Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Tamarack Valley Energy Charlie Lake Divestiture conference call. This call is being recorded on Thursday, May 28th, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Schmidt, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Joelle. Welcome to everyone joining our conference call this morning. I'm Brian Schmidt, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tamarack Valley Energy. I'm thrilled to announce the completion of our transition into a pure-play Clearwater producer, the most economic and fastest-growing play in North America. We have just entered into a purchase and sale agreement to divest our Charlie Lake assets for CAD 804 million. This divestiture provides us with significant optionality to pursue higher total returns to shareholders through a combination of accelerated growth and waterflood investment in the Clearwater.
Also, disciplined share buybacks and an enhanced dividend, as well as the elimination of our debt. Together, with great support from our employees, field operators, our service providers, we're extremely proud of the way we have built and operated the Charlie Lake assets over the last five years. By all measures, the Charlie Lake was a great asset for us.
The assets generated over CAD 450 million of free funds flow, and ultimately yield us a total cash return of invested capital of over 70% since we entered the play in 2021. In the end, the Charlie Lake could not compete for capital nor keep pace with the prolific metrics that continue to surprise us to the upside in the Clearwater. The Charlie Lake divestiture gives us full value for the assets today, while allowing us to bring forward a backlog of more highly accretive development opportunities in the Clearwater. In our five-year plan, we expect to replace more than the disposed Charlie Lake volumes with higher margin Clearwater barrels. In our core acreage, we estimate that there's 25 years of development potential between primary, secondary drilling opportunities. In short, we have a lot of wood to chop in what has transformed into a generational oil play.
Our vision is to be the most profitable Canadian energy producer with lasting inventory, and our mission is to generate long-term sustainable value for shareholders. This transaction enhances both of these objectives. I'll now turn it over to our President, Steve Buytels.
Thanks, Brian. Earlier this year, we initiated a strategic review of our Charlie Lake assets. In our view, our share price did not reflect the full value of the play. The implication was an opportunity for us to capture more value for shareholders through further portfolio optimization. We engaged in a competitive bid process, which ultimately resulted in the divestment of our assets. A tremendous result here for Tamarack. Our corporate transformation started in 2020. We entered the Clearwater in 2020 and Charlie Lake in 2021. The following year, we levered up to acquire a premium position in the Clearwater. A calculated risk was taken as the proven economics of the Clearwater at the time competed with our existing plays, even without secondary waterflood expansion. Since that time, our production and reserves in the Clearwater play have both more than doubled.
We have distributed over CAD 620 million to shareholders. We expect to exit the second quarter of this year in a net cash position of more than CAD 125 million on the balance sheet. Substantial outperformance in the Clearwater over these past few years through higher production, improving netbacks, and reserve growth, has allowed us to divest of our lower margin assets in non-core areas while advancing the more profitable, longer duration asset development opportunities. This portfolio optimization has served to lower corporate sustaining capital requirements, lower our corporate breakeven prices, lower operating costs, non-productive asset retirement obligations, lower our net debt, and boost netbacks, as well as improve capital efficiencies. The Charlie Lake divestiture continues to drive this process forward. The company currently holds 200 million barrels of 2P Clearwater reserves with substantial running room for more growth and delineation to come.
We have set out a CapEx program that can be flexed higher to provide additional growth optionality, over and above what we outlined in our five-year plan of the run rate eight to 10% to something that could be into the mid-teens. Beyond our core developments, we continue to expand our footprint through land acquisitions and exploration activities. We have put together positions at Seal and Pelican Lake with prospective targets in the Wabasca and Clearwater formations. The plays represent meaningful optionality to further enhance per share value to shareholders with success that currently is not reflected in our plan to date. I will now turn it back to Brian for closing remarks.
Thank you, Steve. I'm often asked how we make our key business decisions, both pulling the trigger on acquisitions or divestitures, and how we allocate capital. For A&D, we have been consistent. We ask ourselves, how does a transaction impact long-term debt-adjusted free funds flow per share? We bring in strategically aligned assets that improve our plan, and we sell assets if we can get a higher price than they are currently worth in our plan. For capital allocation, our focus is on maximizing per share value in the environment we're in. At different commodity prices, maximizing that value may be through organic growth or buying back shares. We do not control the price of what we sell, so we must always prioritize being a low-cost producer in the commodity business. Thank you to our shareholders, employees, service and capital providers, as well as the board, for your ongoing support.
