Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the September Sidoti Conference. My name is Kyle May. I'm one of the analysts at Sidoti & Company. The next presentation will be Kolibri Global Energy. The ticker is KEI on the Toronto Exchange and KGEI on the Nasdaq.
We're pleased to have Wolf Regener, President and CEO, and Gary Johnson, CFO, with us today. For those in the audience, if you have a question, please type it into the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen, and we'll address questions at the end of the presentation. Now I'll turn it over to Wolf and Gary, so please go ahead.
All right. Thanks, Kyle, appreciate it. And thank you everyone for coming and for joining us here. Forward-looking information disclaimers, non-GAAP measures, et cetera, just normal stuff for oil and gas companies in the U.S. and Canada. Just you can find all this on our presentation on our website as well. Kolibri is an oil and gas producer in Oklahoma. We operate the Tishomingo Shale oil field in Oklahoma.
Highlights: financially stable, low debt, have good cash flow growth over the last few years, fully funded for our 2024 drilling program, using existing cash flow and our existing line of credit. We have a $50 million line of credit with Bank of Oklahoma, and our strength is our asset. Really, what distinguishes us is we have 32 million barrels of oil equivalent in proved reserves, put together from Netherland Sewell, which is a very reputable reservoir engineering firm here in the U.S.
There are two key proved probable reserves, and other reference is 54 million BOEs. What distinguishes us is our large ratio of proved undeveloped reserves. We only have about 24% of our proved reserves that are in the proved developed producing category, 76% in the proved undeveloped category. We have a lot of running room, a lot of places where we can go to drill low-risk wells.
We feel we're very undervalued on a reserve value basis, and our belief is as we drill more wells, and people believe we can efficiently drill these wells that are in the proved category, convert them to proved developed producing, that differential will shrink between our value and what the stock is trading for. So I'll go into that here in the next few slides in general. Market cap, ticker in the U.S., Nasdaq: KGEI, as Kyle pointed out, the TSX: KEI. We listed on the Nasdaq last year.
We've been on the TSX much longer than that, trading around at $3.22. That's in the ballpark of where we are right now. Share price, that gives us a market capitalization in the U.S. of $115 million, and an enterprise value with our debt of $33 million, of $148 million. And you'll notice that our debt to Adjusted EBITDA is low, it's less than one at 0.89. The significant part of this is our proved reserves at the end of last year, again, done by Netherland Sewell, is $483 million value versus our enterprise value of $148 million.
So we have a long ways to go on valuation. That doesn't even take into account our proved probable, which comes close to $700 million. Where we are? We're in Oklahoma. We're in what's called the SCOOP Play, the very southern part of that. We're located about halfway between Oklahoma City and Dallas. We'd originally drilled the Woodford Shale out here, so the Woodford Shale was quite gassy. It was only about 15% oil.
We had drilled and participated in about forty wells and had about 12,500 acres. Exxon, which is all the purple all around us here, acquired about 280,000 acres in this trend, and we were the last holdout with them. We finally said yes to selling to them for the Woodford rights, but we wanted to hold on to the rights for the Caney Formation and Upper Sycamore.
This is a formation that's only about 350 feet higher than the Woodford, and these depths are down between 8000 feet and 11,000 feet, so 350 feet is not a whole lot. We felt like there was a lot of value in the Caney. They didn't want to pay us for what we felt the value was worth, and so we came to an agreement where they would buy the lower rights in the Woodford. We would hold on to the Caney and the Upper Sycamore.
We've since grown that acreage position to about 17,000 acres, and I'm really glad we held on to it because we've created a lot of value now in that Caney Formation, and now our production mix is more like 74% oil. So we've really transformed ourselves from a natural gas producer into a oil producer, and you'll see now from our production here that we are only about 10% natural gas. So the natural gas prices being low really doesn't affect our cash flow much at all. Our plan for the year is to continue to develop the field.
Forecast the production growth of another 14%-33% over 2023. In the second quarter, we drilled and completed two successful Caney wells. These were actually not even in the proved category, but it was in their possible category by Netherland Sewell, so we'll have more reserves that go into the proved category for our next reserve report, and all the wells we've drilled up till now had been one-mile laterals, so one mile horizontals, go down, drill horizontal for a mile, and so we just finished drilling.
