Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Paramount's 2025 Annual General Meeting. I'd like to welcome everybody. My name is Jim Riddell. I'm the President, CEO, and Chairman of Paramount, and I'll be chairing today's meeting. We will hold the formal part of the meeting, and then I'll give a shareholder update after that about the company's operations. Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge and thank the directors that are here in person today: James Byrnes, Wilf Gobert, Dirk Jungé, Keith MacLeod, Joe McAuley, and Susan Riddell Rose. I would also like to introduce a new director nominee, Shane Fildes. Calling the meeting to order, I'd ask Mark Franco, our Corporate Secretary, to act as Secretary of the Meeting, and Bart Wingirak of Odyssey Trust Company to act as Scrutineer.
A notice of meeting and information circular dated March 25th was sent to all shareholders in advance of the meeting. I direct that the notice of meeting be attached to the minutes of the meeting. I have been advised by the Scrutineer that a quorum of shareholders is present. I direct that the Scrutineer's report on quorum be attached to the minutes of the meeting. Due notice having been given and quorum being present, I declare the meeting to be regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. Items of business and voting: there are three items of business to be considered at today's meeting: the presentation of the 2024 financial statements, the election of directors, and the appointment of auditors. No vote is required with respect to the financial statements. Voting on election of directors will be by way of ballot.
Voting on the appointment of auditors will be by show of hands. We have received all proxy voting results for today's resolutions in advance of the meeting. If you have already voted by proxy, there is no need to vote again. The Scrutineer provided ballots to registered shareholders and appointed proxy holders as they entered the room. Those ballots were to be completed and returned to the Scrutineer prior to the commencement of the meeting. If any registered shareholder or appointed proxy holder did not receive a ballot, please raise your hand so the Scrutineer can provide you with one now. As the first item of business, I place before the meeting Paramount's 2024 audited financial statements. A copy of the financial statements has been mailed to the registered shareholders and all beneficial shareholders who have requested one.
Extra copies of the financial statements are available on the table by the entrance. Election of directors. The next item of business is the election of directors. In accordance with Paramount's articles, the directors have fixed the number of directors to be elected at this meeting at nine. May I have the nominations?
Mr. Chairman, my name is Paul Kinvig, and I'm a duly appointed proxy holder. I nominate for director the nine persons listed in the information circular, being James Riddell, James Byrnes, Shane Fildes, Wilfred Gobert, Dirk Jungé, Kim Lynch Proctor, Keith MacLeod, Jill McAuley, and Susan Riddell Rose.
Thank you. I can confirm that no other nominations were received. Are there any questions on this motion? Voting on this matter will be by ballot. Please raise your hand if you have a ballot that you have not yet submitted to the Scrutineer. The Scrutineer has provided the voting results, and I declare the persons nominated have been duly elected as directors of Paramount to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting of shareholders. The next item of business is the appointment of the auditor. May I have a motion to reappoint Ernst & Young LLP as auditor?
Chairman, my name is Bernie Reed. I move that Ernst & Young LLP be appointed as the auditor of Paramount.
Second the motion.
All those in favor of the motion, please raise your hand. Anybody contrary? I declare the motion carried. Is there any other business to discuss at today's meeting? Seeing none, I will now entertain a motion to end the meeting.
This meeting be adjourned.
Any objections to ending the meeting? No? I declare the meeting ended. Detailed voting results on the matters considered today will be disclosed in a press release and a voting report to be filed after the meeting. Okay. Thanks for bearing through that. Yeah, now I'll give you an update on your company. As usual, I do ask that you keep in mind our forward information guidance as anything I say is accurate to the best of our knowledge. All the small print there protects us against any mistakes that we may make. Let me bring you up to date. We obviously have done a lot in the last year. The major change here, obviously, being closing the major transaction that we closed in the end of January.
