Presidio Production Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
May 15, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Presidio said its first dividend was declared at an annualized rate of $1.35 per share (about a 12% yield), and management expects to raise it to $1.50 per share after the Arkoma/Canyon Creek acquisition closes in early Q3.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Management emphasized that Q1 results were distorted by the merger closing and non-recurring items, including transaction costs and hedge mark-to-market losses, and said Q2 adjusted EBITDA should be about $30 million at current strip prices.
  • Positive Sentiment: The company highlighted its asset optimization playbook, saying it has cut costs through labor, compression, chemicals, and pump-by-exception routing, including a 39% reduction in chemical expense and a 50% reduction in well visits with similar or better production.
  • Positive Sentiment: Presidio is leaning heavily into AI-driven asset intelligence, targeting 3%-5% production improvement this year without capex and saying it has already achieved about 1% improvement in the first four months of 2026.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Management said it has more than $1 billion of deal pipeline and a newly announced $1 billion Goldman Sachs warehouse facility to fund PDP acquisitions, while keeping leverage around 2.2x based on its Q2 EBITDA run-rate estimate.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
Presidio Production Q1 2026
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

Skip to Participants
Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us. Welcome to Presidio Production Company's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If anyone should require operator assistance during the call, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I'll now hand the call over to Mr. Connor Fair, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Connor Fair
Director of Investor Relations at Presidio Production Company

Good morning. Welcome to Presidio Production Company's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Connor Fair, Director of Investor Relations, and joining me today are Co-CEOs Will Ulrich and Chris Hammack, our CFO John Brawley, and General Counsel Brett Barnes. As a reminder, today's call includes forward-looking statements. They are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are beyond the company's control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied on this call. For a complete list of cautionary statements, please refer to the risk factors provided in our most recent Form 10-Q, Form S-1, Form S-4 and other SEC filings, which are available on the investor relations page of our website. Additionally, we will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.

Connor Fair
Director of Investor Relations at Presidio Production Company

For additional disclosures about these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings release issued yesterday, which is also available on the investor relations page of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to our Chairman and Co-CEO, Will Ulrich.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Good morning. Presidio is engaged in the Great Game. Any student of the oil and gas industry knows Daniel Yergin's The Prize, a book gifted to me years ago by my father. His account of the original Great Game, the century-long contest for resource acquisition and geopolitical dominance that shaped the modern world. For more than a century, that game defined nations, toppled governments, and built the industrialized civilization we inhabit today. It was won by those who controlled the most oil in the ground. The game has changed. The new game is different. It is won by those who convert data into decisions into action, and action into cash flow. We call that asset intelligence, and we believe Presidio was built for exactly this moment. This moment, it should be noted, is one of the most consequential in human history.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

This year marks 250 years of American enterprise and ingenuity. America's 250th year is not simply an occasion for reflection. Our civilization has arrived at a crossroads that few generations have ever faced. The rapid development of artificial intelligence may be the most consequential event in human history, perhaps rivaling the founding of this great nation itself. At Presidio, we have made a deliberate choice about how to meet the moment. Our new manifest destiny is not simply to adapt to this changing environment. It is to lead, technically and morally. More on this later. We could not have gone public at a better time. The energy industry is undergoing a fundamental shift, one that we believe will define the next decade and that plays directly to everything Presidio has built. Look at the world around us.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Conflict in the Middle East is disrupting supply routes and destabilizing the producers who have long set the margin of global oil markets. War in Europe has redrawn the map of energy flows, severed decades-old supply relationships, and forced the Western world to confront the fragility of its energy dependencies in ways it had long chosen to ignore. Alliances are shifting. Trade flows are being rerouted. The assumptions that underpinned global energy markets for a generation are being stress-tested simultaneously. At the same time, demand for energy is accelerating in ways that have no historical precedent. Artificial intelligence data centers are being built at a pace and scale that is straining the American power grid. The shift to robotics and automated manufacturing, the next great wave of American industrial reinvention, will drive incremental power demand that forecasters are only beginning to model.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

The inventory of high-quality domestic drilling locations is shrinking. The easy oil and gas has been found. The shale revolution has matured. The next barrel and MCF of American production will be harder and more expensive to find than the last. What does all this mean for Presidio? It means that the assets we own, long life, low decline, already producing American oil and gas, are becoming more valuable, not less. It means that the operators who can extract maximum efficiency from existing production without relying on the drill bit are exactly who this market needs. It means that Presidio's business model sits at the nexus of some of the most powerful and durable forces reshaping the global energy landscape today. We built for this moment, and we could not be better positioned. Before we talk more about our future, let's talk about where we are today.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

