Earnings call transcript: Pine Cliff Energy Q3 2025 sees strategic shifts

Pine Cliff Energy’s Q3 2025 earnings call highlighted the company’s strategic maneuvers amid challenging commodity prices. The energy firm, which has paid over $103 million in dividends since 2022, is focusing on debt reduction and free cash flow generation. The company plans to restart its drilling program in 2026 after a 2.5-year hiatus, targeting the Glauconite zone with high liquids content. The stock remained stable at $0.78, with no change in price following the earnings announcement.

Key Takeaways

• Pine Cliff Energy plans to restart drilling after a significant pause, targeting high-liquid zones.
• The company has maintained strong hedging coverage, the highest in its 14-year history.
• Asset sales in Central Alberta and a reduced dividend are part of funding new drilling activities.

Company Performance

Pine Cliff Energy has navigated a challenging third quarter with a focus on maintaining financial stability and preparing for future growth. The company has strategically sold assets and reduced dividends to free up capital for its drilling program, which is expected to commence in 2026. Despite the tough commodity price environment, Pine Cliff has managed to sustain its operations through strong hedging strategies and a flexible capital allocation approach.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: Not specified in the call
• Earnings per share: Not specified in the call
• Dividends paid: Over $103 million since 2022

Outlook & Guidance

Pine Cliff Energy’s forward-looking strategy includes a self-sustaining drilling program aimed at generating incremental free cash flow in 2026 and 2027. The company is considering a potential increase in dividends as it continues to focus on debt reduction and strategic investments. The market outlook appears promising, with AECO gas prices expected to exceed $3 per MCF in December and forward strip prices for 2026 showing a positive trend.

Executive Commentary

Phil Hodge, CEO of Pine Cliff Energy, emphasized the company’s focus on prudent management and cash flow generation. He stated, "We generate material free cash flow at these price levels," highlighting the importance of maintaining a strong financial position. Hodge also noted, "These wells generate significant cash flow," underscoring the anticipated benefits of the upcoming drilling program.

Risks and Challenges

• Commodity Price Volatility: Fluctuating gas prices could impact revenue and profitability.
• Operational Risks: Restarting drilling operations after a long hiatus may present logistical challenges.
• Market Competition: The energy sector remains highly competitive, with potential pressure on margins.
• Regulatory Changes: Shifts in energy policies could affect operational and financial strategies.
• Debt Management: Continued focus on debt reduction is crucial for maintaining financial health.

Q&A

During the Q&A session, analysts inquired about the company’s asset sale strategy and the funding for the drilling program. Executives addressed concerns regarding the reduced dividend policy and potential future increases. The discussion also highlighted the expected free cash flow generation from the new wells and the strategic importance of maintaining a flexible capital allocation strategy.

Full transcript - Pine Cliff Energy Ltd (PNE) Q3 2025:

Webcast Moderator, Pine Cliff Energy: Good morning, and thank you for joining us on the Pine Cliff Energy third-quarter webcast. We will open with remarks from President and CEO Phil Hodge. Today, Mr. Hodge is joined by Terry McNeill, Chief Operating Officer; Christopher Zack, Chief Financial Officer; Austin Newdorp, Vice President Finance; and Dan Keenan, Vice President Exploitation. Questions for the management team can be registered online during the webcast. Prior to starting, we would like to remind participants that the call may contain comments on or discussion of forward-looking information. As such, we refer participants to the cautionary statements on forward-looking information included in the presentation on our website, www.PineCliffEnergy.com. With that, we’ll turn the call to Mr. Phil Hodge, President and CEO.

Phil Hodge, President and CEO, Pine Cliff Energy: Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. For those of you who sent some questions ahead of time, thank you very much. For those of you who do have some questions, please send them in, and we will be happy to deal with them during this call. Our practice here is not to reread the press release or even my President’s message, and kind of just do a quick overview and then go right to some of the questions that we’ve got. As we indicated in my President’s letter, the third quarter was a difficult quarter from a commodity price standpoint. We’re fortunate that we had as much hedging in place. It was the most hedged we’ve ever been in the history of Pine Cliff in the last 14 years. That helped provide some protection, and therefore our realized price was substantially higher than the.