The sale of our GP assets represented 70,000 BOE a day of production, 70% of our total production at the time, reserves, cash flow, all similar levels. We sold it for CAD 3.325 billion. We also were able to include our Zama property and actually acquire back some additional assets in Northeast BC in the Horn River Basin. In total, CAD 3.325 billion of cash and then those other properties exchanging hands closed January 31st with the cash. We proposed and made in February a significant return of capital to the shareholders of CAD 12 a share and a special dividend of CAD 3 a share for a total of CAD 2.1 billion of total cash returned to the shareholders, CAD 15 a share. In the first quarter, a total return to shareholders of CAD 15.25, including regular dividends.
We also repurchased 5.7 million shares of the company's stock in our NCIB, 4.9 million of those shares in Q1. Reducing our share count to about 143.2 million shares, which have now grown a little bit through some additional dilution through option exercises to 143.5 million shares. The market cap of the company is now about CAD 2.5 billion. We have additional cash on the balance sheet of CAD 640 million at the end of this most recent quarter, March 31st. We also have additional investments in Level 1 and Level 3 securities totaling something in the order of CAD 520 million, and then our Fox Drilling subsidiary as well. We continue to pay CAD 0.05 per share per month in dividends.
I'll maybe just run through some of the highlights as I saw them from the first quarter here that we just released this morning and, I guess, bring you up to date. On the operational front, we produced 54,409 BOEs a day. That compared to an analyst consensus expectation of 54,100 BOEs a day. 24,700 BOEs a day of that total was related to the divested assets because we did still retain those in January. 29,705 was the retained assets. That's the base that the company is building from. 42% liquids in that retained 29,700 BOEs a day. Again, that's in line with what we have communicated. We were retaining 30,000 barrels a day as the initial production before we grow. We spent CAD 216 million in the quarter. Consensus from analysts, the analyst committee was CAD 217 million, so in line.
CAD 20.4 million of that was related to the sold assets that were spent in January. We spent CAD 22 million on ARO spending and continue to forecast spending CAD 40 million in total for all of 2025. We do expect to see that ARO spending drop in the subsequent years as our minimum spend requirement will drop with the assets that we included in the transaction. Operating costs in the quarter were CAD 1,385, and I think that's a high watermark for us. As we see some of the newer production come on stream at Willesden Green, phase I, phase II, and then subsequent additional new production after that, we see our production cost per unit dropping significantly as we go forward. Funds flow, adjusted funds flow in the quarter was CAD 149 million or CAD 1.03 per share. That's relative to consensus of CAD 116 million.
Quite a bit higher than what the consensus was. I don't normally talk too much about net income in our business, but we did post net income of CAD 1.289 billion, reflecting the gain on sale of the assets in GP that were reflected in the quarter. It was actually over CAD 1.6 billion of total earnings. There is a CAD 383 million deferred tax. I bring that up because when you relate that back, the CAD 383 million of deferred tax is tax that we would have paid otherwise had we not been able to shelter that gain through some of the tax pools. Those tax pools were a large part of the transaction that we executed back in 2017 when we bought Apache Canada. We paid just a little bit more than that total, CAD 383 million.
I think we paid CAD 465 million for all of Apache at the time. To see it all realized in deferred tax on the sale was quite gratifying. The ARO at March 31st is CAD 353 million on our balance sheet now. That is a reduction of CAD 290 million related to the assets that were sold in the transaction that closed in the quarter. Again, net debt, we have CAD 638 million of net cash on the balance sheet and no debt. In a very strong balance sheet position. The securities position, CAD 520 million. That is mostly our NuVista stake. We own 31.2 million shares of NuVista. Total is a little over CAD 400 million at current market prices. Celtran is a private logistics company on the West Coast that we own a significant interest in. In the quarter, we did sell our stake in Westbrook.
Westbrook sold itself to Vermilion in the quarter. We did realize CAD 34 million out of that portfolio in the quarter. I guess another asset that we have, we have a hedge position that's significantly in the money at the end of the quarter. We have 10,000 barrels a day, which is almost all of our forecast production for 2025. 10,000 barrels a day hedged at CAD 105 for the rest of 2025. We are well sheltered on commodity prices on the oil side for the rest of the year. Again, I already mentioned the share buyback that we did and the distributions. Yeah, that's kind of the highlights that I wanted to draw attention to from the first quarter. Then our updated guidance.