What we have built at Presidio is, at its core, quite simple. We are a cash flow company. Our cash flow comes from American oil and gas, the backbone of this nation's energy security and economic strength. We acquire producing assets with existing cash flows. We improve the quality of those cash flows. We pay a fixed and growing dividend. We generate a long-term return on equity significantly greater than our cost of capital. We do not drill. We do not take development risk. That discipline allows us to make a simple promise to our shareholders: steady, growing cash dividends funded by assets already in production.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

This may be perceived as a novel business plan, but we have the track record to back it up, having generated compounded annual equity returns in excess of 50% per year during our eight years as a private company pursuing exactly this strategy. When we acquire an asset, we begin optimizing it immediately. Every acquisition comes with a day one business plan, a systematic pre-built playbook that we execute from the moment we take ownership. We reboot the operating culture. We flatten the organization. We push decision-making down to the people who are actually at the wellhead, the pumpers, the operators who know these assets better than anyone in a corporate office ever could. We empower them. We align their incentives with the performance of the assets they run, and we get out of their way.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

As my business partner and Co-CEO, Chris, will tell anyone who listens, come visit our field operations, and you will see something completely unique in today's modern oil fields. The result is a field organization that moves faster, costs less, and produces more. Not because we imposed a new management team from the outside, but because we unlocked the talent that was already there and gave it the tools and the authority to perform. That is, I would submit, a rather underappreciated art form in this industry, and Chris will touch on it more in his remarks. I also want to take a moment to speak to the quality of the foundation we built at listing because we believe the capital structure and investor base we assembled is itself a competitive advantage, perhaps an underappreciated one.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

John Brawley, our CFO, will provide additional detail in his remarks, but I wanted to provide a summary from my perspective. When we came public through our merger with EQV Ventures earlier this year, we made a deliberate choice about who we wanted as partners and how we wanted to be capitalized. They were the result of years of relationship building and a clear view of what a great public energy company should look like. Our shareholder base is anchored by fundamental, long-term institutional investors, not traders. These are serious people who have done serious work to understand what we have built, who believe in the strategy, and who are here to compound alongside us for the long term. Adage, BP, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Investment Management, and others.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

This is exactly the kind of shareholder base a company like Presidio deserves, and we will continue to expand our base and our float and liquidity over time. I would be remiss if I do not also mention that Presidio Management rolled 100% of our equity earned at the private Presidio into Presidio Production Company common shares. Management, as a group, is one of our company's largest shareholders. I'm grateful to all of our employees for their leadership, and I'm proud to say today that 100% of our employees, whether in the office or the field, are equity owners in the company. We are operators and owners. Our interests are completely and utterly aligned with every shareholder on this call. Our capital structure was constructed to support durable, growing shareholder returns.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

At close, we carry an investment-grade ABS, low cost, long duration, purpose-built for a PDP asset base. We raise perpetual preferred equity anchored by JPMorgan Investment Management, one of the great financial institutions in the world. Our SPAC sponsor placed 75% of their founder shares into a mandatory dividend reinvestment program or a share price earn-out structure. The sponsor is not looking for a quick exit. They are invested in the same outcome we are. Everyone is rowing in the same direction. In February, we announced a $1 billion credit facility with Goldman Sachs, the first facility of its kind, purpose-built for PDP acquisition financing. This is a capital structure built for compounding returns, and we are just beginning to put it to work.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

I'm pleased to report that our first dividend has been declared at $1.35 per share annually, representing a 12% current yield. It is, I would note, one of the most attractive yields available to investors, not just in the energy markets, but in any public market. We're pleased to be growing it already. We have signed a purchase and sale agreement to acquire producing assets in the Arkoma Basin for $83 million. This is Presidio's first entry into a new basin, a significant milestone that demonstrates our operating model works across basins. We expect the transaction to close early in the third quarter. Upon closing, we intend to increase our annualized dividend from $1.35 to $1.50 per share. This is the model working as designed.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

