Thank you very much for joining us at the, what is it, 40th Barclays Energy-Power [inaudible] I haven't been here for all of them. But I am delighted to be joined by Linda Cook, who is CEO of Harbour Energy. Linda, thank you for joining us again. It's not the 40th one, but we've been doing a lot lately. What I love about conversations with you is that you and the Harbour team are so busy, there's always a lot to talk about. We're going to start with some big picture strategic questions, then we'll get into the asset base. Yeah. Go through that a little bit. I think, just to take a step back, it is hard to believe, but the first acquisition for the group was nearly 10 years ago, I think? Yeah. In the U.K. Harbour has grown rapidly since that point, both in scale and in geographic presence. Can you talk us through where you see Harbour standing now, particularly given the LLOG and Waldorf transactions in the past year? You've had an Indonesian divestment. I guess what I'm getting to, what is Harbour now? Yeah. Where are we today? As you said, we did our first acquisition now almost 10 years ago. We started out as a private company based in the U.S., and we raised money at a time when most people were actually spending money on non-producing U.S. onshore shale acreage. We decided the smarter thing to do at that point in time was to do the opposite, which was a contrarian, of course, but to buy conventional producing assets outside the U.S. because they were out of favor at the time. We felt like there was a space in the market for another global independent because a number of them had been disappearing. If you think about, for those of you who've been in the business for a while, like I have, the Anadarko of the world, Enterprise Oil, names that were household names back at the time were all being acquired by major oil and gas companies, and we felt like it was creating an opportunity for us to go down that path. Today, I think we've largely achieved that. We've gone from zero in terms of production through a series of acquisitions, to 500,000 bpd. I think we produced 509,000 bpd during the first half of this year. We have a good mix of oil and gas. We'd always set out to be diverse, not to be in a single country or basin, and also not to be just oil or just gas. We have about 40% of our portfolio is oil, and I know many people in the U.S., when I say that, they're thinking, "Oh, that's too bad. You don't have more oil exposure." Then I go on to tell them, actually, we also have 40% exposure to European gas, and that's trading at $130/bbl today. I think we hit $25 or $26 per MMBtu this morning. That's good balance for us in terms of the Brent exposure and the oil exposure, and then the other 20% is various domestic gas markets around the world. We're in five core countries. We like that amount of diversity from a geography standpoint. It's Norway, U.K., U.S., Mexico, and Argentina. That feels good to us, and all of them have interesting opportunities, and we'll probably talk about some of them. We have an investment-grade balance sheet, which has also been an aim of ours. We have what we think is a really competitive shareholder distribution policy that allows our shareholders to benefit through distributions when we're in times like we are today with commodity prices being elevated. I love what you talked about there, that there is that ability to capture the higher prices through both the oil side and the gas side. When you take a step back and look at the portfolio now and the transactions that you've pursued from what was a U.K. originally, how important was it for you to add lower cost, lower tax jurisdictions as well? Yeah, that was definitely the driver behind our latest acquisition, which was the LLOG transaction in the U.S. We'd always wanted to be in the U.S. conventional offshore production, so the Gulf of Mexico at the time, now Gulf of America, made perfect sense for us. But just had not found the right opportunity, even though we had kicked a lot of tires over the years. Portfolios were either non-operated or they were small without a lot of built-in growth. Maybe they had a lot of decommissioning. Maybe they were non-operated, mostly gas. What we were looking for was a set of assets that was oil-weighted and a lot of operational control and a really fantastic team, and we felt like we found that with the LLOG acquisition. As you said, lower tax jurisdiction so that as our production grows in the Gulf of America, and as our production in the U.K. declines, we're lowering the average effective tax rate across our portfolio and improving cash margins. So that was a big, one of the many drivers of that transaction. When you think about that LLOG transaction, the timing was remarkable. Yeah, thank you very much. For those who aren't familiar, we announced the deal in December of last year and then completed it in February. It happened very quick, but it was literally just, what, three weeks or so, two weeks before the conflict broke out in the Middle East, so we got the timing just right on that one. How do you think about the prices that you have to pay to enter a new basin? In fact, when you're making that