Justin Kaufmann.
Thank you.
All right. Thank you for attending today. We're going to walk you through kind of what Saturn is. Really, at the core of it, the investment thesis here is we are a light oil producer based in Calgary. All of our assets are in Western Canada with a tremendous free cash flow yield. Looking at this right now, we're over 85% light oil and liquids. We are a true pure-play producer. Today, we're around 40,000 barrels a day. That allows us very strong netbacks. Because we produce such a light oil mix and we have such low operating costs, our netbacks—again, all the numbers you're going to see here will be in Canadian dollars except when you talk to WTI—are over $ 42 a barrel. Significant downside protection.
One of the things we've always focused on is controlling those variables that are in our power and then hedging against those that aren't. We maintain about a 55-60% of our next 12 months' cash flow is hedged. We also hedge the differential and the foreign exchange as well. Again, just really trying to control for all those things. That really, to us, creates a compelling upside story. With over a 40% free cash flow yield, you'll see that we have now year after year of increased production, beating type curves and beating the Street's expectations for what's expected of the company now. Again, right now, at the end of the first quarter, we're just about 42,000. We have guided towards 40,000. We're over 1,000 barrels ahead of the Street's expectations of where we expect to be.
About 190 million shares outstanding. A market cap of about CAD 350 million gives us an enterprise value, again, of CAD 1.2 billion, and that's Canadian. You can see that our production has come in pretty significant steps. That's thanks to four key acquisitions that we've done over the last four years. This really speaks to the blueprint of what we look for at Saturn. One of the things we do is we've identified our strengths and our weaknesses rather well in that we are relatively shallow light oil producers. We're not gas guys. We're not heavy oil guys. We're not deep basin guys. We don't drill CAD 100 million pads. That's just not what we do. We drill relatively shallow, similar formations across Southern Saskatchewan and Central Alberta. We look for acquisitions where we can build a contiguous land block to that.
We look to buy mid-life cycle assets. Mid-life cycle gives us an advantage because if we find the certain packages, then we look for packages that have a long drilling inventory in front of it, but the infrastructure is already in place. For example, right now, when you compare us to other names, the difference is if you look at a half cycle versus full cycle cost, which is, are you including your infrastructure costs or not, our numbers are almost identical because we have to spend next to nothing on infrastructure because it is already in place. We have the next five years of development, of which over 85% of our development dollars go right towards drilling wells. We do not need infrastructure. We do not need those pipelines. All of that is already in place.
In all the areas we operate, we're the biggest landholders and the biggest infrastructure holders. That gives us significant advantages. When we look for acquisitions, as you'll see coming up, by tacking on acquisitions that are contiguous to our current land base, we can do that, optimize it by reducing the cost of the acquired assets. We've been able to do this by taking on additional leverage to get these acquisitions done. We do so in such a way that as long as within 12-18 months, can we reduce that leverage profile to about a 1. In the past, you've seen us lever up to about a 1.5-1.6. Again, within 12 months, can we get it back below a 1? Can we hedge out that debt repayment?
For example, if you look at the next 12 months, if you take our modeling and you run it at a $5 WTI, we are still cash flow positive. We can repay all of our debt repayments as well as our operating costs and everything else. At a $0 WTI, we are still cash flow positive for the next 12 months. That is what we look for. Then again, we look to layer on additional acquisitions. Here is what that really looks like in practice. It is tough to see, but on the right-hand side at the top, you can see 2020, we were primarily only in the Viking. In 2021, we expanded into Southeast Saskatchewan. In 2022, we came back and expanded into the Viking further. In 2023, we expanded our Southeast as well as picked up our Alberta assets.
In 2024, last year, we picked up the Lower Shaunavon and the Torquay, again, building those blocks and expanding our footprints. Each time we have done this, we have been able to significantly lower the operating costs of our assets by building bigger, more contiguous blocks. What you will hear from Justin coming up is how we have been able to take those blocks and not only reduce the operating costs in them, but also significantly grow the reserves and outperform when we do step in and drill wells in these areas. In every quarter that we have operated and executed on a capital program, we have exceeded type curves. We have exceeded on the operating costs as well.
