Good morning. Happy to be in Denver. We have been here a handful of years. I am really glad to give you an update on Parex, a Colombian oil and gas producer based in Calgary, listed on the TSX. It is really a year of transformation for Parex. I will advance one slide. There have been probably three things that have really changed since the last time we have been here. One is we have rebuilt our portfolio over a number of years, and we are starting to see the fruits of that in exploration success. We have acquired one of our key peers in Colombia. It was a company called Frontera, and that has led us to doubling our production. We expect to be over 90,000 bopd as we exit this year.
The third thing that really wraps it up and gives us extra momentum is we have also had a change of government, a pro-oil and gas administration that has come into the country now. They started just a couple weeks ago, and we think that is going to provide a lot of favorable tailwind for the company as we go forward. Just a slight overview of Parex. We are listed in the TSX. We have about $1.8 billion of market cap , about CAD 2.7 billion. We have CAD 900 million of debt. We have been debt-free up until this point, and we did our recent transaction through the issuance of bonds. We are shareholder-focused. We have reduced our share count over 40% over the last six years, and we have a 6% yield.
I think what is really different about Parex, not only have we been able to grow our production from about 45,000 bopd at the start of this year to, as I said, going to about 90,000 bopd at exit at the end of the year. We have been able to accumulate a land position of over 7 million, 8 million acres. In that, we have access to over 10 billion of original oil in place. So those are the, I will say, the tools we have at our disposal that makes Colombia and our portfolio really exciting and sustainable as we move forward. Why Parex, PXT? I think there are just three key elements that should put Parex on your radar. One, we are completely conventional oil and gas.
These are the opportunities that we saw in North America 20, 30 years ago, and some other operators now are looking at different plays and seeing the economics and how favorable they are if you can find a conventional play. We have transformational exploration potential. We are actually going to start an exploration program, what we call the Foothills of Colombia. It is based on a trend that from the 1990s had over 400,000 bopd of production with 3 bcf of gas. We are partnering with Ecopetrol. We are going to kick that off Q4 this year. When I say being in Colombia, we are going back to 8 million acres of land, a really advantageous position. 10 billion barrels of oil in place. What that has enabled us to do is actually have a track record of returning capital to shareholders. We have returned CAD 2 billion.
This year it will be a function of paying about CAD 100 million of a dividend and also applying the free cash flow to reducing our overall debt. There are lots of conceptions about being in Colombia and obviously the risks are associated in a place like that. This is a field of ours in Colombia. It is in the Llanos Basin. This could be 30 mi outside of Denver or outside of Calgary. It is in the Llanos, meaning prairies. Very flat. Some of the challenges, just like North America or in Alberta would be we have a seasonal aspects of activity. Here, it gets very wet for six months of the year. So we have to plan our activities, drilling, development, in the dry season. That tends to be November through March.
It gives you an idea of the landscape, and this is where about 90% of our production currently is, are in fields like this. So what does Parex offer? I think our value proposition is we have the core assets, low decline, that can give us a target of 15% return per year. Our foundation is growing 3%-5%. We are doing that through exploration, field development, appraisal drilling, and that enables us to have a dividend that is stable and well covered, and then we can also apply the extra free cash flow to debt repayment. Traditionally, we have been focused on spending about two-thirds of our funds flow from operations, our cash flows after tax. That is what we invest in. And a good portion of that capital is actually going to growth. Projects that will give us those reserves, duration, and extra step change production growth over time.
That is really one of the pieces I want to talk about, the Foothills, which is a transformational project that really enables you to have big offshore exploration targets that are onshore. Close to existing infrastructure, close to high-price premium markets. We would be close to Bogotá, where current spot gas prices are over $15/ Mcf. Our focus, our strategy, has not changed over the last handful of years. We want to have exploitation and technology, and that is really applying proven technology that we are taking from our experts in Calgary and applying it to the conventional oil fields in Colombia. This is really where the 8 million acres and 10 billion barrels of oil in place, that is where we can optimize that. Then we couple it with the exploration. We have broken out our exploration into two pieces.
One, what we call small ‘e’, which is really smaller targets, low capital cost. It gives us quick production, but does not give us that long duration of a very large discovery. That is what we have in the Foothills, in the big exploration, which tends to be very gas-focused. We like that diversification, certainly when Colombia is much more LNG-driven priced than anything else. That is why, in our last quarter, our reported gas price was $12/ Mcf. We think future gas prices are only going to go higher as there is a real shortage of gas within the country. We have been in Colombia since 2008, and we have had several phases inside Colombia. One was the initial phase where many companies went to Colombia. Due to the security, fiscal format, there was not a lot of activity. Then it opened up with the new regulations, good security.