As of this morning, we just announced our first three, one-and-a-half-mile longer laterals, and those were both done, or all three done under budget, so we'll be completing those wells in early October, and bringing them on sometime in October or early November. The plan is to do a full field development with these longer laterals.
The intent is, if you can drill longer laterals, so single wellbore accessing more reserves, and in our case, 50% more reserves, then that should make economic wells, so what we're looking to do is prove that we can make even more economic wells by drilling these wells even cheaper than a one and a half times a normal well cost would be, so if we can have that happen, and our first step on that has been achieved, which is the drilling portion of it, that it's under budget, but if we can make these wells even more economic, then that should lead to even higher property valuations, less wells to get the same reserves out of the ground.
Our forecast for the year, 3,200-3,700 BOE a day, 14%-33% increase over last year. Our adjusted EBITDA, $43 million-$48 million a year. For the year, is a 10%-23% increase over 2023. You can see our adjusted EBITDA in 2021, $6.5 million. We've had some really nice growth, $25 million in 2022, $39 million in 2023, and now we're targeting $43 million-$48 million in 2024. With that $43 million-$48 million, the capital that we're expending in order to get to that, and I show this growth here, is estimated to be $33 million-$39 million.
So we have excess cash flow that you can see from that, even with the growth that we've been having. And so the board authorized a shareholder return policy. The TSX approved that for us. We just announced that on Monday. And so, from the TSX point of view, we're allowed to start buying shares ourselves, or for the company, I should say, on a share buyback, starting September twenty-third. Production, quarter by quarter, and you can see that's been a nice increase.
Net operating income, same thing, has been increasing nicely. The red line is what the average blended oil price has been, for the field. And you can tell, obviously, our income's going up, not just because of oil prices, 'cause oil prices have come back down from the peak, but we're still growing from production and being efficient in what we're doing. The field itself, all the infrastructure is in place. There's a gathering system that's less than a mile from all our approved locations.
All of our oil is trucked out. We are getting WTI less about $1.85 a barrel in pricing, so there's not a huge differential variance, in which there are in some fields where it fluctuates a lot. We've been quite consistent at about $1.85 over the years, less WTI. Our gas, natural gas liquids are going into this gathering system that Exxon runs. So we basically pay them a compression fee and a gathering fee.
They sell our gas and natural gas liquids, and they get the same pricing that or we get the same pricing that they get for theirs. We have a lot of running room here. These are 170 mile, or 170 locations at one-mile laterals per section. So that'll change a bit if we can go to, you know, one and a half or two-mile laterals for the rest of the field. But we've got 58 proved locations at the end of last year, 60 probables and 52 possibles.
So a lot of locations where we can still drill here. 17,000 net acres, 32 wells on production, and importantly, almost all of it is held by production, so we don't have to drill certain acreage positions in order to hold that acreage, while that acreage is held by production. This is a little graph, on a table, I should say, from Netherland Sewell's numbers on a year by year, what they were estimating each proved undeveloped location would produce. And you can see over the years, it kept increasing.
So as we put on wells, and there was more and more production history from these wells, Netherlands Sewell was able to constantly increase how much each well would produce. I didn't put in 2023, but it's in the same ballpark here, so not much change. You can see that it's a good reservoir quality, that over the years, the reservoir, the amount estimated to be recovered from each well has been increasing.
Drilling efficiencies. So we strive to constantly improve. In 2016, 2017, you can see that each well that we drilled, these one-mile laterals down at the depth, and that's why this is down, going down 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 feet and then going horizontal. That's what the total footage is that we drilled. That's why it's down at this 13,000 foot- 15,000 foot range.
In 2016, 2017, it was about 30-day wells. We improved that further. We got down to 20-22-day wells. The end of last year, we increased our efficiency again, and the first two wells of this year were in about the 12-day range. When we went into 2023, drilling-wise, we were estimating that those wells were gonna cost $7.2 million each. That is drilled, completed, and the facilities necessary for each well.