decision, what metrics and how do you think about that? The CapEx, what it does to the portfolio. Yeah, we look at things from a lot of different ways, and it's always starting with asset quality and what gap it is we're trying to fill in our existing portfolio or where we're trying to take the portfolio over time. At the very beginning of Harbour's journey, when we had nothing, it was about how do we get to scale in at least one basin, and that opportunity happened to present itself in the U.K., which is why we started there. We didn't have a goal to be a U.K. oil and gas producer. We had a goal to be a global diversified one, but you have to start somewhere. We saw an opportunity to get to scale in the U.K., which we did. Then the focus really became on becoming more diverse and not having all of our eggs in the U.K. basket. That drove the Premier Oil transaction in 2021. Barclays helped us with that, so thank you. I see some of your team here in the room. Then we set out to get scale outside of the U.K., and we became publicly listed with that transaction in 2021. Then we set out to get scale in some other countries, and that's what drove the Wintershall Dea transaction, again, with some help from your team. It was an $11 billion deal that we completed, I think, three years ago now and got us around 400,000+ bp d and gave us scale in Norway, which was, I think, one of the big prizes. There were two most important assets in that transaction were the Norwegian portfolio, which is hard to buy on its own because there's so much competition for pure Norwegian portfolios. But with Wintershall Dea, we were able to get, I think we're in the top 10, top five maybe, producers in Norway today. But we were able to get that through a package transaction. But actually, the most important asset for us in Wintershall Dea were billions of dollars of investment-grade bonds. That gave us, because we ported those into Harbour, that gave us the investment-grade balance sheet that we have today, which has been extremely useful. So that was kind of the driver behind that one. Then we've gone on to do LLOG, which I've already talked about. So they've each had their own sort of personality, but we look at returns for sure, levered and unlevered returns. We look at the break- evens and the returns on the follow-on investment opportunities, because it'd be a shame to buy something and pay for a lot of undeveloped reserves only to find they don't rank in your portfolio when you do your annual budget. We make sure we're testing to say that the returns are going to be durable and that these are things that are going to attract capital going forward. Also important for us now, keeping the oil and gas mix somewhere close to 50/50, improving our cash margins, lowering our effective tax rate or drivers, and then making sure we're maintaining that investment-grade balance sheet, which it's hard to get, and once you get it, you don't want to lose it. Yeah. No, absolutely. If I am going to go into the LLOG side, a little bit difficult, because if I think about it, there is a lot of different parts of the portfolio you talked about for us to get into. On LLOG, if I spend a bit of time there, now you have the assets and most importantly, the people. What pleasantly surprised you in that? Yeah. I would say there is no pleasant surprises because we expected it all. Yeah. It has all been good, and we expected good. The people are fantastic. We knew that going in. They had a great reputation in the Gulf. They have, I think, the best exploration track record in the last 10 years in the Gulf of America. I think they have been responsible for 1/3 of the discoveries in the last 10 years. They have proven ability to develop deep water projects. They have a good set of partners and relationships with their partners. They have a good portfolio of follow-on investment opportunities, so near infrastructure developments that lead to filling up the existing infrastructure. We have had success already in the last two licensing rounds in the U.S. that have taken place since we have completed the acquisition, so we have been pleased with that. All has given us enough confidence to make the decision to pick up a second rig, which just showed up. Now under our control, I think, in the last few days, and we should be spudding our first well with that second rig here in the coming weeks. So good so far, and the integration's been relatively smooth. We're used to integrating acquisitions. This one was relatively easy because it was a single country acquisition in a country where we had no existing staff or organization, so there was nothing in the country to integrate it with. We took the existing team intact as they were, and all we had to do was kind of build the interface between them and our London headquarters from a financial reporting, controls, certain corporate standards, and policy standpoint. Yeah. Relatively easy, and so far so good. We should be watching that well that's spudded to see what's going to happen with that one. Yeah. The first well in the second rig is called King's Road and happens to be an exploration well, so there's nothing more- Test track record. There's