The only change we made to guidance is that we have now added CAD 20 million-CAD 50 million of new spending on our Sinclair asset. That prior CAD 760 million-CAD 790 million of CapEx for the year has now been bumped up to CAD 780 million-CAD 840 million. That is just reflecting that CAD 20 million-CAD 50 million of incremental spending at Sinclair. The big range there is just a question of how much. The CAD 20 million is on the side of doing the engineering and, I guess, the scoping and front-end engineering and regulatory work for new plants at Sinclair.
The CAD 50 on the higher end is if we start to order some of the long lead equipment on the success case where we do FID Sinclair going forward and start to put in orders for some of that long lead time equipment that we'll need to construct a plant there before the end of this year. On the production guidance side, nothing really changed. We are guiding 37.5-42.5 as an average for the year. That has a pretty steady ramp starting in Q4. We did introduce new Q4 guidance of 40,000-45,000 BOEs a day. We have retained that exit guidance of 45,000 BOEs a day. That is really reflecting 30,000 up to when the phase I of our new plants in Willesden Green comes on stream. That adds kind of 18,000 barrels a day of capacity.
We have used 15,000 as a kind of almost fully utilized capacity on the new plant. ARO, again, CAD 40 million of total spend for the year and then CAD 100 million dividend. That is including having spent CAD 0.15 per share in January and then the lower dividend going forward. I do want to draw attention to just what we have been able to accomplish in the last five years. It is pretty interesting. We have been able to return to shareholders CAD 3 billion of cash, CAD 20.83 per share. You can see the ramp as we introduced a dividend in 2022 and then the major dividend and return of capital at the beginning of 2025.
Three billion dollars over that same period of time, we did also grow the production up and, I guess, paid our debt down from somewhere in the order of CAD 800 million-CAD 100 million down to zero and obviously now have a cash balance of CAD 640 million in addition to these returns. We have been able to maintain a pipeline of growth projects to continue with that I'll talk about in a moment. We were also able to, again, retire some of the shares. This is our corporate strategy. The corporate strategy really has not changed. It has been very similar throughout all of Paramount's 46 or 47 years of history.
Core strategy has been to identify early, capture major opportunities at a low cost, and try to delineate them, apply new technologies to them, and then start to develop them, get them to a mature state, free cash flow, harvest that cash, and oftentimes sell it. We've had a number of major divestitures throughout the history of the company. My view is we do it a little bit differently. That probably has a lot to do with the capital structure that we have in the company, trying to live within our means, not dilute ourselves, and try and create the most incremental value per share that we can without and try and reduce or, I guess, minimize that share dilution as we try and grow in a very capital-intensive business. If you look at the center panel, you can see what we're projecting as some very interesting near-term growth.
We see ourselves going from CAD 30,000 - CAD 45,000 as our guidance for exit at the end of this year, growing to CAD 60,000 by the end of next year. Basically doubling by the end of next year and then potentially as much as doubling one year after that. The end of 2027, in the success case of bringing on our Sinclair phase I, we would see the company add another 60,000 or 50,000+ BOEs a day and bring the production for the company up to over 120,000 BOEs a day on the success case. The far right panel is really that S curve just showing that strategy in one little graph, and then showing the things that we have in the pipeline and where they sit in our view in that stage of development.
There is additional early-stage things that do not show up on here for competitive reasons, but the ones that we have introduced on here, we have our thermal oil sands at Hull, very early stage. It has been delineated. We think we understand what a development there might look like and starting to look quite interesting with some of the new technologies. Our portfolio of opportunities in the Clearwater and the Bluesky using the new multilateral technologies, Northeast BC, Liard, Horn River. Those are all things that there is not a lot of near-term spending, not a lot of cost, but they are enormous opportunities that we have captured for the future. Sinclair is the one that we disclosed today. She will talk about it a little more.