We were able to apply 3D seismic, and we had large discoveries. That enabled us to grow from zero, and this is all through exploration, up until about COVID 2019-2020, going from zero to 50,000 bbl. Really successful. Then we got to that phase, and then we had to realize some of the lower-hanging fruit had been picked. Now, what is the next phase that we can do? In the next phase, which is more choppy, it is all about how do you rebuild your portfolio? How do I add different things so I am not 100% dependent on exploration? We added blocks, partnerships with Ecopetrol, where we can access and get 50% working interest in fields that have produced 100 million barrels, and they have billions of barrels of oil in place, but they are mature. They are still doing conventional vertical wells.
How do we get inside and apply new technology that can extract, increase the recovery factor from 15% to 30% on areas that already have existing infrastructure? They have pads. They have roads. They have gathering systems. That half-cycle economics. That is really been the second phase. During that phase, we are rebuilding the portfolio, keeping production flat, and we are returning capital to shareholders. That is over CAD 1.6 billion. That was a combination of share buybacks and dividend. Now that we have been able to transform our portfolio, we are seeing the fruits. That is what the gray bars represent. We have been able to, through a clean balance sheet, acquire a company through a bond issuance. Our leverage is about 1x cash flow.
We think we are going to reduce that to half a turn over the next two years and really take our production from 45,000 bopd to, like I said, in excess of closer to 90,000 bopd for the end of this year. I am going to jump into some of the specifics of the activities that we have been doing. The Frontera transaction was acquiring their E&P assets. What we liked about it is very mature, stable, low-decline assets that we feel that we can apply technology, reduce the decline further, really maximize the free cash flow. Given this extra scale and size, we know there is a deficiency in the marketplace for this midsize intermediate oil producer. We are going to be at 90,000 bopd at the end of this year. That is 98% oil. That is a sizable number that is really increasing our overall awareness with the investor community.
We are primarily or almost essentially all institutionally held. We are doing things to increase our exposure throughout the United States. We are going to have a dual listing in Colombia by the end of this year, trying to really show that we are a premier emerging market oil and gas producer. Obviously, there are synergies when you acquire a mature company, and those will be the things that really drive the free cash flow. I think the biggest synergy we will have is actually the reallocation of capital. Reallocating capital from a company that has not increased their land base, that is working on the same assets for the last 10 years, to the Parex portfolio, where we have grown our asset base four times, and now we can take some of their capital and apply it to much more capital-efficient projects. Really what that does is it decrease the volatility.
It gives us more headroom on our dividend and just makes the overall company much more stable. Remember, this is conventional oil and gas, so our production does move over the quarters. The second thing that we've done this year is increase our overall partnership with Ecopetrol. They're 70% of the industry in Colombia. They have lots of the legacy fields, but they're cash constrained. We've been able to add different partnerships with them where we typically have a carried amount of capital in order to earn 50% of the incremental production. We're listing four projects here. For instance, Northern Llanos has been onstream, very successful project. The Magdalena, Putumayo, and the Foothills are all ongoing and in their development stage. I'm going to specifically talk about the Magdalena project, because we think that's really exciting.
We struck a deal to acquire 50% of a 15,000- bopd field. It's a mature field. It's old, low decline. What's neat about this one is we're actually going to earn half of the existing production and half of the incremental production on day one of when we drill the first wells. We anticipate drilling these first wells in September, October. That's really going to be another step change in our overall production. We think we can apply our technology, horizontal drilling, waterflood, chemicals, polymers, into these fields, and it's really about increasing the overall recovery factor. We think this is really good diversification in our portfolio, which, as you recall, was 100% exploration dependent before. Now, we're adding the other pillars.
I don't want to get away on exploration and, to be frank, we struggled after our initial exploration phases that really occurred, and we were super successful in exploration in 2012- 2015. What we did was really add a lot more land to have better prospects. By doing that, we also increased our technical capabilities. We brought in better seismic resolution. We brought in machine learning, AI, to have a better chance of understanding where the potential prospects were. It takes time. We acquired this block in 2022, at the start of 2022. By the time you do the regulatory, work with the communities for access, do the seismic process, the seismic, and get there, it takes about four years. But now what we have is a new trend, and we think this could be quite extensive.
We have about 1.5 million acres on this trend. It's 100% working interest. What we've done so far, and this is an area, like I showed that picture, where it's very flat, very plains-like, but it can be very wet. The dry season, we went in and we drilled six wells. We wanted to do it in a very low cost, low impact manner, really to focus on reducing our finding costs. Instead of having a 1,500 hp rig with 50 loads, everything was truck mounted, low disturbance. It's really about identifying is the prospect viable or successful. We drilled six wells, had four discoveries right away, and then we moved to drill another three or four appraisal wells to get production onstream before it got too wet. Now, this is producing over 5,000 bopd.