nothing more exciting, right, in our industry than drilling an exploration well, I think. Getting the phone call in the middle of the night. Going, "Is it? Yeah. We shall watch that. We will keep an eye on that one. We are in the U.S., so I do have to ask, what are your thoughts on a U.S. listing? You do now have U.S. production. We have added that there. We will become more Americas focused through time. So what are your thoughts there? Yeah. We get the question. We have had it in every meeting so far today that we have had at this conference, and it comes up in almost every investor meeting. I understand the drivers for the question, that all the data shows similar companies trade better, if they are listed in the U.S. than in the U.K. We have looked at the case studies of companies that were U.K. listed and have moved their listing to the U.S., and I think what most of them have in common is that they had a large base of operations in the U.S. before they made that move. Yeah. Until February of this year, we did not have assets in the U.S., so we now can check that box with a little check mark, maybe. Today, it is just around 35,000 bpd out of a portfolio of 500,000 bpd. So I would not say it is necessarily a huge center of gravity for us yet. But as you mentioned, as our production in our U.K. declines and we shift more investment to the western side of the Atlantic, our center of gravity is moving west, and I think as that happens, it becomes more and more viable of an opportunity or at least something for us to consider. Thanks, Linda. I get it. Obviously, we've talked a lot about the U.S., and I've tried to focus on the U.S. because we're here. There are a lot of contributors to Harbour as a whole, and I do want to spend a bit of time on the operational performance because it has been exceptional, actually. With the 2Q results, the team lifted the guidance again, coming through. Can you just talk us through where we are on current guidance, and what has been behind the strength and performance for you? Yeah. My hat's off to the team, and I'm really proud of the team that we've built in Harbour Energy. They've done a phenomenal job from an operations standpoint. A lot of people, when they start a new oil and gas company, they focus on non-op because it's easier. Again, there's something about us. We decided to take the opposite approach or the harder road. We felt like having operational control was important, and I'm really proud of the track record that the team's established in terms of reliability and efficiency and the targets we've set for ourselves around greenhouse gas emissions and our safety performance. The first half of this year was no exception from that. We had extremely high reliability, in particular across our operated assets around the globe. We delivered some new developments in Norway ahead of schedule, and we completed the LLOG acquisition a bit sooner than we had anticipated. The combination of all of those things led us to be able to upgrade our production guidance at mid-year to 490,000 bpd-500,000 bpd, which was fantastic. Then we also give guidance for free cash flow, and we were able to upgrade that. This improvement was a little bit more startling, I think, or impactful. The beginning of the year, if you think back to where we all were in January and February, other than you, most people were saying that the bottom was going to fall out of oil prices at the time, and we had, like everyone did, a relatively conservative outlook for commodity prices for 2026, and we established our first free cash flow guidance for this year at $600 million. At our mid-year results, we upgraded that to $1.8 billion, so we tripled it. It was the combination of the good operational performance that we saw and the upgrade to our production outlook, but also, of course, the tailwinds created from what commodity prices have done over the last six months. The combination of those two things. I was saying earlier today, if we use today's forward curve, and I realize that's not right. If we use the forward curve from sometime last week, instead of $1.8 billion free cash flow this year, instead we will be around $2.3 billion or upwards of $2.3 billion. We are quite leveraged to that, and it is quite exciting for us on a number of fronts, both from the standpoint of shareholder distributions and the ability to pay down debt. Those are extraordinary numbers when you think about where you were at the start of the year to what you have been able to do, it is actually quite remarkable. To actually get that, to achieve that. Just part of that, I am going to bring it back a little bit to the operational side, because Harbour is a very different scale company to what it was even two, three years ago, whether it was with Wintershall Dea, the LLOG side. Have you and the team had to change how you run things internally within that? Yeah. Of course, we did from going from being a single country company to now having five core countries. In particular, I have had to break down and bring in a COO because I cannot do it all myself, even though I would like to. He is fantastic, so that gives us additional executive capacity. I