Good morning, Eric. Good morning, Menno. On behalf of TD Cowen, it's gonna take me a bit of time to get used to saying that. I would like to thank you for joining us today. I understand it's been nonstop for you and the team since the Ranger deal was announced. I do appreciate your taking the time. Absolutely. Thank you. You know, we were actually working on the final days into Toronto, a number of days in Toronto, New York, Miami earlier this week. Brian and I just put back down here further west yesterday, and happy to be talking about the deal. Congratulations on the TD Cowen. Appreciate that. In terms of the format, we have about 45-50 minutes. What I'll do is maybe manage the questions for the first 30 minutes or so, just to make sure we get through some of the really important stuff. Then we'll open it up to everyone on the line, and you can just submit your questions through the portal. I'm already seeing a bunch of them come through. Maybe, Eric, we'll just start the conversation off at a very high level and have you take a couple of minutes just to walk us through your background, including your most recent experiences at Bonanza Creek and Civitas. Maybe you can also touch on what drew you to Baytex and what you've been most surprised by, good or bad, in the short time that you've been with the company. You bet. You bet. I have a long history of fulsome answers, so I'll try to keep it succinct. You know, just to understand something about kind of who I am within my DNA. I grew up in western Colorado, a farming and ranching family, hunting and fishing. You know, this part of, you know, oil and gas goes deep in Colorado. It goes deep in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Texas. It's extraordinarily important to society. I mean, fundamentally what we do is provide energy for society. I believe, you know, because energy is the number one factor input to food production worldwide, literally people live and die by adequate energy supplies for society. Everyone on this call, I'm sure, already agrees with that. You know, as a farmer and rancher, we were very interested in conservation all the way through. It's important to us at Baytex to continue to build, you know, a bigger enterprise, but also a better, more responsible, both financially to our shareholders, but all of our stakeholders, including our employees, bondholders, surface landowners, and all the rest. This runs through all of the work that we've done at Baytex and all of my history. Again, born and raised in Colorado. I went to Colorado School of Mines, graduated with an engineering degree. Spent the first 11 years of my career after I graduated with Helmerich & Payne. A very deep dive in the service sector, operationally drilling and, you know, casing and cementing wells all across North America, offshore Gulf of Mexico to the West Coast, deep into South Texas. Pearsall and Eagle Ford early in my career, deep high temperature, high pressure. Then later in my career, after 11 years at H&P, I went back to the Gulf of Mexico. I did two years with Dominion E&P in the Gulf of Mexico. These were, you know, deepwater operations, also, you know, blue water jackups. In my time with H&P, I had, done, various consulting assignments within Exxon, Shell, BP, both in Houston and New Orleans. So I had a fair bit of experience within the majors. That was an extraordinarily important training ground for me, technically and operationally. You couple that with the real roll up the sleeves kind of service sector work at H&P. The first 14 or 15 years of my career was just extraordinarily steep learning curve. Lots and lots of exposure across the board to, you know, all manner of drilling completions offshore, onshore. You know, this kind of set the stage for the onset of fracture stimulation, which everybody recognizes was revolutionary. I joined Encana in 2006. My wife and I essentially we had our three children in New Orleans in 2004 when I left Helmerich & Payne. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit back-to-back, and we were evacuated. My office right downtown next to the Superdome was damaged, one could say destroyed. I took my family. Of course, we had good intelligence from the Gulf. We evacuated ahead of the crowd, got into Houston. A few weeks later, we're evacuated from our evacuation center in Houston. My wife looked at me and she said, "What the hell are we doing? Like, we're both from Colorado. We're both from the Rockies. We're here in the Gulf of Mexico running around, you know, trying to escape hurricanes." Began looking. I really enjoyed the work, but I began looking for an opportunity, you know, further west, back to Colorado. Encana was growing dramatically, building the Jonah operation, and that was my entry point. I worked for 12 years at Encana. Absolutely loved the company, loved the experience they provided for me. Fabulous mentors, and just incredible experience. It's how I got introduced to Canadian operations. Of course, you know, in the Montney and the Duvernay, they had substantial positions, which I was familiar with, working there. I worked my way from, you know, kind of a drilling superintendent, manager, all the way through VP and general manager. For three years there before I left, I was running a multi-basin portfolio, five assets across five basins in the U.S. That gave me the opportunity to really gain kind of in responsible charge of a multi-basin portfolio, how to pull assets through commerciality, some which would ultimately be sold, some which would ultimately be maintained or delivered into the development plan. Then I left Encana in 2018 to join Bonanza Creek Energy. This was my first opportunity, you know, to really kind of cut my teeth as a CEO. Small eastern flank, publicly traded company in the DJ with a Midcontinent asset. I joined in April of 2018, I left Bonanza Creek in February of 2022. You know, about this time last year. Four years, we had an incredible run at BCEI, Civitas. We sold one. We sold a Midcontinent asset pretty quickly after I joined the company. That was August of 2018. Then rode through the regulatory turmoil and difficulty with regard to just the surface cultural tension that existed, exists less today, but existed in spades at the time. It helped me understand when you compare and contrast the pure play exposure