Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are very pleased you've joined us for our Oil and Gas Conference. Our next presentation is from Valeura Energy. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book a Meeting" in the top toolbar. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Robin Martin, Vice President, Communications and Investor Relations of Valeura Energy, which trades on the OTCQX market under the symbol VLERF and on TSX under the symbol VLE. Welcome back, Robin.
Thanks very much, Lily. Good to be back chatting with the OTC QX group again. Today's presentation, I'll be presenting from slides that are in our corporate presentation materials, which are available on our website. It's a subset of those slides, so what you'll notice is the page numbers at the bottom aren't necessarily sequential. Before I get started, I will draw your attention to our disclaimers and advisory slide, which is slide two. It's obviously very fine print, so I'll ask that you take a look at this at your leisure, paying in particular attention to the cautionary language here around forward-looking information. For those of you who might be new to Valeura Energy, we'll just go over some key numbers to sort of set the context for what our company is all about. We are an upstream oil and gas producer.
All of our production currently is oil. It's about 23,000 barrels a day. All of it comes from the offshore Gulf of Thailand. As Lily has mentioned, we're traded on the TSX, and we're also listed on the OTCQX. For that reason, when I speak about share price, I'll be speaking in Canadian dollars, but everything else, including all of our financial reporting, is done in U.S. dollars. That in mind, what I would say by way of highlights is we have built a very strong platform here at Valeura Energy. We have a balance sheet with just under a $250 m illion in cash and no debt. We're strongly cash flow generative as well. You can see some pre-cash flow numbers on the slide there. This is based on the last 12 months generating revenues of over $600 million. Capital markets context for you.
Shown here is the share price, again, that's in Canadian dollars, which really dates back to the beginning of our journey establishing this position in Thailand. You can see some of the key transactions that we've undertaken there: mergers and acquisition transactions where we took over Khris Energy's interests in Thailand. We took over Mubadala Energy's interests in Thailand. More recently, we've done a large-scale farm-in with the national oil company PTTEP. Over this time, we've also demonstrated some very solid execution of the portfolio. It's not just the acquisitions that have driven our value. It's actually delivering on the assets, generating that cash flow, extending lives of assets. I'll get into that in a little bit more detail in a moment.
a result of having done these transactions and having executed on the portfolio, we've grown the company to a market cap of just shy of $550 million, and that's based on share prices of about $7 per share. Also, on the bottom of this slide, you can see some of the achievements that we've attained over the last couple of years. Things like being the new entrant of the year within the Asia-Pacific region, Company of the Year, Executive of the Year, as well as some environmental monitoring awards that we've had. Importantly, we've been recognized by the Report on Business magazine in Canada as Canada's number one top-growing company based on revenue growth over three years. That operational performance that I think is really described by those achievements is a core part of our strategy.
Front and center in our strategy to deliver value through growth is what we call operational excellence. This is the mixed batch of things covering ensuring that our people remain safe, ensuring that we're being good stewards of the environment, and also ensuring that we are maintaining a strong license to operate with our governments and shareholders, as well as other stakeholders in the business. The other pillars of our strategy are how we choose to grow. We have described it as maximizing cash flow from our portfolio. You can think of that as organic growth, whereby we work to add reserves, to extend the lives of our assets, to extend multiple more years of cash flow to be had from this portfolio. Equally important, as I have mentioned, we have grown through mergers and acquisitions. I expect we will continue to grow through mergers and acquisitions.
Inorganic growth remains a core part of our strategy as well. Just taking a very brief look at our asset portfolio, what you can see here, the top two assets listed, Manora and Jasmine, I would describe as producing assets that are sort of on the more mature end of their spectrum. That said, these are both assets that have surprised to the upside multiple times over, producing significantly more oil than was initially envisaged when these assets were developed. The game now with these assets is essentially to manage to mitigate declines and manage to add continual more years of reserves from these producing fields. The other two producing fields shown here in the dark blue text boxes, Nong Yao and Wassana, I would argue are at the very opposite end of the growth spectrum when it comes to oil and gas assets.