We acquire, we optimize, we grow the dividend, we repeat. It is, frankly, a beautiful thing when a model works, and our track record shows that it does. Now, to the part of this story that does not fit neatly into a traditional E&P valuation framework, as if we were subject to that framework anyway, and that we believe represents a genuinely asymmetric opportunity for our shareholders. Pay close attention to this part. Since our founding, Presidio has generated significant alpha through the disciplined deployment of technology on our assets. That track record was not an accident. In 2020, we formed FTW Technologies as a dedicated subsidiary. At the time, most of this industry was not thinking seriously about artificial intelligence and machine learning. We were. We had a clear conviction about where the world was heading, and we built accordingly.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

What we have built is a proprietary oil and gas domain model built on a custom ontology and trained on millions of operational data points, hundreds of hours of information-dense voice submissions from pumpers in the field, hundreds of thousands of inputs from well files, drilling reports, completion reports, workover reports, producing pressures, production volumes, and geology, to name just a few. The result is what we believe to be the most sophisticated Asset Intelligence system operating in the upstream industry today. Earlier this year, we made a deliberate organizational decision that I wanted to share with you because it reflects exactly how we think about technology and what we expect it to deliver. We reorganized our operations into three distinct but deeply integrated groups. The first is our Asset Intelligence Group, our engineers and support staff armed with AI and analytics to drive field efficiencies.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Our operations group, the people all of us in Fort Worth serve who run the assets every day. Finally, our dedicated AI group at FTW Technologies, which exists for one purpose. To support the Asset Intelligence Group and the rest of the company with the tools, models, and insights they need to make better decisions faster. To go further, we have also designated our first class of Presidio AI Astronauts, men and women who are serving as ambassadors of this AI transformation, carrying it into every corner of our organization and bringing their colleagues along with them. This is a pioneer program. This is a hard asset business that we have been successful digitizing, but we will always need the man or woman turning the wrench at our sites. Our intention with artificial intelligence is not to replace people. It is to make every person at Presidio dramatically more powerful.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

We believe that with the right infrastructure, the right tools, and the right mindset, we can multiply the productivity of every Presidio employee by an order of magnitude. People remain at the center of everything we do. AI is the force multiplier. I want to be equally direct about what we are and are not trying to do with this technology more broadly. Our primary focus is not to use AI to automate paperwork or streamline administrative workflows or generate reports faster. Those are fine things, and we are doing them, but they are not the prize. In this business, production is the prize. Revenue is the prize. Cash flow, prize. That is precisely where we have aimed our technology. Our Asset Intelligence Group carries a target of growing production 3%-5% this year without a single dollar of capital expenditure.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Not through drilling, not through workovers, through intelligence, through knowing which wells to prioritize, which interventions to make, and which decisions to take before a problem becomes a problem. Through the application of nine years of proprietary data to the specific challenge of making every well in our portfolio perform at its highest potential. Through the first four months of 2026, we have achieved an approximately 1% improvement. We are just getting started. When I say just getting started, I mean it. In the physical world of oil and gas, upside is capped. You can acquire more barrels, you can improve recovery, but eventually there's a ceiling. Technology is different. The upside is uncapped, the growth potentially exponential. The intellectual property we have built at FTW Technologies is applicable far beyond Presidio's own wells, beyond the Anadarko, beyond the Arkoma, beyond anything we have announced today.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Upon the foundation of our domain model, we are constructing well surveillance agents, production intelligence systems, financial modeling capabilities, and deal screening infrastructure, a body of work that will serve Presidio for decades, and that holds real commercial promise for other operators who face the same challenges we do. That opportunity is not lost on us. We are currently expanding our dedicated AI team. Based on the results we are seeing, we have confirmed our conviction that what we have built has significant, potentially transformational value to the broader industry. Stay tuned. If anyone is still awake, I'll turn it over to my co-founder and co-CEO, Chris Hammack, to walk through our operational philosophy in more detail. Chris built much of what I have just described, and nobody knows it better.

Chris Hammack
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Thank you, Will. Good morning, everyone. I want to take a few minutes to walk you through what actually happens when Presidio acquires an asset. The 50% cost reduction Will referenced doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen slowly. It's a result of a repeatable, systematic playbook that we have refined across every acquisition since our founding. A playbook that gets better every single time we run it. When we sign an agreement to purchase an asset, we are on the ground the next day, if not before. Our most recent acquisition prior to going public was fully integrated within 21 days of closing. It is the standard we intend to meet on every asset we acquire, including in the Arkoma Basin. The playbook starts with people. It always starts with people.