Then some of the ones that are more in the development and getting closer to the harvest stage are the Duvernay projects that we have at Willesden Green and Karr Bob North. I'll just maybe start by talking a little bit about Willesden Green and what we have been able to put together there. We have over 400 sections of land now. Over the last decade, we have proved up, applied, and refined the best technology to apply to the development of this resource. It is a very liquids-rich Duvernay resource development, very deep, long, multi-stage fract wells. We are currently producing about 7,900 BOE a day. That was our production in the first quarter. That is through the existing Alhambra plant. What we did was we have tested a number of wells over, I guess, probably about three different pads.
Starting to commercialize that development, we did a small expansion to produce really the test wells into. That facility is full at CAD 22 million a day and 6,000 barrels a day. It is full with those initial wells. It was the ability to use that existing facility, test these new drilling techniques and completion techniques, and establish that these wells really can compete for capital in our company. Based on that success, we have gone out and started a multi-phased expansion, building a new plant at Alhambra, three CAD 50 million a day phases, total of CAD 150 million a day when we are done, and 10,000 a day associated with each of those. It is a 50,000-60,000 barrel a day total new development. We are currently building phase I.
I'll just maybe actually, maybe I'll just before I do that, we did have a highlight here in the quarter, just the latest three wells we did bring on at the beginning of this quarter. We did disclose IP30s for those wells of just over 1,000 BOEs a day, CAD 1.9 million a day, and 750 barrels a day of condensate with those CGR of 393 barrels a million. You can see how liquids-rich those wells are. Just bringing you up to date on where we are on the phase I expansion. That plant is nearing completion. On the mechanical side, we're basically 100% complete. On the electrical and instrumentation, we're about half done. I think we have two more shifts out there to finish that work. We did get the power to the plant last week, and it's now live.
We started to stand up the commissioning crews to when the E&I work is done, they'll be able to go in and start to commission the plant. The other milestones there are the egress, having the TC Energy and the Plains Midstream Canada infrastructure available to take away the gas and the condensate and the HVP, high vapor pressure liquids, away into the Plains system. Both of those, as we've worked with those suppliers, have shown us that they're on time and going to be available with our timing of completion. Phase II, when we completed the transaction, we did accelerate phase II to build the second CAD 50 million a day phase. That is now ramping up and following right in behind phase I.
We have started to, even, we have already built some of the water handling and condensate handling tanks as part of phase I for phase II to be able to take advantage of some of the synergies of building them almost at the same time. That is in full swing. A lot of the long lead time equipment orders were put in in the fall as well so that we are in a position to set all that this winter and then have it available to come on stream same timing one year later, Q4 of 2026. Just on the drilling side, just to give you some indication of where we are at on the, so we were able to, so in order to bring this plant on stream, we need about 16 wells at startup.
We have broken that into three separate pads to distribute some of the risk of executing those and having them all available for startup. We did drill the first pad last fall, completed in the first quarter, and we were able to test those first five wells on cleanup into production facilities, temporary production facilities. We are quite excited about the results that we had from those first five wells. These would be the furthest southwest, deepest, highest pressure wells that we have drilled in Willesden Green to date. The next two pads, we are most of the way done the drilling on those. We are drilling them as batch drilling, which means that you are drilling the surface wells on all five wells. Then you drill all the intermediate through the build section, set them, and then you drill the laterals all out all consecutively.
We have two separate rigs on two separate pads doing that. I'll just note one recent success. Paramount did just drill the longest Canadian onshore well ever drilled in Canadian history, 9,060 meters. That was successfully cased off on the weekend and cemented. We're looking forward to completing that well. It's a 5,700-meter lateral, longest lateral for us, and the deepest well again ever drilled in Canada, or longest well ever drilled in Canada onshore. K-Bob, I guess the main one here, in the quarter, we produced about 8,500 BOEs a day out of the Duvernay. All of K-Bob produced 21,100 odd BOEs a day in total as you bring on some of the legacy or you include some of the legacy.