that a company like Bonanza Creek as a small, publicly traded company exposed to a single play correlated or concentrated risk exposure, in this case regulatory, to the multi-basin portfolio that I had charge over with Encana. You gain an understanding about why, you know, diversification matters. You have assets in different places along their maturity scale, not thermal maturity, but along the development maturity. I learned through, you know, one of the very best development companies that has ever existed, which is Encana, now Ovintiv, about how to bring assets through, you know, exploration, delineation, demonstration and full development. Some to sell, some to deliver to the development plan. You juxtapose that to the concentrated risk that I learned about in the DJ and, you know, then apply that to the modern world today, where we sit with Baytex. That gives a little bit of, you know, kind of context around why I believe in the world we live in today, that diversification matters. It matters in terms of the regulatory exposure. At Baytex, we now have, you know, exposure to the Alberta regulatory construct, the Saskatchewan regulatory construct, obviously the Texas regulatory construct, and the ability, you know, to move capital back and forth seamlessly to press advantages that are profitable in one area that might not exist in another. That is extraordinarily important, both to the resiliency of the business as well as to the profitability. Let me stop there, Menno. That's a wholesome answer, I think. No, that was... Yeah, we just covered a lot of ground there, and you clearly have a lot of familiarity with Western Canada in the Gulf of Mexico as well, which is great to hear. Maybe we'll just cut to the chase on the Ranger acquisition. You now have two Eagle Ford assets that are more or less next to one another in the oil and condensate windows. One is operated, Ranger, the other is non-operated by Marathon. I guess the question is, what can we expect the dynamic between the two assets to look like? Are there opportunities to take learnings from one and apply it together? Obviously, Marathon has been doing really good things on the Karnes County acreage in particular for a long time. You bet, Menno. I think organizationally, we're gonna fold our Karnes Trough non-op operational oversight into our Ranger team. We've got an absolutely fantastic team, and I'll double back on this, on why I have such confidence in the team operationally and technically. It's one of the things that's very unique about this marriage between Baytex and Ranger. But I wanna get back to kinda how we're gonna do it and what we expect the dynamic to be. If you look at slide seven, and I've got the slide in front of me as I glance up to the screen behind my camera, you can see in the Karnes Trough, Southwest Karnes Trough, the 25% working interest in 80,000 gross acres that we have at Baytex in those four AMIs. This is the best unconventional resource in the world. It is absolutely phenomenal. Performs extremely well, drills well. I mean, it's high pressure, but it's, you know, light sweet. You naturally are gonna get really, really good pricing. We've got MEH pricing, which is WTI plus a couple of bucks today. Access to Ship Channel gas pricing, which someday will be worth something again. You know, this is just really, really good acreage. You couple that with the fact that Marathon is a very, very good operator. You just look in the records and you can see, they've done really well in the Karnes Trough. They've done really well on behalf of the partnership. I see nothing but opportunity here. We have, because of the relationship between Ranger and Baytex, which again, I'll double back on here shortly, but also between the Ranger team and the Marathon team, they have a long history of, you know, swaps and trades. Now that we're coupling this large AMI, you know, again, 25% working interest in 80,000 gross acres on the Karnes Trough Marathon operator, which is red, with what looks like blue to me, on the Ranger-operated acreage, we have a lot of opportunity to swap working interest, to swap DSUs. To extend the length, to just create more operational efficiency across both programs. We intend to do that. This is a real opportunity that is unlocked through the marriage of Ranger and Baytex. The reason I've got so much confidence in the team at Ranger is because, you know, I spent 12 years at Encana. Darrin Henke, the CEO, President CEO of Ranger was there. He was my senior. I worked for Darrin for years. Julia and I worked together. She's the COO at Ranger, will be running all of the Eagle Ford operations for Baytex Ranger at the, you know, at the time when we get closed. Julia and I spent, you know, I think she was there before I got there, left a little bit earlier, but we were there together for 10 years. Worked in different parts of the organization, both operationally focused. Darrin and I have known each other for a very long time. I've watched them take these assets and demonstrate that the assets are far better than most people thought they were. Just look in the records. In the last two and a half or three years, they've done an absolutely fantastic job. You know, there's a young man that works there. His name is Taylor Young. I've known Taylor for a very long time. There's a young man that works within Juniper's organization, Garrett Chunn. I've known Garrett for a very long time. I've known Eddie at Juniper as well for a long time. This marriage, there's fabric that goes across the relationships that allows us, you know, to have deeper than the VDR, deeper than all the detailed kind of private data that you get through this kind of evaluation. There's a deep understanding that they have of the asset, and I don't think there's any outside company who understands the Ranger assets as well as Baytex does. When I joined Baytex, back in November, the first question I asked is, who are we interested in, and what are we interested in doing from a corporate development perspective? The team had a model built that they had been tracking, both financially and operationally for years, using public data updated every quarter. I also had a model that I built this summer, my model wasn't nearly as good, as the team's model. When we brought these together, you know, we were able to