This gives you an idea of what we really look for in assets and how we've been able to grow from, again, we exited 2020 at 400 barrels a day to today at over 40,000. This is our blueprint really in action here. You've seen of the major four acquisitions we have done, again, starting with Oxbow at CAD 82 million, going all the way up to CAD 530 million. Really taking advantage of what we see is a hole in the Canadian energy market. If you look at the finer print there, the first acquisition, we paid 1.2x cash flow, 1.9x, 1.7x, and then 2x. Really historically low prices. Part of the reason for that is the major banks in Canada have really turned their back on energy in this same time period. There has been a hole in that.
The larger capitals that have the larger companies that have the capital, they're shifting their focus to deep basin or to the U.S. There is a lack of smaller companies going in behind them. All of our assets have been bought from larger entities. Every time they go to dispose of an asset, generally, if it's of this size, there is not a small junior that can buy them. You are going to see assets selling at sub-$100 million. You'll see those sell at 3x - 4x cash flow because it's a lot easier for junior companies to get a few million dollars in capital and then leverage that through private debt. Normally what you'll see is of this size over this time period, there's just been a real lack of capital in this space.
That has created the opportunity for us to step in and acquire these. Again, we have done so with leverage, with the understanding that we can hedge out that repayment and really step into the fact that we can quickly repay that and protect that downside with hedges. You will see that coming up. That is exactly what we have been able to do. That is what this looks like here. Again, you have seen us with the Oxbow, reduce our debt by 22%. These are all the steps we have done. One, we have stepped in and have purchased a big acquisition. Again, our focus is to optimize the asset as quickly as possible, repay that debt as quickly as possible, and then look for that next one where we can continue to build and continue to grow our position in a meaningful way.
Again, maintaining our liquids is what we've done here and maintaining our liquidity as well. Again, being 86% liquid has given us an advantage, has allowed us to really specialize in what we do. Again, using that hedge book to protect our balance sheet, that's given us the confidence to take on a higher leverage profile. Again, we've levered up to 1.5x - 1.7x . Every time within 12-16 months, you've seen us reduce that leverage back to below a 1x. Again, maintain that balance sheet strength. If we find another opportunity that looks like this, that does fit in well, and we can get at these multiples, that's just something that we've continued to focus on. We get asked all the time, "What do you want to be when you grow up? Is it you want to get to 100,000 barrels a day?
What is it? We never have a great answer because what we do not want is we do not want to sit here and say, "Yeah, we are going to grow to 100,000." Because then we have to chase it. If these assets start selling for 3x, 4x, or 5x , we now have committed to you, the investor, that we have to pursue that. Now we have lost our own discipline by trying to achieve a goal. What we will stand here and say is that we will be opportunistic. We have looked at over 120 asset packages over the years. We have done six, four major ones. This is what it looks like. If it does not fit our criteria in can we operate this efficiently, can we quickly repay debt and protect it with hedges, then we will just pass on it.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you that we're going to do an acquisition a year for the next four years. I don't know that they'll come up or come up with a valuation that we'll transact at. If we start seeing asset prices move up, and the last few assets that have sold in Southern Saskatchewan, the last one that sold as early as three weeks ago did sell at a 5x multiple. We did bid on it. We did lose it. That's a double-edged sword because what you actually get there is, although it's unfortunate that the asset prices are moving up, the advantage to us is our assets are now worth that much more. You use a comparative value on that last deal that just happened, and it gives us a share price of about CAD 11 a share. Today, we're trading at CAD 2.
That is the advantage. Unfortunately, if you cannot do any more acquisition, it is because the underlying value of your assets has gone up that significantly. It is a bit of a trade-off there. I will pass it over to Justin Kaufmann, our Chief Development Officer. He is going to touch on the most recent quarter and what the development looks like for the company. Justin.