We ended up, the last 4 wells, it was about $5.5 million each. So a big improvement over what it was. Now we're drilling longer laterals, these one and a half -mile laterals. Remember, we drilled the first two this year at 12 days, and we just announced that the first three one-and-a-half-mile laterals averaged about 14 days. So only two days more in order to get 50% more of a lateral, for these wells. So we were very pleased with how well the drilling went on these wells. So the enterprise value of the stock or the company versus the proved reserve value.
This is us compared to a number of our Canadian peers, because in Canada, they use a slightly different price deck than, the U.S. uses. So the average trades for about 54% of their NAV value. We're trading at about 22%, so that's why we talk about what our- that we're trading so inexpensively compared to our net asset value in here.
If you look at our full share price or our price per share for our net asset value, it was about $13.50 for our proved reserves, and our proved and probable reserves is closer to $20. And remember, we're trading at about $3.20. So we need over a double in order just to get us to the average, and I'll make the case that we should actually be trading higher than the average, because the amount of money we make per barrel of oil that we produce is more than the peers that we're comparing ourselves to.
So we're at $44 a BOE versus our closest peers at $28 a BOE, excuse me. You look at what else could be wrong, our G&A is going down, so that's all in line. Operating expense per barrel of oil equivalent, we're in the lower range of all of these peers as well, and the only ones that are lower are the ones that are natural gas producers, where it just flows out of the ground naturally. Looking on the SEC comparison, so this is a number that we can compare apples and apples.
Our operating net backs are in the range of where good, other good operators are, and we're a little bit higher, actually, than they are, so given this, again, back to that other number, we should be trading, I think, at higher than 54%. But even if we can get to that number, that's a nice move up from our stock price from where it is now. Yearly net revenue, same thing, has been growing nicely. 2024 forecast, close to $60 million.
Touch briefly on who we are. I'm thirty-six years in the oil and gas business. I've done everything from land leasing, lots of operation experience, a lot of financing experience, a lot of public company experience, so in doing everything from exploration gas wells to heavy oil to lots of shale now as well. Gary Johnson, our CFO, I'll let him say a little bit something about himself.
Hi, yes, I'm the CFO. I've been with the company about 12 years. I have a CPA, started out at Deloitte, and I've been in the industry about 20 years, including running Occidental Petroleum as a director of technical accounting. So I've done a lot of public company experience in the past.
Thanks, Gary. Dan Simpson, he's our Director of Engineering. He'd been doing some consulting for us for a number of years on the reservoir side of things. He came on full time with us last year when we made some changes to our management. Has 30 years of experience all over the world, and has been a great asset to us as well. Alan Hemming, our Senior Geologist, who's been with us for over 10 years now. I've got to update these numbers, and is doing a great job on our geology out here.
Talking about our board of directors, Evan Templeton is our Chairman. Lots of experience in the oil and gas space in the U.S. He was with Jefferies as a Senior Credit Analyst in their high yield and leverage loan markets. Doug Urch, lots of oil and gas experience as well, a number of different companies, chair of our audit committee. He's a chartered professional accountant, CPA, and he's doing a great job for us.
He came on last year with us. David Neuhauser, our director, runs Livermore Partners and owns a significant piece of the company, around 14%, and has lots of capital markets experience, of course. And then, Leslie O'Connor, lots of reservoir engineering experience. She ran the Denver offices of MHA Petroleum Associates and Sproule for a number of years, before retiring. Great engineering experience on that front as well on our board.
And I went through this quickly, but here's kind of the summary, so we have enough time for Q&A afterwards here. Ticker, just to remind everyone, KGEI on Nasdaq. We have nice, strong reserves, 32 million barrels of oil equivalent of the P1 proved reserves, 54 million of the P2 proved probable reserves. We don't run a lot of debt. We keep our debt down, debt-to-EBITDA less than one.
We've got a $50 million line of credit that we draw up and down on for working capital, basically, but we're using cash flow to develop the field and have this growth going on. We've got good growth going forward. Big catalyst in the fourth quarter, where, you know, if we can show that these wells that are with longer laterals are even more economic, that just helps everything.
Makes the wells obviously more economic, we make more money per barrel of oil, and also it creates additional value when the reservoir engineers look at our field overall. We started the shareholder return policy approval, so TSX approved that. So that's goes into effect of, as of September twenty-third.