AECO price was for the quarter. I hope that you got from both the quarterly email that we send out and the President’s letter that we’re pretty optimistic going into the winter here, and we’re pretty optimistic for 2026. We have not seen forward-strip prices with a three across the board in a long time. That is starting next month in December, we already have over $3 AECO and MCF. Next year is over $3. Q1 is kind of closer to $3.50. These are all very good prices. For those of you that have been following Pine Cliff for some time, you know that at those levels we generate material free cash flow. That is kind of what we always are focusing on, is how do we generate more free cash flow so that we are in a position to be able to.

Allocate that capital the best way that we see fit. It changes over the last 14 years. There have been times when acquisitions made the most sense to us. We were very—that’s how we’ve gone from 100 barrels a day to 21,000 barrels a day. We had the dividend. In 2022, we paid over $103 million in dividends since 2022. For a company of our size, that’s a pretty incredible dollar amount. The other thing that paying down debt—that’s another way of increasing equity ownership—is by, when you look at the enterprise value of the entire company, and as you pay down debt, then obviously there’s more and more of the actual business that is owned by the equity holders and not by the debt holders. That’s something we focus on, and we’re going to continue to focus on paying down debt.

The one extra capital allocation piece that we have today, and we’ve had it for two years now, is going back to the drill bit. In our view, it didn’t make sense to be doing that when AECO prices were falling as quick as they were, because in the one area that we’re quite interested in developing, there is still—it does come with a very material and significant amount of liquids, but it also comes with a lot of natural gas. We are very cognizant of the fact of the overall economics. Every company drills its best wells first. For us to be able to be drilling our best wells into what we perceived to be a weak commodity environment did not seem to make a lot of sense. Now we’re heading into a much better environment.

We’re looking forward to getting back to the drill program that we’ve—it’s been about two and a half years since we drilled our last well. We think that once we start this program, given the future, how it looks on the commodity prices, that this will be a program that we continue to keep going every year. We’re now working on kind of the optimal locations to start the program. We now feel very comfortable that it’s fully funded, and we do not have to use debt to do those—to start that program. That kind of brings us a little bit to the disposition. I’ve got a couple of questions on that. You’ll see it was in the—we announced a separate press release yesterday that we had sold some of our assets in Central Alberta.

We’re pretty happy with the assets we’ve built up over the last 15 years, 14 years. We’ve now got a situation where we actually have multiple areas where drilling could make good sense for us. There’s a zone, the Basal Courts in Central Alberta, that we’ve been watching very closely. It was something that we were very interested in drilling ourselves at some point. After we did the Certus acquisition, the inventory that we picked up through there, the Glauconite, is just, in our view, fits our business model better than drilling the Basal Courts wells. Therefore, we kind of came to the conclusion if we’re not going to drill it, and we knew there were some strong companies that would be willing to drill it, then why wouldn’t we sell those assets, use the proceeds for our own development?

That was the motivation. It was kind of something we’ve been thinking about for some time. We knew that there was strong interest in the area because there’s been good results. Frankly, we hope those assets turn out to be extremely productive because we still have assets in the area. The more drilling results that show positive economics, then that’s going to make the land in the area even more valuable. That was kind of the motivation as to why we did that transaction. Going forward, as we kind of look into 2026, we’re not as heavily hedged as we were. We’re about 30% hedged, over $3, 2026. On average, we’re about 33% hedged at around $3 for 2026, but that tapers through the year.

It is a little bit heavier hedged at the beginning of the year and a little bit more lighter hedged towards the end of the year when prices continue to strengthen. Of course, we will always look to add more. Right now, summer gas prices for 2026 are pushing towards $3 in MCF as we speak. We will continue to look at potential opportunities for us to continue to lock in to help protect the portion of our cash flow that is going to be allocated out to our dividend and into our capital spending program. Okay. There was around the hedge program, you will find that in the appendix to our presentation that there is a—we have got a hedge kind of a slide deck in there that kind of sets out the hedging going over forward time. You can take a look at that as well.

