to better profitability. And as we talked about in our last earnings call is Mike working? Hello? As we talked about in the last earnings call sorry about that. You know, there's a we see a pathway back to mid cycle of mid cycle EBITDA margins. You know, on the right, you'll see sort of a bit of a framework where we think the market has to be just sort of like support mid cycle. But as we walk through from the left, really, one of the key things that's going to have to happen is, obviously, price has to go up, right? The severe discounts were given during the COVID times. As Chris pointed out earlier, service pricing generally lags commodity price by a couple of quarters. Net service pricing is going up, but we're also driving utilization and throughput. As things ramp up, as we did from the low of COVID, there's some natural sort of like, probably sort of utilization that's a little choppy. You know, some choppiness in the Q1, you have some choppiness in Q2. And throughput goes up as things sort of settle down go through the market. Plus, it's very much where we're going through an integration, two great frac fleets, two great systems, we're bringing those together. So there's a lot of increased utilization and throughput that we'll be pushing through as we go through the year and especially into next year. The other key part about that is some of the stuff that Ron's section was talked about, logistics, materials handling, automation, dry chemicals, etcetera. We see a path to sort of reduce cost and efficiency to actually increasing profitability. So therefore, the price doesn't need to go up to where it was in Q1 to get us back to that mid cycle margin profitability. We're also going to get some fixed cost leverage. As we see, we've a large portion of it when we first started. We've got a significant amount of fixed cost leverage we'll be working on as we go through the year. But there's a lot of paths to moving back to that mid cycle EBITDA margins, but we see there is a path. And with the market where we are at the moment, it's very supportive, and we're working our way back there as we go through this year into next year and through the end of next year. We have a little. One thing here, this slide can be read in conjunction with Roy's emission slides. This is just a little bit about the movement from upgrading some fleets from one sort of emissions profile or drivetrain to another. You know, tier two to tier two dual fuel, tier two diesel to tier four, tier four to tier four DGB, and then finally, the Digifreq. And a little bit of the capital cost that's involved in those, and I won't go through these in detail. These are more of a leave behind. But just to let you thinking about this, there there is a capital involved and investment needed as we move up that value chain, which is partially supported by fuel savings, but partially as you move out to building new equipment in the current market has to be supported by price. And that's one of the key takeaways from there, and we see that the market is really starting to sort of understand that and moving forward towards that. And here, I'm going to hand over to Chris to talk a little bit of history about our investment philosophy and how we do things. Yes. So you probably recognize that that volatility of our business, and that's the cash return on and cash invested. And then you tell and maybe a tiny bit in a story format. Right? I met Jim in that pickup truck. A lot of the other executives here were partners of mine at Pinnacle. This is a band that's known each other and been together for a while. And the dream, the vision then was to go we saw the shale revolution is real. It's a big deal. It's gonna go for a long time. Frac is the heart of it, and there's a lot of competitors. But technology and culture didn't seem overly strong. It's actually after a lunch, I was like, I wanna compete in that business. And so we decided to start a frack company, and we always said our business plan was super simple. We were gonna set out to build the best damn frack company, period. You know, whatever that was, people, humans, culture, equipment, schedule, we're gonna go out and bring something differential. There's like 40 frac companies that I think it peaked at like 65 frac companies. And and but that doesn't mean it's a commodity business. They're not all the same. Right? So we jumped into that business. And, Pinnacle, the original company that I started again with a lot of the same partners here in this room, that was 29 ago. $100,000 of paid in capital upfront. We grew at 35% compound annual growth rate for fourteen years. And the key is when you start a business, make it so people want your service, do a good job and bring more money in than you spend going out. And you can use that money that comes in to reinvest, to grow your business through equipment or technology. As you get higher in cycles, you send special dividends back to shareholders. That's what we did at Pinnacle. We funded our growth and at high markets that we're about to roll over, we sent money back to shareholders. That was the original plan in Liberty as well. We're just going to run a great private business, navigate the cycles, and at appropriate time, send send big checks back to shareholders, but continue to make a better business and grow our competitive advantage. So and one of things we're proud of. So in ten years, we've gone from this tiny I talked to Jim originally about the $100, and he said, Chris, for $100, it'll be an underpowered frac fleet, and we won't be the best. So we brought in equity investors, a number of them sitting in this room, put a relatively small amount