Again, both those things are things that we just announced here in this last week, last few days, I should say. And, we're just looking to keep drilling wells, grow production and revenue, and narrow that gap between our net asset value and what the market's doing, and out there telling the story to tell more people about us, because that's the only thing we can think of, of why we're undervalued, because we're executing well, and we've got a great asset. With that, I will leave it here.
All right, great. Wolf and Gary, really appreciate the update and a lot of things going on, and a lot of new developments, so really looking forward to digging in further. For anybody else in the audience, feel free to submit additional questions using the Q&A button, and we'll try and get through as many of those as we can.
One thing I want to start with, and you touched on this, but maybe just getting in a little bit further, exciting news that you've finished drilling the new one-and-a-half-mile lateral wells. Is there anything else you can tell us about, you know, what you're hoping to get out of it? Any additional things that you might be testing or trying out, or just, you know, anything else you want to share about those wells?
Yeah, so I mean, those wells are actually located on the west side of our property, where actually these were also possible locations, so we've actually moved out where we saw the geology looked identical to the heart of the field, and we said, "Look, that's a low-risk way of adding more reserves to it as well," and that's where the first two Nickel Hill wells were that we drilled earlier this year, and those came in well, and then so we followed that up with these wells.
Again, looking for constant improvement. You know, we reduced our drill time on our one-mile laterals, felt very comfortable with where we were. Said, "Look, we don't think we're taking on much more additional risk by drilling a mile-and-a-half laterals, which should be much more economic," and that's what we've proven now, where we went from, you know, our really good one-mile laterals were 12-day wells, and now we're able to drill these in 14 days.
So anytime you can add two drilling days in order to get a 50% increase in your lateral length, that's a really good day, and that, you know, should lead to having even more economic wells and even better economics, makes everyone more money.
Absolutely. And thinking about the pace of development, I believe, you mentioned two wells were drilled earlier this year in the second quarter.
Mm-hmm.
Now you're in the process of three. How should investors think about the pace of development going forward?
So that's something we'll talk about at the board level. The intent is to do a balance of... or I said- I should say, my intent or the management's intent, Gary and I, should be to continue seeing some growth, probably not at quite the levels that we've had in the past here over the last couple of years, but we want to see the property continuing to grow. But that also means it'll be generating, you know, assuming oil prices hold in there nicely, some really nice cash flow and allow us to do other things.
We'll pay down some debt, return some capital to shareholders, but we, in our opinion, really are hitting our cash flow stage here, of the company. So that... yeah, it's, we've gone through a big growth, and we want to keep growing it. And we'll walk through those options with our board as well, but that's kind of where our head is at from a management point of view.
Great. And following on with that, one of the questions that was submitted was asking about producing free cash flow, and I think this is something that you touched on, but maybe if you could just kind of remind us of current free cash flow levels, any kind of expectations for the year or anything going forward?
Yeah, so we haven't given out any guidance for next year, right? So our Adjusted EBITDA for this year is $43 million-$48 million, whereas our CapEx is in the $33 million-$36 million, something like that range, roughly. So you can see that there's a differential on that already, even though this year was still a lot of reinvesting cash flow in order to get the production up further and get the cash flow up to these levels.
So going forward, once we get approval from our board as well, and we put something together, we'll put guidance out there as well for next year again. But it should be a heavier cash flow type situation.
Got it. And you also touched on the valuation gap from a few different-
Mm-hmm
... angles or perspectives. What do you think is the biggest thing that investors either are getting wrong or maybe they're just not understanding?
I think it's one, exposure actually to investors. So given that, you know, we listed on Nasdaq late last year, so a lot of people in the U.S. haven't been able to buy us. You know, brokers weren't able to recommend us or anything else, so it's really getting the word out there on that. The other thing is, you have to believe a company can consistently drill good wells, make good wells, right?
And be able to have the belief that those proved undeveloped reserves can be converted into proved developed producing. So if you know that's a really low-risk aspect, then that valuation gap should drop. A lot of people, when you have down markets in oil and gas, they look at just what you're producing today, not what you have that's low risk that you can go after. So as you reduce that perception of risk, then that should start reducing that valuation gap, plus bringing on these wells and getting more cash flow, should just reduce that as well.
Okay, great. Another question that came in is: How do you think about maintenance capital spending this year? And then how about interest or any details on interest costs?
