Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for this Valeura Energy webcast to discuss our Q1 2023 results, which were released earlier today. I'm Robin Martin, Vice President of Communications and Investor Relations, and here with me in our Calgary office is Sean Guest, our CEO, and Kelvin Tang, our EVP Corporate, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary. Heather Campbell, our incumbent CFO, is on the call too, just connected by audio. Are you muted? No. This event is being streamed live and is being recorded today, May 12th, and we'll make a replay available on our website later today. All lines will be in a listen-only mode for the duration of the event today.
In a moment, I'm gonna hand over to Sean, who will take you through some slides that are gonna be shown on the screen if you're joining through MS Teams, and if you're joining by dial-up, they're available on our website. After that, we'll take any questions you might have. For questions, you can submit them either through the Teams app, the button at the top that says Q&A, or you can email them to us using ir@valeuraenergy.com. Just give me a second to switch back to the presentation here. Before we get started, and I hand over to Sean, I'll just draw your attention to slide two in the deck, which are our disclaimers about the materials we'll share today. In particular, please note the cautionary language around forward-looking information. With that, over to you, Sean.
Thank you very much, Robin, thank you everyone for joining us here today. Just before the end of Q1, we completed the acquisition of the Mubadala Gulf of Thailand assets. The Q1 financials that we sent out today really show the transformation of the company as we bring together Valeura, the KrisEnergy Gulf of Thailand assets, and the Mubadala Gulf of Thailand assets. What's really not shown is the operational performance, that's because picking up the assets at the end of the quarter, there isn't the revenue there. The focus is really on this being a balance sheet matter, as we go through the year in Q2 and others, that's when you'll really start to see the cash flow and the numbers coming in from operations.
What I'd like to really get people to focus on today is a couple of points. One, the level of transformation that you're seeing here in the company, and from a company that had $30 million in assets a year ago to now $900 million in assets through this transformation. The other point being, as you look at the purchase price allocation in the financials, Valeura and its shareholders ended up with a bargain purchase gain of about $200 million U.S. for this acquisition. The second point is that all of the assets are performing as we'd expected. The production is good, the assets are good, we're delivering on the financials, and the Wassana and Nong Yao growth projects are online to deliver increased production throughout the year.
Thirdly, as we're bringing the companies together and we're transitioning the companies, we now have an extremely strong full business unit operating in Thailand to deliver those results, and we're transitioning the executive to a Southeast Asian executive with significant experience of delivering results in the region as well as new business growth. Those are the key points really to focus on for this year for this presentation. As we look at the slide that's kind of in front of you now, quite simply, as we put out before, Q1, the assets produced, 20,500, we had good safety performance, and the capital spending was about $34 million. Now, looking at that in a little more detail, the first four months of the year were really dedicated towards operations on the Jasmine field. Right?
That we had a rig that arrived there near the 1st of January and departed around the end of April, so 4 months of activity. During that time, 8 wells were abandoned that were no longer economic. 8 new development wells were drilled, and another delineation/appraisal well was drilled and a workover. 7 of those 8 development wells were successful and have been brought on stream, and that's really led to this 4 months of activity increase of production to what we're seeing, you know, for May, an average of about 11,000 barrels a day as opposed to the 8,500 barrels a day that we had in December prior to starting these activities.
All that's very good and very successful, increasing at about 30%, now what we'll see as we move the rig to other areas, you know, the field will start to have a natural decline, and that will decrease as we go through the year. The other point I wanna note on Jasmine is we expect next week that that field will produce its 90th million barrel. Obviously, as Valeura, we can't take credit for that, having just done the acquisition, but it really brings up 3 points that I'd like to highlight. First, the field was sanctioned 18 years ago and brought online to recover 7 million barrels of oil.