Chris Hammack
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

The first thing we do on any asset is interview 100% of the field staff. We evaluate them against a standardized framework, and we make fast decisions. We flatten the field structure, we empower the people, and we align their incentives directly with the performance of the assets they operate. The result is a leaner, faster, more accountable field organization. One where the right people are making the right decisions at the well level in real time without waiting for permission from someone in a corporate office in Houston or Oklahoma City. Next, we focus on artificial lift. Legacy operators tend to oversize their compression. They install systems for a peak capacity and never right-size them as production evolves. It's a common and expensive mistake. When we arrive, we audit every compressor on the asset. We downsize, release, or swap equipment to match actual system demands.

Chris Hammack
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

On our acquisition case study, we achieved a 28% reduction in compression expense in month one alone. We apply the same discipline to artificial lift, lowering pump depths, installing plungers on gas lift wells, reducing downtime, and improving drawdown. These are not capital-intensive changes. They are operational decisions that generate immediate cash flow improvement. Third, we have chemicals. Most acquired assets run vendor-managed chemical programs. Vendors have little incentive to reduce consumption. They are paid by volume. It is a misalignment of incentives that cost operators dearly. We bring chemical management in-house on day one. We centralize oversight under our own operations team, implement well-level tracking and sampling, consolidate suppliers, and standardize treatment protocols across the asset. Year-over-year, from 2023 to 2024, we have reduced chemical expense by 39% across the portfolio. That is a structural change. Finally we implement industry-leading pump-by-exception model.

Chris Hammack
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Rather than sending pumpers to visit every well every day, the legacy industry standard and a profoundly inefficient one, our system services only the wells that require attention. We visit the top 20% of wells by cash flow value every day, and we visit the rest only when our technology flags an issue. The result is a 50% in reduction in well visits with the same or better production performance. Our pumpers are spending their time where it matters the most, not executing routes designed a decade ago by someone who never ran the math. Taken together, labor, compression, chemicals, and field deployment, these four levers are what drive our cost reductions across every acquisition we have made. This playbook was written in the Anadarko Basin, but it was never meant to stay there.

Chris Hammack
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

The assets we are acquiring in the Arkoma Basin were operated under the same legacy models we have transformed before. We know what we are walking into, we know what to do, and we know how long it will take. I'll close with this. Will described Presidio's technology as an asymmetric upside in our story. I would add that our operational playbook is the foundation for everything, where everything else rests. Prior to AI, it was the OG alpha generator. The acquisition model works because we underwrite based on what we know we can achieve, not what a seller tells us we might achieve. The technology layer performs best when it sits on top of a field organization that is already lean, already aligned, and already executing at the highest level. That is what we are building, and it's working. The best is genuinely yet to come.

Chris Hammack
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Now I'll turn it over to John Brawley, our CFO.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

Thanks, Chris. I'll start by noting that we will be filing our first 10-Q after market close today. Moving along, let's discuss the first quarter. The first quarter is not representative of the earnings power of our business going forward, and the reasons are non-recurring and related to closing. I'll walk through this in some detail. We closed the business combination on the 4th of March, and as a result, our first quarter financials are bifurcated into two periods: a predecessor period, January 1st through March 3rd, and a successor period, March 4th through March 31st, with a new basis of accounting at closing of the business combination. Specifically, the EQVR assets acquired at closing are not reflected in the predecessor period, so you cannot add the predecessor and successor periods together.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

Going into some specifics, the first quarter includes transaction-driven items which are non-recurring that management does not consider indicative of ongoing performance. The first of these is approximately $47 million of non-cash stock-based compensation in the pre-predecessor period, a one-time item tied entirely to the transaction. This amount reflects management's investment in Presidio's common stock, which relates to how we accounted for the roll of management's equity from private Presidio to public Presidio. As Will alluded to earlier, management rolled substantially all of its equity value upon IPO, demonstrating management's alignment and commitment to the new Presidio as a public company. In addition to this, the predecessor period also includes approximately $7 million of acquisition and transaction costs, with smaller amounts of each carrying into the successor period. The next major item relates to changes in the value of the company's hedge portfolio as commodities rose during the period.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

In total, the company recognized approximately $44 million of unrealized net commodity derivative losses across the two periods. Roughly $17 million in the predecessor period and $27 million in the successor period. These amounts are unrealized non-cash mark-to-market adjustments to the hedge book as oil and gas prices moved higher during the period. Further, we executed a $60 million restructuring of our commodity hedge book concurrent with closing. That restructuring resulted in $2.2 million of realized derivative costs recognized in the period, the economic benefit of restructured hedges did not begin until the second quarter. To be clear, there are no restructured hedges providing benefit in the first quarter. This begins in the second quarter. In summary, the first quarter carries the cost of the hedge restructuring and the transaction. The second quarter is where the benefit begins.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

