Good morning. I'm Jeff Lang with IMA, and it's truly my pleasure to share the stage with these two gentlemen today. I was excited when I got the invitation to moderate this panel entitled The Resurgence of Exploration, a little bit different than what we talk about in most of these presentations. I think this is going to be really interesting. With me today, I have John Christmann of Apache Corporation and also Bill Armstrong of Armstrong Oil & Gas. I'm going to introduce John first and let him show a few slides, and then we'll do the same with Bill, and then we'll answer a few questions. John Christmann was appointed Chief Executive Officer and joined the company's board of directors in 2015. He had previously served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of North America since 2014.
Prior to that, he held the roles of Region Vice President, Permian Region, Vice President of Business Development, and Production Manager for the Gulf Coast Region, as well as various positions of increasing responsibility in the business development area since joining the company in 1997. He began his career with Vas tar Resources and ARCO Oil & Gas in business development, crude oil marketing, and various engineering assignments. He received his bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, and I just learned he was a hell of an athlete while he was there at the same time. We can talk about that. He then went on and got a Master of Business Administration from Southern Methodist University. John sits on the visitor's board at MD Anderson, as well as the Texas Tech University Academy of Petroleum Engineers.
More than three decades in the oil and gas industry, including more than 27 years at Apache Corporation, John certainly has the proficiency and depth to manage and operate a large-scale oil and gas exploration and production company. Please join me in welcoming Mr. John Christmann .
All right. Okay. The fun part's going to be the panel. We'll get through a quick introduction quickly. Being public, I've got to open up with a disclosure statement. Here it is. I promise you, if you're struggling going to sleep at night and need something to read, read it. It does say that, you know, do your research. When you look at us globally today, you know, 465,000 BOEs a day. Our capital budget this year is $2.3 billion. We're going to spend $65 million on exploration. I think the important thing is, if you look back from 2020 through this year, we're going to have spent over $850 million on exploration. The point is, we're an E&P, and people forget what E stands for. It's exploration.
You know, we took advantage of the opportunity over the last five years to what I think is build a world-class exploration portfolio. Our production is really anchored in two areas: the Permian, where we, you know, generate 75% of our free cash flow, a big chunk of our production, and Egypt, where we've got both long-lived onshore asset bases. We've got a development in Suriname, and then we've got exploration as well in Suriname, Alaska, which we're going to get into with Bill, and Uruguay. We believe in long term, and I think exploration is a long-lost art that the industry, you know, is going to get back after.
Under any scenario, it's been funny to watch all the forecasts come out, you know, over the next two decades, three decades, there is a big wedge of production that we're going to need now to meet demand globally for oil. You can look here at found resources. You can look at what, you know, can be developed. That leaves a massive wedge. If you look at the second point, this is just conventional exploration spend. Over the last decade, the industry has really ratcheted back, and since 2014, it's been spending 50%. We think we're positioned well. I think the other point that you'll see is it takes time for long-term exploration. Our portfolio today in Suriname, and I'll go through a timeline in a minute, we've got an FID project where we brought in Total as operator. It's a 220,000-barrel-a-day FPSO, first oil in 2028.
It's a block we picked up in, you know, the spring of 2015. Alaska, we were fortunate to enter into a joint venture with Bill two years ago. We're going to spend a lot of time on that. We've now got two discoveries there. He'll talk a lot about it, but we're very excited about the potential on the North Slope. Egypt, we've been in the country in Egypt for over three decades. We spent our first 30 years exploring for oil. We started last fall exploring for gas, and we're off to a tremendous early start on that. Very excited about gas potential in Egypt. Uruguay is another country. It sits off, you know, across the margin from Namibia, which is starting to get a lot of press. We picked up two very large blocks in Uruguay. We think we're very well positioned, you know, and excited about it.
It'll be longer term, but could be another country like, you know, Suriname in terms of future potential. Sometimes I think it's worth just putting a quick timeline on. It takes time on exploration. This is something that you can't just decide we're going to get back into. This just shows timeline on Suriname. We picked up Block 58 at a time when we were reducing rig count, cutting capital, but we knew it was an opportunity we couldn't pass on. We got Block 58 for a $5 million seismic option. In 2019, we spun our first exploration well. We were fortunate enough there'd been some success next door in Guyana. We spun that well 100%. In December, we announced a partnership with Total. We cut a pretty good deal there for us where we bet on the future.