The expected ultimate recovery now of the Jasmine field is over 100 million barrels, and this is really the message we've been trying to get out to people about the Gulf of Thailand assets and how they can keep delivering this type of reserve growth, production growth over time. The second point is, while Valeura can't take credit for the 90 million barrels, the team in Thailand can, and this is now our team. This is the team that has been developing these fields, drilling these wells, maintaining these assets, and delivering the results that we've seen. It is now our team, and I congratulate the team there for the delivery that they've had on taking this field up to this level of 90 million barrels recoverable. The last point I'll just make is it does point to the stability of the fiscal terms in Thailand.
What we can say as an operator in Thailand, when we make business decisions, we know what our fiscal terms are, and they're stable. For anyone who's on the call, whether in Canada or in the U.K., you can appreciate that difference as you deal with some other regimes, like in the U.K., where there's much more risk on fiscal stability. For us, it's really a low country risk environment, given that type of stability you see. The last point I just wanna make on this slide is the operating costs for the quarter were about $38 million, and that comes out at about $21 a barrel. Now, the guidance we put out, we've had just under $30 a barrel for the full year. We do expect that this OpEx will go up.
Wassana is now on production, those OpEx costs will come in as well as later in the year as we go into the Nong Yao development, we're likely to pick up increased OpEx costs there. While this is a really strong number, we'll have to see as we progress through the year, but we do see the potential for trying to bring that OpEx down as we bring these companies together. Okay, going on to the next slide, Robin. Just summarizing the Valeura financials, at the end of the quarter, cash and cash equivalents, $268 million. When you work through the additions of inventory receivables, then take off tax, and other payables, now you end up with about $104 million in working capital at the end of the quarter, which is very positive.
When the acquisition completed, I talked about that purchase price allocation, which you'll find in the financials. We end up with a purchase price gain of over $200 million, right? That comes on to the income for the quarter, and therefore, if you look in the financials, you're seeing we're just getting about just under CAD 3 a share income for the quarter. Obviously, this is a one-off event at this time, but I think it closed trading yesterday at about CAD 2.18 a share. Looking at the last point there, during the quarter, we did complete the acquisition of the 12.5% interest in Valeura Energy Asia.
What this done, besides being value accretive to the shareholders, the deal also cleans up our corporate structure so that now all of our subsidiaries are 100% wholly owned, which just increases our ability to operate and our commercial flexibility. The next slide. It also you know, I wanted to highlight as we look at some of the subsequent events. When we announced the deal to acquire Mubadala's assets in December, a lot of the questions we've had since that time is, "Well, what other deals do you have coming?" What we've said is we do have a lot of what we'll expect, smaller deals, equity consolidation and those types of matters, and that's what we've been seeing. We've cleaned up the SPV buying the 12.5% interest.
We increased our working interest in the Wassana field to 100%, just as we brought that field back online. Also in an announcement, we saw that we've actually exited the G6 block with the Rossukon field, but have taken a royalty going forward on that. A lot of these, as we talked about, is just really trying to clean up our ability to operate and to work commercially and get the most value out of these assets. Okay? The other point in the subsequent development here is we brought on the Wassana oil field. That came on April 28th, and it's been averaging about 2,600 barrels a day for the past 10 days. Now, they are still bringing that field up to speed slowly.
We expect the production numbers to keep increasing back to the levels we've talked about before, about 3,500 barrels a day, and can even be higher. You know, those operations are ongoing, and it's continuing to produce. We're just trying to make sure we optimize that as we go forward. Okay. The guidance we put out several weeks ago, and that guidance remains for this point in time, largely unchanged. I touched on the operating costs, which we really hope we can see some synergies there to bring that down. The main point I wanted to talk about on this slide was the capital spending. We put out the range of $180 million-$200 million. We do hope to see synergies on that that can bring that number down as we bring the companies together in Thailand this year.
The main point to make there is that there is a split there between what we would consider to be normal maintenance spending and what is growth spending. As we look historically at the three fields we've acquired from Mubadala, generally, the spend per year there has been in the $70 million-$85 million range, and that's kept the production in what you've looked at in the slides we put out before, the 7.5 million-9 million barrels of production. We now do add Wassana in there, but a lot of that CapEx, just under half, is likely focused on the Nong Yao C development, which will increase production there to over about 50%. We're looking at an average just from that field in 2024 of approximately 11,000 barrels a day.