of equity at that time for the business we are today. But then right off the bat, we generated positive cash from operations, and over 50 of all the equipment, technologies, everything you've seen talked about and developed was paid for by cash flow from operations. We did bring on additional equity. Obviously, did an IPO. We've used debt capital in modest amounts, but our belief is generate cash from operations, reinvest it at high rates of return. And if you don't have good high rates of return investments, send it back to ownership. That's the Liberty goal from the start. We thought we'd it private. Now we're going to do it public. All right. So so things go, and as I mentioned, you hit downturns. When you hit downturns, you can either pull in and hunker in your shell, lay everyone off so next quarter doesn't look as bad. Maybe that's the standard playbook. That's never been our playbook. So I mentioned in that first downturn we hit, we didn't lay anyone off. We just grew market share, and we were ready for an incredible opportunity to buy sand gel that happened. And when we did that, so we put capital at risk when no one wanted to. That's why you can buy things at a better price at that time. And then we had that equipment ready to roll just as a cycle is coming up. When a cycle is coming up, that's the best time to invest. You don't know when that cycle is gonna end, but you're at the start of it. So all the maximum amount of profit opportunity in that cycle is in front of you. Be ready for that. Be ready to jump on that. And we did that last time. We went into this downturn again, very unexpected again, but we had strong balance sheet strength. We had this fantastic transaction with Schlumberger. And I should say, I think it's truly a win for both sides. We are ongoing technology cooperation partners with Schlumberger. We are not competitors. A lot of their great alumni now have a Liberty shirt on. Some of their current employees wear a Liberty shirt in the boardroom or their alumni wear a Liberty shirt in the boardroom. But, we're at a similar inflection point. We do not know the future, but we're very you know, this this quarter is much better than last and vice versa going back. The the things are gonna get meaningfully better in the future. That's how we're looking at investments. Investments is not just a piece of equipment at today's pricing. It's for the long run. If you buy a piece of equipment, you've got to staff that with a bunch of people. We don't hire people for a cycle or till a peak and then we lay them off. We hire them to be part of our team. The marketplace, I talked about this earlier, so super quick here. And again, we hear these, you know, whatever, crazy gloom and doom or whatever of our industry. It's always important to step back. This is probably the sixth or seventh time we've declared the end of the oil and gas business. This one's gonna be about as accurate as the last ones. We don't know what's gonna happen going forward, but demand for oil and gas to enable people to have wonderful lives in fact, you can't build a wind farm, a solar farm, a nuclear plant, a dam or a biofuel facility, none of those are possible without copious amounts of oil and gas. So we're reasonably confident that demand for our products will be good going forward. The underinvestment that's happening globally, You always wanna be in a business that the outlook's pretty good, but everyone thinks it's worse than it is. If your outlook is good, but everyone thinks it's fantastic, that's a scary time. The time to invest, the time to believe in something is where the real outlook is better than the consensus outlook. I suspect we're in one of those times. I'll take turn it over to Michael again on and and and look. We don't know the future. We're making it very simple assumptions that, yeah, they could be too pessimistic. They could be too optimistic. We don't know. Sort of a mid case, hey. If things rebound this way, what might we do in that scenario? So yeah. So, you know, we're often asked for projections. Right? So but every decision is Liberty. Every capital decision is an individual capital decision. We don't make a capital plan and then blindly execute on it. You know, we make those and everyone's reviewed before every step. So what we decided to do here for you today is put together a view. Chris talked about our our investment philosophy, and I'm giving you a couple of illustrative models, two ends of a spectrum, not two ends of a spectrum because it always can go lower, COVID. Right? You know, we could be $100 oil. There's a lot of differences. But here, two illustrative models, a lowercase and a higher case. A lowercase is sort of a six year ish transition of the whole fleet to next generation. You know, the the the lower case model, the higher case model has been a three year transition to all to next generation fleets. What next generation, I mean, tier two dual fuel, tier four dual fuel, tier four and electric, and various versions in between. Right? So just to and now just to say, all growth CapEx at any given time in Liberty is discretionary, right? As we've showed, we're very, very good at managing cycles because we're very conservative. So but it's going be dependent on market pricing, market demand, customer commitments and operational cash flow. So as you look here, you've got a maintenance capital that runs in the 300,000,000 to $3.50 range for a three year period. They're relatively steady, as we know, like runs on the number of fleets. Growth CapEx, electric fleets, digifrac rollout is going to be very much dependent on sort of customer demand because, again, to build a new