Freehold Royalties Ltd
TSX:FRU
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2023 Analysis
Freehold Royalties Ltd
In 2023, Freehold showcased the fortitude of its transcontinental portfolio, which features a stable Canadian production base complemented by an ever-expanding position in the United States. The company celebrated a 4% growth in total production to 14,714 barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOE/d), fueled by a striking 16% climb in U.S. production, especially from a 25% increase in the Midland Basin. Canada held its ground with a stable output of 9,612 BOE/d without any significant acquisitions, hinting at the robust nature of the Canadian assets.
Financially, Freehold was in line with expectations, generating $315 million in revenue and $240 million from operations. The accomplished balance between shareholder returns and reinvestment of free cash facilitated a sustained dividend payout of $1.08 per share, translating to a reasonable 68% payout ratio. The company also cut down 27% of its net debt from the year before, showing prudence in managing its financial leverage while supporting growth through the procurement of valuable assets.
December saw Freehold's aggressive expansion with the acquisition of high-quality Permian assets, expected to boost 2024's average production by around 600 BOE/d, contributing to a 30% uptick in Permian production and a 12% overall U.S. production hike. This strategic move is anticipated to intertwine Freehold's future with leading operators like Exxon Mobil and Pioneer Natural Resources as key contributors, reinforcing the company's growth roadmap with a projected incremental annual growth between 8% to 12% in the Permian over the next four years.
Freehold's royalty lands were at the center of oil-targeted drilling, hosting 993 wells, hinting at a sizeable $8 billion in third-party capital investments—an increase from $6 billion last year. Moreover, the company raked in a record-breaking number of 122 Canadian land leases that have already begun seeing spuds, emphasizing anticipated drilling momentum for the following year.
The company sets a prudent yet optimistic production estimate for 2024, ranging between 14,700 to 15,700 BOE/d, targeting around 3% growth. In the U.S., asset growth is calculated at 3% to 4% before factoring in new acquisitions. Despite a minor contractual decline in natural gas volumes in Canada, Freehold forecasts flat to slightly reduced production at approximately 1%. These projections enfold expected transitions, such as less drilling activity in the Viking region against an increase in Saskatchewan and Mannville, along with other new ventures.
Even in the realm of new leases, Freehold perceives substantial upward potential in Southeast Saskatchewan and Mannville heavy oil, suggesting early-stage opportunities for expansion. Multilateral drilling, extending to Bakken and Shaunavon, further exemplifies the scope for technological advancements to enhance well productivity and recovery.
Freehold tentatively ventures into nonenergy royalty opportunities, including potash, with modest success. However, stringent regulatory landscapes and a conservative diligence approach have curbed aggressive moves outside the energy sector. The company remains cognizant of the rich returns from their U.S. investments which continue to be the core focus, demonstrating a strategic recovery of half of those investments through revenue.
The authority has exhaustively screened over $1.5 billion worth of deals, maintaining a U.S.-centric focus and staying abreast of discussions on the M&A front. Freehold places high value on acquisitions that strategically complement its existing portfolio, enabling the company to reap the full benefits of drilling activities in burgeoning fields. Nonetheless, there persists a watchful eye on the dynamics between Canadian and U.S. assets, ensuring opportunities align with investor expectations.