Also the Wassana field, where we're looking at that five horizontal well campaign in Q3 into Q4, which should increase the production from that field approximately 50%. It's really indicating that it is an enormously high year on this, but this we expect to deliver production in 2024 above the levels that we're currently producing at now on these assets. Just the next slide, Robin. Finally, just summarizing around on the leadership team and the changes that we have there. When we've talked about the acquisition of Mubadala assets, we've also really highlighted that we're really buying a full business unit there. We said that the only person who's been leaving that business unit has been the Emirati country manager who stayed with Mubadala and returned to Abu Dhabi.
We've now brought on Dr. Ian Warrilow, who will take that role, and he's on seat currently in Ian Warrilow and my career passed each other as we worked in Shell and Woodside early in our career. Ian Warrilow has been working in Mubadala, where he was the country manager of Indonesia, oversaw the development of gas field there, and more importantly, he had the senior leadership role in the Thailand business unit here. He is well known to the team. He knows the team, he knows the assets, he knows the regulator, and it's just he's moving into a role there where we see that business unit is now fully set up to deliver the operational results we need. If we step up to the executive team, a key point to note is the executive team will be moving over to Southeast Asia.
It is just too hard to run a Southeast Asian business, to grow a Southeast Asian business from Calgary. It's just too remote. I've been living over in the region most of the time for the past year, and with these changes, we've actually brought on Yacine Ben-Meriem, who will be the Chief Financial Officer. Yacine has been working with us now for almost 2 years and really led the acquisitions in 2022 of KrisEnergy and the Mubadala assets. He's well-known entity, and he has a backing, this background in investment banking in the region, has done a number of deals that also brings both financial acumen in the area, but also a lot of new business success. The other role in joining me in Calgary here today is Kelvin Tang, is EVP Corporate.
Kelvin is a lawyer by background, but Kelvin has been intimately involved in the assets that we've just acquired, right from the blocks originally being acquired, through the development of these blocks and many commercial deals throughout Thailand. He's got that strong experience of how to operate, how to work legally and commercially within Thailand and the region, and as well as he's done new business in the region. We now believe we're getting the team in place that can deliver the operational performance and financial results from Thailand, as well as the executive oversight there to deliver the financial results, but also to deliver the growth that we're looking for in Southeast Asia as we move forward. Really just bringing it to a conclusion there. The key point is the financials this quarter demonstrate the transformation of the company that we've been promising you.
The assets are performing extremely well, and the company is really getting positioned as we move through 2023 to bring these companies together and look for savings and delivering strong cash flow in 2023 and 2024. At that point, thank you very much, and I'll hand back over to Robin for any questions.
Okay, thanks, Sean. Just as a reminder, all lines are gonna stay in a listen-only mode for this call. If you would like to ask a question, you can either do that through the Teams app. There's a button there that says Q&A, probably at the top of your screen, or you can email questions to us, and we'll see them on our screen here. Just give us a moment to sort through the questions here. Sean, first question. You ended on a production note there and specifically, what do you anticipate production will be in about December of this year?
Well, in December of this year, we expect production to be, you know, likely around the guidance number that we've put out in that mid-range. The main reason for this is that as you get into Q4, the rig is going to be working on the development of Nong Yao C and not other maintenance activities. Nong Yao will have been declining through that period, and it's really as we hit Q1 next year and you bring on that facility that you're going to see the jump up to probably more than 25,000 barrels a day, and above as you get towards the end of Q1 or Q2, next year in 2024.
Okay. And speaking of changes in the portfolio toward the end of the year, we've had a few questions on operating costs, and I think you addressed much of this in your prepared remarks, but perhaps you can just rehash for the few people who've been asking this question. We've presented in these results a number of $21 per barrel for OpEx in the first quarter, which obviously compares very favorably to our guidance number of $30 per barrel thereabouts. Can you comment on why such a difference between what we observed in first quarter and what we're anticipating for the full year?
