PrairieSky Royalty Ltd. (PSK) Earnings Call Transcript
October 27, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PrairieSky Royalty Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Andrew Phillips, President and CEO.
Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for dialing into the PrairieSky Q3 2026 Conference Call. On the call from PSK are myself, Andrew Phillips, Pam Kazeil CFO; Dan Bertram CEO; and Mike Murphy, VP, Capital Markets. Before we begin, there are certain forward-looking information and statements in our commentary today, so I'd ask that listeners and investors review the forward-looking statements qualified in our press release and MD&A, which can be found on our website. Organic growth continues in our business. Over Q3 2025, (sic) [ 2026 ] natural gas is up 2%, oil is up 4% and NGLs are up 20% as high liquids gas replaces dryer gas. Net debt decreased 34% over the prior quarter. Strong leasing activity continues as PSK entered into [ 30 ] new lease arrangements with 41 oil companies. New leasing was pervasive across our entire land base and includes numerous modular SAGD leases to qualified operators. $7.9 million of lease issuance bonus was brought in over the quarter. 230 wells were spud in Q3 at a 6.5% average royalty rate. This included 30 Duvernay wells in the quarter versus 46 in all of 2025. Our team continues to execute well and is focused on continued active leasing of our large mineral title position. With the capital cycle turning and a number of teams restarting, grassroots exploration in the basin has returned for the first time since 2013, 2014. We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this trend with our mineral title land base. I will now turn the call over to Mike to further discuss activity on our lines.
Thanks, Andrew. Drilling activity was strong in Q3 with new well spuds up 14% over 2025 and at a higher average royalty rate of 6.5% compared to 5.1% last year. We had a record 30 Duvernay spuds in the quarter, bringing the total for the year to 81, including 65 in the prolific West Shale Basin. As of the end of this quarter, only 22 of these West Shale wells were on production. So upcoming completions are expected to continue to support Duvernay light oil growth through Q4 and early 2027. Notably, we've seen a resurgence in other light oil plays in the basin, including short cycle time plays like the Viking, where our spud count is up 49% year-to-date. Moving to heavy oil. [indiscernible] multilateral drilling activity is up 57% through the first 9 months of the year relative to the same period in 2025. This has translated into 26% year-over-year production growth in the Mannville stack, which has averaged over 1,100 barrels per day year-to-date. The Clearwater has maintained its [ 20% ] growth rate and exceeded 3,200 barrels per day of oil royalty production in the quarter. Waterflood operations continue to expand into Clearwater with an estimated 60% of our production in the play under waterflood support, supporting low declines and a highly sustainable production base. I'll now turn it over to Pam to discuss the financials.
Thank you, Mike. Good morning, everyone. PrairieSky's total royalty production averaged [ 26,936 ] BOE per day in the quarter, an increase of 5% over Q3 2025. The -- this growth was driven by the over 1,000 barrels per day increase in liquids royalty production with oil royalty volumes increasing 4% to 14,739 barrels per day. and NGL royalty production increasing 20% to 2,647 barrels per day. The Clearwater, Mannville stack and Duvernay plays are the biggest contributors to these volume increases. Royalty production revenue totaled $153.4 million in the quarter compared to $107.7 million in Q3 2025, with PrairieSky's realized oil price averaging just over $100 per barrel during the quarter. Other revenue totaled $11.6 million, including $7.9 million of bonus consideration bringing total revenues for the quarter to $165 million. Strong quarterly revenue generated funds from operations of $127.9 million or $0.55 per share, an increase of 42% over Q3 2025. -- during the quarter, PrairieSky declared dividends of $61.6 million, representing a payout ratio of 48% and completed $1 million of acquisitions, targeting incremental Mannville heavy oil royalty interest. After dividends and acquisitions, excess funds from operations were directed towards debt repayment. Net debt decreased by $63.6 million during the quarter to $123 million at September 30. The Year-to-date, PrairieSky has reduced net debt by $153.5 million or 56%. The Board has approved a fourth quarter dividend of $0.265 per share payable on January 15, 2027, to shareholders of record on December 31, 2026. I will now turn the call over to the moderator to proceed with the Q&A.
Our first question will come from the line of Patrick O'Rourke with ATB Cormark Capital Markets.
I guess -- just the first question. In terms of the outlook for production growth, I think it's pretty well understood ratable growth in the Clearwater high-impact Duvernay that's coming online here -- in the medium and longer term, sort of what does the outlook for the small-scale SAGD? What's sort of the timing in and around those things? And then -- just on the comment that you made on other light oil plays, maybe a little bit more color in terms of the trends that you're seeing there specifically.
