I'm Philip Cooper, Managing Director at Three Part Advisors. Our next presentation comes from an Investor Relation client of ours, Pine Cliff Energy, a company listed on the TSX under the symbol PNE and on the OTC under the symbol PIFYF. Pine Cliff Energy is a Canadian natural gas producer with a strong balance sheet, sustainable dividend, and one of the lowest decline rates in North America. Now I'd like to welcome Phil Hodge, President and Chief Executive Officer. Phil.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for your time and attention today. It is a, it's always nice. You can never time these things as to when, you know, when you're speaking and what's happening with the stock, what's happening with natural gas. But today, everything, the stars are in alignment. Our stock moved from CAD 0.80 to CAD 0.90 in the last few days. We've had NYMEX natural gas prices and AECO both moving very rapidly with the colder weather. We've got LNG news this week with both out of the Gulf of Mexico and out of Kitimat. So I'm going to talk about all these things, talk at the, give you a little bit more background on who we are. Starting with, for those of you who haven't met me before, I was the founder with a gentleman by the name of George Fink about 13 years ago for Pine Cliff.
We started with 100 barrels a day up in Canada. We're now up to 23,000 barrels a day, about 80% of it natural gas. The whole concept around Pine Cliff was always to build a company that was going to be a dividend payer that was going to be focused on natural gas. And that's always been the kind of the premise of what we've built. It is, you know, we've gone through different cycles over the years. We'll talk about them a little bit. Over the last 13 years, we've seen a lot of different gas prices. We've seen a lot of different dynamics. The one thing that we've never seen before, ever in Canada, is LNG exports. And we've been talking about it for a long, long time. And LNG exports start up in Canada in the next seven months.
So it's been, and it is a really interesting time to be looking at Canadian, Western Canadian natural gas stories and Pine Cliff in particular. This is, I think this, you know, I'm not happy that we went through some of the lowest gas prices in 30 years this year in 2024, but we just did. For those of you who follow us, we just announced our Q3 numbers last year, or sorry, last week. And we've got the, we had CAD 0.68, I think was the average price, the AECO price for the quarter. We had a realized price of CAD 2 because we had done a lot of hedging going into it. But those are, that's a really low gas price. This morning, it's close to CAD 3. That's how fast things can move once, you know, we start to get a little bit of cold weather. And like I said, some really good macro pieces together.
I think the—from our shareholders, we've been very fortunate. We've got a very supportive group of shareholders. Our biggest shareholder is one of the biggest pension funds in Canada. It's called AIMCo, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation. They own over 10% of our stock. They've been with us now for eight years. The concept was always to, you know, build in the dividend. We started putting the dividend in place in 2022. And we're only, like, you know, today we're, let's say, we're CAD 300 million. These are Canadian numbers, but a 300 and a little over CAD 300 million market cap. We've already paid about over CAD 90 million in dividends. It's just since we started putting the dividend in place in 2022. So we're paying a, it's CAD 0.005 per month per share. So CAD 0.06 annually, which today is a little under 7% yield.
I think that's a pretty, pretty nice yield to be paid to kind of wait for what's coming. That's what I want to talk about: why—and I can speak again—the timing is just perfect. Why did I just buy more shares over the last two days? I'll explain to you my thinking as to why I've added more shares. I've never sold a share of Pine Cliff, but I continue to add to the position. This is where we are based, in Alberta. Our last acquisition was not quite 12 months ago. We announced it in November of this year or of last year, sorry. We did an acquisition. It was about a CAD 106 million acquisition. We did not issue any stock at all.
We had about CAD 50 million of cash in the bank, and then we did put about CAD 60 million of debt. Our debt to cash flow right now is about 1.5 times debt to cash flow. We're paying down debt every quarter. Our goal would be to get that back under one times. The reason we like to have the debt, the balance sheet in a strong position is that it helps us to move fast on acquisitions. And we've done a lot of acquisitions in the last 13 years. That's where we got most of our growth from. The assets that we bought are just in central Alberta. That was about 5,500 barrels a day. Right after we announced that deal, our stock was about CAD 1.65. And then what happened was the winter came. And actually, more importantly, the winter didn't come.