Yeah. A few things in that is obviously the OpEx that we built out and put up in guidance is you still have two companies that are operating. As we move through 2023, we will look at how the synergies that exist and how we can use this to kind of bring down some of those costs. The guidance numbers though are really based on looking at the two companies and building them up separately, and we do expect synergies as we move forward. The main point is that Q1 did not include the OpEx for Wassana, and Q4, we expect Nong Yao OpEx to come in at a higher level as you're paying some lease costs on the equipment that's installed, and yet you won't have brought that production on.
Okay. Okay, a couple of questions on CapEx as well. Again, I know in your prepared remarks you went through some explanation of the split between what's to be considered maintenance and what's growth. Specifically the question is, when we're talking about growth CapEx and that approximately 50% of the capital budget we've got per year, are you talking about growth in reserves or are you talking about growth that's just oriented toward production?
The key point is we've shown to people, and it's been in our other slides, is that the reserves that we have largely remain unchanged each year because the amount of production you're getting tends to be replaced with about 100% reserve replacement each year. We do expect a similar result this year. You are talking really about more it's the production that you're actually yielding with that. As we noted, we do expect the average production in Q4 to be above the levels that we're currently producing at, which is just over 23,000 barrels a day.
Okay. Okay, a question on reserves while we're on the topic. One of our investors has noted in our reserves report that we published earlier in the year, there were a couple of the 1P reserves values that were negative. Can you comment on this? Do you believe that the future outlook of our assets is being misinterpreted by the reserves evaluator?
Yeah. It's not so much that I would put it down to the, you know, putting blame on the reserves evaluator at this point in time, but it's back to that slide I was referring to a moment ago, which shows especially as you look in those slides, the 1P each year remains largely unchanged. That's one of the key points is that, okay, yeah, the 1P for a couple of fields is looking like it could be just borderline economic, but the number doesn't change each year, and that's going back six years we've demonstrated that. The other key point to really bring up is the 1P always just assumes this drop in production, the abandonment comes very quickly, and the 1P is fully burdened with the abandonment costs.
It's really not surprising that if you only have the 1P, you accelerate the abandonment forward and you burden the 1P with the full abandonment cost. That's why you see that kind of number. Again, I'd ask people to refer back to the presentation we showed before, which is a 100% reserve replacement ratio on the 1P.
Okay, a couple of questions on taxes as well. You know, a specific question, what can we expect for taxes in 2023, either as an effective rate or kind of general expectation on applying tax pools? The investor has noted here that when we announced the KrisEnergy deal, he did mention that there were tax losses involved. What should we expect, is the question. Heather, perhaps you could take that one, if you don't mind coming to you.
Yep, no problem. For 2023, you can expect, as we've said before, any Wassana is fully tax shielded. The Mubadala assets are not at this point in time. However, work is progressing on that reorganization to allow those tax pools from Wassana to be shared across more assets. That will take several months.
Okay. Thanks, Heather. While we've got you, a couple of questions, more balance sheet related things. Special Remuneratory Benefit or SRB, which is Thailand's effective windfall tax. The investor is asking, how much of that SRB is included in the payables that we have on our balance sheet, which are about $173 million in total?
Right. About half of those are SRB. SRB will be in the range of about $80 million, and it'll be paid actually this, later this month.
That SRB is really related to 2022, right?
Right.
With the period of high oil prices that existed there, and that's why there is this high level for the payment that's now due.
Correct. Yes. That's all related to 2022 and that over $100 oil price we had in the middle of the year.
Okay. Also, a couple of questions have come in on decommissioning. specific question, are payments for decommissioning deductible for tax purposes in Thailand?
They're deductible when the expenditure is made. I think we've described before about the securitization of that with the government. That is just, you know, putting in place letters of credit or deposits. That's not tax-deductible, but when the expenditures are made, they are.