I'll now turn it back to the moderator for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one on your touchtone phone. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question comes from Jamie Somerville with Roth Canada. Your line is now open.
Good morning, and thank you. Just wondering, clarification on the guidance for year-end net cash and the royalty rates. Can you say what kind of oil price assumption that you're using in there? Apologies if I missed that somewhere, I didn't see it.
Yeah, Jamie, it's Steve here. On the royalty rates there, what we did is we ran a CAD 80 budget go forward. Then we actualized prices to date. You see the little bit of the jump in the royalty rate just reflecting the higher budget prices moving forward. That would be reflective with that net debt or net cash, sorry, position, as well for the estimate that was provided in the guidance.
Perfect. Thank you.
Yeah, Sorry, Jamie, it's Kevin here. Just that greater than CAD 125 million net cash, that's a pro forma end to Q2 number, so that's a June thirtieth this year.
Thank you for the correction there. Yeah, then maybe just, I don't know if you can comment on this, but, I don't really see you able to use all of the cash that this gives you and the free cash flow that I'm expecting with the dividend, and maybe even at a normal course issuer bid. I think this positions you well to look at potential acquisitions, but if the Charlie Lake didn't cut it, then maybe it's only the Clearwater and maybe some other Mannville stack that competes. There's an implied question there, and I don't know if you want to comment on it.
You know what? I'll start here and Brian can add any color. We did this, and we were pretty clear here that, yeah, the Charlie Lake's a great asset and didn't compete anymore for capital within the opportunity set that the Clearwater has. The Clearwater is a really advantaged asset in the sense that we can grow it, while at the same time, we're reducing decline through the waterflood. We need to pull value. We have decades of inventory that we see here, that we outlined both through primary and waterflood, that we have to get after. Outside of the plan, we still have Pelican and Seal that sit there that are seeing some really interesting competitor de-risking and really good competitor results around that acreage. We have to get after all of that and bring that value forward, too.
At the end of the day, we felt that the, again, the current price environment lended well to moving off of the Charlie Lake. The Charlie Lake for us ended up being a return on investment of over 70% when you go through what we've been able to do with it in terms of generation of free cash, and then the proceeds relative to the capital and the acquisition cost that we bought that at. That asset served us really well. Going forward here with that opportunity set organically in front of us, that is gonna be our focus. Again, we've got a pretty good history of being very disciplined in running that and making sure that anything we do is accretive to debt-adjusted free cash per share.
I think you nailed it earlier where there is a lot of free cash that this asset spins out, even with the dividend, and the capital program range that we outlined through the Five-Year Plan. I think if anything, we would look to potentially add more growth and accelerate that waterflood investment to bring more of that value forward quicker.
Yeah, I think I would add that if you kind of look historically what's been going on with the Clearwater, a couple of years ago, we drilled 140 primary wells. We're down to 85 this year, something like that. The number of wells that you need to drill is going down, and we got a great growth rate over those years. With, depending on how you measure, there's 1,700 to 2,100 wells in inventory. Stuff that happens beyond 10 years, it creates no shareholder value. We have to find a way to accelerate that, and this gives us some great optionality to pull those wells forward to create value for shareholders. The waterflood, roughly in the areas that we're going to do waterflood, for every barrel of primary, you're going to get at least a couple of barrels of secondary.
That's going to be a key focus for us is the organic growth that comes through drilling wells and waterflood.
Thank you. That all makes sense, and definitely congrats. Thanks again.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star one. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Brian for closing remarks.
My only closing remark, I just want to thank all the employees that worked at Charlie Lake asset and created just a ton of value, and it's just showing up here. It's been a great asset. I also want to acknowledge that in my years of working assets, I haven't worked an asset this prolific, and I think many around the table here would say the same thing. I'm really looking forward to focusing on this asset here going forward and what it's going to be able to deliver. It's a once in a career opportunity that I think all of us enjoy right now. Thank you for all your support online, and we'll close it off there. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.