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the fourth quarter results conference call. I would like to turn the meeting over to Mr. David Spyker. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. On the call with me with Freehold are Rob King, our COO; and Dave Hendry, our CFO. 2023 was a strong year for Freehold. It really showcased the strengths of our unique North American portfolio, which consists of robust production base in Canada and a growing oil-weighted position in the U.S. Total production of 14,714 BOE a day in 2023 was up 4% over the previous year driven primarily by oil-weighted U.S. production growing 16% year-over-year to 5,102 BOE a day. Growth in our U.S. assets was driven by the Midland Basin with volumes up 25% over 2022. Our Canadian portfolio had no decline in production year-over-year. 2023 production in Canada was 9,612 BOE a day driven by consistent operator activity. This was achieved in the absence of any material acquisitions and really highlights the quality of our Canadian asset base. For 2024, we're expecting production in the range of 14,700 to 15,700 BOE a day, implying approximately 3% growth at the midpoint over 2023. Revenue in 2023 was $315 million and funds from operations was $240 million, both in line with expectations, and funded our annual dividend of $163 million or $1.08 per share. This resulted in a payout ratio of 68% for the full year. We expect to continue to maintain our current dividend level, striking a balance between strong shareholder returns and retaining the ability to continue to fund business growth through reinvestment of excess free cash flow above the dividend. This strategy has allowed us to reduce our net debt by 27% in 2023 compared to year-end 2022 and facilitate funding of the $115 million in transactions that we announced in December, utilizing the strength of our balance sheet. These December transactions were with 2 private sellers, and we acquired high-quality Permian mineral title and royalty assets in the Midland Basin in Texas and the Delaware Basin in New Mexico and Texas. Some of the highlights associated with the assets include: 2024 forecast average production of 600 BOE a day, increasing Freehold's Permian production by approximately 30% and the company's U.S. production by 12%. These assets are 85% liquids-weighted production, of that -- most of it is oil on a full basis, it's 65% oil-weighted, and that versus Freehold's U.S. liquids weighting of 78% and the company's total liquids weighting of 64%, thus providing meaningful uplift to Freehold's realized price. With the assets, we see multiple years of future upside with greater than 2,000 gross development locations identified, increasing Freehold's total U.S. drilling inventory by 25%. The future development is expected to be underpinned by some of North America's top operators with the combined Exxon Mobil and Pioneer Natural Resources expected to move into Freehold's top 5 payer list and represents greater than 25% of future gross locations within the company's U.S. inventory. Pro forma, these transactions are expected to double Freehold's Midland Basin activity with 1 in every 7 wells drilled in 2023 would have occurred on Freehold's land on this combined asset base. In total, 993 wells were drilled on our royalty lands in 2023. 95% of the wells are drilled targeted oil prospects in Canada and the U.S. Approximately 28% of gross wells on Freehold royalty lands targeted prospects in Alberta, approximately 18% in Saskatchewan and almost half at 46% in Texas with a balanced spread across other regions. We estimate that in 2023, approximately $8 billion in gross third-party capital was spent on our lands, up from $6 billion in 2022. Spending was comprised of $7 billion, about $35 million net on our U.S. royalty assets and about $1 billion or $34 million net on our Canadian royalty assets. Backstopped by the quality of our asset base, we delivered record level of leasing on our Canadian lands in 2023 with 122 leases signed. Approximately 10% of these leases have had -- already had wells spud, and we expect to see continued momentum on the drilling on these lands through 2024. The majority of these 122 new leases are made up of Mississippian light oil targets in Southeast Saskatchewan, representing about 51% of the leases; and Mannville heavy oil targets in Alberta, representing about 28% of the leases. We continue to see a revitalization of Southeast Saskatchewan light oil and Mannville heavy oil with several well-capitalized, growth-oriented junior producers focusing on these areas. Multilateral drilling has been a focus by operators in the heavy oil areas to improve both well productivity and ultimate oil recovery. With our year-end results and our forward look, we are very excited about the position of strength we have in both the quality and the diversity of our portfolio. Looking forward, we continue to expect robust performance from our assets, generating significant funds flow that will underpin our sustainable dividend, will maintain our balance sheet strength and fund further growth opportunities on both sides of the border. We will now take the time to answer any questions that investors may have.
[Operator Instructions] And the first question is from Travis Wood from National Bank Financial.
David, you touched on it a bit in your opening remarks with respect to some M&A activity and Exxon moving up the payee list. With a lot of the M&A activity in the U.S. now, how is that changing your outlook on pace of development on the lands and maybe how important the lands that have been acquired kind of over the last year or so? Has there been a shift in how you see activity picking up with some of the deals more recently in the U.S.?