For those reasons, management believes the first quarter is not indicative of our performance in subsequent quarters, and that's why we decided to provide clear guidance for the second quarter. We expect approximately $30 million of adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter, assuming current strip price. Beyond the second quarter, we believe this is a reasonable level to frame each of the quarters through the remainder of 2026. With that framing on the operational metrics, our current net production is approximately 22,000 BOE per day, roughly 16% oil, 57% natural gas, 27% NGLs. Lease operating expense in the successor period was $9.47 per BOE. Capital expenditures were extremely low during the quarter, under $1 million, consistent with our low reinvestment model. Our reinvestment rate remains among the lowest in the sector by design.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

Our restructured hedge book, which took effect at the start of the second quarter, provides multi-year cash flow visibility across oil, natural gas, and NGL production, extending in places out to 2031. The detailed hedge table is in the press release. We will continue to layer in additional hedges as we close Canyon Creek, consistent with our practice of protecting dividend sustainability. Next, I'll discuss our liquidity and balance sheet. At quarter end, we had total liquidity of $48.7 million, comprised of $20.7 million of unrestricted cash and $28 million of undrawn capacity under our $65 million RBL. Total cash, including restricted cash, was $31.5 million.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

On the debt side, principal outstanding was $295.9 million, which includes $256.8 million of investment-grade ABS notes, $37 million drawn on our RBL, and a $2.1 million term loan. This leads to a net debt number of $264.4 million. Using our projected second quarter adjusted EBITDA run rate of approximately $30 million, that equates to pro forma leverage of approximately 2.2x. In addition to our debt outstanding, we also have a Series A preferred stock with a $125 million aggregate stated value, which carries an 8% cash pay, 4% PIK rate. You may also note the Series B preferred. This is a toothless preferred, and it's in effect very similar to the Class A common stock.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

Its primary provision is that it is convertible into 2.7 million shares of common stock. I'll spend a moment on our $1 billion Goldman Sachs ABS warehouse facility because it is central to how we will fund acquisitions going forward. We're super proud of this facility, and we're grateful to our partners at Goldman Sachs. The facility is a first of its kind oil and gas ABS warehouse. It's special for several reasons. First, it's not a 365-day bridge. It has several years of term on it. This allows us to be patient for the right ABS window to refinance it into our long-term ABS. Second, it is structured to allow us to stack multiple transactions into the warehouse before refinancing them into a more permanent ABS. This provides scale and limits the number of ABS we have outstanding.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

This is very important to us. We are focused on having as few ABS tranches outstanding as possible to keep our capital structure simple. Ideally, we will only have two ABS structures outstanding at any time, our core ABS and the warehouse. Third, the ABS warehouse has an attractive cost of capital. This allows us to show up and bid for an asset with money behind us without compromising the strategic cost of capital advantage ABS provides when buying producing assets. Given we are a dividend-paying company, the facility allows for payments to come out, assuming its provisions are met. This allows us to hold assets in the warehouse and still have an ability to use cash flow to make dividends. This is another unique factor for our facility.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

As we speak, the facility is being constructed from its initial terms into final documentation to provide for its first funding. Upon closing of the Canyon Creek acquisition, we'll make our first draw to fund $55 million of the cash portion of that purchase price alongside cash on hand. The remaining capacity, nearly $1 billion of it, is available to support future PDP acquisitions as we continue to execute on our pipeline. This facility was purpose-built for our acquisition model. It allows us to move quickly on bilateral deals, finance them efficiently against the cash flows of the acquired assets, and turn them out into permanent ABS once the assets are acquired. With this facility, we have the firepower to put our deal pipeline to work. Speaking of ABS, I will note that our current ABS uses a very heavy amortization structure.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

As a company, we have amortized approximately $130 million of principal on our existing ABS since it was issued in 2023. The rate on this ABS is in the mid-8%. I would note that the market is currently closer to the mid-6% for this type of investment-grade paper. Current structures allow for reduced amortization, freeing up more cash flow for dividends. Certainly more to come here. Stay tuned. Moving on to dividends. As Will mentioned, our first dividend has been declared at an annualized rate of $1.35 per share. The record date was May 4th, and we are greatly looking forward to paying our first dividend after the weekend, this coming Monday. We are intentionally delivering on our plan. We said we are a dividend paying company. We are delivering on that dividend.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