So we had a very warm winter last year. Gas prices across North America dropped considerably. There was no kind of increase in any of the LNG demand. But I'm going to talk about that. The big for the last two years, if you've heard me speak at this time of year, I would have been talking about, okay, here's what the weather's setting for us. Here's where storage is at. But I would not have mentioned any LNG coming on. That's different this year. We've got a lot of LNG coming on in the next nine months here in North America. Not just in Canada, but also out of the Gulf of Mexico and also out of Mexico. So it's a really interesting time because if we get any kind of winter, it's going to accelerate what is going to be coming anyway.
So I don't, you know, I don't think the winter is going to dictate whether or not it's a good time to invest or not. I'm just saying that if we can, you know, if we continue to see a normal winter, again, not even a cold winter, just a normal winter. The last two winters have been two of the warmest winters on record in North America. But if we see a normal winter coming up, look out on gas prices. And again, you can. This is happening as we speak. Gas prices of, I think they were up $0.25 this morning on NYMEX. They went from $3 to $3.25. Like it's. This is a live story, if you will. I like this slide because it shows kind of what we've done as Pine Cliff with both lower gas prices and then the higher gas prices.
Back in 2019, 2020, we had very low gas prices. And in those times, we, you know, we continued. Our business model continued to generate cash flow, but not a lot of cash flow. And then 2021 happened. And it was like, that was the best year ever in the history of Pine Cliff. 10 years of Pine Cliff at that time, we did about CAD 59 million of cash flow. And then 2022 happened. We did CAD 55 million of cash flow in one quarter in 2022. So we did CAD 163 million that year. This year, you know, like I said, we've, the Q3, we're now at about CAD 29 million. Who knows what the Q4 is going to bring? But it'll be, it won't, I don't think it's going to be as good as 2021, 2023, but it'll be our fourth best year ever from a cash flow perspective.
What's interesting, though, is that AECO and natural gas prices are moving up into 2025 and 2026. So the question is, what are we going to do for cash flow in those years? We're bigger now than we've ever been before. We've never been, you know, the last acquisition took us to 23,000. Actually, it took us to close to 25,000 BOE a day. Here's a distinction on Pine Cliff. We were the only oil and gas company that I know of in the public markets that didn't drill a well last year at all. It didn't make any sense to us as shareholders. I own a significant amount of stock in Pine Cliff, as I mentioned at the beginning. And to us to bring on new wells at a time when gas prices were at 30-year lows made no sense to us.
We're very fortunate, though, that we can make those kinds of decisions because we have the—as Phil mentioned in the introduction, we have like a 9% production decline. It is the lowest production decline of any public company in Canada. I believe the United States as well, but don't hold me to that. I don't watch the U.S. quite as close. The average natural gas company has got about a 30% decline rate. In other words, they have to replace that much production every single year or the drop. For us, we didn't drill a well this year. We did the acquisition, CAD 100 million acquisition. That took us about 25,000 BOE a day. We just let the production come down this year because, again, it doesn't make any sense. We're now at about 23,000, 23,500. We'll look to get back to drilling again next year.
I mean, if we've got the free cash flow, we maintain the dividend and keep paying down debt. Those are the two main focuses for 2024. We got the guys, our geology and our engineering teams are anxious to get after these new assets that we just bought. Really good drilling inventory. We've never had this deep a drilling inventory ever in the history of Pine Cliff. But again, we will do it if it makes sense on a capital allocation standpoint. And I think we're heading into that timeframe. Every acquisition we look at, we look at it from a free cash flow perspective. That's the number one focus for us is free cash flow per share. And we're very proud of the fact that we've been, every deal that we've done has been accretive. Every deal that we've done, and we've lowered the OpEx from the previous assets.
And that's kind of what we've built. We're not. You'd think that given the fact that we don't do a whole bunch of drilling, that we wouldn't have growth, but frankly, we have one of the highest growth per share rates of anyone in the industry. But we do it through acquisitions. We do it through, you know, in our case, we aren't against drilling. It's just that we'll only do it when it makes economic sense. We're heading back into that time period where, and with gas prices, where it does make sense. And again, depending on what you think is going to happen over the winter, it's going to potentially accelerate the whole thing.