Yes. Travis, I'm going to turn that over to Rob. Just to answer that, pretty active in looking at that as part of the -- how we assess these opportunities. So Rob, do you want to handle that?
Yes. Sure. Travis, so yes, it certainly has been a key focus for us, particularly in the Permian. Just to kind of put some numbers around what we sort of look at the Midland Basin, which is our -- most of our Permian production is concentrated in, that basin has become a lot more consolidated between the Exxon-Pioneer combination and the Diamondback-Endeavor combination. Those 2 operators are now more than 50% of Midland production. So it certainly is a lot more concentration under a handful of names. I think that's one of the things that got us super excited with the January transactions that we just closed just given how much was concentrated under Pioneer in those 2 transactions. Now the combination of Exxon and Pioneer is both 2,000 of our development inventory locations, which is about 45% of our Permian inventories underneath the combined Pioneer-Exxon. And I think what we've also -- we've seen this is just from Exxon's public disclosure, where they talk about how the Pioneer acreage is some of the highest quality in the Midland Basin and relative to what Pioneer's oil growth forecasts were in the low single-digit rates. Exxon has been talking about in the 8% to 12% annual Permian growth over the next 4 years, which we anticipate a meaningful amount coming from the Pioneer acreage.
The next question is from Luke Davis from RBC.
Just with respect to the most recent Permian acquisitions, can you remind me what the impact they expect to have on 2024 volumes and if any of your kind of initial assumptions or expectations have changed since closing?
Yes. Luke, Rob here again. So in terms of -- we expect the 2 transactions to add about 600 BOE a day to our '24 production. So we're sort of expecting in that 3% growth range for our existing U.S. assets plus the 600 BOE a day from the -- from our most recent acquisitions. I think one of the things that really gets us, again, excited about that deal is just we've added about 30% to our acreage footprint with those 2 transactions with really modest overlap with the existing Permian-Midland footprint that we have. So we're really kind of getting more of that what we like to call wall-to-wall carpeting across the Midland Basin. And we're -- in January, at least, we were capturing 1 in 5 of the rig activity in the Midland Basin, kind of up from that 1 in 7 number that Dave mentioned in his remarks in 2023.
That's helpful. And historically, you provided some context just in terms of the amount of deals that you've evaluated. Just curious if you can give us a sense for how much is currently available that you guys have been looking at and sort of contextualize that within the last year or 2.
Sure. We -- in Q4, we still looked at about 20 deals coming across our plate, about $1.5 billion worth of value. That's sort of on trend for the over 100 deals that came across that we actually evaluated. Saw a lot more than that, but those are the ones that we actually looked at. Most of those are still on the U.S. side, 70% focused on the U.S. front. We probably took our gas -- foot off the accelerator a little bit just given we got traction on these 2 deals in late October, November time frame, so sort of turned our attention to evaluating these and getting these 2 deals across the finish line. 2024 looks strong again. We probably -- we were down in -- at the NAPE conference in Houston a few weeks back, and just the amount of conversations and opportunities that have come out over the last 3 weeks since NAPE has been pretty impressive.
The next question is from Pat O'Rourke from ATB Capital Markets.
I'm just kind of wondering maybe shifting back, and this will be more Canadian-oriented. But in terms of the leasing activity, I think that you guys had a record year in 2023 here. You spoke a little bit to it in the preamble there. Just wondering if you can sort of unpack a little bit more granularity in terms of what the key trends you're seeing. And then I think you spoke to some of the multilateral development. In terms of your inventory of available lands for leasing, sort of where you sit in that life cycle and where the land rush is maybe inning-wise?