generation piece of equipment, pricing has got to be right. Commitment has got to be right. Diesel to dual fuel upgrades, really moving to Tier four, the next generation. Still not 100% supported by the fuel savings. Again, pricing has got to be where it's got to be. Tier two upgrades, a shorter cycle. And then other equipment upgrades, you know, going to dry add units, etcetera, and some synergies. But as you see, you'll see on the right hand side kind of what our fleet composition might look like under these two very illustrative models and situations. As we know, with all predictions, we know they're wrong, and these are only illustrative. So but, you know, this gives you some idea of what could potentially happen and what could drive the market. And the thing about that one is, what does it mean? What does it mean? I think Liberty is uniquely positioned post this acquisition to lead a generational fleet change. As we talked before, there's really two markets at the moment, and the winds are blowing behind the move to next generation fleets, fuel savings, using natural gas, a better ESG profile, right? There's a reason to move to that. One of the things we get I get asked about all the time is about the overhang of some of the older equipment. You know, we used to have 20,000,000 of equipment of old of equipment sort of in this space, and we're using maybe 12 to 15 at the moment. And what's happening with all that older equipment? Really, this is sort of about a generational change away and how that shifts out of the marketplace, you know, I think over this time period. Now we don't know what this time period is gonna be, but have a look on the left. You know, this would be at a relatively mid cycle EBITDA case, somewhere between 14,000,000 and $18,000,000 a fleet. What happens with the crotchy cash return on cash invested? As you see, you know, starts relatively similar. They are moving up in the high Ks, and they start to they start to change, right? That's because of what we're modeling in here is really this idea that there's going to be a on top of the fuel cost savings, there is also an additional small premium for the ESG profile of these fleets, right? And that that's a that's a change in earning profile from some of the older tier two diesel to the brand new DG frac or tier four DGB. And I think, really, the one on the right kind of illustrates that, really, what you're doing you're spending a little more upfront to drive greater cash flow. So you're delaying a little of that cash that's coming in that you're reaping from good operations, but investing to drive much higher future cash flow. That's the way we look at the business. You know, this business is here for the long term. We look at that, and that's how we've sort of managed our returns through the years. As you see, early cycle investment, it maximizes long term free cash generation. Strong operational cash flow, this is what Ludi is completely focused on. It enables growth and enables optionality, right? You know, we're not spending everything we earn. We're not borrowing. We're not betting on the come, as you would say. You know, this is something that's still a very conservative way we run the business. We won't change from the way we've always run businesses. And next generation fleets are really changing that market dynamic. So this is just two illustrative cases, as I said, but I wanted to give you a flavor of where we think the market is potentially going. And as I think, you know, my investment adviser would like to tell me, you know, past performance is no guarantee of future performance. But I always like to say, you know, if I wanna look at your projections of what might happen, I sure as hell wanna look at what you've done before. Right? And I think that coming back to this, it really when you look at the way we manage the business, yeah, we're not changing that philosophy. We're not suddenly becoming aggressive. This is about the way we've run the business from the beginning, and we've been relatively successful at managing the cycles. And again, I think one of the things we're most proud of there is, I would say, to attract your capital, to attract people to invest in us, we're in a we're in a volatile industry. You know, it's cyclical. So we have to outperform the less cyclical industries. Otherwise, we're not attractive, and we want to be attractive to attract your capital. And that's a key thing for us. And this is the last slide, and I'll leave you with and this is just our takeaways, as we always do, just to think about, you know, who we are, second largest North American completions company, significant free cash flow generation potential, as you've seen. I think we do the you can do the math on the back of the envelope. This acquisition was a movement in scale that I think was just done at the right time. You know, it's for the with the right people, the right technology. We're always focusing on growth with a strong balance sheet. And I think today, as you've seen, you know, we wanted to focus, you know, the team that is driving our technological leadership. We're focused on value creation. As Chris says, you know, that's how we've always run businesses. And we've provided industry ESG leadership from the beginning. They're really executing on what makes really makes a difference. I mean, we wrote an ESG report that I think is wonderful, and Chris is incredibly eloquent with it. But, really, that's been the focus of Liberty's from the beginning, and that's all about sustainable competitive advantages. And so that is the end of the slideshow as it stands. So thank you. Thank you. Oh, with that, I would like