Another question we had here come in was just about the asset sale and kind of is that going to be something that we’re going to continue to see on an ongoing basis to fund the drill program? No, I don’t think that I would look at it that way. It was a bit—it’s not fully coincidental. I mean, we could see that because of Q2, Q3, natural gas prices being weaker, that we had less cash flow than originally budgeted at the beginning of the year. It was a bit fortuitous and good luck, fortunate timing for us to do the disposition at the same time that we were starting up the development program. These wells, when you look at the type curves and you’ll see some of the information in our presentation, these wells generate significant cash flow.

Once you’ve started to drill the program, it’s our view that the drill program should be able to self-sustain itself with its own cash flow. In other words, as cash flow comes in, that’ll be the cash that enables the next well to be drilled. We’re not anticipating having to infuse any new capital because we haven’t drilled in the last two and a half years. The simple analogy goes back to my farm boy days: you need to prime the pump. There had to be an initial amount that has to be put in, and then once the engine’s running, it looks after itself. I think that’s what we needed to do here to start the program. We need to put that money aside.

That’s one of the reasons that we reduced the dividend back in March was to free up some cash to be able to do the drilling. These wells are not cheap. I mean, we’re kind of budging in around that $8 million level for these wells. These wells are significant in length and horizontal reach. They are also very prolific. When we can see the results from around the area that we have, we can see the other oil and gas producers in the area and kind of the results they’re getting. It’s pretty clear why it’s an active area. These are very, very economic wells. It is not something that we anticipate going forward. Another question we had was, what should shareholders expect in terms of free cash flow generation once Certus drilling gets underway? I don’t know, Chris, do you want to touch on that one? Yeah.

Obviously, I mean, there’s a combination of factors that are going to contribute to our free cash flow generation in 2026. It’s obviously higher commodity prices as well as the incremental contribution from the production that we expect from the drilling program. The drilling program is attractive for us in that these wells have a higher liquids content than our general portfolio. We expect it’s going to be incremental to our netbacks. The short paybacks mean that we will be adding incremental free cash flow as the program rolls into 2026 and 2027. The paybacks on these wells are around 12 months, about a year on these wells, maybe a little bit longer at current prices. As we bring those wells on, we’ll be able to generate cash flow and start to see the benefit in our portfolio. Yeah.

One other question we had was just about dividend policy going forward. I think our plan is to continue to maintain the dividend, and that’s why we continue to—you would have saw the announcement in the press release that we’ve continued to pay the monthly dividend. As we generate more free cash flow in 2026, then that’ll be the time that we have kind of a discussion around capital allocation across all of the areas that I mentioned earlier, which would be debt repayment, which would be potential acquisitions, which would be the drill program, and potentially whether or not we increase the dividend. I think all those things will be on the table. It’ll all depend on kind of just how much free cash flow we have. I think obviously our long-term goal is to continue to increase the dividend.

We want to make sure that we’re doing it in a prudent way. We’ve discussed various mechanisms in the past, whether you do a special dividend or whether or not you can increase the base dividend. I think all options would be discussed and on the table. I think it’s an important part of kind of the model we built. I think a lot of our shareholders, now that we are in 2022, when we moved to paying a dividend, I think they now appreciate receiving the monthly dividend. Our goal is to make sure that we manage the business prudently, that we continue to pay the dividend. Obviously, like I said, our goal would be to get to a point where we can raise the dividend. We’ll wait and see whether 2026 gives us the free cash flow that we think.

Makes that a prudent decision. I don’t think we’ve got any other questions. I think a lot of some of you have reached out by email, and I’d responded, or Chris had responded to you directly. I don’t think. We might have lost audio. For everyone on the call, we might have lost audio for about five minutes. Please note that. The replay will be available on our website, and the entire call will be recorded for reference. Okay. Thanks, everybody, for your time. Appreciate it. Take care.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.