would have to say nearly everyone on our senior team that we have built, like myself, spent a lot of their career at global oil and gas companies, if not major oil and gas companies. We are actually used to running and managing more diverse global portfolios. It is funny because when I thought about this particular point, what comes to mind is actually what I find harder, is making sure that we do not turn ourselves into a mini major by implementing too many- Yeah. ...global processes and controls and introducing unnecessary bureaucracy. I probably spend more time making sure we are keeping ourselves lean and nimble, letting the individual country business units get after what they can get after best, and us staying out of their way, but providing them support and making sure the necessary, but only the necessary controls are in place. It is a balance between the two. That idea of sharing things across the groups and best practice, and it allows you to do a little bit of that. Yeah. We focus a lot on that. We get the business unit leaders and technical teams together regularly. We have already had people from Covington, Louisiana, where our LLOG operation, our U.S. Gulf operations run out of, in Aberdeen. People in Aberdeen there were sharing ideas across between Gulf of America and Mexico or offshore Mexico projects. In particular, when it comes to working with supply chain on projects in both of the, just across the country line and the Gulf, I think there is a lot of synergies we can get as we go to our developments in Mexico by working with contractors across both jurisdictions. So I think we will get and continue to get a lot of benefit out of that. You did touch on Aberdeen there. Obviously, the U.K. is in an area of operational outperformance for you, which is, on the one hand, a really good sign. Yeah. But the fiscal regime stability and the overall environment are still challenging. How are you thinking about that U.K. business? Obviously, we talked about the EPL changes, and how it fits within the Harbour portfolio, particularly given the Waldorf acquisition. Yeah. It is a shame given the changes there to the fiscal regime. But we play the cards that we're dealt. While we continue to lobby the government to accelerate a change to a more sensible fiscal framework, because it's coming, it's just not coming till 2030. We continue to advocate to bring that forward. But while there's not necessarily any real signs of that happening, we continue to do everything we can on the self-help front. The team does a fantastic job there. On the cost structure, we've been able to drive costs down from, I think they were $20/bbl three or four years ago. They were $18/bbl last year, and our aim is to keep them there, if not lower, as long as we can. That gets harder and harder to do as you pull CapEx, pull investment out of the country, and take your cash flow and invest it elsewhere. But they're doing what they can. It means production will continue to decline for us in the country, and we're taking the cash flow, and we're reinvesting it into countries where the tax rate is more favorable. Because of that, we have higher return opportunities. It's a difficult thing to do, but that's the role the U.K. plays for us today, is continue to get as much cash flow as we can out of the existing assets, and we can redeploy it elsewhere. That links a little bit back to the point earlier of actually creating a business that has lower tax and lower costs that ultimately increase margin. Yes. If we think about our production outlook going forward, we think we can keep production relatively flat at around 500,000 bpd for the next several years with our existing portfolio. That is happening while the U.K. production is declining, so that means we are replacing that with growth in production from the U.S., where we have just picked up the second rig, so we will have accelerated growth from there over time. Projects in Mexico, additional growth in Argentina as well. Actually, Argentina, it is one of the areas that I am most excited about, because the monetization of that, [FLNG] is actually, I think, a key catalyst for you. Can you just talk about the progress that you have made so far in Argentina, and what we should be looking for as we go through the next 12 months? Yes. We are quite excited about Argentina. I think everybody who is there is excited about it. At this point in time, it is hard not to drink the Kool-Aid, if you will, while you are there. Hopefully we are pretty clear-eyed about it all, and we are keeping our size of our investment there at the right scale for a company of our size. What we have today is about 70,000 b p d of mostly conventional production. The majority of it is coming from conventional producing assets, offshore Tierra del Fuego, natural gas that feeds the domestic gas market. In addition to that goes really well. It is Total operated. The team there does a fantastic job bringing new existing discoveries on stream in order to keep the existing infrastructure full. Kind of a high return, good margin business. The exciting part in the future is all around the Vaca Muerta, and we have an interest in two really large