to invite Lane Byers and Ron Gustek up on the stage because I'm sure there's gonna be some technical questions that neither Chris or I are gonna be able to answer. Well, thank you again. And and I also wanna thank I'm sure everyone's doing it already. To me the most important thing today is you saw a whole bunch of members of the Liberty family. They're what make this company great. Know, it's we're a few humans. We're not the people doing everything that happens, that you saw an insight into the great humans and their attitudes and their passion that have made Liberty special. I just get the luck to talk about what they're doing. I get to do the bragging, they do the delivering. So I thank everyone in this room from Liberty and everyone on location today working every day to make Liberty special. I am humbled and proud to be on your team. Thank you. With that, I'd love to open it up to questions. We'll start live questions here in the audience. I see Tricia's hand out. Yes, me again, Tricia Curtis. So two, I think, kind of hard questions that I'm hoping you can answer. You didn't really talk about maybe you did, and you just have a different term for it, but the simul frac thing. I would love to understand, NexTier does talk about it a lot in their earnings call, what is the implications to your business? Are you doing it now? And maybe you sort of explain that with the way you called it something pumping, and maybe it's just a different terminology. And really also the sand thing is like you guys own some sand now, which is I love frac sand, love completions. But we're I think the industry is probably going to go toward local sand mining and is. I mean we have a couple of test sites going on in the Permian. Nomad Prophet and some others are thinking about doing it. And I'm guessing by year end, we're going to see folks actually mining on-site. And I would love to know those seem like two pretty big things that could I don't think are bad for your business, just a part of the business. And I would love to know what how you think about them and what you're doing with them. I'll take the first one, and I'll give Ron the second one. He's the sandman. So simulfrac, I don't know if we were first, but we might have. And in fact, the guy whose wells we simulfrac was in the room earlier today. I think he's left. But the idea is you got a whole bunch of frac equipment lined And if you can frac two wells at once, you can drive things faster. We had another interest in it, which is that if you frac offset wells at once, you'll impact how fractures grow. I used to when I was a frac modeler, I said, Fracs are like frac modelers. They don't like each other. So they grow away. They can't which is what you want. They don't go to drain the same rock. They push away from each other. So we began where you where one frac fleet, maybe an upsized frac fleet, frac two wells at once, and we relied on downhole diversion to achieve it. So that's, know, simulfrac has grown more recently. One of the reasons it's grown a lot recently is there's a whole bunch of horsepower sitting around. So to tell a company, hey, bring out twice as many pumps. Oh, hell, yeah. We'll bring out twice as. And it's more, Tricia, that a lot of simul frac today is really just two frac fleets on one location at the same time, which we've also done for years, but they run at the same time when you frac two wells. So it is a good idea. If you have a large well inventory, you can supply the water and logistics to manage it. It's a good thing, and you'll see more of it going forward. Will everyone do it? No, of course not. Because you need a number of conditions that really is a win. But if you've got a bunch of offset wells you're shutting down and a big pad and you get it done half as fast, that's a real plus. So we'll if you're reading that headline frac number, like three twenty five frac fleets to 200 frac fleets, could you maybe could you maybe not have to, you know, would we incrementally, could we see that eat into that that total number? Well, yes and no. So when you're simulfracking, that's not a frac fleet. That's sometimes it's two frac fleets, sometimes it's 1.7 frac fleets. So yes, when you count a frac fleet for activities, if every location has two frac fleets on it, well, 100 isn't 100, it's 200. So yes. And again, all frac fleets, because there's so much idle equipment, have been sort of supersized. So there's a little bit of that going on right now. Assignable frac is maybe 10%. So the two ten fleets out there really is more accurately maybe two thirty frac fleets. I think that's about right. So yes, there's an impact to it. One of the dynamics of it has been starting in a super bad market and a bunch of desperate people with a lot of idle horsepower, the benefits of it have dominantly, and in fact, some cases, more than 100% of the benefits have gone to the operators and not to the frac companies. So some of the business handling of simulfrac hasn't been done beautifully yet. We're in business. So we do simulfrac, but we'll do simulfrac when we share in those benefits. So we do do it. We do expect to see more of it. It's an innovation, but it's not this game changing, we only eat half as many frac fleets. It's basically just consulting operations. I don't want to undersell it, but a lot of what you hear is a bit of hyperbole. And I'll let Ron talk about these mobile sand mines you're talking about just to clarify. Local sand mines to us or the Permian sand mines, you know, the Eagle Haynesville sand mines. What Tricia is asking about is mobile sand mines. Here's the wells. Let's make a mini mine right here. Yes. So to your point, of