get a real jump on it. That's why in five short months, we were able to get to where we are today because I had a deep understanding and confidence in the assets, but more importantly, the team, Darrin, Julia, Taylor, and all the rest that, you know. Rusty, for example, I've known for a long time. Very, very good team. That confidence was inspiring to me and by proxy, inspiring to our team. Then the deep dive, we just kept finding opportunities to be more encouraged. So, you know, that's the double back I've been promising on the team. And it goes a long way, I think, to understanding why we could react so quickly. When you think about the differences between the Marathon-operated and the Ranger-operated assets, like what would be sort of the top three major sort of differentiators when you look at the two asset bases? Yeah. You know, the Karnes Trough, particularly south of the Graben feature, which is clearly a seismic feature. You can see the Karnes Trough acreages that is Marathon operated, we're non-op in, is just south of that. It spans volatile oil, gas condensate, and gets a little gassier to the southeast as you move kinda down dip in the Gulf Coast basin. It's quiet, meaning it doesn't have a lot of seismic complexity or geophysical complexity that you would see, you know, in terms of the structure in the subsurface. Again, south of the Graben feature. The Graben feature itself is very noisy and busted up. If you get south of it, where this red set of polygons, it's a little bit quieter. They've got a lot of understanding, a lot of history in development there. As you move on trend to the northeast, it gets a little bit more seismically active, meaning it's a little bit more fractured. There's more faulting. The team. This is one of the things that I really credit the Ranger team, particularly in the last couple of years, to have done a fantastic job reprocessing the 3D seismic. Understanding at a very, you know, kind of deep and detailed level what those structural features look like and how to navigate the structural features. You know, sometimes you can drill right through them. There's nothing but a bit of, you know, fault gouge, and you emerge on the other side, you can cheat the fault and drill longer. In other cases, you know, the faults can be more problematic. The team has done an extraordinary job in building out the data set and how to navigate these. They've shown it to us. We're very confident in it. You know, I've drilled in fault and in fractured zones and horizons throughout my past. There's an established science to doing it, but you've got to have a good operational understanding. This Ranger team does. They've demonstrated in the last couple of years. I would just point to yesterday's release. You know, the Ranger team just released a 3,000 BOE a day IP30 well. 3,000 BOE a day. Now, that is phenomenal. When you look at the performance improvements they've put together, quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year in the last couple of years, they're really unlocking the potential of this resource. I think that had we waited a year or two, what would have happened is everyone would have recognized that the team was unlocking the potential, and we wouldn't have been able, you know, to sort of buy this asset, this team, and merge these two entities together in a constructive way we have here at such an accretive price to the Baytex shareholders. I think that's really important on the timing. We had a unique opportunity that we could react fast because of the confidence in the models and the confidence in the team. Also I think we got such a fair price for the buyer because, you know, we saw what the world will see in just a few short quarters. I think we were able to see it before the market saw it, and we're able to sort of buy that opportunity. I think primarily it is two things. It's the fractured, faulted nature, which if you can navigate the faults well, which we're confident we can, you know, the stress environment creates better fracture stimulation performance, and I think the 3,000 BOE a day well really demonstrates that. It also tends to sit just a little bit up structure, so disproportionately liquids oriented. We've got more black oil, volatile oil, and gas condensate on Ranger lands, and you can see that. Again, I'm sort of staring at slide seven. You see the crude oil mix and the total liquids mix in red is kinda 59% and 77%, respectively on the MRO-operated Baytex standalone lands. You see those same two numbers are 72 and 87. It's higher on the Ranger standalone lands. Of course, today, liquids weighting is more profitable. This gives us the opportunity to move capital around across gas and oil, across different parts of both the operated, and hopefully, you know, having, you know, some opportunities to influence Marathon about how they capitalize on the asset that's non-operated as well. Let me stop there, Menno. Sure. No, that was very thorough. Maybe, you and I were chatting about this before we got this fireside underway, yeah, last week was a very busy week on the Baytex side of things. Had a lot of different conversations with a lot of different people. I had a number of people suggest that this acquisition has negative read-throughs for the rest of the portfolio. Meaning that, you know, perhaps some of your other assets aren't as competitive as previously thought or lack the running room on drilling inventory. What, how would you respond to that? Yeah, I think it's a reasonable reflex, right? People, you know, will often look at acquisitions or mergers as, you know, some sort of judgment on the existing portfolio. I would say that that's a decent reflex, but it's, but it wouldn't be the right read-through. I'm looking at slide nine here. What I wanna point out is the quality of our existing portfolio is absolutely fantastic. Again, I'm staring at slide nine on the lower left panel. This relative IRR is a function of 2P reserves on the X-axis. You see on the left your standalone Baytex inventory. These are all run at $75 TI. You see on the left there, you've got kind of a steep collection of assets. That's at the Y-axis. That's our Clearwater at Peavine. I don't have to tell anybody how spectacular that is. At $75, it's, you know, generating, you know, 300%+ rate of return. In the first 18 months of