Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jack Greenberg with the Midwest IDEAS Conference, hosted by Three Part Advisors. Next up is Pine Cliff Energy, traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under PNE and the OTC under PIFYF. Presenting on behalf of the company today is Phil Hodge, their President and CEO, and with that, I'll hand it over to Phil.
Thanks, Jack. Thanks, everybody, for attending. Some of you I recognize from before and have heard the Pine Cliff story, but I'd like to update you on where we've been in the, especially in the last year. And a lot of you have not heard me speak or talk about the acquisition that we did in December of last year, which was a CAD 106 million acquisition that we did with buying another 5,500 barrels a day of oil and gas production in Canada. So, just as a bit of a summary for those of you who aren't familiar with Pine Cliff. Pine Cliff is a natural gas-focused company in Canada. We've got. We're now up to about 22,350 barrels a day of production.
We started with 100 barrels a day of production 13 years ago. I was employee number one at Pine Cliff. I have continued to add to my stock position since then to be one of the larger shareholders in Pine Cliff. I've never sold a share. What's interesting about Pine Cliff is that we've got not just high insider ownership from myself, but from the rest of the management team, and on top of that, we have the biggest pension fund in Western Canada is our biggest shareholder. So, a group called AIMCo, which is the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, and they own over 10% of Pine Cliff. And then we've got one other individual who owns just under 10%, and then myself and my former chair together own over 10%. So we've got some very strong ownership.
You know, the shares are in good hands. There's a couple unique things about Pine Cliff. One is, we've got the lowest production decline of any public company in Canada, period. This is the perfect time to be highlighting that to you, because in 2024, we stopped all drilling, because it didn't make any sense for us to be bringing on fresh drills in at a time when gas prices were depressed, and so we just did this acquisition in December of last year, CAD 106 million. We had CAD 50 million of cash in the bank at the time. We added about CAD 55 million, CAD 56 million of debt at the time. That...
What I'm quite proud of is we haven't issued any stock in five years, so we continue to do acquisitions. We've done about 15 acquisitions in the last 13 years. But the last, we haven't issued any since 2019. In 2019, that was in the depths of very low gas prices, very similar to today, and we saw a great opportunity. Insiders all put up money. AIMCo put up money. It was really just almost like a small rights offering, if you will. We try to keep the balance sheet very, very clean. We've got a roughly, I'd say, on forward, on current prices, we're about one and a half times debt to cash flow. On forward strip prices, depending on, you know, it's always i f you look at different analyst decks, we have about six analysts that cover us.
They've got us doing anywhere to CAD 80 million-CAD 85 million of cash flow next year, so our debt would be more likely point five times debt to cash flow. We've been debt-free before. In 2022, we've seen what happens when gas prices. And I'll show you a slide here. In 2022, we went from CAD 50 million of debt to CAD 50 million of cash in the bank within twelve months. So that was caused by increasing natural gas prices, and that's the environment we're in right now. As you can see, gas prices right now are at significant lows in both Canada and the United States. But AECO and NYMEX, AECO's the Alberta natural gas price, NYMEX is the U.S. gas price, both are rising into the forward strip of 2025 for very good reasons.
That's what I'm hopefully can convey to you today, is that if you're considering natural gas as a piece of your portfolio, I would highly encourage that you take a hard look at it now and in the next few months, because the market, we're at this really unusual inflection point. Many of you are recipients of my email that I send out every quarter. If you're not, you can either give me your business card or give me your email, and I'll put you on the list, or you can sign up on our website. But what I've been highlighting here in the last little bit and what I...
Around the Q2 numbers, is that everybody? The market is very focused on natural gas storage right now, and I don't blame them, because there was a real concern that both U.S. natural gas storage and Canadian natural gas storage could potentially fill in 2024. We've seen that happen before. We saw it back in 2019, 2020. When that happens, gas prices go to essentially zero because there's nowhere to put the gas. However, that is a very short-term impact of what happens with the gas markets. We have, you know, in 2019, 2020, we've seen this scenario where we've had these really low gas prices. The NYMEX right now in the United States is under $2. That's happened five times in the last 25 years, that the gas prices have been that low. But...