I don't think, I really believe that you should have natural gas in your portfolio, not because of the weather, not because of the potential of what could happen this winter, but because of the incremental demand that's happening around energy. If you believe that we're going to continue to use more energy, and I've got a lot of statistics and graphs and things that will show this to you, many of you, some of you at least, anyways, get my quarterly email that I put out. And if you don't get it, please give me your email and I'll get you on the list. But there is the energy demand that's happening globally right now is unbelievable. It is, I don't think I've ever seen as much. And it's then you add on the data centers and you add on the Bitcoin and you add on all these, the electric vehicles.
Everything that uses power is driving up energy demand. Natural gas is the single biggest source in most countries or for, I mean, I always ask my American friends, 43% of all the electricity in the United States comes from natural gas. It's not a stat most people know. It's not even close to second places. Like nuclear is around 17%. So if you think you're going to use more energy, you're going to be using more natural gas. And that's kind of the whole big premise of what we've always built on. We think natural gas is going to be around for a long, long time. And I think from what we've never seen before, and I can speculate, but we've never seen what's going to happen when Canada finally gets LNG. We've always had our only exports have been to the United States.
Just to put this in context, the United States makes about 100 BCF a day of gas, roughly. You know, they dropped a little bit low. I think today, I don't know what it's at today, but let's say it's 102. But for easy math, let's say it's 100 BCF a day. The United States exports about 14 BCF a day for LNG, and they export another six to seven BCF a day down to Mexico. So they're exporting about 20 BCF a day. You bring in about eight BCF a day from Canada. Canada only makes 18 BCF a day. We send about eight down to the United States. The very first LNG facility that's coming on in Canada comes on next year. It's two BCF a day.
Over 10% of all the production in Canada is going to now be exported out of Kitimat, BC, starting next year. That's phase one. The pipeline they built to get to, I'm going to jump ahead, the pipeline they built here is this Coastal GasLink pipeline. It's built for 5 BCF a day. So the question is, when do they go to the second phase of LNG Canada, which will then take it to 4 BCF? That's over 20% of all the production in Canada is now going to be able to be exported off the west coast of British Columbia after having zero going forward. So it's going to be a really interesting time on the Western Canadian side.
The reason why having that coming off the Kitimat is so advantageous compared to the Gulf of Mexico is because the single biggest importers of LNG in the world are Asia. So China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, these are the biggest importers of LNG in the world. And it takes 10 days to ship off the west coast of North America to them, which is why Mexico is building an LNG export facility, even though they are importing their natural gas. They don't have an excess of natural gas in Mexico, but they're building up the Altamira LNG facility, which is about two BCF a day. The very first ship just left here in the last quarter. They're getting ready to ramp up, but they're getting the same 10-day advantage versus coming out at 24 days out of the Gulf of Mexico. So it's really quite an interesting time.
This is the graph. If there's one graph that you take away that you haven't seen before, this is the one you want to remember. We've had no new LNG built in North America for two years. This is from 2022. In 2016, the United States exported zero LNG. By 2022, they're the world's largest LNG exporter. Very important geopolitically because what that allowed the United States to be able to do is to send gas to Europe after the war broke out in Ukraine. So therefore, they wanted to quit using Russian gas in Europe. The United States was able to divert LNG into Europe. What you're going to see here, though, like this ramp up, we're going to go to 20. We're going to almost double the amount of LNG exports out of North America in the next three years.
This is, you know, like I said, the last North America. That blue, it's all everything right there. The question was, is the increase in LNG exports, is it going to be Canada or North America? And the answer is North America. You are going to have two BCF a day out of Mexico. You are going to have two BCF a day out of Canada. And you are going to have the remaining on. If you look at the chart on page 10, you will see all the blue, that is all coming out of Gulf of Mexico. That is U.S. Golden Pass, Calcasieu Pass, the Corpus Christi, those are all being built up right now. People talk about the moratorium and how President Trump is going to lift the moratorium on day one. That really is about LNG projects past 2030.
All of these projects are already coming on. These are all under construction. These are all ready to. So you're now seeing just this week, the Plaquemines was announced that they're starting to ramp up their production, which is, that's one of those blue wedges on there. So it's pretty impressive that we're talking about going to 25-26 BCF a day in the next three years. Today, like I said, 14 BCF a day leaves North America. We're going to double that in the next few years. So I think the natural gas story is, you know, this is just LNG exports. This doesn't even include the fact that the data center growth that's happening. And this is very real.