They are in what I call an initial growth phase. The Nong Yao field, for example, we added a third major cluster to last year, which propelled that to becoming our largest and most profitable asset. And we've grown that since by an infill drilling program that just completed a month before last. The Wassana asset as well, currently one of our smaller assets. By the second half of 2027, we're forecasting this one to be our largest asset. We're going through a large-scale redevelopment of this field involving building a new central processing platform. I'll get into a little bit more detail on what that project looks like.
The light blue assets are the ones I mentioned earlier that came to us by way of a farm-in that we've done with the national oil company here in Thailand and some exciting developments to be had in the very near term from those assets, which I'll mention as well. Key achievements. These are the things that we're proud of when it comes to looking back at our portfolio. Growing production and reserves is absolutely key to adding value through this portfolio. We have grown production significantly over the time that we've operated these assets. At the same time, we've replaced that production and, in fact, added to our reserves. You can see 98% growth in our proved plus probable reserves comparing the most recent year-end with year-end 2022.
That plays out by delivering value in a very tangible way through an increased NPV, as reported by our external reserves evaluators. You can see that in the middle graph there. In fact, the 2P NPV10 of our portfolio has grown by 223% over that same period. At the same time, we've also amplified that by working to ratchet down our decommissioning obligations, partly by strongly interrogating what it will actually cost eventually to do that decommissioning and partly by pushing the timing expectation of that further out into the future. Speaking of the future, there are some exciting things we're doing on that front as well. I've already mentioned the Wassana redevelopment, but here we've got some key numbers identifying just how valuable a project like this really is for our portfolio.
Even at $60 Brent Oil, and I'll note that we're still above that even now in the low oil price environment, I would expect a project like this generates about 40% IRR and will pay back in 18 months. Moreover, projects like this, modern processing facilities have the ability to ratchet down our operating cost per barrel, which ultimately should be reflected in the overall cost of operations within our portfolio. Strategic Gulf of Thailand farming is mentioned here as well. I'm going to jump to the next slide to speak about that in just a little bit more detail. We've signed a very important strategic relationship with the national oil company PTTEP. It's a low-cost entry into these two very large blocks, each which span about 300 km north to south. Now, we describe this as exploration. In fact, it's exploration with near-term development.
Both blocks have oil and gas discoveries on them. At this stage, in fact, we have moved to development planning already, working closely with the operator PTTEP to put some flesh around what that development will look like in the hopes that by about this time next year, we would be considering a final investment decision on the first gas development on these blocks. In an offshore context, that is about the fastest turnaround that you will ever see when it comes to acquiring acreage, drilling wells, and getting to a final investment decision. To get into just a little bit more detail on these blocks, and I will not speak about them in a huge amount of detail, this is our block G1. You can see two of the focus areas identified in the callout boxes here.
I want to point this out just to show these prospects that we're looking at are nestled in very tightly, very close to large existing producing fields within the Gulf of Thailand. Those are fields that, by and large, are operated by our partner, PTTEP, meaning any development that's done within these couple of focus areas that we've shown here would be developed by way of tying back into producing infrastructure in those other fields. Very efficient way to do this. Similarly, block G365 has those same characteristics, large prospects being immediately next to large gas fields.
Interestingly, on this block, if you'll look to the bright yellow bit in the northern part of the block, that is, in fact, our Nong Yao asset, so our largest and most profitable asset, again, nestled right in there next to these prospects that we see as highly prospective and within an oil fairway between our producing field and other undeveloped oil fields nearby. Gulf of Thailand is not necessarily a well-known oil and gas province to a lot of people in the Western world. However, this is a basin that has had multi-decades of oil and gas development. With that comes the full suite of oil and gas upstream services that we need to make this business work, including everything to do with drilling and contractors and maintenance, as well as construction of major facilities and everything else that goes into developing a new oil and gas play.
An interesting dynamic that we really like about the Gulf of Thailand is shown in this graph to the bottom. This is showing you proved reserves over time. One of the challenges that we get with Thailand is, at any given time, the life of the reserves by way of a snapshot looks like it's very short. It looks like we've got only a few years of production when you compare current production rates to current reserves. However, if you look at the dynamic of that over time, what you can see is, in a year, the red bars there show production. The green bars show reserve adds. In fact, the overall balance of reserves and production hasn't really changed over multiple years. There are geologic reasons that that happens. One technical slide, I promise, is all I've got in my presentation pack here.