ownership, it's paid back its entire acquisition value and upfront development capital. Over the next decade of operations, Clearwater at Peavine will generate CAD 1 billion of free cash flow over that decade. You know, if we could do nothing but Clearwater at Peavine across our entire, you know, $1.2 billion of CapEx per year, we would. We can't. It's, you know, right now operating in the 12,000-15,000 barrel a day range, and we believe that's the responsible place to operate. We'll push it harder if we can, but we want to be very transparent with all of our stakeholders, our shareholders, our landowners, you know, our royalty interest partners, because, you know, people live on these lands in which we operate. I've learned this over 30 years of operating in the U.S., Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, in New Mexico, it's Jicarilla Apache and Navajo. Obviously, you know, native relationships with the native peoples in Canada is something that the Baytex team has a lot of experience in. We didn't really have to tell each other how to do it. I think we all understood that being a responsible operator and sort of managing our commitments for pace of development within our headlights and our landowner relations is extremely important. That's why we are continuing to deliver, you know, in this kind of 12,000-15,000 barrel a day plateau. And that is just the responsible way to operate. As you look at the next group down, that's mostly the Karnes Trough, and that's our Marathon Oil-operated interest. You see just to its right is kind of the top 40% or 50%, let's call it 50% of the opportunities on the, you know, newly merged Ranger Oil lands. With the Ranger team and all of their operating and technical capability, you can see that those assets perform, you know, the top of the assets perform in line with the Karnes Trough, and they step down a little bit at $75 as a WTI price. You get into that kinda center orange block. You've got, you know, your Duvernay assets, that are kinda standalone Baytex. Viking assets, on both the left and the right. We've got Lloydminster on the left. The point of this is to say, as you continue to work your way through these blended groups of both Ranger assets and, both our heavy oil and our light oil assets in Canada, they mix very well. You can see when I, when I go through the capital allocation, you'll see that we're not diverting capital from Canada. We'll spend CAD 600 million in the four-quarter period after close on Canadian assets. Or I guess more, more clearly on our Baytex standalone assets, which would include, you know, the, Ranger lands. Or sorry, the Baytex, Marathon-operated lands. In addition to that CAD 600 million on our Baytex standalone lands, we will also spend another CAD 600 million on the Ranger merge lands. What we've effectively done through this merger is we have doubled the size of our opportunity set to deliver, you know, on average 85% or 90% returns within the portfolio at a 50%-55% reinvestment rate. We're doing so with 12% or 13% weighted average cost of capital through the merger, if you think about just kinda 50/50 debt and equity use to merge. We bought 12-15 years of, I don't know, 75%-95% returns. To me, that's just a really, really compelling opportunity. At 75%, you can see the step down, you know, the blending of Baytex standalone, Ranger standalone, Baytex standalone, Ranger standalone, and so on, as you move your way through the skyline plot. One of the things that I think is so important for the investment community and to understand is this is also a defensive asset. We talked about MEH pricing, you know, TI plus. You look to the right, if you run this same portfolio at $55 TI, you still see the Clearwater up Peavine on the left. You still see the Karnes, but you see how the group of blue boxes, they compress, and they move to the left. What that means is it's effectively a defensive asset. With prices go to $55, these assets are more profitable in our portfolio relative to the entire portfolio. As prices continue to go down, this asset continues to deliver free cash flow even deep into the $40s. What we have now at Baytex post-close is we have this defensive set of assets in South Texas with, you know, MEH pricing. You've got defense to the bottom or low TI price, and you've got all this exposure, which we're not diverting opportunities from, that has torque to the upside. Now you have more dimensionality, more ability to both protect the balance sheet, protect the business, protect shareholders, protect free cash flow, and the return of capital in a defensive asset, but also maintaining all the torque that our heavy oil generates to the upside. When you couple that with the defense against, you know, kind of concentrated risks that we talked about earlier, with regard to the regulatory diversification, we now have heavy oil, light oil, both in Canada, light oil along the Gulf Coast, and we've got, you know, multi-basin exposure to regulatory. This is just a much more durable and resilient set of assets, and company. At the same time, we can deliver on, you know, accretion basically all the way through the financial metrics from, you know, unit revenues all the way through operating cash flow per share, free cash flow per share. I mean, 20% accretion per share all the way through our return on capital. If you look at our return on capital on a long-term basis, over the next four years of our five-year plan, every shareholder, for every share they own, for every quarter they own it, they will have 23% more money in their pockets just as a result of this transaction alone. Let me stop there, Menno. If we pivot back to the Ranger assets themselves and the development plan, I think you talked about a 39% decline rate. I think you also talked about going from three rigs to two rigs. Can you just elaborate on what you have planned on those lands for the next, call it, 18 months, and how you would expect that to impact the corporate decline, which I believe on a blended basis is about 34% or 35% right now? Yeah. You're right. 