Did not take anything up front, but, you know, set up a carry, you know, joint venture. Announced the first discovery in 2020. FID the project in 2024 and first oil coming in 2028. It shows you the time it takes, and you know, for large-scale big projects. When we think about exploration, it's the way you can add the most value if you can be successful and it's done right. Alaska, I'm going to let Bill jump in on this. We saw an opportunity with Bill in 2023. We got after it. We've now announced two discoveries. Very excited about it, and I know we're going to spend a lot of time on that. With that, I will hand the stage back over to the moderator.
Thank you, John. Now Bill Armstrong. Bill graduated cum laude from SMU in 1982 with a B.S. in geology, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and a future wife, Liz, a geology classmate. It wasn't all studying, apparently. They set up their home in Denver, where they raised three children, and Bill founded his business, Armstrong Oil & Gas, in the attic of his garage. Over the last 40 years, AOG has been involved in expansive wildcatting and discoveries of over 20 oil and gas fields in a variety of geologic provinces that include Williston Basin, Green River Basin, Wyoming, Utah, Overthrust Belt, Green River Basin, Michigan Basin, Cook Inlet, Gulf of Mexico, and San Joaquin Valley.
Most recently, Mr. Armstrong has been active on the North Slope of Alaska, finding at least 10 100+ million barrel oil fields, including one of the largest oil fields in U.S. history, the 3 billion barrel Pikka field. Mr. Armstrong is an active member of several boards and associations, including SMU's Board of Trustees, Permian Oil Corporation, All- American Wildcatters, and the National Petroleum Council. He has won numerous awards, such as the AAPG Outstanding Explorer Award, Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists Explorer of the Year Award, Wildcatter of the Year from Western Energy Alliance, and was named by Oil and Gas Investor Magazine to their Hall of Fame and was profiled in The Wall Street Journal as the last prospector, a Texas wildcatter is tempted by a final quest.
In addition to his oil and gas career, Mr. Armstrong and his wife founded Epoch Estate Wines in 2004, which is an ultra-premium vineyard winery operation located in Paso Robles. Bill and Liz now reside in Dallas and have nine grandchildren. One quick thing, we got to warn the audience here. Ron Gusek in the first talk today used the word stinking, referring to a paper that was written back on We Don't Need No Stinking Propent. I'm guessing Bill's going to use some stronger language than that. We're going to see something a little harder than stinking. The over-under is right now at six. With that, Bill, take it.
Oh, that was a great introduction. Thank you for that. I have no idea what I'm going to talk about today, except for it's going to, I think, lean towards exploration. Just a show of hands real quickly, I actually gave a rousing talk here at Intercom nine years ago. Let's see a show of hands on who was here to see that. Okay. I met eight or ten of you. All right. I'm going to give the exact same talk because my opinion really hasn't changed much in that period of time. One thing I want all of y'all to understand right out of the box, and that is, John said it best, everybody calls themselves an E&P company, but for the most part, the E is gone, and that disappeared with the advent of shale drilling.
Back in the day, most companies tend to put like 10% of their budget into exploration. Apache is leading the way, and I think that was only you only represented 4%. Yet, most companies are under 1%. In fact, most companies are zero. Never, ever, ever underestimate the leverage capability of a successful wildcat. Even the Kansas City Chiefs have to, you know, hire a rookie every year because there's always a life after the veterans go away. We're going to talk about a lot of the hot exploration plays I see around the world. We're going to talk about Alaska a little bit. They have some questions for us, which I'm looking forward to answering those silly fucking questions. Now we're down to five. We had six. Is it over and under six?
Let me remind everybody, the hottest exploration play in the world right now is in a country called Guyana. Exxon has been on a roll like I have never seen in all my career, and they're batting like 31 out of 34 or some ungodly success rate in Guyana. You recently read about that big battle that Chevron had with Exxon trying to buy Hess, and there being a $60 billion acquisition, all for essentially Guyana. This goes to show you that a successful exploration venture can even move the needle substantially for an Exxon or for a Chevron. I know a lot of y'all are investors, a lot of y'all are analysts, a lot of y'all are looking for the next good place to put your money. Every company that you talk to, you should ask them, what are you doing for the future?