Yes, you bet. Thanks for the question, Patrick. So firstly, on the thermal volumes. The one thing that we have that's kind of in the queue right now is the Lindbergh expansion with Strathcona, which 2031 should get to 45,000 to 47,000 barrels that should effectively double our net royalty oil production coming from thermal from a current 1,200 barrels per day to just around 2,500 barrels per day of total royalty production. With all of the leasing we've done in Western Saskatchewan, we expect over the longer term kind of starting in 2030 out to 2040, we should add another incremental 4,000 to 5,000 new royalty barrels from those plays as they're developed. Using about 50% of them effectively being evolved over time. But we think the chance of success is higher for that because a lot of them have been substantially derisked. And then on the conventional side, we've been very actively leasing a lot of conventional plays that had been quite quiet over the last 5 years and even some new technological advancements, multilateral drilling, et cetera, coming towards some of these plays. And new waterflood opportunities on some of the older plays. And I think you should start to potentially see that conventional portfolio flatten out to potentially grow sometime in the next 3 years, assuming oil price hangs in there.
Okay. And maybe just shifting gears in terms of I think you guys have been fairly clear about the countercyclicality of your acquisition strategy. And so debt came down in excess of $60 million in the quarter. I think most of -- myself and my peers across the street would see you guys being debt free in the first half of 2027. How do you think about allocation of capital, whether it be returns to shareholders or M&A acquisitions in the context of the current market and releasing some of that cash you're going to build on the shareholders, either through acquisitions or direct returns in.
Yes. When you look into 2027, we'll review the dividend in February as a board. We're looking to show dividend increases every year. I think we definitely have the ability to do higher ones, but I think we'll keep it very pragmatic and kind of smaller dividend increases because we see a lot of value in share repurchases over time, potentially acquisitions as well. And even in 2025, which was pretty frothy market. We were able to do $100 million of M&A with high teens returns. So whatever provides a better return, we're willing to execute on. And I think it's been nice over the last 5 years, we've seen the share count come down 3%, pay [$1 billion] in dividends. And our royalty oil production has roughly doubled. So is we're in a good position now. We expect more organic growth over the next 5 years. And it's hard to find acquisitions that look as good as our current business with kind of mid- single-digit growth rate, so mid single-digit free cash flow yield and then some of this higher return M&A taking you to almost a mid-teens returns on an unlevered basis. So again, we think we see a lot of value in the buyback and -- but we'll try and do it countercyclically. Appreciate the questions.
Our next question comes from the line of Aaron Bilkoski with TD Cowen.
My question is on the potential royalty concessions from the province. There's obviously an expectation that we're going to see some royalty concessions to bid MDUs, whether that's just going to be on heavy oil or conventional is going to be included. But to any extent that you can share, I'd be curious how you think this might impact rise?
Yes. When you think about the royalty concessions, I know Saskatchewan has been very aggressive with the royalty connections, and you did see capital flows into the province. I think for us, 1 of the bigger impacts would be if they loosen some of the regulations on water recycling for modular SAGD. We have a number of opportunities in the Cold Lake region that we think would be excellent at opportunities with low SORs, but because they're smaller projects, 6,000 to 12,000 barrel projects, they would require some type of relaxation on water recycling regulations similar to what they have in Saskatchewan. So we think that would be the bigger incentive. But I think overall, already what the federal government has put in tax incentives and depreciation incentives that just puts more capital into the system, then there's more capital to deploy into the field, which ends up impacting us positively. Thanks for your question.
I would now like to hand the conference back over to Andrew Phillips for his closing remarks.
Well, thank you very much for dialing into the PrairieSky Q3 2026 conference call. And please feel free to call Pam, Mike or myself if you have any questions, and have a great rest of your day.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.
Read the full transcript via the API
You're viewing the first half of this call. Get the complete PrairieSky Royalty Ltd. transcript - plus 257,000+ transcripts from 12,000+ companies, speaker segments and full-text search - through the EarningsAPI REST API or hosted MCP server.
Get an API key View API docs →For developers and AI pipelines
Programmatic access to PrairieSky Royalty Ltd. earnings transcripts and 257,000+ others is available through the
EarningsAPI REST API and the hosted MCP server.
Quarterly plans from $145 - full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search,
and the /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.