And I can speak to the point that we've talked to multiple parties about putting data centers on our facilities up in Alberta because they need 24/7, 365 natural gas to supply generation sets that then create the power for these things. And it's the reality is that wind and solar, although has, you know, many good applications, they don't have 24/7 type capability. So if you're going to have any of that, you're still going to need natural gas backup. And again, this goes back to the talk, you know, what we've talked about, natural gas demand in both the United States and in Canada, primarily in Alberta, are hitting new records and have been for some time now without all of these extra pieces coming into place.
You know, some of you have heard me say this before, the biggest single user of natural gas anywhere in North America is the oil sands up in Alberta. They use three and a half BCF a day of gas every single day, and what they do is they use the gas to heat water, to put the steam into the ground to allow the bitumen to flow. What is interesting is they just, the TMX pipeline, again, I don't expect everyone here to be totally up to speed on all these issues, but the TMX pipeline is now operational. It's an oil pipeline going to the west coast of Canada. It's going, it allows the oil exports to go from 300,000 barrels a day to 900,000 barrels a day.
That allows the oil sands to create, to be able to produce more oil, which means they'll use more natural gas. We've got the, in Alberta, we've had announcements of new chemicals facilities, Methanex facilities, data centers announcements, liquids fractionation, all hydrogen, all which use natural gas as its feedstock. So I'm, as you probably have picked up, I'm quite bullish on the natural gas demand picture. Supply has been strong. And so that, you know, that's why we had weaker gas prices in 2024 is because supply didn't come off in the United States, in Canada. U.S. did. Went from 105 BCF a day down to about 98 BCF a day. Producers were doing the right thing. You go, well, why didn't Canada do that? Why did they stay at about 18 BCF a day? The reason is because they're getting ready for LNG Canada.
And because the producers needed to have that production up to ready to go for when LNG Canada started up. LNG Canada has already started to take gas in. So it's commissioning the plant. We've already seen flaring there. We're already seeing commissioning. And therefore, that's why gas stayed quite high throughout that. The demand side for natural gas, though, it comes back to what we talked about, what I mentioned earlier. It's just on how much energy is being needed. And there was a good, I stole this bottom right chart from our friends at Ontario. You know, you're seeing growth from the electric vehicles. You're seeing it from data centers. You're seeing it from crypto, all of which use natural gas, all of which are, you know, the energy focus.
One of the key, you know, I sat on the competitiveness panel for our premier of our province, and she's been very vocal about encouraging these data centers to come to Alberta, but the phrase she always puts up is you need to bring your own power. The biggest issue that we're all going to face in every jurisdiction that you live in is how is our grid going to deal with the increased amount of power that we're asking for it to do, so the one way for the data centers to avoid that whole issue is that they set up these data centers right in the backyards of the gas plants, and therefore, they don't have to deal with the grid, so the gas goes directly in for their gen sets. The gen sets create the power, then they put the warehouses right there.
So if you've got sites that have the ability to put these warehouses in them, which we do, that makes it very attractive to these groups because they don't want to have to pull it off the grid. And frankly, the grid operators don't want more and more of this coming off because the question is how are we going to keep up with the energy demands. So it's, you know, again, in Texas, I don't need to explain, you know, with the grid vulnerability of what happens. And we've saw this in Alberta and in Texas, which is really ironic because you have two of the biggest energy producing jurisdictions in North America, both had grid issues when it got cold because the wind doesn't blow typically when it's really cold and the sun's not shining.
You've got, you're now really taxing the natural gas infrastructure unless you've got, you know, ability to nuclear or hydro. And so in those jurisdictions, we had it happen twice last year in Alberta where we got the warning saying, please turn down every possible electric device you can in your home. And in Canada, you know, at least in Texas, it got cold when they had the spells of cold weather. But in Canada, when it gets cold, it gets really cold. I mean, it's minus 15 right now in Calgary, Alberta. When it gets really cold in Canada, it gets to minus 30, minus 40. You don't not want to be turning off the heat in your home when it gets down to those temperatures. So there's a whole bunch of dynamics that are going on that are pretty interesting on the gas side.