What are you doing for exploration? What are you going to do that can lever your company up to really show some big success? How do I do this? Just push the button here? Okay, cool, y'all. Let me just quickly show you Alaska real quick. I haven't got a pointer here. There's the state of Alaska. This box right here is the North Slope of Alaska. Alaska is a really big state. That box is roughly the size of Montana. Here is the North Slope of Alaska. It is one of the largest unexplored regions in the world, yet it is one of the richest hydrocarbon systems in the world. The largest field in the United States by far is right here at Prudhoe Bay. Collectively, we have about, I don't know, 25 billion, 30 billion barrels that have been found in Alaska.
We know, though, that there's been over 1.5 trillion barrels of oil generated up there. There is a lot to do. Before us coming to Alaska in 2001, it was as dead as disco. Everybody assumed that the play had been made. Everybody said that all the big fields had been found. We happened to be there at the right place at the right time because seismic technology was catching up to stratigraphic traps. If you look at Alaska from a structural standpoint, from a geologic standpoint, it is the most quiescent basin you've ever seen. There are almost no faults. There's almost no salt. There's no anticlines. It's just a whole series of very, very flat terrain with oil trapped in so many various stratigraphic traps you can't imagine.
In the ensuing years that we've been up there, since then, we've found this big field here called Pikka, which is going to be about 3 billion barrels. It's being turned on later on this year. Our initial IP is at 80,000 barrels a day, going to probably 150,000 right away. Ultimately, that field will be 3.5 billion barrels and probably producing a quarter million barrels a day. You guys have been reading a lot about Conoco's big discovery. It's this field called Willow right here. Here are the fields that we have found since we found Pikka. There's now been nine discoveries up here since we did it. We did it. Our track record for success on these wildcat wells is about 90%. A really, really high success rate. The average field size that we found so far is about 500 million barrels per field. It's unbelievable.
If it wasn't for things going slow in Alaska with weather and NGOs and whatnot, we would be crushing even Guyana as the hottest play on the planet. I'm going to talk a little bit about Sockeye and King Street over here with what we have with Apache , and then a little bit about going into the NPRA, which, by the way, has been off-limits for the last five years because of our previous administration. Somebody's now in charge that actually wants to see America great again. That's coming on. Going back real quickly to where I just was, I'm going to show you a seismic line that runs kind of east to west, just to show you the type of opportunity. This is our Pikka field. It's a very subtle stratigraphic trap, 3.5 billion barrels. You can see the Willow field that Conoco found.
Again, no structure at all, just a little strat trap going up dip. Here's our next prospect we're going to drill. Then there, then there, then there, then there. It is just going to be like shooting ducks in a barrel. This stuff lights up on seismic, if you know what you're looking for, like balls on a dog. It is really, really going to be exciting. I'm excited that Apache is my partner in part of this. Let's talk about the world right now because I think there's only, other than me and Apache , I think there's two other exploratory companies talking today. Brian, I think you're talking about Namibia, and then some company I haven't heard of has some Venezuelan and Colombian stuff. Anyway, the world, here's the hot spots in the world right now. Hottest spot on the planet right now is Guyana.
I just talked about Alaska. I would say that's probably, this is hot. By the way, the Alaska stuff, it's onshore. It's like 5,000 ft deep. I mean, it's unbelievable. Good oil, no H2S, no CO2. Really terrific stuff. Hottest play in the world right now is Guyana, and that has just literally been like shooting ducks in a barrel. John and Apache and Total have extended it into Suriname. You all just mentioned, you just read recently that BP has this new discovery in the Santos Basin, which is really exciting to see BP kind of pull their head out of their ass and come back into exploration. They had lost their mind over that transition game, and they finally have realized that ESG and DEI doesn't feed the bulldog. They're now back in exploration.
Had a really nice discovery, the biggest discovery they've had in 25 years. Right across the conjugate margin from South America Brazil here is Namibia, which is probably the second hottest play on the planet, I would guess. Of course, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East continue to find big fields. Kuwait just announced a 3 billion barrel field last year. I think Saudi Arabia announced like 20 new discoveries. That is fantastic. One thing that's really important to note is those big basins like that just keep delivering. It's kind of like the North Slope. You find a really good basin, and it will deliver for a long, long time. The hot plays that are coming up, I think, is this Pilatos Basin just on the other side of Namibia.