Every single time that it's been that low, the old adage kicks in, "The best cure for low prices is low prices." We've seen gas prices move up rapidly, and forward strip right now for next year, NYMEX is around $3.50. In Canada, it's a little over two. It's about CAD 2.60. So the prices are already showing what's coming on the demand side, and we're gonna talk about that. I think that's probably the biggest reason to consider natural gas right now as an investment, is what's happening on the demand side, going in, into 2025. So we've slashed our CapEx budget this year. As of yet, we haven't drilled one single well in that...
You know, our CapEx budget for the year is at $17.5 million, but we've saved about seven million of that for drilling capital, that we may not even spend. I mean, we're already almost in September. So if gas prices start to improve, we'll look at whether or not we do some drills in the back half of this year. If not, we'll wait till 2025. It's one of the advantages of having that very low decline. One thing I'd point out on the CapEx, just when you're comparing us to other apples to apples, that includes all our CapEx. That includes all our abandonment and reclamation money, that includes all our maintenance capital, and includes whatever we might spend on drilling. Very. We're very hedged, more hedged.
This is the most we've ever been hedged in the history of Pine Cliff, in the 13 years. So we are over 50% hedged on gas and oil for these summer months, but for 2025, it's we're more in the 25% range. What we probably will do is we'll wait until kind of the Q4, Q1, to start to add some hedges to 2025. Our view is that typically we want. Because we have the dividend, because we've got debt repayment, I'd like to probably see that hedge forward at somewhere between 25% and 35%. But we wanted, this summer, we wanted to be very hedged 'cause we were very concerned that storage was gonna fill.
If any of you have looked at our Q2 numbers, which just came out, the average AECO gas price in Q2 was CAD 1.17. We averaged CAD 2.10 in MCF, and that's a lot of that was because of the hedging and because we own some pipelines that we're able to take gas elsewhere. This is one of the biggest distinguishing slides when it comes to Pine Cliff. The average natural gas company in Canada has a 30% decline rate. We have a 9% decline rate. We're the only single-digit decline rate that exists in the public markets and a company of our size, and because of that, it means we don't have to spend the money on drilling if we don't wanna have to spend the million to do, 'cause it's gonna have a very minimal impact on our forward production.
You can see the percentage of our cash flow that we spent on CapEx is one of the lowest in the industry. Many people have made this comment, we're actually more like a royalty company than we are an E&P company. I understand that logic, because a royalty company doesn't do any drilling. We do drilling, but very limited. In 2023, we had about a CAD 30 million CapEx budget. We did about four or five wells. This year, we haven't done any wells. Next year, we haven't set the budget, but I suspect we'll go back to more like a four to six wells program. What's interesting is that we've had one of the highest per share growth rates that exists in the space. And you wouldn't...
When you look at from a high level at the Pine Cliff story, it's probably not something that jumps out at you as saying that this is a growth story. It's because we've done it by acquisition. I think we're very good acquirers. You can look back at the deals we've done in the last 13 years. We started with 100 barrels a day. We're now close to 24,000 barrels a day. It's been by acquisition. I think we've shown our discipline. You can see. And I mentioned in 2022, where we had CAD 50 million of cash. 2022 was a fantastic year for gas prices, great year for cash flow, horrible year to try to do deals because everybody was trying to sell their assets at a multiple of those cash flow, and so we didn't do any deals.
We did a deal in December of 2021 and didn't do another deal until December of 2023, and that was that CAD 100 million deal we talked about. What I think the... If there's one takeaway I would hopefully you get from today, is that you really should consider getting some natural gas exposure in your portfolio if you don't already have some. And for those of you who have known me over the last 13 years that I've been presenting, you know that's not something I'm always saying. I'm not someone who's constantly saying, "You have to own natural gas." But we've... This is such a unique time. We've dealt with low gas prices before, and we're very proud of the fact that we made money even in those times.
We're very proud of the fact that we're still paying a 6% dividend yield today, even with these low gas prices, but what's different this time is the forward strip. We've never had low gas prices and such strong contango on the forward strip. That's a new feature. Let me talk to you a little bit about why I think that's happening. The biggest reasons are energy demand. If you're energy bullish, then you're natural gas bullish. You may not realize it, but you know, probably the statistic that I love to throw out that a lot of the average American isn't aware of is that 42% of all the electricity in the United States comes from natural gas. 42%, it's by far and away your biggest source of natural gas or of electricity. I mean, if this...