I mentioned the natural gas supply. This is to the right, the U.S. So you can see how, you know, it actually dropped. For those of you who do get my email, I highlighted this that it was the first time in 20 years that the natural gas supply has dropped in the United States this year in 2024. Canada, not so much. Canada production has been stayed pretty resilient, but that's because, again, they're getting ready for LNG Canada, which is a big number. You can't, you just can't bring on 10% incremental demand without supply being ready for it. So the one thing, you know, I was having this conversation with somebody here earlier this morning who's been a longtime energy investor.
I remember when I first looked at my first energy presentation, which is probably close to 30 years ago. I remember really puzzled as to how it worked that they've spent more money than they brought in year after year after year, and they did it with equity. So those of you who invested in the energy sector remember these early years where CapEx was actually higher than cash flow. What's changed in the last five years is how much cash flow is now coming back to shareholders. We're not the only ones that have a dividend. We're not the only ones that are, you know, we don't buy back shares. We tend to use the dividend as our primary use of capital allocation back to shareholders.
But you can see what the change in how much more cash flow does go back to shareholders now than it did before. I think that's there for a couple of reasons. One is I think a lot of investment has not been coming back to the energy sector in the last few years, and so companies have had to go in that direction. It would be the one caution I would put when you hear the drill, baby drill, and what's going to happen to the Trump administration. It's going to be very difficult for oil and gas companies to change the business model, which is to give money back to shareholders, and so I don't think you're going to see this a huge spike up in production.
I think what you will see is probably more infrastructure projects are going to get approved a little quicker, and that will be helpful for egress. But I don't know if you're going to see a whole bunch of extra drilling. I think we're going to see, you know, my own view is that we're going to need to get more natural gas supply. And so therefore, you're going to need to have better prices to encourage that. But we got lots of natural gas. And there's no shortage of natural gas. It's just you're going to need $3-3.50 to pull it out of the ground. You can actually motivate the producers to go out and drill for the gas. You're going to need to have a decent price. So you know, in that world, we get back to where we were previously.
I think we'll have some of the best cash flow years ahead of us. Because if you give us a $3-3.50 gas price, we do extremely well. I mean, this year we did pretty well this year, and you gave us the worst gas prices in 30 years, so we manage our business, I think, very tightly. That's what happens when you get insiders that own a lot of stock. It's all about per share. There's nothing that we don't do that isn't on a per share basis. If you look back at the acquisitions, we've done about 15 acquisitions in the last 13 years. You'll see every one of them is highly accretive on a share basis. We just, like I said, we did a $100 million acquisition just 12 months ago.
I think it's going to be some more opportunities are going to be pried open here in the next six, nine months. We've seen a couple recent, for those of you who watch the Canadian markets, we've seen some consolidation, continued consolidation. There's been three multi-billion-dollar deals here in the last little bit when Bonavista got taken out at CAD 1.7 billion, and Crew got taken out at a 70% premium to market and over CAD 1 billion. And then just last week, there was a CAD 3 billion announcement. So I think it's going to continue. I think the LNG is going to attract a lot of international attention. And so we're getting some of the U.S. investors coming back into Canada. When I say the U.S. producers community is looking at the Canadian, the Montney and the Duvernay. So it's going to be an interesting time.
The one thing, and you're again, I started this discussion talking about how we're right now live on what's happening in natural gas, and you'd say, how is, why is it moving so rapidly? Why did we see such a big jump in natural gas prices just in the last week? This chart on the right, I think kind of explains that to a degree. We've had no new storage built in North America in the last 10 years, but look at how much growth we've had in the change in supply and demand. In other words, this is the simple analogy some of you may have heard me make before. It's like if you have a gas tank on your car that is the same size, but you keep building a bigger and bigger engine to go into that car.