John's got a super exciting project going on in Uruguay, and we are working a play in Aruba that will knock your hat in the creek. Let me show you what that looks like real quickly. First of all, when I say Aruba, you think of a Caribbean island, right? It's the first thing you think of. You can actually see Venezuela from the beach. It's actually an oil country. It just happens to be just 20 mi away from Venezuela. Look at this here. This just goes to show you the type of opportunities that sit out there. Here was a well that was drilled by Repsol and Total, about eight, nine years ago. It was an uncommercial well, but it had pay in it. Pretty interesting pay, actually. It wasn't even in a basin. It was drilled on essentially a volcanic type high.
Going across this basin to the northeast, look at this bad boy here. That is the biggest thing I have ever seen undrilled. Covers about 200,000 acres, has about 2,000 ft of closure. It looks just like the largest oil field in the North Sea called Ekofisk, which is a big four-way, it's a big 4 billion barrel field. The only thing different about this than that is this is 15x bigger than Ekofisk. That's coming down the pike. It just goes to show you, we haven't picked a partner yet who we've invited to come into this play with us. It's the kind of thing that if that's drilled and it works, that company is going to go to the moon. I just want everybody to know there's a lot going on out there besides the Permian, besides the [Maune], besides the Haynesville, besides the Marcellus.
There's just a lot going on, in particular now that the runway of some of these shale plays is running a little bit light. Anyway, that's my intro slide. There you go.
We'll get into the question and answer part here. First question: Can you discuss the genesis of yours and your respective company's exploration DNA? What drives your exploration instinct? John, you want to start with that one?
Yeah. You know, number one, I'd say we've always believed in a diversified portfolio. I've lived in Midland twice. I grew up in West Texas. I was there for a ramp from two rigs to 46 rigs. I've seen the treadmill, I've lived the treadmill personally. We felt like staying committed longer term was the right thing. We've always tried to position ourselves into areas where there's lots of hydrocarbons. Bill said it. You want to be in super basins. The Western Desert of Egypt is one. We're proving that now by going after gas. We've known there's gas there for a long time. Produced a lot of oil. Permian, obviously, is a super basin. We love it. It's three quarters of our company today. We're going to be there a long time.
As the shale starts to roll over, and it will roll over, the world's going to need, as you know, my second slide showed, we're going to need a big wedge of volumes coming from somewhere else. Suriname, Guyana is proving to be a super basin, and the North Slope of Alaska is a super basin. What we've tried to do is position ourselves and take advantage of the last 10 years when everybody moved to shale and became pure plays and really put together a portfolio that we would not have been able to do for a company our size had we not stayed committed to exploration. It takes time. There's timelines on it. It's all about adding value. I was an M&A guy most of my career, but I've seen what exploration can do, and we've stayed committed to it.
What was the question again?
It's just yours and your respective company, it's exploration “DNA.”
Exploration DNA, that's what it was. You know what? Exploration is not for everybody. I mean, let's face it. Most people, I think, kind of wake up with some version of faux foo, fear of fucking up. To go out and drill a well and walk away with nothing but a tax write-off is not for most people. It just really isn't. However, I grew up in the oil business, and I saw so many people make companies out of nothing with exploration. It's the lifeblood of our industry. It always has been. We've taken a really lengthy detour here with the shale plays, but the future, I think, truly lies in exploratory drilling. Technology has made it so much easier. In the old days, it was a little bit akin to throwing a dart.
Now, with really highfalutin seismic, with algorithms and FWI technology, etc., the chance of success on a well-chosen wildcat is approaching 30%, which is not like it used to be. Back in the old days, it was less than 10%. It's getting quite a bit better. You ask about the DNA. I've never been excited about just going and drilling development wells. It never did much for me. I kind of look at an oil field a little bit like a pregnancy. There's the beginning, there's the discovery, and then there's the end of field life. That's kind of a nine-month process. The part I like the best is knocking the girl up. That may not be for you, John, but it always has worked for me. Is this okay? Did I say this stuff?
Two good ones and three little ones.
Okay. By the way, my dream team is on the front row here. They've heard all this stuff before.
Bill, why don't you take this one? Talk about what's unique about exploring and operating in Alaska.