Thanks, John. John talked a lot about the Saturn blueprint. A big part of that is expanding our margins. If you take a look at what we've been able to do with our operating costs over the last four years, we've been able to reduce them by 30%. How we've been able to do that, three main ways. One, technology. We use remote sensing in a way that differentiates us from our peers. We have cameras on site and monitors so that we do not have to actually send the operators to every single site every single day, which essentially a lot of our competitors do. This allowed us to reduce our labor costs. Also, with the synergies with acquiring the offsetting packages, we're able to amalgamate a lot of the fluids inside similar batteries, reducing our fixed costs. A third way is scalability.
As we've grown in size, we can lean on our chemical providers and other service providers to reduce those costs. Another way is reducing royalties. Our royalties have come down about 21% over the last four years. Canada is a little bit different. Its land is made up of essentially what we call crown land, which is owned by the government we lease, and freehold land, which is owned by individual owners. When you drill wells on crown land, you actually pay significantly less in royalty. The royalties on a new well is anywhere between 3%-4%. Where on freehold land from the individual owner, it's closer to 20%. Canada is also undercapitalized as compared to the U.S. So there's still opportunity to buy and drill on crown land.
Just last year, we picked up 15 sections of crown land for about CAD 5 million that we found about 100 development wells of inventory on. That is where we're focusing our development. That is why you're seeing our royalties go down year over year. Essentially, what this equates to is higher netback. We had about a CAD 42 per barrel netback in Q1, which is essentially one of the strongest amongst our peers, a big part of that being that light oil weighting as well. Now stepping into our development, which has been pretty exciting. We've been growing year over year. We started in 2017 with one rig. Last year, we had six active rigs going, one in Alberta, five in Saskatchewan. We need to drill about 100-120 wells a year to keep close to our 40,000 barrels a day flat.
We do have about 2,300 wells in inventory. That is about an 18-year stay flat case. Half of those locations are booked. Essentially, what that booking means is they are within a quarter mile of a previously economically drilled well. We were 22% over type curve last year. That type curve is not only made up of our historical results, but our peers over the last three years. We had a great year last year where we excelled the most. It was in our Southeast Saskatchewan conventional field, 40% over type curve, more commonly known as the Frobisher formation. The Frobisher has been one of the top rate of return plays in North America for the last 15 years. It is a conventional carbonate play, meaning it has fairly high permeability, so you do not need to frac these wells. The total drill complete tie cost is about CAD 1.1 million.
That's about $800,000 U.S. That's the reason for the high returns there. Really outstanding results year over year. In 2023, we had 12% above type curve. In Q1, we had some beats too. We're pretty excited to release those results as well. Essentially, excelling on our capital program has led to excess cash, same with on the operational side. One of the ways we've chosen to use that is return capital to shareholders. We announced an NCIB in August of last year to buy back about 11 million shares. We've purchased about nine so far. The TSX has certain rules around how many shares you can buy back, a certain percentage of your float. We're actually buying the maximum allowable by the TSX on a daily basis.
We've also just announced an SIB as well, where we'll be buying back about 7 million of additional shares. John showed a slide earlier that showed our big institutional ownership. We have about 70% of our shares held tightly with institutions, which has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages would be the liquidity because those shares aren't traded. We really think that if we can lean into this SIB, it should have a good mark on share performance. I'll turn back to John at this time.
Yeah, thanks, Justin. One thing I just want to point out before we kind of touch on guidance, if you're unfamiliar with how operations in Canada work, every spring we go through what's called breakup. Breakup is generally when the frost comes out of the ground, given most of the access to most of the leases is on dirt roads. The counties or municipalities prevent you from taking heavy trucks on those roads. Basically, from mid to end of March, depending on the weather, till June, you cannot drill wells. You can generally operate your wells. Even then, trucking becomes a bit of a pain. Most of our production is tied in. We have very few disruptions. Just to give you an order of magnitude of that, we have over 6,000 km of pipeline, over 200 key facilities. We own and operate our own gas plants.