That gas tank's going to get drawn down or filled up much quicker depending on what's going on in supply and demand. The market is a lot tighter than people appreciate because of how much growth. We're now talking about 100 BCF a day of supply and demand, the battling it out as to what's going on. And then you're getting these quick changes. Storage is the same size. We've had about, it's about four TCF in the U.S. It's about a half a TCF in Canada. Just here's, I'll give you, these are coming right off the press because I just got an email from my trader this morning. In the first half of November in Canada, we've been drawing, we've been putting gas into storage. So it's been injections, not withdrawals. So we're right on the shoulder season. This is regular as we're heading into winter.
The summer is when you put gas in, winter is when you take it out. In the last two days, we've taken out more gas out of storage than we put into storage in the first two weeks of November. We're going to take out about, so we've just yesterday, we took a BCF a day out in Western Canada, and that's because of the cold weather. By the end of this month, we're probably going to withdraw about 10 BCF a day. This morning, it was announced that every Thursday, the storage numbers come out. They expected to see an injection in the U.S. It was a withdrawal. Prices jump by $0.25 on that news. It's a lot tighter than people think. The forward strip is now, like I say, we're now over $3 U.S. for NYMEX next year.
We're getting close to CAD 3 for the winter Canadian for AECO. All to say, you know, for most of this year, the issue was, were we going to fill storage in Canada and the U.S.? Because if you fill storage, there's nowhere to put the gas, and that's when you get negative pricing. Right, so we've seen this over the years. It's happened. We didn't fill storage in either country. We didn't, or we didn't hit the maximum. We filled storage, but we didn't hit the maximum amount, and therefore, we never saw the negative pricing. We're now pulling out gas out of storage, so this is now coming down the other way. My premise to you would be is it's going to come down a lot faster than people think it will, especially if there's any kind of winter.
You know, I think we touched about this and, you know, for those of you who do get my email, you'll know that I love these macro charts about what's going on with natural gas demand globally. You know, there was an announcement here just recently that India has announced that they need to go to more natural gas. They're at about 3%. They want to get up to as high as 10% of their energy needs coming out of for natural gas. Germany, which has never imported any, they've never had any LNG import facilities, is building five LNG import facilities as we speak. There's now over 50 countries in the world that can import LNG. Like everywhere that natural gas is used, the demand's going up. And again, because it's cleaner, it's very efficient.
And from, you know, what we've really seen is how much power demand is rising globally and how much of that's going to be driven by natural gas. So it's kind of a, it's a very interesting time, you know, the global LNG this comes, you know, this is, I think from Shell or from BP, they're calling for a shortage in LNG even with all this growth. So in this chart, so it's slide 17, you'll see that the LNG, this is what is in operation. I talked about that huge growth of LNG facilities that are being built. That's the yellow on this chart. But you can see even then they're still expecting there to be demand is going to be higher than what we can keep up with. Great situation for North America, great situation for the United States as the largest exporter of LNG.
And Canada is about to join that party as being with our first LNG exports ever in our country's history. So it's an interesting time. So that was a very fast spin through as to why I convinced my wife to let me buy some more stock this week. I'm happy to take any questions that anybody here may have. Yes, please, up front. Yes. Yes, this hopefully comes over. You have plans on going back to where you were. The question was about our dividend and the cut that we had in March. So since we put the dividend in place in 2022, I got to get this right. We either raised it twice or three times, I think. Let's say twice, and then we cut it in March.
Anyone who's heard me speak about Pine Cliff in the past will have heard me say we will not use debt to keep our dividend going. It was at CAD 0.13 a share. You could clearly see that what was coming in Q2 and Q3, some of the lowest gas prices in 30 years, we couldn't maintain it at those levels. So we cut the dividend. It wasn't a shock to, I don't think to our shareholders because I'd always said all along that we're not going to maintain it with debt. I don't think that some companies have chosen to do that. I don't think that's wise. I think it's a slippery slope. Our goal would be to move the dividend back up at the right time. There's no, you know, we've got no plans right now.
Right now, as I said, I want to, the fact that we were able to maintain a dividend with the lowest gas prices when we're 80% gas weighted through 2024, I'm very proud of because we were able to keep giving the dividend. We did that with a lot of hedges. We did that with the liquid production. So we got about 5,000 barrels a day, 4,500 barrels a day of liquid production. That was extremely helpful in keeping the dividend going, and I want to keep paying down the debt. To me, the low debt is what's enabled us to do the acquisitions that we've been able to do, so I think our job, my job is really capital allocation: what do we do? What's the best use of capital, and this year was like, okay, drilling doesn't make sense.