The graph on the left, I think, illustrates the point and why that comes to be in the Gulf of Thailand. The red lines that you're seeing there are multiple stacked reservoirs within this basin. An individual well might encounter as many as potentially 10 producible reservoirs. However, it's also a basin that's influenced by extensional forces, or think of it as being stretched, which results in faulting, faulting being the pink lines that you see on this chart. What that does is divide these producible reservoirs into discrete fault blocks, which has the consequence of, when they're drilled, only those reserves from that discrete fault block go into your reserves at the end of the year.
When a well reaches the end of its life, it creates an opportunity to reuse that well slot on your offshore platform, drill into the fault block next door, which you can image on 3D seismic, and you've essentially replaced your reserves, brought production on, and renewed the entire portfolio. This is why we see these reserves continuously being replaced year- after- year. If 100% reserves replacement is the bog-standard expectation for the Gulf of Thailand, in fact, we've done better than that by being a little bit more aggressive with our drilling program. In our first year of full operations in Thailand, we replaced 219% of the production that we had. I'm looking now at 2P reserves, by the way. In the second year, 245% reserves replacement ratio, meaning, to put it a different way, we have added double the production that we produce every single year.
A very important consequence of that is those barrels add to the longevity of the assets, meaning what we're effectively doing here is layering on more years of future cash flow to be garnered from these assets. That is shown in the bottom graph here. What you can see is all of our assets are expected to be in production through 2030. In the instance of Wassana, we've extended field life from 2027 out to 2043. There is good reason to believe we can push that even further yet. Importantly, these barrels that we're producing and the reason that we're chasing this is because of the strong margins that we're able to generate from the Gulf of Thailand. That is shown here when we look at the last 12 months' financials and specifically the cash flow that we've generated. I've mentioned 12 months of revenue.
This is up to the end of the second quarter of this year, by the way. Twelve months of revenue being $643 million, generating adjusted after-tax cash flow of $288 million. Very respectable margin. You see the same dynamic when you look at the balance sheet itself. We've grown the cash on the balance sheet from $147 million at the midpoint of 2024 to $242 million at June 30th, 2025. Again, strongly cash-generative business built on the back of an oil production profile that continues and generates very strong margins. We publish guidance every year. Here are the key numbers. We've commented on this further in our third quarter update that we published last month, indicating that, as far as production is concerned, we see the second half of the year as being more of our production waiting.
The result is we expect to be within that guidance range for production in 2025. We will shortly come out with our third quarter results, which will be the time that we comment further on the other metrics here and our expectations for the rest of the year. What do you do with the cash is the million-dollar question that I face quite a bit in my meetings with investors. There are really three sort of places that we like to deploy cash. Number one is organic investment, investing back into our portfolio for the purpose of adding reserves, extending field life, adding more years of cash flow. Obviously, key to the business that we are pursuing here. Ultimately, our modeling shows that that will keep this portfolio producing between 20,000 and 25,000 barrels a day well into the 2030s. Number two, value accretive M&A.
As I've said, we have grown through M&A. I expect we'll continue growing through M&A. We do this with strict acquisition criteria, though, meaning we will not get impatient and do bad deals. We insist on dollars, not bragging rights. Ultimately, the idea is to parlay this cash generation that we've got into layering on more assets that have the ability to do more of the same. This is how we'll grow the company. There's a third bin here, returns to shareholders. We do have a share buyback program in place. Admittedly, we've been relatively modest about using that as a tool to deploy cash. The reason for that is we continually weigh the opportunity set that's before us, including M&A opportunities, organic investment, and returning cash to shareholders through our buyback program.