Okay. Another question on decom. Has the undiscounted estimate for total decommissioning costs changed or is the number that we're seeing on the balance sheet really just the discounted value?
Yes. The number on the balance sheet, it's older. The undiscounted, uninflated value has not changed. The amount on the balance sheet is the present value.
Okay. Okay, just a couple more questions. Just a reminder, you can use the Teams app and those pop up in front of us. Just trying to sift through the last few of them here. Our favorite question. Dividends. Any plan to start paying a dividend?
Look at this point in time, not immediately. Obviously, our key focus this year is on demonstrating that we have the cash flow from these assets and starting to really put in place that kind of cash cushion as we go forward. We expect the board again to kind of look at this dividend policy, and whether there might be a dividend introduced in the future. Really at this point in time, as we've kind of tried to emphasize, we do believe in growth and that we can actually put money into growth to deliver good value as we did last year and as we hope we can do as we go forward in the coming years.
Just to reiterate again, if we find a few years from now that we're getting strong cash flow from the assets, we're not seeing good accretive opportunities for growth, then I would expect the board to look much more at, you know, how you return those funds to shareholders.
Okay, we've had a few comments from investors here saying, to the effect of why is the share price still so low? Maybe just to sort of bundle that with a slightly more specific question, one of our investors is asking, your Q1 earnings are nearly $3 a share, which is obviously well above your current share price. Clearly the company looks very undervalued. What are you doing to attract investors and in particular long-hold institutions into our stock?
That's a really good question because obviously we believe, like the investor does, that the share price is currently well undervalued when you look at the metrics relative to other companies, when you look at the cash flows and that. In our view, it just doesn't make sense at this point in time. We appreciate the question coming forward. It is a focus now as we kind of get the company operating stable to find the executive. Yes, we are going to start to look at marketing more. We're going to be, you know, as we get the assets fully understood, we'll be looking at a capital market state because we really think it's important to have the time with the investors to explain the story.
It is really a bit of a different story, and it takes a bit of thought, but we really see the potential for growth in the share price continuing. Last year we were obviously, I think, number two on the Toronto Stock Exchange in venture for return to shareholders at 375%, and we see more of that this year.
Sean, maybe I'll just add another comment to that. It bears mentioning that for much of last year, and in fact the last 2 years we were in a blackout phase, which prevents us as insiders from buying and selling shares. Also prevents us from being in the market and actively marketing the story. We're beyond that now. We're out there on the road and doing just as much as we can to meet with investors. We've had a very good reception, both in the U.K. and North America, and that work is continuing as soon as, you know, next week we'll be back on the road.
Yeah, Robin, maybe, you know, another point on that is just to say now where we have got to with our board and executive holding, I believe it's over 10% of the shareholding in the company at approximately that level. We remain heavily invested in the success of this business.
Speaking of investors that are heavily invested, we've had a couple of questions here about our largest shareholder, Baillie Gifford. Right off the bat, you know, obviously we can't speak for their intent and what they might be doing. You'd have to ask them themselves. The question is, did Baillie Gifford sell down in large volumes in April? Do we know if they're looking to exit? The one thing that I'll mention is Baillie Gifford is very good about publishing the transactions that it does when it crosses through the statutory thresholds. On SEDAR, you can see their reports as to what they've sold and when they've sold it.
Beyond that, yeah, you'd need to ask them what their intent is, but we believe them still to be a very significant shareholder of the business.
That's correct. We would have had to have seen on SEDAR that they would have made a filing if there'd been a large change. All I can say is we do remain in communication with them.
Good. It looks like, Sean, that that's all for questions. We'll leave it at that.
Maybe just before we kinda sign off, I just really wanna thank, you know, Heather. As the company is moving over to Southeast Asia and given mobility issues, Heather has decided to remain in Canada and seek other opportunities. I really wanted to thank her for her time with Valeura and her really financial oversight as a CFO over the past number of years. Again, thank you specifically for that, Heather.
Thanks, Sean. It's been a great ride, and wish everybody all the best.