course, there are a couple of them out there now. We've got a few of them out running in pilot projects. I think there are a few things you have to keep in mind that ultimately decide how pervasive this is. Number one, you have to own the surface to be able to do that, right? You have to go to a location where you own the right to dig up whatever material you're going to consume there. B, you have to be in a position to consume wet sand, which of course a large portion of the fleet is not today. You're typically not going to dry that sand out there. And so I think what you're going to see is those situations where you're comfortable using wet sand, where you have the equipment to do that and then where you have the surface. It's not a small amount of capital. It's $15,000,000 to deploy a mobile sand mine, give or take a little bit. I don't know the exact numbers, but that's the rough numbers I've heard. So I don't expect to see us with a mobile sand mine attached to every frac fleet. They're only good for about, maybe the numbers I've heard, hundred seven hundred thousand tons a year. That's basically two frac fleets. If a mobile sand mine is going to make sense, you probably need to have a couple of frac fleets operating in close proximity to that. And then be far enough away from the major sand mines that exist today that you can justify the cost of moving it there, setting it up and obtaining the surface rights and producing sand. So I think there are applications where it's going to make sense. I'd take the Northern Midland Basin as a great example. Hauling distances are 75, eighty, ninety miles. So we've got a long round trip distance there for trucking. Makes a ton of sense in my mind to put a mobile sand mine there. In the Delaware close by existing sand facilities, I don't see that happening. So I think we're going to see some of them appear, but meaningful amount of capital in what I would argue is still a pretty tight business from a margin standpoint means that it probably is a fit for purpose thing and not a pervasive deployment thing. Great. Right up front. There's one way back there. Guys, we heard a lot of great things about the company today that you've advanced in the last four years, whether it's the technology or the integration. I'm curious, what do you think is the greatest differentiator you have versus your competitors out there? And what do you think happens to the competitive landscape going forward? People and culture is the obvious answer. I think that's been our biggest advantage from the start, and it's certainly the biggest advantage today. It enables a number of other advantages, some of which we talked about today, some of which we haven't. I'd also say, John, that the partnership mentality, we have a trust factor with our customers that we're their partner. If somebody is a commodity, I had a very large company talk to me recently, I don't know why we don't do more business with you. And my I said it politely, but my answer was you're a buyer of a commodity, and we don't sell a commodity. So do we want to work for everybody out there? Absolutely not. But it's really people and culture, the way we look at the business. But what's going to happen in the marketplace today? We're still in an overcapacity situation, right? So legacy players that are not reinvesting and don't have something differential, that business is slowly going to shrink. And in three or four years, it will be gone. So I think we'll see some continued consolidation. Think we'll see continued consolidation among our customers and continued consolidation in the frac space. But there'll still be plenty of frac companies around for the long run. It's always going be a competitive business. And our hope or our goal is that we can get and everybody's getting better. Our industry is getting better. I I think that's good for the world. But our our goal is that we're going to get better at a faster pace than the others. Chris, it sounds like there's a subtle difference in the outlook, maybe a melt up in the outlook if you mid-200s fleets exiting this year. If you're holding share, you're probably getting closer to 40 than 30 fleets in Liberty. Do you have line of sight on more reactivations? And if so, how are you getting the pricing signal today to stimulate that? So for us, market share is always at output, not an input, right? So just because the market is growing the number of fleets operating doesn't at all mean that we're growing the amount of fleets we're operating. Ours is always as Michael said, these investment decisions, deployment decisions are always bottom up decisions. For us to deploy a new fleet today, it's got to make sense strategically for our business and economically make sense. So I do think we'll see 10% or 15% more fleets at the end of the year than we had running two or three months ago. It does not mean Liberty's fleet count is up 10 or 15%. Our fleet count could be exactly flat. Our fleet count could be up that. It could be up more than that. Probably not up more than that, but it could be totally flat. So no, it was not meant in any way a guidance of our activity levels. It's just sort of demand. We are working with our customers and partners to kind of bring our returns up. Theirs have already come up. It's always a lag. That's fine. But I think things are following a pretty rational pathway these days. Thank you. Two questions to hit you on, one kind of forward looking, one very forward looking. The first one, the time to upgrade your fleet from the kind of legacy and obviously maintaining pace ahead of the industry, a rough time line that you would aspire to. And then the second