In the recent past, the argument has won out to say it makes more sense to us to be preserving the strength of the balance sheet in order to support M&A. That is just a reflection of the richness of the opportunity set that we see. Speaking of that opportunity set on M&A, this frames our thinking for how we approach M&A. We see an attractive regional market. Ultimately, we've got economies within the Southeast Asia region that have declining oil and gas production and yet are very energy hungry. They see this as economies of the region see this as absolutely and directly fueling economic growth, which is ticking along at rates that we do not see in the Western world. At the same time, there is a reduced number of operators pursuing these opportunities.
We've seen the exit of large companies who are pursuing larger things that are material for them when maybe they don't see this as material, but we do. At the same time, there's a relatively shallow buyer pool. That's another way just to say there's not a lot of competition for these assets. We don't typically go into deals or data rooms and see 10 or 12 potential buyers. For us, it's more like 2, 3, or 4. There is another asset. Sorry, I'm going to skip back to that slide. I wanted to make another point on this to say the map that you're seeing here of Southeast Asia really defines what is our core area. At the moment, all of our assets are in Thailand. We expect to continue growing in Thailand. We also expect to continue pursuing growth in other countries of the region.
Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei would be key focal points for us, but also interested in stepping a little further afield. The right opportunities in Vietnam could be attractive. The right opportunities in Australia could be attractive as well. However, this Southeast Asia region is very much seen as core to our business. There is one asset that's outside of that region, a legacy asset for us in Turkey, a deep tight gas play where we drilled wells in conjunction with a partner that we had a few years back. This has sat as a relatively dormant part of our portfolio while we started and built our business in Thailand. However, more recently, we have signed a farming agreement to bring Transatlantic into these assets. They are pursuing a farming opportunity that will see them potentially earn 50% of our working interest in these assets by fracking and testing an existing well.
Following success with that would provide the opportunity for them to drill another deep well to test commerciality of this play. It is exciting in that we see significant resource here. It is a modest spend on our part. The deal has them covering the vast majority of the cost to pursue this play, and the upside could be significant. I will just note that everything that we do, we do with a mind for sustainability and sustainable operations. That means being proper stewards of the environment. That means ensuring that we are taking care of our people and the communities where we operate. It also ensures that everything we do is done with the utmost care for governance and ethics. With that, we also have a strong commitment to transparency and publish our results by way of an annual sustainability report.
I want to just touch on value for a moment. Again, switching back to CAD here, if we're trading in the CAD 7-ish range, I would note that the analyst consensus target price for Valeura is more in the order of CAD 13. In fact, if you were to take our 2P net present value and add our cash to that, you'll come to a number per share of more than CAD 14. There's significant room to move. Just to wrap it all up with some key messages that I'd like you to take away from this presentation. Number one, the platform we've built is truly an exceptional one when it comes to fueling the ability to keep growing. We are, in fact, the second largest oil producer in Thailand with 23,000 barrels a day. We've also made some major recent achievements that we're proud of.
Replacing reserves would be number one on that list for sure. The result of that, as I've described, is extending the economic field life of all of our assets and therefore adding more years of future cash flow and therefore more net present value. At the same time, we've layered into that some thoughts, some opportunities that really build out the longer-term view of what this portfolio is. We are delivering on growth by delivering development, redevelopment of our Wassana field, delivering on growth by pursuing this strategic farm-in in Thailand, which I believe really shapes what the portfolio will start to look like in the 5- to 10-year timeframe from now. At the same time, the financial performance is strong. I would describe it as industry-leading, especially when it comes to the snapshot of our balance sheet.
With nearly a quarter billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet and no debt, we are in a very strong position. There are big things coming as well. We see M&A opportunities out there that keep us very active. We are increasing our efforts on this front and pursuing some acquisition opportunities very strongly. For that reason, we've chosen to allocate much of our cash toward M&A rather than distribute that cash through shareholder returns or other means. Ultimately, the endpoint of this is I see Valeura shares as excellent value. I hope you do as well. I hope with this you would go away and do some analysis on the valuation, the relative valuation of our shares versus peers. I think you'll come back to the same conclusion that there is significant room to move on the value of Valeura.