Yes. Rob here, Patrick. So a little more color on it, as Dave mentioned, 122 leases, 41 counterparties. The vast majority of it was concentrated in 2 plays: Southeast Saskatchewan Mississippian and Mannville heavy oil in Eastern Alberta. It's where, gosh, 80-plus percent of the leasing was. Duvernay would be the next largest amount, but that would be a lot smaller than those other 2. The nature of the companies taking the leases are sort of on that private/junior E&P front. And they've already been active on, probably importantly, translating that leasing into drilling. We've already seen about 15 of those 122 leases having spuds on them. So that's encouraging. For us, we are anticipating a rotation in our Canadian drilling results from maybe less Viking but more Southeast Saskatchewan and more Manville heavy oil. In terms of what inning that we're at, I mean, I think there's a lot more opportunity set that we see in both Southeast Saskatchewan and Manville heavy in particular. So I'd say early innings would be my comment.
I would just add to that a little bit, Patrick, that we talk about the multilateral drilling in the heavy oil. But certainly, multilateral drilling has been rolling out in Southeast Saskatchewan a little bit with a number of operators, looking at the Bakken with the multilateral, see some licensing in Southwest Saskatchewan now in that Shaunavon area. So I think this multilateral technology, that's where I think we're in some of the earliest innings of where we can unlock value. And so we're watching that closely. And as Rob referenced, we have lots of opportunities that we see on our land base that will really benefit from some of that work that's being tested.
And so I guess the follow-up question for me would be, in terms of your confidence in the productivity and the results you're going to see and obviously the challenge with providing guidance on the production side, you don't have full control over the drill bit. You're at the behest of some of these producers that have leased off you. I'm just wondering what sort of risking and sort of parameters or outlook you have in terms of when you can have more confidence in providing some guidance to potential growth there or how that kind of evolves over time here in terms of a lag between lease to conversion of forward outlook for production there.
Yes. I mean some of those 122 leases, about 10% of those, we actually had drilling obligations associated with those. So you get some perspective on it. We've kept the average term on those leases to 2 years. So it does help in terms of incentivizing the driller to either get after it or the land comes back to us and we get to do it all over again. You're right, coming out of spring breakup is really when we'll be able to have a much better feel for sort of how the operators are feeling with some recent softness, particularly on the gas side, but also on the oil side as well.
The next question is from Aaron Bilkoski from TD Cowen.
So I wanted to follow up a little bit on Luke and Patrick's questions. You talked about U.S. assets growing 3% or 4% before the acquired volumes. How do you see the Canadian production trending throughout the year? And I guess a follow-up question to that is, how much of the opportunity you just spoke about is baked into your 2024 guidance already?
Aaron, Rob here. So in terms of our Canadian production, I think we are -- there are sort of 2 things that are causing what I would sort of call a modest downtick on the Canadian volumes. One -- this is probably a lot more detail than we need to give, but we'll give it anyways. One, we sort of have a production volume royalty agreement with terminalling that is contractually declining by about 100 BOEs a day. And this is natural gas volume. So the revenue impact is like less than 0.5 percentage point. So it's very marginal impact on what matters the most, being cash flow, but does have a volume impact, and that's something that we're just needing to manage. The other, I think, is that we just talked about it with Patrick in terms of the transition that we're seeing where there's going to be in our portfolio less Viking drilling and more Southeast Saskatchewan, more Mannville heavy oil drilling. So those -- that -- those -- the lease conversion that we're expecting is baked into our '24 numbers. It's in that -- in the range that we provided. But those sort of 2 factors in the Canadian side, it's probably going to be where we believe our Canadian volumes are going to be flat to like slightly 1-ish percent down.
And then maybe just a little bit more color there. Our Canadian portfolio has been 9,600 BOE a day for the last 3 years, I think 9,620. And with that is only with modest early-stage investment in the Clearwater. And so when we look at that, even though that 95% of our drilling activity is oil-focused, those gas wells do have more of a BOE impact, although to Rob's point, not much of a funds flow or cash flow impact for our business. And so when we look at Canada, we're just taking a little bit more conservative perspective given the weakness in gas pricing. And -- but again, it's got a pretty strong history of delivering. And as we look at those leases that we've got signed, we look at the activity that we're seeing, that's kind of why we're feeling, yes, it's probably going to be another year of fourth year in a row of plus or minus that same 9,600 BOE a day with the contractual step-down in that PVR of 100 BOE a day of gas. The -- but we think that we can make that up as we go throughout the year, but those are later-in-year volumes that will come out of the drilling on the new lands or the leased lands.
