Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NASDAQ:CHK) Q4 2023 Results Conference Call February 21, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Chris Ayres - Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer

Nick Dell'Osso - President and Chief Executive Officer

Mohit Singh - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Josh Viets - Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer

Conference Call Participants

Josh Silverstein - UBS

Charles Meade - Johnson Rice

Matt Portillo - TPH

Nitin Kumar - Mizuho

Bert Donnes - Truist Securities

Doug Leggate - Bank of America

Paul Diamond - Citi

Michael Scialla - Stephens

Ati Modak - Goldman Sachs

Phillips Johnston - Capital One

Operator

Good day. And welcome to the Chesapeake Energy Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Results Conference Call [Operator Instructions]. Please note today's event is being recorded.

I'd now like to turn the conference over to Chris Ayres, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Chris Ayres

Thank you, Rocco. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining our call today to discuss Chesapeake's fourth quarter and full year 2023 financial and operating results. Hopefully, you've had a chance to review our press release and the updated investor presentation that we posted to our Web site yesterday. During this morning's call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which consists of statements that cannot be confirmed by reference to existing information, including statements regarding our beliefs, goals, expectations, forecasts, projections and future performance, and the assumptions underlying such statements. Please note there are a number of factors that will cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements, including the factors identified and discussed in our press release and the other SEC filings. Please also recognize that as except required by applicable law, we undertake no duty to update any forward-looking statements and you should not place undue reliance on such statements. We may also refer to some non-GAAP financial measures, which help facilitate comparisons across periods and peers. For any non-GAAP measure, we use a reconciliation to the nearest corresponding GAAP measure, which can be found on our Web site. With me today on the call today are Nick Dell'Osso, Mohit Singh, and Josh Viets. Nick will give a brief overview of our results, and then we will open up the teleconference to Q&A. So with that, thank you again. And I'll now turn the conference over to Nick.

Nick Dell'Osso

Good morning. And thank you for joining our call. We continue to execute on our strategic pillars in 2023, proving we’re a company built to deliver sustainable value to shareholders through cycles. The Marcellus team had another strong year with well cost improving 17% since Q1. We increased our footage drilled per day by 40% and drilled nine of the 10 longest laterals in our history in the basin. In the Haynesville, we delivered strong production performance throughout the year, benefiting from improved gathering system hydraulics while our drilling performance continues to outpace our peers in the most difficult drilling environment in the Lower 48. Importantly, we accomplished these operational milestones while improving our total recordable incident rate by 40% to an industry leading 0.14 injury rate. Additional highlights for the year include; returning approximately $840 million to shareholders via dividends and buybacks; advancing our path to be LNG ready by securing HOAs up to 3 million tonnes per annum linked to JKM and recently signing an LNG sales and purchase agreement with Delfin and Gunvor for long-term liquefaction offtake; completing our Eagle Ford exit for a total consideration of greater than $3.5 billion and receiving credit upgrades from all three agencies and exiting the year with a cash balance of approximately $1.1 billion.