We're currently producing something more like 9 or 10 thousand barrels a day as we just brought on one of the most recent drill pads. We have drilled and are going to complete and bring on stream before year-end another five well pad. Very good success again. IP30s out of that last one of 14, four well pad was just a little over 850 BOE a day. These are very, very highly weighted to the liquid. They produced about 750 barrels a day and about 500,000 a day of gas in that 850 odd BOE a day as IP30s. I'll just make a comment on Paramount has started to understand the way the Duvernay formation responds.
We started to choke back and produce much more slowly initially our Duvernay wells with the idea that we're going to get a longer-term better performance out of these wells by maintaining a higher bottom hole flowing pressure as long as we can. We have chosen to restrict the rates and flow them at very high pressures and maintain that pressure with the idea that we're going to get better performance in the long term out of those wells and higher recoveries. Moving on to our Sinclair property. Again, we disclosed the results of our first drilling campaign out here. We put together over 150 sections of land, 100% owned. The whole concept to this play was to go out and find a significant resource in the dry gas window where we could end up with the lowest supply cost.
Our target is to be developing the lowest supply cost gas opportunity in North America. We think we need to do that in order to compete and be confident that we're going to get a return in a North American gas macro that, frankly, has a lot of gas. If you're the cheapest supply cost, you have a good chance of getting a very good return. We chose to go furthest into the basin where the gas is driest. We don't have the incremental costs of building infrastructure for the liquids and the incremental cost of producing. The op costs can be quite a bit higher to produce the liquids-rich gas compared to a dry gas. The first two wells that we went on and drilled to test that concept were done in the fall of 2024.
We completed them in January, flow tested those, and we're happy to report that the flow test came in with results that were above expectations on the flow rates. The first two wells tested 24 million and 16 million a day in two separate distinct intervals that we tested in the Montney. The other thing we were looking for was to confirm that our mapping was correct and that we were going to find an H2S. Generally speaking, when you go further into the basin in Alberta, in the Montney, you get more and more sour. We thought we had found an area where we were going to see a little less H2S content and therefore have a lower cost of development and production. We are happy to confirm that the H2S levels came in lower than expectations.
Our expectations were set on something that was going to be successful. We are happy to report that both the flow rates and the H2S levels were lower than what we had anticipated, which is a positive. The gas was extremely dry so that we are, in fact, going to be developing infrastructure and have an operating cost that is going to be lower in value. Based on that success, we have kicked off engineering of a new plant. The phase I development that we think this first well pad proves up is a 400 million a day plant with about 350 million a day of sales. We had previously gone out and captured egress to be able to bring that on stream in the fourth quarter of 2027.
Again, on the positive outcome that we do have a plant cost forecast that is in the neighborhood of what we're expecting, we would see an FID later that allows us to go forward and potentially be ordering equipment to build that plant and have it on stream for Q4 2027. Very exciting. I'm going to just make some higher-level comments on some of these longer resource plays that we're working on. We have 1.3 million acres back in the roots of the company back in Northeast Alberta. We're principally targeting, I guess, heavy oil using the new multilateral technologies and applying it into the Bluesky, the Clearwater, the Wabaska.
Our strategy there has been to use other people's money to try and de-risk and make some of these discoveries and learn about this play a little more than what we know so far. In the success case, we try and apply our own capital and grow it around some of these opportunities that we find a positive outcome on. The other main focus here is we have been capturing for the longer-term large in situ opportunities that we think technology is going to eventually unlock and make those opportunities compete with some of the other ones that we have. We have a long-standing, large, fully delineated opportunity at Hull. When we used to do the independent engineering for it back in the Cavalier days, we had 1.2 billion barrels of recoverable resource and project scale.