This whole move to electric vehicles, the whole move to needing more energy demand and electricity with the data centers and with AI and all the... That just means more and more natural gas demand is gonna be needed. So you can see that the... And here's an interesting data point that happened in the last year, that many of you may not be aware, is that in July of this year, Canada and the United States had the highest natural gas demand ever on a single day. So in July, it's never happened before in a summer month. We've had highs in natural gas demand use before. It's always in the winter when it's cold. So I'm from Canada. It's not unusual for us to have -30, -40 degrees.
When that happens, as it often happens every winter, the wind doesn't work, solar's not available, natural gas is. But it's unusual that we've had this kind of high in the summertime in both countries, and that goes to how much natural gas is supplying the grid and how much power demand increased when it got hot here in the United States and in Canada. A lot of air conditioning went on, a lot of electricity demand. So this incremental demand that's gonna be happening on LNG that we've talked about all the time. You've seen this chart before, but it's probably the most powerful chart that we've got in there on the LNG side.
We've gotten a little bit, I wouldn't say lazy, but a little lackadaisical on the LNG side of the equation because we haven't had any new LNG in North America now for almost 2 years. Unbelievable growth. In 2016, the United States did not export one single molecule of LNG. They are now the single biggest LNG exporter in the world. Along with Qatar and with Australia, those are the three biggest LNG exporters, and they're about to launch into another phase of LNG growth. These are all facilities that are currently being built. They don't need approval, they don't need FERC. They're all being built, and we're gonna go from 14 BCF a day, which is what today, it's, you know, today it's about 13 BCF a day 'cause I think Freeport's off today, but it's in that 13, 14 BCF a day.
It's gonna go to over 28 BCF a day in the next three years. That's a tremendous amount of growth. What's even more interesting is that two countries in North America are about to join the party and be the very first time they've ever exported LNG: Canada and Mexico. You, you might be a little surprised to hear about Mexico because they are importing six BCF a day from the United States every single day, and yet they are gonna have a liquefaction facility that has already shipped their first ship two weeks ago. In August of this year was the first ship that went out. They're just getting ready to ramp up. That's gonna be about two BCF a day. LNG Canada, we just built the Coastal GasLink pipeline. That is a CAD 34 billion pipeline, 100% complete.
They are just today, just this morning, I saw LNG Canada make an announcement that they are now testing the main LNG site, which will allow them to start to commission that plant into operation. They're they expect to be up to two BCF a day of exports by the summer of next year. That you can't overstate how big that is to the Canadian natural gas market. All of Canada makes 18 BCF a day. That's our entire production. Every single day, we make about 18 BCF a day of production. Starting next year, we are gonna be exporting more than two BCF a day in LNG exports for the first time ever in the history of Canada. More than 10% of all of our production.
That pipeline that was built across was a CAD 34 billion Coastal GasLink pipeline and has a five BCF a day capacity. LNG Canada has announced that they have got the first two BCF, which is going to start to be in full implementation by middle of 2025. They have got the capacity to go up to five BCF a day. Everyone is waiting for when they announce their second phase. When do they go positive FID, final investment decision, on phase II? That is coming. That will take it up to four BCF a day sometime in the next couple of years, and there are other multiple LNG projects happening off the West Coast. Why are they happening off the West Coast of Canada? Why are they happening in Mexico?
It's because the biggest importing LNG nations in the world are in Asia, and off the West Coast of North America, it's 10 days shipping versus 24 has a huge economic advantage. That's why you're seeing LNG exports happening off the West Coast. This is just a chart showing a lot of the projects that are being proposed. That's all great, and I suspect that a lot of that's gonna have. There's another major LNG export facility in Western Canada called, it's now called Ksi Lisims it was called Rockies LNG. Our biggest natural gas producer in Canada is a company called Tourmaline Oil. They would be your equivalent to EQT here.
They are behind that new LNG facility, so that's in addition to what we just talked about so it's not inconceivable that Canada's exporting, by the end of this decade, six to seven BCF a day. There's a couple of smaller projects, the Woodfibre and the Haisla, point three, point four. Those are all under construction as we speak. Rockies LNG has not gone positive, FID yet. We saw this. I saw a version of this about four years ago when we started having Bitcoin operators approach us and want really low-cost energy and natural gas so that they because they, they're so energy-intensive. Flash forward four years, I don't hear much from the Bitcoiners anymore, but now we're hearing from the data center group, so the data centers that are growing in North America is substantial.