More than that, we expect to grow it. We issued an LOI for the Canyon Creek assets and after a lot of hard work, thanks, Brett Barnes, our General Counsel, we converted it into definitive agreements. We expect to close that transaction in the beginning of the third quarter. Upon closing of the Canyon Creek acquisition, we intend to increase the annualized dividend to $1.50 per share, subject to board approval. I'll spend a moment on the acquisition market because I think it's important for investors to understand not just what we've announced, but the opportunities set in front of Presidio. The addressable market for the kind of assets Presidio acquires is large, and it is growing. There are tens of billions of PDP assets currently held by private equity funds that are expected to require liquidity over the next five years.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

These are aging funds with maturing assets. Great operators who built important positions when capital was plentiful and exit timelines were forgiving. Those timelines eventually hit a wall, and investors eventually need an exit. With the rise in commodity prices related to current global events, we have seen a relative flood of assets hit the market. As a public company with an attractive cost of capital and an impressive amount of dry powder, we are perfectly positioned to capture attractive assets as they come to market. We're working on doing so and have well over $1 billion of bids in process. Some of these deals are marketed and some are bilateral. We often get asked, "What's our criteria? What are we looking for?" First, we don't drill, so it needs to be developed.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

If there's some upside, we can bring in partners, but the value we're looking for is in the producing wells. In that vein, Second, it needs to be operated. Chris talked already about how we drive value from operations. If you aren't the operator, you can't impact operations. Third, we're looking for wells with great margins but lower declines, preferably below 20%. This leaves room to improve the wells meaningfully while ensuring they provide stable cash flow over time. Fourth, location, location. We are targeting what we call the Mid-Continent, but we mean that broadly. Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding areas. These areas have large inventories of existing producing assets. When you combine these criteria, the assets fit perfectly with our business model, expertise, and experience. After scoping these criteria, when we evaluate our deal, our ultimate hurdle is economics. We are targeting equity returns above 20%.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

We won't grow for growth's sake. We are disciplined to underwrite to a clear base return with upside from our operational competitive advantage. We have the track record, experience, and capital, and opportunity to execute. That combination is what we believe will make Presidio one of the great compounding stories in the American energy market over the years ahead. Moving on, I'll briefly mention investor relations. As we gear up following IPO, we want investors to know that we are intentionally and carefully working on building Presidio's presence in the public markets and liquidity in our stock. We've been incredibly busy out of the gate, both on transactions announced and future exciting events for which you should stay tuned. We are actively working with research analysts to establish sell side coverage. We expect to announce initial coverage in the coming months.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

We are discussing our story with analysts who can tell the full Presidio story, the PDP acquisition model, the operational playbook, and the technology upside. That is a differentiated story. It deserves differentiated coverage. On the conference front, we will be participating in conferences, and we welcome the opportunity for our team to sit across the table from investors and make our case directly. The next conference where we will be in attendance is Hart Energy's Energy Capital Conference, Post Oak Hotel in Houston on June 4. Beyond the institutional channel, we are committed to building a broader community of investors and followers around FTW. Will is actively engaging on X. Follow him, @willulrich, for his views on the energy industry, the evolution of the Great Game, and ideas that drive this company's strategy. We believe that great companies communicate clearly, consistently, and accessibly.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

We're a new name on the NYSE. We intend to be a familiar one and a respected one for a very long time. Thank you. Now I'll turn it back to Will.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Thank you, John. I'm gonna leave you with a thought that I find myself returning to often. Our civilization is at a crossroads. The technological forces reshaping the world are not coming. They are here. The question for every company, every leader, and every team is not whether to engage with that change, but whether to lead it or be led by it. At Presidio, we have made our choice. We are not simply adapting, we are leading, technically and morally, into a new era for this industry. We've been building this company since 2017. Nine years of acquiring assets that others overlooked, optimizing them in ways others hadn't imagined, and investing in technology. We did that work quietly, deliberately, and with a very clear picture of where we were going. We didn't go public to celebrate what we've built. We went public to accelerate it.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