licenses, an oil license in the heart of the oil fairway, and we are in the final stages of negotiating the terms around that unconventional license with the local government. Once that is finalized, hopefully in the coming weeks, the plan is to pick up a rig and start drilling in the oil fairway of the Vaca Muerta early next year. That will be a big new milestone for us and something we are excited about. Then second, our second license in the Vaca Muerta is in the gas fairway. We already have a one rig program going there now. The gas is going into the domestic market. Every well we drill is getting cheaper and better than the well before. The learning curve we saw in the U.S. is alive and well in Argentina, and more and more contractors are showing up with more and better equipment. Infrastructure is being built, new oil pipelines under construction, or new gas pipelines under construction. That is happening. In addition, the first of what will be at least two LNG projects in the country is under construction. We have a 15% stake in it. It is called Southern Energy LNG. It will consist of two leased Golar floating LNG vessels, total of 6 million tons per annum. As I said, we have a 15% stake. Why that is important for us is it gives us access to global gas markets for our gas, instead of being confined to what the Argentinian gas market needs. It enables us to We have applied for the project to be qualified under what is called the RIGI investment incentive regime, and it was approved, so this is a big package of investment incentives. In addition to the tax breaks, you are able to keep your revenues from the project offshore. When you hear about people in the past getting burned in Argentina because they generate a lot of revenue in the country, and they are unable to get it out without taking a big discount on the exchange rate, if you are qualified under the RIGI, you can keep your revenues, which for us in the LNG project will be in U.S. dollars, be able to keep those out of the country. So we reduce that sort of country risk that some people might think about when they think about Argentina. A lot of milestones coming up and a lot of things we are really excited about. It is interesting just listening to you now. It is that idea of, well, obviously, we have LLOG with the growth coming through. We have Argentina with growth coming through. This is really setting up for growth in free cash flow towards the end of the decade, I guess, coming exactly. The other part, and I want to stay in Latin America, is Mexico, because obviously, that is again a big growth area for you with Zama and Kan. Can you just talk through where we are on that now? Yeah. We have two discoveries in Mexico that we are now the proud operators of. It was not the case before, but we have picked up interest in both through, coincidentally, two different acquisitions that came as packages, so that together we are now the biggest private interest holder in both of those projects. We have a 70% interest in Kan, and we have a 27% interest in Zama. Zama is the largest undeveloped discovery in Mexico. It is shallow water oil. Both of these are oil, and both are in shallow water. In Zama, we have Pemex also as our partner, and Pemex was the operator until late last year when they agreed to transfer operatorship to Harbour. Both projects are making some good progress now. We are about to enter FEED in both of them. Yeah. If all goes according to plan, both will be FID ready towards the end of next year. Yeah. Then we will see once we get final cost estimates in, understand what the schedule really looks like. Hopefully then we will be able to take positive investment decisions. For us, these are big projects. In total, almost 350 MMbbl of reserves, Harbour share, across both of those projects together. Developing them simultaneously or in close timing with each other allows us to capture some synergies, in particular through the contracting strategy. We have a common partner in Grupo Carso in both of those projects. That's the Carlos Slim upstream oil and gas entity there in Mexico, so a really strong, aligned, and well-connected partner there. Then we also have Talos as a partner in Zama, so really strong partnerships as well that we're excited about. I think there is that idea of free cash flow growth and being able to grow out towards the end of the decade. If I bring all of this together, you've got a really solid production base, some really good resources in place. Where, ultimately, do you want to take Harbour go forward? Yeah. Is it harder in the current macro environment as well? Because obviously that's Yeah it gives you a lot of cash flow, but it gives you a lot of choices. Yeah. If you are talking about M&A, definitely harder in the current macro environment. We have tried, and fairly successfully, to avoid buying high, if you will. I think what we feel good about, though, is that with the portfolio we have today, we are able to keep production flat organically. Yeah. We do not rely on or need to go out and do an acquisition right now because of the strength of the existing portfolio. So we really like that, and there are a lot of catalysts