We expect this to be increasing in 2,500 bopd increments throughout the rest of the year, especially when we get back into the dry season in Q4. Then we are going to start another round based on this success and our machine learning of what is successful and what is not, of drilling another 20 wells over the next year, which will be comprised of probably another six exploration wells and more development/appraisal drilling. We think we can take this now, these learnings, and then take them to another trend actually near our core area in the Llanos. We are really excited about how we have revamped and de-risked our exploration program, which we like to call small ‘e’. What this does is really provide near-term cash flows and production to our overall portfolio.
This is something we have been talking about for the last several years, but we are actually getting close. The reality of big projects in the oil and gas sector is they take time. There are lots of things to line up. This is on a trend that has produced over 1 billion barrels, but we are right on trend from existing discoveries, and we are partnered with Ecopetrol 50/50. We are the operator. We are going to spud this well this autumn. Very exciting. The first well, we are covering 100% of the cost, and thereafter, it is 50/50 on the development. What we like about it is it is on trend with the existing discoveries. It is gas focused. There will be a gas condensate type of well. Very high deliverability of the wells. We think this could be a step change in the discovery size and the ultimate production for Parex.
It is close to existing infrastructure that Ecopetrol has had throughout the years. It will not take a lot of time to actually monetize the gas and process it. It can also go directly to the Bogotá market, which looks like to be greater than $15 in Mcf. We are really excited about what that potential can be for Parex. That really is the upside to our story. It is outside our targeted 15% return where we think the application of technology, increased recovery factor, small exploration, that gives us our base portfolio growth of 3%-5%. This is where we want to have a step change. Putting those items together, it comes back to show on the chart. Parex was about 45,000 bbl before we added Frontera. Now, we are adding another partnership with, we call it Magdalena. It is a partnership with Ecopetrol.
That is going to get us into the 90,000 bopd as a H2 average. We are on track to do that. But revamping this portfolio has really enabled us to optimize our capital allocation. We think what that does really in the end is deliver more free cash flow. We will be on better projects as you have more opportunities. The political climate, as we talked about the introduction, is more inducive to these investments. We are anxious to see what kind of policies will be brought out. We are thinking they will be somewhat anything that encourages investment such as higher deductions. Just regulatory process that we can move faster, and we know how governments can slow down, and that really costs us time and money. What we are seeing, even in recent transactions of a peer acquisition, is there is more money that wants to be deployed within Colombia.
That is where we are starting to see the valuation increase. I am seeing that because I looked at our Q1, we were 45,000 bopd in our financials. That is what you will see on Bloomberg. Q2 was 54,000 bopd as we got one month of the transaction. Now, we are going to be in the mid-80,000 bopd for Q3, and I would like to be in the range of 90,000 bopd for Q4. I think that valuation starts to catch up once it is realized. All this does is actually— We want to be shareholder-focused. I think a unique thing about Parex is we are Calgary-based, we are Toronto-listed, we are focused on the emerging markets. That is the opportunity. I think what separates us from perhaps other players or opportunities in that area is this focus on the shareholder and returning capital. We have done it through a combination of share buybacks and dividends.
Our next short phase will be to get our debt down in half. We would like to see that over the next 24 months. Then we can address, how do we return additional capital to shareholders? Is it through further debt reduction, share buybacks, or looking at our portfolio and the sustainability of it to see if we can increase the overall dividend? What is next? One, we are just in the process of integrating the Frontera transaction. That happened June 1st, it closed. We are working through to generate the synergies. G&A, tax. How do we market the barrels? How do we reduce the diluent cost? Those are the pieces that are near-term focus. The second piece, which is actually ongoing, is reallocating the capital in those businesses to the best projects. As I mentioned, we will be working to spot our first wells in the Magdalena.
That will give us 7,000 bopd- 8,000 bopd of extra production. The Eastern Llanos is really exciting because I believe it demonstrates a large trend where we have 1.5 million acres and we are 100% working interest. Drilling our first Foothills exploration well in the fall. All of that is underpinned by the new pro-business government in Colombia. That is the story of Parex. I think we have taken really concrete steps over the number of years to reposition the portfolio. It really provides a different, I think, business opportunity in the oil and gas sector. Conventional, emerging markets, technology-based, supported by exploration. That is a different story, and I think it is something that is resonating more and more with our investor base. Thank you very much.