Yeah, so, Gary, I want you to handle the
Yeah, so the interest rates were at about 8.5%-9% this year, and that's about $32 million right now.
Yeah, so we'll be looking to pay that down a little bit to
Yeah, next year.
Yeah. So it'll go down a little bit in hopefully December, then a little bit more in January type of thing. So yeah, and sorry, I just forgot the other part of your question, the first part.
That's okay. Maintenance costs.
Oh, maintenance costs. Yeah.
There might be a different way to think about it, but maybe it's-
No, no, that's fine.
Flat.
Yeah, I was gonna say holding production flat. So on mile-long laterals, I'll speak to, because we don't have the numbers yet on the mile and a half. So we were thinking basically, you know, around four wells a year roughly should be enough to hold production of that flat. So you can think of it as a CapEx of, you know, call it $22 million or something.
Okay, great.
Which will also bring-
Um-
Which will also bring more reserves into the PDP category, right, as well, for the long term.
Right. Absolutely. And then you also touched on net backs. And maybe if you could revisit that and provide some more details on exactly what the net backs are, and then, you know, how you're able to, I guess, have better - so much better net backs than your peers?
We're fortunate that we don't produce a ton of water out here, and so our water, we don't have to put in a huge infrastructure cost for water disposal, for instance, right? We still haul our water out of here. We get some of our fracture stimulation water back, but then the wells really drop down on a water production basis, where we don't get a lot of that water back. So our lifting costs, we're efficient. We use what's called gas lift. We don't have electricity costs out here.
Because of that, we're burning our own natural gas with compressors in order to get lifting costs, so that's an aspect that's cheaper as well. And they're pretty low maintenance. We don't have to, you know, pull or do anything on these wells for years.
As far as what our netbacks are, for the first six months of 2024, they were just under $40 per barrel, if they want to know the exact number.
Okay. No, that's, that's helpful. Thank you, and then maybe switching to shareholder returns. As you mentioned earlier this week, you put out the announcement about the share buyback program. Can you provide any more details about, you know, kind of why you went down this avenue, and maybe any future potential for other ways to return value to shareholders?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, we do believe we're drastically, you know, trading lower than we should be on a, at, compared to on an asset value basis. So, you know, buying some shares back just makes the most sense for us. When we have more steady cash flow, and we have decided that this is our development plan for a longer period of time, then you can start looking at dividends as well. But this was the first step in that as well. That's really what it comes down to.
Got it. And you also touched on, I guess, current inventory. You have a long runway, but, you know, maybe aside from that, just curious about thoughts of, M&A opportunities, areas for inorganic growth or anything around that nature.
Yeah, we're always open, so we're looking at other projects as well. When we're trading well below our net asset value, it's hard to make an accretive transaction, and it needs to be accretive transaction, so if we can get a valuation that's comparable, not to where we're trading, but comparable to what our assets are worth, with something else, and we can acquire that, that definitely makes sense, and we're looking out for that as well.
Especially since next year we get into a more cash situation where we may have extra cash. You know, in the beginning, when you're getting up to speed here over the last three, four years with that growth, we've had to reinvest a lot of that. That situation is changing a bit in 2025 and just gives us more options to look at other things as well.
Maybe following on with that, would you be more interested in, I guess, trying to find something in your existing area or diversifying to another basin or part of the U.S.?
Really, I'm agnostic on that. Really, what it comes down to is it has to make sense for shareholders, right? It has to be something that's accretive. So, you know, we're not gonna buy two wells that are, you know, in the middle of nowhere, and we don't operate. But if it's a transaction that makes sense and has a meaningful potential impact on the company, and again, that it's accretive, it has to be accretive. So if you can, you know, get barrels cheaper than you can drill, you do that.
All right. That's great. It looks like we're at the end of our time, but, Wolf and Gary, I really want to thank you for your time today. Thank you, everyone else for listening in, but, I will leave it with Wolf and Gary for any closing remarks.
No, that's pretty much it. We're always open to answering questions. So anybody that has any other questions, feel free to reach out. I appreciate everyone's time here today, and thank you very much, and thank you, Kyle.
Thank you.
Sounds great. Everybody, have a good day.
Yeah, you too.
Thanks. Take care.