question, you mentioned special dividend a couple of times as a way to return cash to shareholders. How do you evaluate or how have you evaluated special dividend versus other methods? In other words, would you do a share repo? Would you ever consider a regular dividend? Probably not given the volatility in the space, but I'm just curious how you've worked through those various options. I'll start and hand it over to Michael. So the fleet upgrading, first of all, a lot of our fleet today is already next generation frac fleets. And that's another one of those things. It's very much a bottom up. If we've got a customer specific thing that wants something and the economics and stuff makes sense, we'll do it. And we are doing But there's no like in this time frame, we're going to do X amount of these or X amount of those. It's always granular, always granular, which is why Michaels were not projections. It's just kind of like, here's a doing it really slowly scenario. This is what this does for cash return and cash invested and free cash flow. If the bottom up decisions make sense to do it faster, hey, the free cash flow will be lower at first, but it will ultimately be higher. It will get to a high level faster. So it's all bottom up. So that, know, literally, it will be one fleet at a time discussion, which is both the economics of the upgrades and, of course, making sure it's never a balance sheet issue at all. And we did pay a regular dividend before. I mean, that is, yeah, at a small level through this industry. We only stopped it because of COVID. And so return of capital buying shares just depends on what's the investment return of that versus equipment versus the balance sheet versus special dividend. So that's always what makes sense. But I'll turn it over to Michael. Well, I actually think Chris just answered it, to tell you the truth. But obviously, this is something that we discuss with our Board, and a large number of the members are sitting over here sort of all the time. But as Chris said, when we went out on the IPO road, one of the first things we said is we are historically this is how we've run businesses as private people, and we are this is how we're going to run businesses going forward, right? So we've always been about sort of investing low end of the cycle, reaping cash, returning cash to shareholders. Now I think as you see, it was threefour after our first RIPR roadshow, we started a regular dividend. We like that because it sends a message, we are return of cash to shareholders. Now we stopped that during COVID. It was a very sensible thing to do. So that's a key thing, but that's a message we want to that is the type of company we are. And I think the market is, when we look at it again, will depend on share price, on buybacks, will depend on special dividends. And I think the market itself, and we talk to our long term investors, about the receptivity. And I think what we're coming into, into a different long term growth cycle, and that's a way, a key way to look at the business. Just kind of sticking with the theme of the last two questions, but maybe tacking on to it. As you think about these investment decisions from adding incremental fleets, adding a full digit frac fleet out into the field, how is the dialogue going with customers with respect to securing some longer term contracts that might undergird that investment decision? Are they receptive to it? Is are we still in such an overcapacity situation? Those discussions are that they're tense, they're not really going anywhere. Just kind of where do we sit and how do you think about securing a contract before you build? Are we going to see any contracts anytime soon in the industry? I think the last real frac contracts were signed were back in 2011 apart from one or two smaller ones recently, but just So we're in those discussions. In fact, I was in-depth one yesterday. So no, those dialogues are around. If you're going to deploy new capital into a weak market, right, you've got to make you've got to have some assurances. But you talked about the take or pay contracts in 2011, 2012 when we started. They were terrible. They were terrible because, of course, oil prices went down or frac prices went down. And in fact, there was one public company that was so proud of all their take or pay contracts. And in the short run, they made a lot of money because people were forced to overpay for services. Every company they did business with said, we're never gonna do business with you again, and that company went bankrupt. They bragged a lot and went bankrupt. And that's just not the Liberty mentality. It is not the Liberty mentality. We are our customers' partners. We have customers we've never had a contract with. We've never had nothing nothing more than a handshake that we've fracked with for seven years straight. Now if we're gonna build a whole new fancy fleet and as she as as Chris calls her, and we'll walk down the street and see her, you know, when we have commitments for that, we we will. We will. But we want a balanced commitment. For us, you know, a ten year commitment at some fixed price, we don't want that. That doesn't actually make sense. We want a commitment that makes the investment safe and strong for us, and then we wanna we don't want people are leery. Like, people also signed early electric frac fleet contracts. They took the risk of how it was going to work. They're pissed too, actually. We don't want to piss our customers off. We want to make money together with them. So we want to deliver on the technology we're bringing. We want a commitment and great economics to launch it, and then we want the long run