Okay. Alaska is a really interesting place. First of all, if you were to give the world an enema, you'd probably give it to it right on the North Slope. It is flat as a pancake, despite what you might see in the Sierra Club annual report. I think I was voted second most dangerous man by the Sierra Club. I'm going to frame that and put it on my wall. ConocoPhillips was named number one, but that was a company. It wasn't a person. I got number one person. Alaska is nothing but flat, flat, flat. It's frozen eight months out of the year. It's dark as shit, cold as shit. In the summertime, it's just a big old swamp. You don't want to leave an environmental footprint up there. You have to do all of your exploratory drilling in the wintertime.
You have to build an ice road, a long ice road. You build an ice road by putting fresh water on top of the tundra. The fresh water freezes. You make that road however far it is to your wildcat. This last year, I think it was 37 miles to our wildcat, John, that we had it. The road alone this year was $17 million. Just the road, and it melts in May. That's slow going, and it's expensive. Once you find it, you then have to build a gravel road and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Once you have your facilities in, it's pretty typical. The Alaska pipeline is about three quarters empty. There's lots of infrastructure up there to take advantage of.
For whatever reason, the North Slope has been, at least on federal lands, kind of like the fighting grounds for the NGOs and the environmental extremists, even though they don't really know what they're talking about. If you actually went up there, more people see an oil field by 10:00 A.M. on a Monday morning flying into Dallas-Fort Worth Airport than they see in an entire year on the North Slope because underneath the DFW Airport is the Barnett Shale, and you can't even find it from a plane. That's kind of one of the problems or the difficulties in Alaska.
Anything to add, John?
I think it's, you know, you look at where we are today and the time it takes and the cost of the wells. You just want to be deliberate. We're in a position today where we have two really nice discoveries. We've got a 375,000-acre block up there. There is a lot more potential. Quite frankly, the largest prospect is one we haven't even drilled yet, right?
Yeah, it's coming up.
I think for us, it's being very measured and making sure you understand how you want to approach it and understand what the real size of the prize is and what's the priority in terms of how you want to appraise things and the steps you want to take, right? We're in the process of, we won't have a rig there this winter. There will be one the following winter. The teams are working like crazy, integrating new data. We're reprocessing the seismic, but very, very excited about the potential up there.
Yeah. Let me just speak about what we did this past year. It was really exciting. We drilled this well called Sockeye-2 . To give you an idea, we had a 350,000-acre lease position. There was one well in that entire lease position. I mean, think about that. If you'd gone into the Permian Basin out of a 350,000-acre lease position, even before shale drilling, there'd probably already have been, I don't know, close to 500 wells. There was one well, and we made a really good case that it was bypass pay. It was truly a rank wildcat we drilled this year. Our well came in as mapped. Excuse me, we had a non-stimulated well of 3,000 barrels a day. If we would have gone horizontal and put a little small frack on it, it probably would have been 15,000 barrels a day.
We have permeability that is roughly 1 million times the permeability of a well in the Permian Basin, 2-Darcy permeability as opposed to the type of nano-permeability you have in the Permian. It works. I mean, it's not like, you know, you're going up there because that gives, and we think it's going to be like 700 million barrels. We still have to appraise it and all that, but we know what it looks like seismically now. It's the kind of thing that there's just a lot laying around out there if you have the will and the interest of doing it.
It sounds like the key is you line up the rig before you build the road, pretty much.
Yeah, you don't want to build a road to nowhere.
Yeah, not have the rig contract.
Right.
Can you talk about the other regions other than Alaska that you're exploring? John, you've touched on a few of them, but any that you want to point out?
Yeah, I mean, I think, like I said, we try to focus on super basins, you know, where there's been a lot of oil and gas found, and we know there's more still to get after. We've obviously, Suriname was a place. 2015, we've spent now the last 10 years there. With the development that we have underway there, we had said as part of the appraisal and announcement of that, that there would be more to do. You're starting to see our partner, Total, talk about more exploration potential in Block 58. There will be more drilling there, either for additional tiebacks into Gran Morgu, which is the project that's underway now, or potentially more infrastructure in the future. Excited about it. We took what we were there and moved down the coastline and happened to be able to position ourselves in Uruguay with two very large blocks.