The strategy of a lot of companies is to sell their downstream infrastructure. It shows higher operating costs, but they do get some cash in the door for that. Again, just not a strategy that we deploy. What this means is when you're looking at our numbers specific to the bottom right there, you can see that 65% of our free cash flow comes in Q2, just because that is the least amount of capital you are deploying in that period. We get this question all the time. It always comes up in Q3 and Q4 is, "Hold on, you guys said you had a 40% free cash flow yield. Looking at your last quarter, your cash flow yield's 5%." We said, "Yes, that's fine." Q3 and Q4 being the highest CapEx quarters. It happens every year with every company.
It's the highest CapEx, lowest free cash. Q1, you can see, is the second. Q2 is really where you generate the bulk of your free cash for the year. Pretty standard. It's specifically in Saskatchewan. Sometimes in different areas, if you're in Northern Alberta, breakup may change, and it depends where you are. Some companies are able to drill through breakup, although it is relatively weird. If you are doing any look at our financials, you're going to notice that that does stand out. Perfectly normal. As such, you can see our production dip matches that as well. We exited Q1 at 42,000 barrels a day. Today, we're just under 40,000 barrels a day, just because you come off with Q3 and Q4 is your biggest drilling, followed by Q1. Now you're in the dip.
We will be back in the field drilling here in July. In about a month's time, we'll start rolling rigs back out in the field. We will drill right till the end of February. All that adds to our 2025 guidance. We are targeting 38-40. We have been much to the higher side of that throughout last year, throughout the first quarter of this year. We suspect that we're quite confident in our ability to meet or exceed on these numbers. Again, maintaining that oil and liquids weighting. It is primarily light oil that we are producing at about 85%. It gives us an adjusted EBITDA. This assumes a $70 oil. We are a little better than that in the first quarter. We have been lower than that in the second quarter.
We'll see what the rest of the year shakes out to be. It gives us adjusted EBITDA net of derivatives of about that $550 million-$575 million. Again, as oil price creeps down, what's happening right now is our derivatives, our hedging contracts are in a net positive position. Although oil has dropped to, I think today it's at $66, our hedge book is actually in a positive cash flow position right now. There is that offsetting hedge that's inherent in there. The other thing that has really helped us and every Canadian oil company is our weakening dollar. We effectively get paid in U.S. dollars, and we pay our expenses in Canadian dollars. Every Canadian company has that built-in hedge, which is kind of fantastic. Everyone talks about 2012, 2013 being the boom time in oil. Oil was $110 a barrel, neat, great.
Our Canadian dollar was at or above par at that time. So effectively, we were getting CAD 100 a barrel. In January, the oil was at $74, and our dollar was at CAD 73. So we were still getting over CAD 100 in January just because of that foreign exchange. That is one difference that I always ask U.S. investors. They said, "What's the difference between you and a U.S. company?" We pay our expenses in Canadian dollars and get paid in the U.S. So that's an advantage we have. It gives us adjusted funds flow of about that CAD 480 million or per share, about CAD 2.50. Again, today we're trading at CAD 2 a share. So actually less than our adjusted funds flow per share amount. Dev and CapEx, we're targeting here 300-320.
We can say with a couple of things that have come up in Canada that are really exciting. One in particular due to Saskatchewan, they have eliminated carbon tax in the province. Carbon tax is just basically as it says. That elimination of carbon tax will add about CAD 30 million-CAD 35 million to the bottom line for us this year. That is over and above these numbers. The carbon tax was just eliminated here on April 1. That is a carbon tax on everything from power to fuel to steel and everything. We estimate CAD 30 million-CAD 35 million in bottom line increase because of that. Our development CapEx will actually come down to just under CAD 300 million, largely due to the savings that we see there. It gives us free funds flow of about CAD 150 million-CAD 160 million or about CAD 0.65-CAD 0.85 a share.
Again, about a 40% free cash flow yield on that. Decommissioning, so ARO. In Western Canada, you have to spend, you have to clean up about 6% of your wells every year that are inactive. For us, that equates to about CAD 14 million a year. It gives us net debt of about CAD 700 million this year. Again, this does not take into account the carbon tax savings. Net debt to adjusted EBITDA 1.2-1.4. By the end of 2026, we will be well below a 1, which again is exactly where we hope to be. Common shares outstanding about 193 million. That is before we announced our additional SIB last week. You will see that come down by another 7.5 million shares. Again, maintaining a lower royalty. This is one thing that a lot of other companies will do is they will sell a royalty on their company.