The Goldman Sachs facility is loaded. The Arkoma deal is signed. The pipeline has more than $1 billion of bilateral conversations underway. Our Asset Intelligence Group is driving production growth without a dollar of capital expenditure. Our AI team at FTW Technologies is growing. Our well intelligence platform may well be adopted beyond our own wells, maybe someday beyond our shores. And our field teams, the pumpers, the techs, the asset managers who are out there every single day are executing at a level that we believe is unmatched in this industry. We've declared our first dividend. We expect to increase it upon closing of the Arkoma acquisition. The model we have laid out, acquire, optimize, grow the dividend, repeat, is a plan we are executing on. Presidio is engaged in the Great Game. The game has changed.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

We saw that change coming, and we built for it, and we are just getting started. Thank you for joining our first earnings call. We look forward to a great many more. Please open the line for questions.

Operator

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from the line of Neal Dingmann with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Neal Dingmann
Neal Dingmann
Analyst at William Blair

Morning, guys. Could you, maybe the first question just around you've already given Johnny, you and Will gave a lot of color around the M&A strategy, but particularly notable was in the release, you talked about, you know, I think even over $1 billion that you're seeing potentially in the pipeline. Could you just talk about, I mean, are these smaller deals? You know, gassy? What regions? I mean, any color you could give around that. Thank you.

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

Thanks, Neal. There are several deals we're looking at in basin in Oklahoma. Those would follow the same liquids profile of our existing assets. We're also looking at some deals in Texas, and I'll be deliberately vague. Those are likely to have a higher liquids component, but I'll leave it there. There's multiple deals included in that number, both in basin, more deals in basin and a couple in Texas.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Size-wise, I would say you can think, you know, in kind of small, medium, large, for what we're looking at across the board.

Neal Dingmann
Neal Dingmann
Analyst at William Blair

Great. That's kind of what I was expecting. Secondly, maybe just Chris, you will just talk a little bit on the marketing strategy. It seems to me, you know, there's and you hinted at this, that there's potential maybe what you're doing around even, you know, with the gas, maybe potentially around future, around the power, LNG offtake, you know, any of those type agreements that you could possibly structure in the future.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Our gas marketing philosophy for years has been to get molecules as close to the end user as possible. As more end user demand increases, we'll continue to pursue that strategy. If you think about it generally, kind of where the upside could lay, currently we're selling about 30% of our gas to power plants for electric generation. We've seen data center build-outs coming in the Panhandle, we expect that that number would increase. Obviously the closer we can get to the end user, the better pricing we receive. When we think about LNG, our Arkoma acquisition will likely be taken to LNG, that gas.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Then for the western end of our production assets, as we build scale, that'll give us basically the economics to take out the FT necessary, to get that delivered, for LNG export. You know, over the long term, I think these flow, the flow, the reshaping of the flows that I mentioned in my remarks, you know, will, I think trickle in, you know, to, Presidio here over the coming years.

Neal Dingmann
Neal Dingmann
Analyst at William Blair

Okay. In fact, seek one last one just on the AI-focused Asset Intelligence Group. Could you talk more about the targeted 3%-5% you know, decline or improvement that you're looking at, you know, for the remainder of this year and, you know, how you're assuming for future years?

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Sure. You know, I'll give you an example of kind of the 1% that we've gained so far of the 3%-5%. This is, you know, we ran our model over our production and looked at it. Basically, the model came back and looked at it in a way and cut it in a way that we hadn't looked at before, which was around the days of the week of production. What we found was because of our pump-by-exception model, where we have limited weekend interactions with the wells, we would see production declining on a day's basis into the weekend, and particularly on Mondays, the low day.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

As that pumper was, you know, working on those wells over the following days, we would see a high peak on Thursday before running that same cycle. We were able to identify and intervene and take steps before the pumper is finished for the weekend on Friday. That essentially has flattened out that peak and trough, and the flattening of the peak and trough has lifted production by approximately 1%. You know, for the balance of it, we've deployed, and 100% of our field operators have the technology with them in their trucks every day, a well intelligence agent that we call Doug.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Doug essentially, you know, will take the production from the company every single, essentially live, and provide feedback to that pumper about where he should be spending his attention. We've done this, you know, historically through our pump-by-exception, and this is just kind of putting that, creating an AI layer onto that pump-by-exception. When we laid it, we rolled it out, it, you know, gave these suggestions for how to intervene with the well. In the beginning, and mind you, this technology just accelerates so rapidly, you know, it was, we think, calculating the correct intervention maybe 50% of the time. Within weeks, we were up to a 70% correct answer. You know, we'll expect that to continue to accelerate.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