of that fleet and that relationship to take care of itself as it has in the last ten years, as it will in the next ten years. But yes, there will be some contracts, even in this soft market, at good economics. I would maybe add to that. And I think there's an acceptance of that. I'm probably in Houston two or three times a month right now with Chris Buckley and the ST-nine team giving Digifrac tours. The level of interest is incredibly high. But I think there's a recognition among the folks who are coming to visit and see that technology that there has to be some sort of trade off there. There has to be a partnership approach that allows us to continue to develop and ultimately deploy that technology and that they need to share in that. And obviously, everybody is going to get there at a different pace. But certainly, never hear pushback from the customers around a recognition that there has to be some line of sight to some amount of work in partnership with us to be able to bring that technology to the table. I'm going to jump in with a webcast question. We have Derek Podhaser from Barclays. Digital and technological advancements inherently create a deflationary environment for services. How do you balance lowering the cost per barrel of oil for your customers but also be able to benefit from the value you create? Yes. All right. So technology and to the question, technology has definitely been deflationary in our industry. I think that's as a force itself, I think it's neutral. It's a great thing. It makes our industry better. It lowers the price of oil and natural gas. You saw two of our greatest years of cash return just below 50% cash return on cash invested. We're at pricing that was 50%, probably more than 50% lower than it was five years beforehand. So lower pricing doesn't mean worse profitability, right? It's only it's pricing and total cost relative to our cost structure. So if you drive your cost structure down 40% and your pricing go down 30%, you're making tons of money. If the pricing goes down 40%, you drive your cost down 25%, you're in trouble. So it's the market supply and they're almost separate things. One's efficiency, one's a marketplace of supply and demand and how good are you compared to competitive offers. So really, ultimately, is not driven by technology and all that. Pricing I mean profitability is driven by competitive advantage. Competitive advantage. Do we have one in the room or I can start. We'll take a room question. Thinking about kind of the split between your fleet, Tier two diesel, Tier two DGV, the Tier four counterparts, Can you talk about kind of the different factors that would go into the profitability differentiation, whether on the cost side, the ESG pricing premium, etcetera, what you're seeing currently and then what you would see in sort of a mid cycle environment? Yes. I mean I think if you look at it, we're still just over the majority of our fleet is already next generation. And north of over onefour is sort of Tier four emissions or better. And I think when you look at it, a lot of it's driven by there's a cost differential per lateral foot, right, with fuel savings. So if you're using fuel gas, you're using CNG as a driver, that's a cost differential per lateral foot. So you're that's a we can run we can actually run the same price, and we can save that fuel savings. They're more on demand compared to the higher pricing. So you get a little bit better pricing on that. A little bit better pricing, same sort of fuel differential on the Tier four DGB. That's always a key one. It depends on your clients. Some clients have a more sort of focus on the ESG profile. And if they're sitting there thinking about sort of their NOCs or kind of like their admissions, they may put a value on that. So it really comes down to the value your client places on the solution you're bringing them, less the cost that it costs basically to complete that well. That's a key thing that drives that differential in profitability. Chris, just a clarification. The two fifty fleets you expect to be active in the industry by the end of this year? And if that's the case, what do you think pricing could be for pumping? And what's are you hitting those numbers based on your conversation with customers? Or what's the basis of that forecast? Great. Well, thanks, Waqar. First clarification, I didn't say $250,000,000 I said mid-200s. So you could say the midrange of mid-200s might be $250,000,000 I mean, could be $235,000,000 It could be well above $2.50 So that's conversations with customers. That's just seeing people's activity levels. You know, again, publics are are not really, not meaningfully changing their plans at all. Oil was $50 or oil is $80. This year, public are doing the same thing. But as you saw, like half of rigs today are privates, and they've just got a different a different calculus, a faster response to price. So well costs are down, oil prices are up, drilling economics are excellent. So yes, privates are continuing to increase their activity levels, and that's why we think that's well, from everything we hear, the total amount of fleets running is likely to continue drifting up, go late in the year. So two factors on the supply and demand side. We've got a sort of a gentle growth in demand right now. That's helpful. That's a positive. Maybe even the bigger force is we've got a pretty meaningful drop in supply going on right now. A frac fleet last, I don't know, six, seven, eight years. And for people to take care of them horribly, maybe it's five years. So 10%, 15% of the frac fleet, if you don't invest, the frac fleet shrinking at 10% or 15% annually. So this