Could I ask another question? In last year's annual report, you mentioned Freehold was advancing the technical due diligence on several modest-sized, development-stage opportunities, including potash. I guess, what did you learn from this process? And are you still looking at these types of nonenergy royalty structures?
Yes. We're still looking at them, Aaron. Like we've had, I'll call some really small level of success on the potash, really acquiring some additional mineral title on the potash side. To date, it hasn't been a needle mover. It's good business. Some of the other opportunities that we're digging into a little bit more on the due diligence side have fallen away. And some of it with regulatory concerns that we've stepped away. And so we're still looking at a lot of stuff, but a cautious approach. We do recognize that when you look at the returns that we're getting on the U.S. investments, really since we really stepped into the U.S., we've already recovered half of that investments through revenue. And it contributed $131 million of revenue last year and 5,100 barrels a day. We're going to be pretty careful when we evaluate an opportunity outside of oil and gas that it can compete for those returns or in the long term, really make us a much better sustainable company. So we're looking at a lot of stuff and -- but taking a cautious approach here. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves, knowing what we can invest in, in our base business right now.
[Operator Instructions] And the next question is from Christopher Jones from Haywood Securities.
Just coming back to the M&A theme. Freehold has been active in acquiring royalty assets in the U.S., but what is your view on corporate consolidation within the mineral space in the U.S.? Do you think it will play catch-up with the E&P consolidation that the market has seen? And what, if any, opportunities would this create for Freehold? And then maybe just remind us of some of the different dynamics in the U.S. versus Canada as it relates to potential acquisitions.
What was the last part of your question, Chris?
Yes. Just maybe remind us of some of the different dynamics in the U.S. versus Canada and kind of how that relates to potential acquisition opportunities.
Yes. I think that from the consolidation opportunities, we did see a little bit of that with Sitio and Brigham early last year on the royalty front. We don't get a sense that there's a lot of discussion there and nor do we view that it makes a lot of sense for us at this point, when you look at a U.S. shareholder base versus our shareholder base, which is a predominantly Canadian shareholder base, when you look at -- we're a dividend-paying company in Canada and U.S. shareholders in U.S. consolidation. At this point, we're not looking at that as an opportunity. We see more opportunity just to continue to add land like we did with these December transactions that closed in January. We can just really, really targeted on the land that we want to bring into the portfolio. We've kind of got a bit of a sweet spot to identify that we're focusing on. And as Rob referenced, our goal ideally in acquisition work would be the wall-to-wall carpeting or full coverage in the sweet spot so that any drilling activity that would happen in those areas would be on land that we have a royalty interest in. So if we think broader acquisition strategy, that's how we're thinking about it right now. So it's much more bespoke-type acquisitions that really fit specific criterias in building out sweet spots in the basins that we have identified.
And Chris, a few of the big differences between Canada and the U.S., I mean the U.S. in the areas that we care about, really being Texas, that's effectively 100% privately owned mineral title as opposed to Canada, which the vast majority is held by the provincial Crown governments. So the opportunity set -- not only do you sort of have like in the Midland Basin, where there's almost 5 million barrels a day of oil production, you also have 100% mineral title that's available. Multiply those 2 together, and you just have a significant opportunity set. To kind of put that in context, the average mineral title royalty in Texas is about 25%. Our average net royalty interest in Texas is 0.5%. So even in the lands that we have, there's another 24.5% interest that we could -- that we continue to add. So that's a bit of why the opportunity set is as big as it is in the U.S. and it's just so -- even though there's half a dozen of the public companies, they control about 2% of the overall value of mineral title that's available in the U.S.
There are no further questions registered at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Spyker.
All right. Thank you, everybody, for participating today. Good active dialogue, and we appreciate your questions. And we look forward to catching up with everybody in May on our Q1 results. Thank you.
Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.