34% on the Baytex standalone. Of course, we've been underway on a reasonably modest kinda 3%-4% development pace or growth pace. That's the way we're gonna operate the Ranger lands as well. Now the Ranger team has been growing, you know, the Ranger standalone lands, much more significantly than that, running three rigs at times, even four rigs at times. We're gonna pull back, and we're gonna run two rigs level-loaded across the operation. Julia, Darrin, and their team have helped inform us on this. It was a subject of lots and lots of work. We really like this kind of, call it low to mid-single digits production growth, 50-ish percent reinvestment rate. That'll take CAD 600 million to run those two rigs with a, with a stimulation crew, you know, right at the tailgate. We'll maintain a working DUC inventory, not building a whole bunch of DUCs in inventory. It's capitally efficient. You know, it runs right on par with the capital efficiency of our standalone. Not quite as good because fracture stimulation, you know, is a little bit more, you know-Capital in the numerator, the wells are absolutely phenomenal in the denominator of that capital efficiency calculation. It competes really well. On an operating cash flow basis, it is definitely accretive to the overall cash cost structure of the Baytex business. The margin's a little bit better on the whole when you merge them together. The operating cash cost structure is lower on the whole, and the capital efficiency is just a little bit higher or slightly worse when you merge them all together. The point of this is, on the whole, this is a far better business. Now on declines, the 39% decline rate is certainly running the business faster, as the Ranger team has done. As we moderate that pace of development, that's gonna come down, you know, call it, I'm gonna say 37% is kinda what we're thinking, 36%-37%, as we bring that down to the 3%-4% production growth with two rigs and a frac crew. When you blend that with the standalone Baytex at kinda 33%-34%, you're gonna end up in the 35%-36% kinda blended average decline rate. Given, you know, the operational cash cost structure, the margins, and the free cash flow this combined business presents, with the opportunities to really flex across, you know, such a, such a large attack surface, we believe we're gonna be able to make a lot of improvements along the way across the business. Whether that's TMX coming online and basis diffs compressing or whether that's NEH coming on or Freeport connecting, our gas to, you know, markets outside the North American continent, I think there are tons of opportunities to unlock here. If the accretion is not good enough, you know, at 20%-25% across all the cash metrics and over a zero to four -year period, then there's a ton of opportunity to continue to unlock, given this opportunity set. We'll continue to develop this thing over time, Menno, at, you know, 3%-4%, 50-55 net wells, CAD 600 million. Very levelized, very deliberate, with a team that is second to none. I did promise to open up the line to questions. I've got a bunch of them, so I'm going to consolidate them a little bit. Some of them relate to some of the transactions that you completed, Bonanza Creek and Civitas. You've got one across the line at Baytex. How should we be thinking about your appetite for additional M&A going forward? Is this a one and done? I guess the other piece of that I'm just, again, trying to consolidate questions here. How are you thinking about the Marathon-operated assets? I know under the prior leadership, there was some openness to potentially unloading that if the right price or the right offer were made. How are you thinking about all of that post Ranger? Yeah. Let me go back. I wanna unpack the BCEI, Civi, and the M&A piece. One should never do an M&A for the sake of M&A. Bigger for the sake of bigger is not in the interest of public shareholders. However, there's a very clear correlation to market multiple expansion as E&P companies get bigger. If you measure that in terms of EV or you measure that in terms of, with a healthy balance sheet, in terms of market capitalization, either way, it's very, very clear there's a positive correlation to scale. That is the market multiple. The market will deliver a better multiple, and there are fundamental reasons why that's the case, right? It has to do with scale and investment-grade credit and the lower cost of capital that comes both on the debt and the equity side of the business when one reaches investment-grade scale and investment-grade credit quality. All of those are aspirational goals, we are one big step closer to all of those things. Those accrete straight through to the shareholder because a lower cost of capital means a few percentage points of additional return to the shareholders. When you think about kind of M&A, it's bigger for the sake of better, and I think we've printed a very, very good deal here that demonstrates how better looks. You know, it's not just scale, it's also accretion on every metric, it's a more durable business at both low prices and high prices. You think about, you know, how one goes about doing that. In April of 2018, the first thing we did at Bonanza Creek is we disposed of the Midcontinent assets. It was a reasonably small transaction in an absolute sense, but given the scale of that company at the time, you know, it was a $500 million publicly traded small cap, in, you know, primarily in the eastern flank of the DJ with these MidCon assets. We got a premium price out of the MidCon assets, and it's an interesting story, but I won't bore you with it today. That was August of 2018. Of course, the regulatory construct sat in, and it was tough on all public companies in the DJ. What we did is recognize that outside competition, outside capital won't be competing in the DJ given the regulatory construct, and we could use that to our advantage. Because it reset the table, and we had the opportunity to take our balance sheets and net cash with that transaction, we did so. We really invested hard in our assets, and we demonstrated that the eastern flank of the DJ, while objectively maybe in the bottom half of resource quality, you know, as you measure it in terms of, let's say, re-resistivity as a simple measure of resource quality. Over the four-year period, out of all the operators that were operating in that four-year period, from the day I started to the day I stepped down, objectively, the kind of bottom half objective resource quality, punched at the very top of the pack. Top decile. Second only to Noble, and