How that feeds into production is, you know, it learnings over our entire well set. So, you know, whereas a route might be, you know, in Oklahoma, it wasn't benefiting necessarily from learnings of a well intervention that was happening in Texas that would increase production from that well. Now it is across all the wells, so that, you know, it's seeing things that an individual pumper, you know, wouldn't see, that might be able to impact production positively on his route. So as we see that continued rollout and a continued increase in the correct answer for the intervention, and mind you, the pumper always has the choice, you know, to make the intervention and suggest or to do his own thing.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

He provides that input back into the system, and the system learns, but we expect to see continued production uplift through that. It's around, you know, predictive pump failures, around earlier well interventions, around, you know, seeing trends in pressure drops that might be consistent with needing to change a plunger setting and communicating that directly with the pumper.

Neal Dingmann
Neal Dingmann
Analyst at William Blair

Excellent. Thank you, y'all.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, it's star one to join the question queue. Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Robertson with Water Tower Research. Please proceed with your question.

Jeff Robertson
Analyst at Water Tower Research

Thank you. Good morning. Will, with respect to the technology platform that Presidio utilizes, can you talk a little bit more or share any color on how much value you can identify, excuse me, in the acquisition evaluation process that you can either use in a competitive situation or keep in your back pocket for incremental returns for over and above what you might be bidding on with respect to a PDP acquisition?

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Yeah. That same intelligence tool that we use on our own wells, we're using on an acquisition due diligence right now. The way we think about it is, you know, you essentially have theoretical production from a well. You know, if the well was producing perfectly with no physical constraints, no downtime issues, no pressure issues from midstream takeaway, you know, it should be producing X. If you look at what actually happens operationally, you know, we found that it's kind of X less, 10%-15%, call it, because of, you know, those things that I mentioned, and because it is a physical reality and not just a, you know, theoretical one.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

What we think about is that distance to theoretical production. What our model enables us to do is to identify, you know, what that theoretical production should be so we can understand what the gap would be. That's something that I don't think other people think about in their due diligence. Historically, you know, our company has been very focused on the efficiency of the operating expense side, and now we've added, you know, the tool of looking for the efficiencies on the production side. We can already see interventions that we would make to provide production uplift. It's not something that, you know, we think that we need to pay way in today's market.

Jeff Robertson
Analyst at Water Tower Research

You mentioned looking at some opportunities in Texas broadly. Is the model one that can be adapted relatively quickly to a new area where you might have an interest in evaluating acquisitions just based on the datasets that are available?

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Yeah. It depends on what data is available from the seller. you know, I think we're very good at asking questions and getting the data that we need to be able to do the analysis. Being able to tie artificial lift type by well, you know, is important for us, but for some areas, you know, it's gonna be dominated by one artificial lift type anyway, so we can make an assumption even if we don't have the data. you know, we're able to, we're able to see, I think, pretty well into those insights in other areas, beyond the Anadarko Basin.

Jeff Robertson
Analyst at Water Tower Research

Excuse me. One last, if I can. The hedge book extends out into 2028 and is a little bit in 2029. Can you just talk a little about Presidio's hedging philosophy and the way you think about that along with the acquisition pipeline?

John Brawley
CFO at Presidio Production Company

Yeah. It's John Brawley speaking. Happy to. I would say that our hedging philosophy is really driven by the type of debt that we use, specifically ABS debt. In order to get that investment grade rating for those notes, we have to apply a pretty specific hedging program. That will include typically seven years of gas hedging, five years of oil hedging, three years of NGL hedging, +3 years of basis hedging. We'll tend to hedge with swaps. We'll tend to follow that mantra, that type of hedging philosophy because really of the type of debt that we use.

Jeff Robertson
Analyst at Water Tower Research

Thank you for taking my questions.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Thank you for asking them.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our question and answer session. I will turn the floor back to Mr. Ulrich for any final comments.

Will Ulrich
Co-CEO at Presidio Production Company

Thank you all for joining our first call, and we look forward to many more. Have a good day, everyone.

Operator

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Executives
    • Chris Hammack
      Co-CEO
    • Connor Fair
      Director of Investor Relations
    • John Brawley
      CFO
    • Will Ulrich
      Co-CEO
Analysts
    • Jeff Robertson
      Analyst at Water Tower Research
    • Neal Dingmann
      Analyst at William Blair
Powered by Quartr