Antero Resources Corporation (NYSE:AR) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call October 26, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Brendan Krueger – Chief Financial Officer of Antero Midstream and Vice President of Finance

Paul Rady – Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President

Michael Kennedy – Chief Financial Officer

Dave Cannelongo – Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation

Justin Fowler – Senior Vice President of Natural Gas Marketing

Conference Call Participants

Bert Donnes – Truist

Umang Choudhary – Goldman Sachs

Arun Jayaram – JPMorgan

Roger Read – Wells Fargo

David Deckelbaum – Cowen

Jean Ann Salisbury – Bernstein

Jacob Roberts – Tudor, Pickering and Holt

Gregg Brody – Bank of America

Subash Chandra – Benchmark

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to Antero Resources Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Brendan Krueger, Chief Financial Officer of Antero and Vice President of Finance.

Brendan Krueger

Thank you. Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for Antero's third quarter 2023 investor conference call. We'll spend a few minutes going through the financial and operating highlights, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. I would also like to direct you to the homepage of our website at www.anteroresources.com, where we have provided a separate earnings call presentation that will be reviewed during today's call.

Today's call may contain certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to our earnings press release for important disclosures regarding such measures, including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures. Joining me on the call today are Paul Rady, Chairman, CEO and President; Michael Kennedy, CFO; Dave Cannelongo, Senior Vice President of Liquids Marketing and Transportation; and Justin Fowler, Senior Vice President of Natural Gas Marketing.

I will now turn the call over to Paul.

Paul Rady

Thank you, Brendan. I'll start my comments on Slide number 3, titled drilling and completion efficiencies. After a record-breaking first half of 2023 operationally, we continued to build on this momentum during the third quarter. As an example, our completion pumping hours per day increased to over 17 hours per day, up nearly 50% from a year ago. In June, we set a company record pumping on average for over 22 hours a day. This increase in pumping hours per day contributes to higher completion stages per day. Year-to-date completion stages per day have averaged 11 stages a day, a 35% improvement compared to the 2022 average, and is a nearly 90% increase from our 2019 levels. The net impact of all of our operational improvements has led to significantly shorter cycle times, as shown on the bottom of the page.