You've got different varying expectations and projections, but you're seeing some as high as seven to nine BCF a day extra gas demand just for the data center growth. Most of the growth that's happening on natural gas and energy is coming from the industrial side. So that's what we're trying to highlight here. This is, I stole this from the Antero Resources folks. When they're talking about the data center growth in Bitcoin, you can see just how much over what's projected coming in over the next decade for electricity demand. And again, if you believe that the world's gonna use more energy, if you believe the world's gonna need more electricity, then indirectly you are a natural gas bull, whether you know it or not, because that's where the bulk of the energy is coming from.
Meanwhile, the industry, I think, is at a place where we've been more disciplined than we've ever been before. Pine Cliff is not a good example, because Pine Cliff has never spent more money than what we make, but our industry has. If you go back a decade, you'll see that in the early years of the decade the companies would quite often spend more money than they brought in. In other words, their CapEx was higher than their cash flow. The way they did that was by issuing equity, because the market loved growth. Look at how much that's changed, though, in the last few years. Again, if you're an energy investor, you know this.
If you're a generalist investor, you may not know this, and I think that more people are gonna become appreciative of this as we generate more and more income in the coming years and give it back to shareholders. Pine Cliff was always set up to be a dividend company. Always. That was from day one, that was the goal that we wanted to do. George Fink, who was my chairman, had done this before on an oil company called Bonterra, where he had paid over a billion dollars in dividends over 20 years on a low-decline oil base. He paid himself $100 million, because he owned 10% of the company.
The concept was always to do the exact same thing on natural gas, and that's where we are today, is that I think we've now are paying a dividend. We started in 2022. We've raised it. I think it's three times, but we lowered it once, which is in March of this year, and the reason that we lowered it in March of this year is because we clearly could see what was happening with the lower gas prices, and I've always said, we're not gonna keep the dividend going with debt, so we moved it down to a level that we are more comfortable keeping it going forward. I think there's a couple things that and, you know, kinda wrapping up the on the presentation, is that this is what we talked about. This is the storage situation in Canada and the U.S.
This is what people are focused on, and in the United States, it looks like we're gonna be fine. In other words, there was more demand this summer than was originally expected, and therefore, storage is very full. You can see it's near the five-year highs, but it doesn't look like it's gonna be overfilled, and we're gonna know the answer to that in the next eight weeks. Canada's a little bit different. Canada's on the higher side of that equation, and so it's still a debate whether or not it's gonna be filled or not. The point I would make as a longer term investor, like myself, is that no matter whether it fills or not, this is all gonna be answered in the next two months.
You flash forward to October of this year, and we'll be looking back. I'm sorry, just looking forward, it either filled or didn't fill, but now it's all about the demand. It's what's coming on LNG. What kind of winter is it gonna be? That's when people started sending me all these La Niña and El Niño charts, telling me it's gonna be a colder winter. We'll see. We had two of the warmest winter on recorded history the last two winters in a row. That's why storage is as high as it has been. But the difference now is that the demand side, and this is, again, an interesting chart. This is how the natural gas storage has grown in the last 10 years. It hasn't.
You've got the storage tank, if you will, is the exact same size it was 20 years ago. The difference, though, is the size of the industry and how much natural gas is produced. The United States produces 100 BCF every single day of natural gas. Actually, it's a little bit under that right now, but it's ballpark. And demand has been every bit as high. We just talked about how demand is rising. My point is, that that storage tank can get drawn down very fast, just like it got refilled very fast, because of how much supply-demand is now on top of it. The analogy I make is to an engine and to your car.
If you've got the same size of gas tank, but you keep putting a bigger and bigger engine on, that gas tank can get drawn down or pulled or drawn up very quickly on production. This is why I like natural gas as a business and as where we are situated, is because when I look at the global use of energy, which is continuing to rise everywhere in the globe, natural gas is the single fastest growing hydrocarbon that's being used in the world. Coal had its best year ever last year. You know, the... But it's pretty flat. Oil, slight growth, continues to grow over 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 million barrels a day of oil growth in last year, and then projected for this year.
