Daily Brief Energy/Materials: Empire Energy, Pan African Resources and more

• Empire Energy Group Limited (ASX:EEG) is an oil and gas producer/developer, with onshore Northern Territory (NT) and US oil/gas assets.
• EEG has the largest tenement position in the highly prospective Greater McArthur Basin, which includes the Beetaloo Sub-basin.
• The NT energy basins are fast developing as strategic high calorific gas bolsters for east coast Australia’s future domestic requirements, growing Gladstone LNG ullage and potential supply for Darwin’s expanding LNG export terminals, amid funding support from territory and federal governments.

Pan African Resources (PAF) announced its FY23 interim results in the context of known production results and a JSE listing requirement paragraph 3(b) trading statement that indicated both earnings per share and headline earnings per share (HEPS) in the range 1.40–1.64c at the interim stage. In the event, HEPS and EPS for the six-month period were exactly in the middle of the guided range at 1.52c/share. In the wake of the H123 results, we have upgraded our forecast for normalised HEPS for FY23 from 3.82c/share to 4.17c/share (assuming the gold price remains at US$1,835/oz for the remainder of the year). NB Our upgrade would have been to 3.91c/share had our gold price forecast for the balance of the year remained unchanged at US$1,749/oz. Further out, we estimate that development of additional productive assets will increase PAF’s production to c 250koz in 2026 and its normalised HEPS to c 6.00c/share.