year, there's a very small number of fleets being built. There's probably less than 10 frac fleets being built, And there's 30 or 40 frac fleets going out the other end. So even if demand was flat, every month, the market's getting a little bit tighter. So yes, by the end of the year, which if fleet count stays flat or fleet count migrates up to 20 or 30 fleets, supply and demand will be better at the end of the year. And Michael briefly mentioned earlier another issue, which is personnel. I'm on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank, and it is the biggest economic issue in the country right now. We have millions of people out of the labor force that were in the labor force a year or so ago and are going to return to the labor force, but they're not in the labor force today. And that has a ripple effect throughout the economy. And, so even though you've got a fleet that's not worn out, staffing it with competent, qualified people, that is increasingly challenging. That's an additional force pushing down supply of frac fleets. Based on your numbers, what do you think? How much Based on your numbers, you know, what kind of pricing leverage do you see by the end of the year? Oh, I think it's 8.74% higher. Waqar, I don't know. It's but it's migrating in a positive it's been migrating in a positive direction, and it's going to continue to migrate in a positive direction. From the wind? Yes, sure. We have a buy side question. Let's just take a step back for a second and say, could there be an acceleration versus history in the pace of decline in petroleum as a percent of energy mix due to the emerging and near religious espousal climate change initiative? So again, just an opinion. My guess is no. And the reason is just there's there's sentiment, there's opinion, and then there's government spending. All of those are blowing strongly in one direction. And the government spending, of course, will have impacts on what's going on. But, again, as as the numbers nerd, renewable energy as a percent of the total energy mix was near a 100% throughout all of human history. Right? And then fossil fuels arrived, and the and and the consumption of traditional biofuels actually didn't shrink. Fossil fuels were just additive energy on top, food per capita energy consumption, so the market share of traditional biofuels shrunk dramatically. So renewable energy as a percent of the total global fuel mix bottomed in the 1970s at about 13%. And today, it screamed up from third I don't know the future, but extrapolating, that would be my guess. That's great. We have another question. So just to get back to the nerdy numbers, what is DigiFrac maintenance per year, if you could expand a little bit about that? Less. I don't know that we'll go beyond that. As Chris mentioned, it's just a different simpler system. You're using electromagnetic induction to transfer energy, and it's just as far as moving parts, it's just a simpler process. Yes. I would say the same thing. I don't think we know those numbers quantifiably yet, but if you think about the fundamentals, we have a natural gas recip engine that's going to run at probably far more steady state than we run a frac pump at today. And so that's good for the longevity of an engine and the maintenance cycle for that. We've removed the transmission from the equation entirely, which is something that requires some amount of maintenance and has a regular rebuild cycle to it. We have a far more stable input to the power end, the actual mechanical end of the pump, not the fluid end of the pump, versus having to shift gears. And so today, if you were to go out to one of our frac locations, for those of you who had the chance to visit yesterday, what you would have seen out there is an engine connected to maybe a seven speed transmission connected to a pump. And so those guys are changing gears, sometimes under load. That introduces some mechanical shock to the system that is hard on a power end. If you've ever run an electric motor with a rheostat, you know that the wind up in power is very, very smooth. So And that takes some harshness out of the system that we anticipate translates into longevity of components. So yes, I think at the end of the day, an electric frac fleet from a maintenance standpoint is going to be lost less or more cost effective to run, less costly to run, but we don't know those numbers exactly yet. But in a couple of years' time, when we've got a few of them out in the field working away, we'll know. And for the finance modelers out there, that'll actually be split between your operating expense and your capital your capital rebuild expense, possibly a larger a smaller larger portion on the capital rebuild expense that will save the operating expense. Great. Do we have critical question, Andrew? Or should we wrap it up? We've we're hitting 03:00, so I think we have to wrap up today with our questions. But so if that's all right with everyone, we're going to wrap up for today with the webcast. It's truly been a privilege to be able to host this for you. You've really heard a lot about our culture and safety and efficiency and ESG that weaves through every aspect of our business. So let's continue the conversation. We've got the sharpest team in the business, great sense of humor, great sense of family. Everyone's going to be out here for the rest of the day. Join us to visit our Digifrac. Take come on down with us for the happy hour. And for those of you on the webcast, we thank you very much for joining us, and we thank the full team here for being a part of us, and we're so happy to have you.

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