Following a strong financial end to 2023, Range Resources plans to hold steady for 2024 with a production target at 2.12 Bcfe/d to 2.16 Bcfe/d.

The Fort Worth-based company, with proven reserves of 18.1 Tcfe in the Marcellus Shale, produced an average of 2.14 Bcfe/d in 2023 and recorded $941 million in revenue, beating market expectations by $260 million.

“Our year-end reserves update and 16th consecutive year of positive performance revisions points to the repeatable nature of our Marcellus inventory,” said Dennis Degner, Range Resources’ CEO. “As we look towards the year ahead, you will hear those themes repeated, and I believe the resilience that our business has in a lower price environment will be a key differentiator for Range.”

Executives for the company emphasized operational flexibility for the years ahead, adjusting to a market that currently has natural gas prices dropping close to $1.50/MMBtu while preparing for a future with growing LNG exports and other demands.

“As we look on the program going forward in the inventory build that would support our setup for 2025, we see that we’ll have the flexibility to basically adjust timing for turning lines based upon what the macro is telling us and what the basin fundamentals are looking like,” Degner said.

While consolidation through M&A continues to disrupt the energy industry, the CEO said the company would approach expansions cautiously, while remaining open to opportunities. Degner said company leadership has considered the growth needed to adjust to an increasingly globalized natural gas market.

“Size and scale is something that certainly we’ve been asked about a number of times, and there could be some positive benefits, whether it’s leveraging cost of services, combining transport and other processing and gathering type cost structures,” Degner said. “So, we see that there are those opportunities, but when you look at where we’re at with some of our metrics, it would have to look a lot like Range, or we go the other way.”

For 2024, the company forecasted $575 million in maintenance capex, while adding an additional $45 million to $90 million in capex for additional wells, water infrastructure and possibly adding up to 500,000 lateral feet of inventory to its production acreage.

Executives said that the next year will be a good time to expand some infrastructure, despite the dropping price of natural gas and other companies’ decisions to cut back on production. 

“Just-in-time inventory works fine most of the time, but if you can make very modest investments and have a small inventory of wealth, that’s far more operationally efficient and friendly from a cost perspective,” said Mark Scucchi, Range Resources’ CFO.

“Do we maintain the inventory? Do we build it or do we have the option of using some of that, if for some reason prices remain subdued? That’s the resilience and the flexibility of the Range story of why we generated cash flow last year and will do so again in 2024,” Scucchi said.