I think one of them's, you know, 4.5 million, 5 million acres. The other one's 2.5 million acres. We got half of it. One of them was Shell. The other one, we have 100%. Moved down the coast and, you know, same geology, same reasons why it hasn't been explored today, like the other places were obviously. We look at that and look at our company today with stable production, 220,000 barrel a day FPSO coming on in 2028 in Suriname. Tremendous potential in Alaska. I think we're in a good place, and we've moved early, which puts us in a place. We were at an investor dinner last night. I got the question, how do you avoid, when industry pivots, the fray? I think the point is, is we built the portfolio today that we don't have to jump into that fray now, right?
We did it at a time where you could work it in high grade. We put together an exploration team. I think staying in, we were able to kind of collect a lot of really good talent and keep the DNA of, you know, we're a very good shale operator, but we're also a very good offshore explorer and onshore explorer. Those aren't capabilities that you just decide you want to reactivate next year and kick back into gear, right? Very excited about our entire portfolio.
You know, you said the key there, John, I think it was really important is you got to have a portfolio. Here's a story that everybody in this room should know. It's about exploration. We talked about Guyana. Guyana is now producing 650,000 barrels a day. It's on its way to 1.5 million barrels a day in the next four or five years. Exxon had that project for 20 years before they drilled it. Their partner was Shell. After 20 years, right before they get ready to drill the well, Shell bails on the prospect. They turn to their management and they say, "We can't show there's a source rock out there. It's a strat trap play. I don't know, too risky." Shell bails after 20 years. Exxon goes to their management and says, "We like this.
We should drill it ourselves." Exxon management says, "What does Shell know that we don't know?" They said, "Listen, we're not going to drill it unless you go find a partner." They go out and they bring in Hess. Exxon shows them Guyana, and they say, "We have two prospects we need to drill here. We want to drill this prospect called Skipjack." Hess said, "We don't like that as much as your other prospect called Liza." Exxon said, "We really like Skipjack." Anyway, they drilled. Hess convinced them to drill Liza. That was the discovery. That was the billion-barrel discovery that kicked off Guyana. They moved that rig to Skipjack, dry hole. If Skipjack had been drilled first, Guyana would still not be there. They would have left it. That goes back in importance to the portfolio.
John is selling himself short as far as what kind of explorer he is. When I had my project coming on stream in Alaska, by the way, if you look at all the fields I found in Alaska over the last decade or so, my partners were ENI, Oil Search out of Australia, Repsol, now Santos. One thing that I haven't mentioned, not one American company, because every American company was doing shale plays. When I decided finally that I'm going to go look for an American company, I called up John and I said, "Because this guy's got hair in his balls." By the way, one of us on this stage can run, when in college, ran a 4-4-40 and was a wide receiver, and it wasn't me.
Long time ago.
I walked in and I showed John, and he has this fabulous exploration manager by the name of Tracey Henderson. She had found the play-opening play in Western Africa called Jubilee Field, billion-barrel field. I laid out in an hour meeting. Tracey looked at John like, "Who the hell? You're bringing in this friend to show you this deal?" An hour later, she turns to John and said, "This is what we've been looking for all over the world." We sold you guys a deal on the spot in an hour. Never showed it to anybody else. That shows you somebody who has real exploration balls mentality. Excuse me. In our Aruba deal, you said what's coming down the pike? Our Aruba deal is so sexy, you can't even believe it. DHIs up the wazoo. Flat spots, velocity slows. DHIs going wild. AVOs. Never been drilled in the basin ever.
Huge, huge stuff to be drilled. For the first time, I'm certainly popular again. In the last month, I've had Exxon, Total, BP, ENI, Repsol, Statoil, Oxy all give me a call and say, "Hey, what's coming down the pike?" I think the world is now realizing that the runway is getting short on shale plays. We need to find something big.
That's great. This next question is kind of a longer one, multi-piece here. Is exploration a dying art? I think we know the answer to that. Do you see much competition from your peers? Are there enough younger professionals being taught to do effective exploration? How do you shift your team's mindset from the variabilities of reservoir quality and unconventional resource plays to a probabilistic success or failure analysis that is required in wildcat exploration?