buoyed by their absolutely large scale and top quality resource, you know, to, you know, BCEI's West. Okay, put that in context. You take, let's call them tier two assets. We spent, you know, time and energy in helping unlock the resource quality and deliver basically the concept that was if you stimulate right and you take a systems engineering approach to reservoir pressure management, all the rest that had to be done through the Bonanza Creek apparatus, you could deliver top decile performance out of tier two assets. We did that. It's in the record. Over time, what that did is it allowed us, one, to gain a great deal of confidence in the shareholder and investment community. Two, through the balance sheet strength, when COVID hit, others weren't as strong in the basin and there was no outside capital to compete with. It became effectively a reverse auction. We acquired, you know, it was an acquisition by merger of HighPoint, at a discount to their PDP. We worked directly with their bondholder group to do so. That was a one of a kind toggle mechanism through that deal. Public merger. We doubled in size there, we doubled again. We closed that in April of 2021. We announced the 50/50 MOE with Extraction in May of 2021. Before we filed the merger proxy statement, we folded in Crestone Peak as a joint acquisition. Again, another one of a kind deal. Closed those in November of 2021, doubling the size again. You double it, you double it again. Moving in toward the end of the year, post-closing, we made a small acquisition of Bison that was a private entity. Coincident with that announcement, I stepped down. Personal reasons. You know, four years of M&A and fighting through regulatory, you know, was enough to make me wanna take a breather. I did in February, stepped down. Absolutely love that business. Created a great deal of value. We took that company from, let's just say round numbers, $500 million market cap to almost $6 billion in February of 2022. Did so without leverage. Now, looking back, leverage could have amplified the total shareholder returns even more. If you look back from the day I started to the day I ended, it wasn't because of me, but if you just mark that time, the total shareholder return on an absolute basis for BCEI over that almost four-year period, was the highest of any E&P company, large or small, any basin, anywhere in the U.S. That includes Baytex, and it includes everyone, including Magnolia. Magnolia was a SPAC at the time I started. That's a phenomenal company. Really rewarded well with its market multiple. That's the only company to the left on that TSR plot, and it was something like 30 companies that existed at the time. Any investment banker can do that work for you, but I think that's a demonstration. 10x-12x growth in market capitalization without leverage, you know, the highest total shareholder return growth over the same four-year period. I'm confident, I'm absolutely confident that Baytex is starting with a better set of assets in a better place. If you apply the same kind of application of disciplined M&A, you know, bigger for better's sake, along with the fact that you can create advantages across the larger portfolio, I think we stand to do quite a bit better in terms of just what Baytex is capable of. I'm really excited to get the Ranger team together with the Baytex team and unlock the potential in the people, unlock the potential in the resource. I couldn't be more confident. Let me, let me stop there, Menno, and, you know, feel free to kinda auger in any part of that. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, we went through that exercise as well of just sort of mapping out the outperformance of Bonanza Creek, and it was, to your point, pretty stunning. I'll just touch on sort of the cross-border business model. There's not too many companies that have that. It's yourself, it's Ovintiv. Enerplus had that. Now they're effectively out of Canada, solely focused on the U.S. You just relisted on the NYSE. Ovintiv chose to re-domicile to the U.S. Sort of a lot to speak to there. More broadly, how are you thinking about the advantages versus the disadvantages of the cross-border model, and how committed are you to that? I guess my question is that an output, or that's something you're actively, That you expect to actively pursue longer term? Yeah. Let me say at the outset, we have no plans to re-domicile. There's no reason why we would pursue that. We absolutely love, you know, the headquarters office in Calgary. I think listing on TSX and NYSE is absolutely the right thing to do in terms of unlocking the largest possible investor base. Also initiating the dividend opens up, you know, a whole world of kind of income-oriented institutional investors. Also it's just the right thing to do as one buys back shares and hopefully, you know, begins to flirt with one's kind of intrinsic value. You wanna have a dividend that you can not only grow over time, also have a dividend that you can kinda lean on in the event that you need to pull back from your share repurchase plan. It would be a good problem to have if one was priced at the point of intrinsic value. Right now, we're disproportionately shareholder, or share repurchase oriented, but we intend to grow the dividend over time. It opens up a lot of shareholders on both sides of the border. We like that. We think the NYSE listing does as well. We like that. We love our headquarters in Calgary, and we love our assets in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. When you put these things together, I think it stands up on its own. Just the dimensionality, and the opportunities that we can, that we can push and probe and press. Like today, you know, the phenomenal capabilities of the team, and rolling the, you know, the industrial logic of the Marathon-operated assets into the operated team with the premium pricing to the south. You look at the torque that the northern assets, you know, provide particularly heavy oil with the performance at Peavine, but also our exposure, you know, at Lloyd and a lot of heavy oil exposure in the broader Peace River. Our exploration program across the Clearwater fairway. We have tons of opportunities to the north. As TMX compresses, you know, helps to compress the basis diff, we were very conservative in how we ran our basis diff in these models. It was CAD 17.50. We're already above that, and we haven't added any of that to the kind of the narrative around free cash flow. At $80, this business prints $1.2 billion a year of free cash flow, and that's assuming a 1750 basis. As that basis compresses, those numbers go up. If you like $90 better as the WTI, then that free cash flow goes to CAD 1.7 billion. And half of that will go to pay down, and half of that will be allocated to return of capital until we get to our next milestone, at which point we step up our return of capital even more. I think the time has kind of come where, you know, acreage, you know, acreage acquisitions have mostly run their course in North America. The positions are all held, and inventory is kind of the name of the game over the next, I'm gonna say, zero to five years. The world is gonna come to realize it's short oil. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in the quarters and the years to come, the world is gonna recognize it's short oil. The world is also gonna recognize that it's North America that can answer that. We have short cycle capital. We have a very strong regulatory apparatus. We have, you know, the best and most fluent investor base in the world, it's North American oil that can answer that call. We will continue growing at 3% or 4% per year production growth and generating a lot of free cash flow to the benefit of our shareholders over time. I think this asset base stands on its own in terms of its accretion, in terms of the free cash flow it can print, in terms of the structure of the return of capital framework, and in terms of our opportunities to move capital north and south of the border with very limited friction through a multitude of commodity exposure, heavy oil, light oil, NGLs, natural gas, and obviously across multiple price points, MSW at Edmonton, WCS heavy, as well as MEH Houston and Ship Channel Gas. We've got a lot of opportunities to really take advantage of the upside. Opportunity is the name of the game, inventory is where you're gonna get it these days. I also think that, you know, scale is gonna matter a lot in terms of kinda how one capitalizes. Very few companies our size sit on 1.7 million acres of oil-weighted exposure, and that's what we've got. It's a real, like, this is a sleeping giant. I'm convinced of it. We can print a lot of cash flow along the way, so it's not like you have to wait if you're an investor, you know, for three to five years. We're doing it tomorrow. As soon as we close this thing, we're gonna step up. Yeah. I'm getting a couple of questions on sort of the remaining steps that need to be taken to get this deal across the line. Is there any risk in deal closure? Well, there's always some risk. We've worked very hard to structure this deal. Again, I mentioned that I've known Eddie for a long time. I've known members of his team for a long time. I've known the Ranger team for a long time. On both sides, they feel very good. Obviously, unanimous support from both boards. You know, the other thing that's unique about this is, you know, the Juniper Capital ownership of Ranger as a standalone entity was 54%, and the threshold for shareholder votes in the States on a deal like this is 50% + 1%. Juniper can and has signed a support agreement to deliver their shareholder vote in favor of this deal. On our side, you know, we intend to deliver our shareholders, and we believe this deal stands on its own. I think the shareholders over time are gonna grow to love what it stands for. There's nothing not to love except the emotional reaction to, you know, the idea, which I think we've largely worked through because the merits of this deal both low price durability, high price torque, as well as opportunities to create a more durable framework across regulatory time and space, commodity time and space, and pricing and markets time and space. It's a phenomenal opportunity, and I think the deal stands on its own. I'm quite confident we will deliver our shareholders. I'm quite confident that the Ranger shareholders will deliver a favorable vote. Steps along the way, you know, there's an antitrust process called Hart–Scott–Rodino, the HSR clearance. I've never had it stand in the way, so knock on wood, it won't stand in the way of this deal. I don't see how it could from an anti-competitive perspective, but that is a regulatory hurdle that needs to be cleared. Obviously, we have regulatory filings as two public companies on both sides of the border. You know, we've got the shareholder vote, but we have committed financing. We have a strong bank group, and it's an incredible asset package combined. I mean, two companies that are great standalone, but as a combined company, far better than either company could be standalone. I couldn't be more excited. I just wanna keep, you know, delivering the message to folks so that they can understand more and more. I'm happy to keep doing these, Menno, as you get more questions. Okay, yeah. Maybe we'll just continue the rapid fire here. This is a fixed income question. Could you, what are the interest rates on the new credit facilities, for the acquisition, revolvers, bridge, et cetera? Chad Kalmakoff is far better to have this conversation. Whoever asked that, Menno, please ask him to call, you know, through Brian, through the RIR or through you and your team. Okay. Chad Kalmakoff is our CFO. What I will say is our credit facility is a non-RBL-based. It's a covenant-based credit facility, so it doesn't have six-month redeterminations on reserves. It's not like the U.S. facilities, number one. Number two, it's being expanded, and it's a SOFR Plus, so it's variable. SOFR is the new version of LIBOR. It's a SOFR Plus facility. As everyone knows, you know, cost of capital is going up on the back of all the, you know, central banks around the world raising interest rates. That will go up. I think it's SOFR Plus 200 basis points, but Chad is far better. You know, maybe it's 175. Again, Chad will have the right answer on that. It's a SOFR-based facility, and that's going up. In absolute terms, some of it's gonna be financed at SOFR Plus, you know, up a small bit. Some of it's going to be financed with a combination of a term loan and then committed bridge financing to a high-yield offering. We intend to, over the next