That was something like 100,000 barrels a day just for Hull. We have four more additional in situ opportunities in addition to that. We continue to try and add to that. Our view is that capturing very large resource at very low cost per barrel and seeing the development of some of these new technologies is going to create a lot of value for shareholders in the future. A bit of a similar story in Northeast BC, and this again was part of the Juventum transaction. In the last few years, we've been capturing, we now have 50% of the yard position up here. This is often referred to as one of the most prolific shale gas opportunities in North America or in the world. We're a believer in that.
Some of these wells, I guess when we look at wells here, we think the type curves are in the order of 100 BCF gas and have IPs that are in the order of 100 million a day. They are deeper, higher pressure. They do cost more. They're probably in the order of CAD 45 million-CAD 50 million to drill, but they're enormous wells. We've also had, and we've added through the Juventum transaction, additional resource in the Horn River Basin. We now have 100% in the Two Island Lake development and 50% in the Key Wagana development. All of this is connected to existing infrastructure that is in the order of 2 BCF a day. It's all currently shut in, but there are pipelines, there is infrastructure. Our work has been focused on how do we improve the wells.
There has not been a modern frac in 10 years done on this resource play in the Liard or in the Horn River. How do we bring these into these existing facilities at a competitive cost? We have not quite got ourselves to that point where we are confident that we can do that. I can tell you we are working hard, and capturing the resources is the first step in that, which we have done. Okay. Lastly, I have kind of gone through a lot of this already, but just additional value in the company. I will just point out again our investment portfolio, the investments in public companies, CAD 430 million at March 31st, private companies, CAD 90 million, our drilling company book value of CAD 80 million. So about CAD 600 million in total, including the Fox Drilling item.
I think I've talked about everything else on the slide here, really, other than the top right-hand box there. That's the unconventional resource that, or I guess the long-term conventional discoveries we've made in the Northwest Territories. We have significant discoveries up in the Mackenzie Delta and the central Mackenzie that, sadly, we're actually now going up. They're very exciting, massive discoveries that our regulator is now asking us to go up and abandon. That's my little rant for the meeting here is why we're going up and abandoning perfectly good discoveries just because they've sat. The whole concept there was to go up and find enormous resource. We did that. The shale revolution came along and found cheaper gas closer into the existing infrastructure so that remains for another generation to be exploited.
The last thing I'm going to, main slide I'm going to talk about is just our EH&S. The one I'm really going to, so we worked very hard to minimize our impact on the environment. Some of the latest things we're doing, we use fully, the last three or four pads we've fracked have all been using natural gas-fired turbines to minimize the amount of diesel we use. We've converted all of our rigs to work on biofuel diesel and natural gas and displacing the diesel as much as we can with natural gas. Reduces our cost and reduces our impact on the environment. We've done a huge program on reducing the fugitive emissions out of our pumps using some of the new technologies.
We have been working hard to reduce the amount of ARO that we have in the company and diligently overspending our requirements every year to retire that and bring the environment back to the way we found it. We have great relationships in the communities that we work in. We have been working very hard, particularly in Rocky Mountain House in the last couple of years to go after our Willesden Green development, but be respectful of the people that live in that community. On governance for our company, I would put our governance as second to none. I think we do it right. I think we have a great board of directors that gives great guidance on that. I think you can be very confident in knowing that our company is really a poster child for how to do it right.
I rant on probably long enough. 45 years of track history, I think our capital structure, our insider ownership allows us to take a long-term view and do things that others might normally not choose to do. A great example is the divestiture and return of capital to shareholders that you do not see a lot of companies undertake. I think the shareholders have been rewarded because of that. We have a huge, amazing, large prospect inventory to look forward to. I am very excited about it all. I think that has a lot to do with that. It has a lot to do with the staff that are in the room and the whole company. We have an amazing team that executes on this and really creates a ton of value for us. I am super proud of all that. That is it.
I think I can answer a few questions if anybody has any, and I'm happy to do that. There is a microphone here. I think we're webcasting, so if you have a question you want to come up and ask it, now's your chance.
Okay. Not even Bernie Reed is going to do that. Okay. Thanks very much, everybody, for coming, and appreciate your support.