Let me take that one. At least the first half of that. The second half, I'm going to let you talk about that probabilistic horseshit. Listen, if I show you a prospect that's never been drilled, it covers 200,000 acres with 2,000 foot of closure and a flat spot and bright spots all over it. If you can't figure out the economics on the back of an envelope, you shouldn't be doing the deal. I mean, it's just, you know, it's the kind of deal it's got to be big if you're going to do it. You got to swing a bet. Actually, I heard a really interesting statistic last week. You know, the famed tennis player, Roger Federer? In his career, he won only 54% of his points that he played. Yet he won 80% of his singles matches.
That goes to show you the exploration mentality should fall in that category. If you're chasing the right 50%, you will be the GOAT. You will be the greatest of all time if you're chasing the right mentality. That story actually sounded better in my head than it did coming out across this room. What was the other question you asked me? Okay.
It's exploration “DNA,” and what I would say is, it's a dying art.
That's an art thing.
You know, it's something you have to stay committed to. What is one of the most important things with exploration? It's experience. It's being able to look at things and quickly assess, this makes sense or it doesn't make sense. Having the instincts to say, something here is not right. We need to go dig further on this, right? Anybody can make a prospect look good. The real question is figuring out which ones are real good. I think it's something you have to stay committed to. You have to keep people inside the organizations. It's about mentorship and training younger folks. We've got a lot of bright young folks that are working on our exploration teams that are learning from very, very seasoned, smart people that have seen a lot of things.
I think in the end, you can't replace the experience and the instincts when you've seen a lot of things. There are people that find oil, and there's very few of them, but the ones that do seem to do it over and over and over again, like this guy, right? He's got a lot of good people working for him as well. To me, that's the key. You can't, it's just not something you can decide. Yes, question on competition. A lot of our peer companies that have become pure plays will, around the industry events and stuff, pull me aside and say, "Man, I wish we could do, you know, had the runway to go into other areas." There have been benefits to them becoming pure plays and being only Permian.
Longer term, we're very well positioned with a diversified portfolio and have had the ability to be able to allocate some capital to exploration. If you look back, we've done a pretty good job of rifling those dollars into the right places.
Let me. I've got a minute and a half left before you all are going to give us a hook. Let me tell a story I think is actually pretty fun. As you talk about the people that are getting trained up by the youth, we were at your place shooting birds with Rick Muncrieff. He asked me, he said, "Hey, Bill." Rick Muncrieff was the CEO of Devon, in case you guys don't know who he was. He said, "Bill, would you mind coming to my office and talking to my technical guys about drilling wildcat wells?" I was like, "Come on, Rick." He says, "No, no, no, I'm serious. I mean, it's just been a while. We kind of need to get exploration back." Anyway, I went up there. I didn't have any props. I didn't even have a map. I just showed up.
I thought it was going to be a half a dozen people. It ended up being a room full of about 75 technical guys. I started with my talk. I said, "Okay, let me see a show of hands in this room. Who in this room has ever drilled a dry hole?" Two hands went up. Can you imagine that? It is a dying art because nobody has been trained. I then said, "Let me see a show of hands of anybody who's ever actually drilled a commercial shale well." No hands went up. No, I'm just kidding. It is a dying art. Most of my peers have retired. I'm 65, and the vast majority of them have moved on. There's a gaping talent gap coming up. It's actually a real concern.
John, do you see your younger technical folks jumping back and forth between exploration and unconventional roles?
You find out which ones are good at which, right? You position them. We've got a lot of bright young people working both sides today, and they like what they're doing. We were able to attract talent because we were exploring. In 2020, when COVID hit, we had a rig in Suriname. We were scheduled to drill four wells. We had options on those. We could stop at any time. We kept a rig running. The measures we were going through to keep that moving with the testing and leaving the crews out there longer and all those steps showed our commitment to exploration.
That showed a lot of bravery. Drilling that 100% showed a lot of bravery.
People like Bill noticed it. People in the industry noticed it. As a result, we've been able to really put together what I'd call a very good, high-graded exploration staff. There wasn't a lot of competition out there over the last couple of years as we put together some additional follow-on things from a portfolio perspective.
We've done a good job of kind of getting us back. We started a few minutes late. I'm going to give you all just a chance to make a parting shot if you'd like. Any final thoughts you'd like to leave this audience with? I don't see that there's a scheduled breakup.