I'm going to pause just for a moment and read some of the questions that came in. If I can figure out how to do that. Company seems to be significantly undervalued. Why do you think that is? Yeah, it's a very good question. I think there are a couple of things that we can point to there. One of the challenges is, as I've described, we tend to face a little bit of criticism for the fact that Valeura, as well as the other operators within the Gulf of Thailand, tend to have a relatively short reserves life index. That said, it's a reserves life index that tends to always be a three to four-year number, meaning we replace reserves.
Screening criteria maybe has investors sit on the sidelines, but once we get opportunities to present the story and have people understand, we tend to get a bit of an aha moment where people become comfortable with the story. More promotion on that front, definitely helpful. The other thing that I think the market would probably like to see is more movement on the mergers and acquisitions front. I agree. We'd like to see that too. Obviously, we're pursuing that very strongly. I think you'll see some interesting things in the future from us on that. Will Valeura's exploration budget shift meaningfully in 2026? I think you will see us do a little bit more exploration in 2026. We will publish some guidance around this in due course.
With the two large exploration blocks now in the portfolio, it makes sense that we would pursue some opportunities on those. Moreover, we also see some opportunities on the existing portfolios as well. Interesting things near Nong Yao, near Manora, even near Jasmine that are all currently in discussion as we piece together the 2026 plan. Watch this space. What are the key drivers behind production uptime and efficiency improvements? Yeah, I mean, a mixed bag of things here, to be honest. We have interrogated our operating costs very hard. We've negotiated some significant improvements on that front. That all translates to efficiency as I see it. When we're talking about actual production uptime, we have a very, very strong record of production uptime. We have a team that has been running these assets basically as long as they've existed.
I do not think there is anyone on the planet that can operate our assets better than we operate them. As a result, we enjoy very strong uptime. Sorry, just reading questions here to make sure that we are not covering too many duplicates. Interesting. What progress has Valeura made in reducing emissions intensity and what further sustainability initiatives are planned? Yeah, and thanks for that question. I do not get a chance to answer these questions a lot. We have implemented some projects essentially to modernize our production infrastructure. A fantastic example of that is on our Jasmine Field, we have installed a low- BTU gas generator. Ultimately, what this is doing is this is taking a stream of waste gas where when the platform was initially developed, it would have been just that waste gas.
As technologies moved on, that gas is actually possible to be combusted to generate electricity, thereby offsetting the use of diesel, thereby reducing your emissions. That, plus various other initiatives that we've done around diesel savings, efficiency, and the way that we operate, has resulted in a 19% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions intensity comparing 2024 to 2023. We are hopeful that we're able to continue this. We've got various other projects that focus around power generation and diesel consumption and various other things that we can do with waste streams across the portfolio that I expect will continue to see us on that trend of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Question here on reserves replacement 2025. I'm going to decline to comment on that. We've done 219% in our first year of operations, 245% in our second year of operations.
We do evaluate the reserves by way of a third-party external evaluator at the end of every year. You won't have to wait too long on this. We announce our reserves in February of each year. I'll just note that, as I've mentioned, it is a bog-standard expectation in the Gulf of Thailand that operators are able to reduce, or pardon me, able to replace reserves to the tune of about 100% every year. Question on how we're investing cash. We do have a large cash position. What are we doing with it? We're keeping it on the balance sheet because we see significant opportunities on the M&A space. In the meantime, there are opportunities to earn interest on this.
Some of the changes that we've made in the tax structuring of our business result in us not needing to keep as much cash in Thailand for the purpose of payment of Thai taxes, meaning we can keep a larger proportion of cash in U.S. dollars in accounts domiciled in Singapore and elsewhere, which gives us exposure to higher interest income than maybe you've seen in the past. In the interim, while that cash sits on our balance sheet, we are working on the cash management side of things to maximize what we're able to do on that front. I've got less than a minute left. I'm going to see if I can fit just one other question in. I think I've actually answered all of these. Most of them are duplicates there. I thank you for your time today. My contact details are shown on screen.
I'm sure you can contact me through the webcast system as well. Feel free to reach out directly if you'd like. Feel free to request a meeting as well. I'd love to take the conversation further. With that, I'll thank you for tuning in and listening today.