couple of weeks, start getting, you know, really busy around the high-yield offering. That will be something that, you know, Chad is going to lead along with banking colleagues. You know, there will be a lot more time to talk about the financing and the cost. I think one could expect that today, in the world we live in, that high yield might go for 9%. I'm guessing so, you know, take that for what it's worth. You're getting that from a drilling engineer, not a finance guy. I think, you know, a new high-yield issue in today's world, you know, five-year no call two or something maybe a touch longer than that, would probably go for nine. You know, our grid is probably notionally at, let's call it six and a half in terms of our, maybe seven in terms of our facility. When you look at those together, that's how I kinda arrive at this notional construct of 8% cost of debt. You look at the free cash flow yield, and that's, let's call it 16%, maybe 20%. For round numbers, you know, this is how we get to, kind of the weighted average cost of capital used to merge the two entities and finance, the deal against 12-15 years of 75%-95% returns. Go ahead, Menno. Next rapid fire. Yeah. The, we'll kinda wrap it up in the next five minutes here. I think I promised you 45 minutes, and we're running up on 55 minutes. It's all on me, my fault. Yeah, no. Hedging. Is there, is there any desire to maybe lock in the payout period on this acquisition through hedges beyond what you have on the books right now? Yes. We do intend to layer in puts, and those puts will be set, you know, I'm just gonna say notionally again. It's a, it's a team, it's a combined team of very smart folks, including a lot of input from our board on how we set these. We intend to layer in puts notionally at about $60 WTI, layering those in over time. We intend to also layer in calls probably a little bit further out in time. The intention here is to separate the puts and calls so that they are not necessarily a cashless caller. They'll appear as though you're setting up a caller structure, but the duration and the time period won't necessarily be coincident, right? The puts and the calls will be offsetting one another in every time period. The reason I mention that nuance is because we want to be able to roll the calls up and out. This backwardation in the strip is challenging to set a call structure so that it doesn't, you know, clip your upside. None of us want our upside to be clipped, we're willing to pay a little bit of our cash, you know, cash flow in order to maintain a little bit of upside. We will set the puts in a way that protects our downside, again, call it 60. The team together will, with our boards, will make that call or that decision. The calls themselves, you know, we will put those in place in a way to, one, help offset the puts. We're selling the calls to help offset the cost of the puts. We wanna be sure that we're not just kind of mindlessly racing forward with callers that constrain our upside. We will be diligent about taking advantage of opportunities to roll those calls up and out as, you know, longer-dated contracts roll into shorter-dated contracts and give us opportunities to do so. I hope that's a clear answer. We are intending to do it. The level notionally will go from 20%. I think we're at 18% today, 18% of the standalone Baytex to notionally 40% in terms of volume hedged. This is how we're gonna do it. We're gonna layer in the puts. We're gonna separately layer in the calls. We're gonna do so in a way to give us maximum exposure to the upside because I firmly believe, the world is short oil. We'll come to know that over the next couple of quarters. The last question, I promise. I think it's an easy one. Deal synergies. Presumably, there aren't any or they're very negligible, but any color there would be good. Yeah, we didn't make a big fuss about synergies because it's pretty clear this deal was meant, you know, primarily to create an operating capability and really drive accretion to the combined business. I've gone through that a lot already. The synergies that we've identified in our deck are about CAD 15 million per year. That's a combination of just eliminating redundancy on both sides. Let me just give you a couple of examples of how that redundancy comes to be. You don't need two boards. You only need one board. There's some redundancy there in terms of just cash retention and then travel costs and all the rest. Then you don't need two leadership teams. Darrin and I are friends, long time friends. You know, he's done an extraordinary job, but, you know, you don't need both of us. There's synergy there. Likewise, with the CFO, you know, and other members of the C-suite. You know, we will bring Julia on as a top leadership. She's top flight, as good as it gets anywhere in the world, and she knows these assets, she knows these assets cold. She will continue running not only the Ranger assets, on behalf of Baytex, but also running the non-op side of the business as well. Her scope increases. Then we're keeping, you know, almost all of that, you know, very lean, very high-performing operations team. We're keeping almost all the rest of them. There's redundancy in the C-suite, and there's redundancy at the board level. Then there's other back-office redundancies, which you might not think about, but, you know, outside financial audit, you don't need to. Outside SOX audit, you don't need to. Outside IQREs, you don't need to. There's a lot of rationalization of, you know, I would say, IT systems, and I don't mean people necessarily, but I mean redundancy in systems. You know, subscriptions. You combine two subscriptions into one, and you save 50%. There are lots of economies of scale and purchasing power. Again, if you take CAD 15 million per year, and you run that out at a 10% discount, it's about $100 million, you know, all in PV. It's not nothing, it wasn't the real driver of this deal. Okay. That's, that's great color. I think we'll, we're coming up on the hour, I think we'll wrap it up there. Again, really appreciate your taking the time. I know it's been a very busy, 10 days, maybe we'll catch you back in six months or so just to see where things stand. Thanks to everyone on the line for joining us, have a great day. No, thank you. Thanks to everyone. Thanks, Eric. Take care.