That's 100 million barrels a day that is used in the oil. But look at gas. Here's an interesting stat: 20 years ago, the world's energy, 86% of it came from hydrocarbons. We spent trillions of dollars down here on wind and solar and geothermal. Today, 20 years later, 84% of all the energy in the world comes from hydrocarbons. Most of that, the little bit that we've been giving up has come off coal, but natural gas continues to be... Everywhere natural gas gets used globally, especially, this is most important, in Asia, is continuing to rise. So, as I mentioned, China is the biggest importer of LNG in the world. India wants to go to 10% of their entire energy consumption on natural gas. India is now the most populous country in the world.
These are factors that I think we don't fully appreciate as to of what's happening on the global side on energy, so you know, we're about 79% of our production is natural gas. I don't think we'll, you know, I guess you never say never, but I think it's highly unlikely that we'll ever not be predominantly a natural gas company. I really believe in the natural gas. I believe we're gonna see some more acquisition opportunities on the natural gas in the upcoming years here. We've been very, I think, very disciplined with the way we've done acquisitions over the last 13 years, and I don't anticipate that changing.
The team that's been with me, many of the individuals now have been with us for over ten years, so we know how to operate these assets. There's been not one acquisition, especially when we buy it from bigger companies, where we haven't been able to lower the OpEx on the assets that we get, including the deal that we just did, even though we just got it eight months ago. We've been already seeing OpEx reductions and G&A reductions on that. So it is, the LNG is what's driving the global side. You know, for those of you who do get my email, there was a stat in there that in by 2030, there's gonna be more LNG tankers on the water than there will be oil and gas tankers, oil tankers.
This chart on the right shows that this is from BP and Shell, calling the red is the amount of LNG that's currently in operation. The yellow is the number of LNG that's being built around the world, in Qatar, in the United States, in Canada, and Australia, and in Mexico. Very sizable, but they're calling for an LNG shortage by 2030, that there will be. The blue is the demand. That's how much, you know, increase. And you can see on the far left just how fast the LNG growth is happening and is expected to happen. Because it's not only is it a very readily accessible source of power, it's also a cleaner source of power.
Places like China and India, they continue to use a tremendous amount of coal, not because they necessarily want to, because it is the cheapest available source to them. But it comes with an environmental impact, and China in particular has been very vocal about that. So if you've been to Beijing over the, you know, if you were there ten years ago versus today, it is a very different environment. They still have got pollution issues, but it is nowhere near where it once was, and a lot of that was because they've moved from natural—or their all their public transportation is now running on natural gas. Here's a little side trivia for you: the single biggest user of LNG trucks in the world is China.
LNG, they by far and away are dominating the world, moving their heavy-duty trucks to LNG, off of diesel, for the same reasons. So that is kind of a quick summary of who we are. Like I said, we've it's, if there's one takeaway from the entire presentation, it's probably that you really should consider getting some natural gas exposure in your portfolio, because I think it's gonna be a really interesting next couple of years here in the natural gas side.
I purposely left a little bit of room here for any questions that anybody might have. And if not, we can... I'm very available by email, by text. You can sign up for my quarterly email on our website. I would welcome that. Again, I'm never at a loss to talk. Always looking to chat more about natural gas and about Pine Cliff. Is there any questions here in the room? Yes.
The question was whether or not we've kind of have a target in mind on when we'll increase our drilling program. You know what? Right now, I would've thought that when gas prices start to rise back up on a spot price over $2, it's gonna that starts to make some more sense to us. It does depend a bit on where oil prices are as well. Because the reality is, our first wells that we will drill, whether they be in Q4 of this year or whether they be in 2025, will be oil-weighted. Because the oil's at $75 a barrel, it's a very healthy price. That, along with the gas prices increasing, makes the wells more economic.
It's just, it made no sense to us as a team to drill wells today in 2024 with such depressed gas prices. These locations aren't going anywhere. We own, we have over two million acres of land, all held by production. So it's the same locations are gonna be available next year as they are this year. And so the great advantage of doing the deal that we did, is we moved production up, we got good cash flow, we can keep the dividend going. That's all good, and we'll drill when it makes sense for us to drill. Any other questions? Thank you very much for your attention today. I very much appreciate it. Have a good day.