They'll take all their lands and they'll sell a royalty. Mathematically, a lot of guys like this because they say, "We trade at three times cash flow. I can sell a royalty at 6x - 7x cash flow. Perfect. That works great for us." The problem is that might be true, but that burdens all of your locations. All 2,300 of our locations would have an additional royalty on it. We've never done that. We don't like that. In our opinion, that's just off-balance sheet financing that you can never repay. What a lot of companies will do is they'll sell a GORR, show a lower debt, but then their royalty. If you look at most of our peers, they'll have a royalty of 20%-25%, whereas our royalty is, again, 12%.
I'd rather show the debt on the balance sheet, pay it off quickly, than have an overriding royalty on your lands. Net operating expense, we're budgeting CAD 20. I don't think we've operated a quarter where it's above CAD 20. Our highest OPEX quarter is always going to be the first quarter. Even there, we came in at under CAD 20. With these additional savings, with some other operational synergies, we'll likely be well below CAD19. That gives us G&A of about CAD 1.50. Again, if you look at any of our peers, sub-100,000 barrels a day, you're going to see that that's on the low end, if not the lowest of almost any of our peers. When we got started, oil was CAD 60-CAD65. We've never had the luxury of $100 oil.
A lot of our peers have, and they grew up at CAD 100 oil, and they spend if it's CAD100 oil. We've always been cheap. We've always run efficiently, and I think our numbers show that. This just gives an idea of where our capital goes. Again, you take your adjusted EBITDA. Again, this is CAD 70 oil. Our average hedge position is right around CAD 68-CAD 69. At CAD 70, we are in a bit of a hedge loss position. Today, we are in a hedge benefit position. It gives you interest, adjusted funds flow, development capital, and free funds flow. Our debt is amortized. We have amortization on there of about CAD 100 million a year. In the first quarter of this year, we are in the bond market. Our bonds traded into the 80s.
We are happy to step in and buy and retire another 20 million of those. As we always say, if it is buy 10, get one free in the bond market, we will participate. Retiring more debt in addition to retiring shares as well. If you look at debt retirement as well as share buyback, we will have contributed about CAD 160 million back to our shareholders this year. Again, that is off of market cap of about CAD 350 million. That is what it actually looks like. Real quick, here is the comparisons. Again, by every analyst comparison, we are at the low end of valuation when you look at payout and when you look at your actual multiple. There is the firms that are covering us. Anyways, that is it for the formal. Happy to get in more detail to any of these.
I know it was relatively high level and a little quick, but happy to dive into anything from our sense on debt, hedging, our infrastructure, our asset base, inventory. I will turn it over to the floor if I can answer any follow-up questions. We're happy to do so at this time. Yes, sir. Have you thought about a dividend for your shareholders? Yeah, the question was just for the webcast. We thought about a dividend for our shareholders. We have. I can tell you, I do not love the idea. And the reason I do not love the idea is oil is so volatile that, in my opinion, you cannot put on a meaningful enough dividend that is not at risk of being cut if oil falls. You need such a low dividend that I do not think you get properly valued on it anyways.
We like the buyback idea because we can layer it on or off as we see oil prices fluctuate. The problem with the dividend, the minute you take it off, your share price gets killed. For us, right now, what we found ourselves in in the first quarter and now is our cash position creeping up on CAD 100 million. Just not a great use of cash sitting on the balance sheet. Again, we looked at a couple of acquisitions. The pricing started to go quite high. Now we are saying, "What are we going to do with the surplus cash?" We can do a one-off share buyback. We are looking to retire debt faster at CAD 60-CAD 65 oil. We do not want to put it back in the ground right now. That is when we made the decision. We will try and retire more debt and more shares.