coming towards us in the next year and a half that are going to help keep us that way. I have talked about a lot of them. More projects coming on stream in Norway. Yeah. One and two well tie-backs, multiples of them in the pipeline. The second rig in the U.S. Gulf, the projects in Mexico heading to FID, and then the opportunities we have in Argentina are all very exciting. We want to keep the investment-grade rating on our credit. Again, really important for us. We like to keep a mix of oil and gas. So that feels good to us if we can dial it a bit back more towards oil. I think that will naturally happen as we grow production in the U.S. and then bring the Mexico projects on stream because all of those are oil. So I think that will happen naturally or organically at least. So yeah, just continuing to maintain our position as a global, diversified independent, 500,000 bpd, investment-grade credit rating, distributing a lot of cash to our shareholders. It is interesting because I think that the idea of being an international E&P, actually with a view of this sort of scale, I think is important. You touched on it right at the end there, that idea of the $1.8 billion of free cash flow guidance at the half year, mark to market $2.3 billion. What do you do with all the cash? Yeah, it's a good question. I think we have a good answer for it. There are three things we could do. We could increase CapEx, and I don't think that's the right thing for us to do at this point in time. We have a team, they need to stay focused on what we're doing now, and we want to avoid that sort of knee-jerk reaction to changing your CapEx plans just because commodity prices might be higher or lower for one year to the next. The other options we have are to return it to shareholders and pay down debt, and our plan is to do both of those. With the $2.3 billion, if that's where we end up this year, we have a shareholder distribution policy that we recently put in place that says we will pay out 45%-75% of our free cash flow to shareholders each year. And where we land in that range will depend on where we are with leverage and debt levels. Yeah. Having just completed the LLOG transaction earlier this year, our feeling now is we need to have a priority around debt reduction. So it's likely that for the full year, we'll be paying out towards the lower end of that range. Precisely where, I don't know. But if you think of, let's use 50%, because it's a round number, $2.3 billion, it means $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion will go to our shareholders, and then we'll be able to make a big dent in our debt using the balance of it to pay down debt. And we had $5.4 billion of net debt at mid-year. So being able to apply $1 billion- $1.2 billion or $1.3 billion against that feels like really good progress on that front. Then on the shareholder distribution, $1.1 billion, we have a commitment to a dividend of at least $300 million. Yeah. So we'll for sure do that. That leaves $800 million after that. We've already approved a $250 million buyback, so that takes us to $550 million, so we have another $550 million to decide what to do with. I think for those of you who are familiar with Harbour know we have a major shareholder in BASF, the chemical company. They were major shareholders in Wintershall Dea, and so as a result of that transaction, they ended up with a stake in Harbour, and they owned 47% of the company at the beginning of the year. We now already have them down to 24%. Their stated intention to exit is now happening, which feels good for us because everyone was waiting. Investors, in particular, were waiting to see when and how that was going to take place. So through three different transactions, we have them now down to 24%. Hopefully, they'll continue on that journey. But as they are executing their exit from the company, being in the market with buybacks or having the firepower for buybacks and/or the possibility of buying shares directly from them is also out there. I think that's sort of what makes sense for us in the near term. I think actually having them down further would be helpful as well. I'm conscious of time, and you know this always happens. We go far too quickly, and there's a lot of things we haven't touched on. But if I can just go back to, what your key message is for investors here in New York, if you want one thing for us to take away today? Yeah. I think it's a good time to think about investing in Harbour. What we hear from U.S. investors is that now that the U.S. onshore shale play has matured, they're looking at where to invest next. There aren't many companies like Harbour that have scale, investment-grade balance sheet, and that good exposure to both Brent and European gas prices. I think there's still room to run on European gas, and it may run for a while. The team has a proven track record of executing and delivering and operating well. I think we are worth taking a look at. Absolutely, I can agree more. For me, there is a lot of upside potential there. That is a brilliant way for us to end the session. Linda, thank you very, very much, and thank you for everyone who is coming. Greatly. Thanks, Lydia.