Pay down the debt, maintain the dividend. That's what we did. Kept our payout ratio around 100%. So I didn't, because if you go over that, then you're using debt and we were able to keep it at below that level. Now that we're getting some relief in gas prices and they've moved, that's going to help with free cash flow. So next year, pay down more debt. I think we'll look at doing some drilling for next year. So we, like I said, we took the year off, but I think we'll look at it and then we'll see what we do with the dividend. Yes, please. So the question was about our ownership of land and our drilling areas and then also the use of water.
We own. We're very, you know, one of the reasons why we have such low OPEX costs is because we own almost all of our infrastructure. We own over 80% of all of our infrastructure and pipelines and land. We have the lease rights to about 2 million acres, which is a pretty sizable piece. The two new acquisitions that we've done in both the kind of the Caroline area, what we call in East Central Alberta, and then our Drumheller area, which is West Central Alberta. In both those areas, those would be probably where we'd be looking to drill in the future years. Water access, we have very good access to water. So that's not been an issue. Again, we're not, you know, even when we move to a full drilling program, maybe we're doing four to six wells a year, right?
Like we are never going to be the one that's out there doing 40 wells a year. That's just not our business model. Our business model that it's very fortunate when you've got a decline rate of only 9% is that you could, you don't have to drill much to kind of replace that. And you can then have the free cash flow to give back to shareholders. The model has always been designed to focus on, once we have the dividend in place, to have a fairly high payout ratio because again, we don't have a big CapEx program to maintain. So we're very fortunate. We like to buy assets where we own the infrastructure and own the land. So that's always been the focus. And you know, you're right to ask about the water rights.
I mean, if you're a very active driller, then you need the water for the fracking, and so, you know, again, this year we didn't drill a single well, so it wasn't an issue this year. Going into the next couple of years, we're very comfortable with the water access. Thank you. Yes, question here, so the question was about what we plan to do with our hedging program given with the recent move in AECO. We do not have a mechanical hedging program, so you're right to point out that we would have been waiting for this cold spell to add some more hedging, so I suspect, I know we'll feather in some more hedges for 2025 into this price.
We were, at times, over 50% of our production was hedged for 2024, which is why our realized price was so much higher than the actual price. I think, I believe that things are going to get quite good on the natural gas side in the back half of 2025. The beginning of 2025 still might, you know, some of these LNG projects, they don't tend to come on earlier than you expected. They tend to maybe get delayed. They're coming on, but they may get delayed to the back half. So we will add more hedges. I think we're about 35% hedged now for next year, 30%-35%. We'll probably, that's probably a comfortable level. I don't think you'll see us get back up to the full 50% hedging.
If we were to do an acquisition and we wanted to lock in those prices, you'd see some more hedging. That's kind of what happened with the last transaction. Or if we were to ramp up our drilling program, we might do a bit more hedging with that. I like that we're paying down the debt every single quarter. We have an amortized payment. So we're paying CAD 2 million a quarter. So it'll be, I think our hedging program will be in the longer term, probably in that 25%-40% range given, you know, but we do not, it's not mechanical. We do add to it over time. Last question. So the question again, this one was on hedging is how far out do our hedges go and also how do we think about it when in a more bullish market?
Our hedges, we rarely are hedged out more than a year. And so we've got hedges in place right now that do go into 2025. And you're right, we do tend to, we believe that the back half of 2025 is going to be a pretty good time for being a natural gas producer. So you won't see our hedges ramp up to the full level that they were in 2024. 2024, we knew it was going to be a tough year. Like as soon as we were coming out of a no winter, you could see the gas prices dropping. And so we locked in a lot of the prices for 2024 to keep the dividend going. And so, you know, we'll make that call as we go along here that we like to hedge at times when it's cold. So it's cold right now.
And so we're seeing that jump up in forward strip prices. So we'll start to feather in some of those hedges. I mean, if we're at that, you know, our hedges in place now are around $3 is about what our average hedge price is. You know, that generates a lot of cash flow for us at those levels. Thank you very much for your attention today. Appreciate it. Thanks.