Yeah, it's just a problem I have with dividends. It's just tough because if oil drops from CAD 80 to CAD 50, you get swagged anyways because people think your dividend rate's unsustainable. It is tough. It's tough to do with such a volatile commodity. Again, that's my stance. I know a lot of companies have it, and I've done it religiously. Yes, sir. Should we think about your production mostly being linked to Edmonton Light? And then I guess as a follow-on to that, do you see any evolution of how that's going to trade in light of maybe a little bit more pragmatism in Canadian energy? I think that's a great question. The question was, how do our barrels trade? What we model is we model WTI less $3.50. That's what our light trades at.
Right now, we're actually seeing it trade at $1.50-$2 less. To your point, with more access to pipeline, for example, when TMX came online, now that we are shipping more barrels to Tidewater that are getting Brent pricing, there is no less demand for Canadian barrels in the U.S. market. That is causing that differential to tighten. If we get more egress not to the U.S., I think you'll see that continue to tighten because you have a better option to sell directly to Brent through Tidewater. I will think that will tighten to a degree. It will only tighten to even at $1.50. That is pretty much your transport from Saskatchewan to West Texas. It's unlikely you'll ever see that go away because that's just that pipeline cost.
I think you can see tightening of that range. I think you should kind of expect it to be between $2 and $4 would be the outsides of the ranges that I would expect to see on that. Yeah, the more egress that we put into place, if our federal government allows for it, I think you're going to see those differentials stay tight. Yeah, John's right on the differentials close to $4. 32,000 of our 40,000 barrels is oil. 27,000 of that would be that Edmonton Light and about 5,000 to WCS, which we actually get a dollar premium just because our oil isn't quite as heavy as the WCS is. The distillates will continue to trade well as long as bitumen is being extracted.
Yeah, we have about 3,000-4,000 barrels that trade at about 50% of that Edmonton Light that you're talking about. Most of our liquids that we produce, we actually consume in our own blending operations. We blend that back into our heavy barrels to get an upgraded thing in the barrels, which is why our barrels trade at a slight premium. We just consume our own liquids when possible. I think we've got a couple of minutes left. Is there any questions on the plan or what we're doing? Yeah, so our bonds, for those who are interested, they trade at the coupon is 9 5/8%. We did a deal last. Goldman Sachs led the bond deal for us last year. It was a fantastic deal. Again, it does amortize at 2.5% a quarter, 10% a year. We wanted to show our commitment to amortizing that bonds out.
Because they are free trading, we do have the option to go in the market, as you've seen us do in the past, and buy and retire more bonds. Again, just looking at different ways we can return cash to shareholders and just looking for additional ways to add value. Yes, sir. What does it look like if we fast forward 18 months when the current hedges are over? And what if oil is still $60? What is the, if you're not wanting to drill as much, what does the company look like at that point? Yeah, the question is, if we roll forward 18 months, at the current commodity price, what does it look like? Again, we're not getting our hedge position being CAD 68, somewhere about that average cost. We are getting some revenue from it, not a huge amount.
You're going to see relatively similar cash flow numbers. Again, how we kind of view it, if oil's around CAD 70, we'll spend about CAD 300 million a year in capital. That keeps our production flat or grows it by 1% or 2%. At closer to $60, we'll spend closer to CAD 200-CAD 220 million. If we see oil closer to CAD 50, we'll spend probably CAD 100-CAD 140 million on capital. At today's pricing, I wouldn't expect a major variation. If you forecast oil at CAD 60 for next year, I think we would probably look to spend closer to that CAD 200-CAD 250 million range, which would result in a 2-3% declining production. Again, we have over 600 tier one locations that produce well in excess of, I think, a 75% rate of return at CAD 60 oil.
We do have a lot of locations we can drill. We just prefer to keep those in the ground for higher oil price. It would be more focusing our efforts on paying down debt and returning cash to shareholders at that point. Similar free cash flow numbers. I would say every $5 adjustment in WTI is about CAD 30 million of EBITDA.
To add to that, a question we get a lot is on our breakevens of the 2,300 locations we have. Our breakeven is $49 WTI. That is over all of the inventory. The inventory we are drilling in 2025 and 2026 gets closer to $40.
All right. With that, we are out of time. Thank you guys very much for attending today.