All right, hello everyone, and thank you for continuing to join us throughout the day here at the Lytham Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference. Again, my name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lytham. Our next presentation is going to come from VAALCO Energy, and presenting from the company is their Chief Executive Officer, George Maxwell. As a reminder, the company trades under the ticker symbol EGY on the New York Stock Exchange. George, thank you so much for your participation. With that, the floor is all yours.
Robert, thank you very much for the introduction, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. For those of you who don't know VAALCO, we're an oil and gas company based in Houston, Texas, with our assets focused predominantly in Africa. We do have some North American assets as well. We have a production base in West Africa and in North Africa. During the presentation today, I'll give you some of the background of where we've come over the last, particularly the last four years. I took over in 2021 and where we're going over the next four years, through to 2028 and beyond. You can see some of the growth trajectories that we've achieved and obviously what we're planning to achieve in the next four to five years. I'll just move forward on the presentation. Who are we? We're a diversified oil and gas operator. We operate nearly all of our assets.
For one in Côte d’Ivoire, we're a non-operator. The company's been around since 1985, and we've grown to just under 300 employees. We operate and develop in five countries, and you can see the countries listed there. Like I say, our focus is mainly in Africa. We've been growing the company now from a single asset base in 2020, where we were just in Gabon and producing in Gabon, to the location maps that you see now. That's been done through acquisitions and investments. You can see we've got lots of multiple catalysts in the near term, and all our developments that we've got planned in three of the countries in 2025 and into 2026 are fully funded. That's kind of important. If you look at what we have both in Egypt, we've got an almost continuous drilling campaign where we produce about 11,000 barrels per day onshore.
In Côte d’Ivoire, we've got a significant investment profile going on in 2025 and into 2026, with drilling commencing mid-2026. In Gabon, we've got a drilling program that's due to commence in Q4, and that's up to a 10-well program. In Equatorial Guinea, we've got a significant development opportunity, which we're currently going through FEED and FID over the next few months. We have a small operation up in Alberta, Canada, which does just over 2,000 barrels per day, a non-conventional mixture of gas, oil, and energy. You can see where we've been in 2024, just under a working interest position of 25,000 barrels per day, with an adjusted EBITDA of just north of $300 million. Our SEC 1P reserves are 45 million barrels, and 2P working interest reserves are just under 100 million barrels.
In 2022, we introduced the company's first dividend, and we've been maintaining that quarterly dividend from 2022 through to current. That dividend currently yields around about 6.4%. Where have we been in the last four years? We've been growing substantially, both through acquisitions and through organic production and development. In 2021, we doubled our position in Etame, the main asset of the company back at that time. We acquired one of our partners' interests. We also then did a transition to a field reconfiguration. We started that with a new floating storage and an operating vessel in Etame, in Gabon. In 2022, we completed the phase two drilling at Etame, adding considerable production. We completed that field reconfiguration, which was basically a complete field redesign. We have four platforms on the field and a floating storage and offtake vessel.
We previously had an FPSO, which had production that was an aged vessel and not very efficient. What we've done, and you can see it through the production profiles from 2022 through 2025, is we've considerably upgraded the field and with that have had the benefits of increasing production in Etame. We had the plan approved for Equatorial Guinea. We have a development there of about 20 million barrels offshore. That plan was approved in 2022. Since then, we've been going through FEED towards FID. The company has been debt-free back then. At the moment, in 2025, we continue to be on a net cash basis. We did secure a debt facility. We also initiated, as I mentioned at the start of the presentation, shareholder returns through dividends and through buybacks. In 2023, we acquired positions in Egypt and Canada. We've had some successful drilling campaigns in both locations.
That full integration of our operations into VAALCO has reached significant benefits, both in scale and more importantly, in health and safety. We've had some fairly significant gains in our health and safety performance in Egypt when we took over. We're now somewhere north of 5 million man-hours LTIC. At that point of acquisition, we looked at the cash flow generations. We looked at the prices, and we doubled the dividend position. We've sustained that through 2025. Last year, we contracted the rig for the drilling phase I just mentioned in phase three at Etame, Gabon. That rig's due to commence drilling in Q4. We also acquired a company, Svenska in Côte d’Ivoire. That got us locations into Côte d'Ivoire for production. We concluded a $30 million buyback program.
When we look at the execution of our programs across our portfolio, you can see the production increase from the 2020 position of just over 5,500 barrels per day, five-fold to 25,000 barrels per day in 2024. One of the most important things is where our reserve life is and how our reserve balance is looking. In 2020, 9.7 million barrels of 2P reserves to 2024, a tenfold increase to just under 100 million barrels of 2P reserves. You can see that's really significant for our runway point forward. There are two key points when we come to the end of this presentation. I'll be showing you where we're going in the next few years. Where we're going is all related to discovered oil. There's no exploration required. It's all about execution on oil that's already on a reserve base.
When we look at the portfolio, we look at how we've been looking at opportunities to enhance. For instance, in Gabon, we've been producing in Etame for almost 24 years. We've extracted 150 million plus barrels out of the field. We've got to look at how we can improve the position through the remaining reserve life, particularly for that field. We see it through the opportunities for drilling. We see it through opportunities for field extension in Gabon. We definitely see that extension forward through into the mid-2030s. The other key is how we're looking at reserve growth from the organic base. You can see it there from Côte d’Ivoire drilling at over 9 million barrels. You can see it there in the Equatorial Guinea development of over 16 million barrels and Gabon drilling of over 5 million barrels.
With the activity we have planned in those key assets, you can see the strength of the reserve increase and therefore the production base that we have going forward. We look at how we've achieved that. We've done a lot of it through M&A. The M&A has been highly accretive. You can see it in the Sasol transaction, the cost per barrel on acquisition of just over $2 on a 2P2C basis. We look at the combination of businesses that we put together through TransGlobe with the synergies and over $40 million of synergies achieved predominantly through working efficiencies in drilling and elimination of G&A. With the Svenska transaction, you can see there on the 2P2C basis of acquiring these barrels, you're less than a dollar. A very, very accretive transaction for Svenska.
With that accretive transaction and those step changes in production, you can see the kind of performance that it does both for our profitability when we were back at lower oil prices, admittedly, but also with a single asset, you know, very vulnerable in a position for protecting the company's cash flows and its production. This is where it's key that we have to, one of the key objectives is how do we de-risk our position and de-risk the company's cash flows and production. We've done that through the acquisitions, but we've only not done it through the acquisitions. We've acquired it into areas where we have key expertise. We have a management team that has in excess of 200 years of experience working in Africa. That area doesn't fear us, and we travel there constantly.
We meet with the government constantly, our host government, to ensure there's an alignment in extracting value both for the host government and for our shareholders. You can see the performance there through the EBITDA growing more than tenfold in five years. We would compare that, bearing in mind that five years ago, the company's market cap was somewhere around about $120 million. Since that period, we've returned over $100 million to shareholders in the last three and a half years. Looking into Gabon, you can see the areas that we have there. The Etame PSC is right in the middle there. That's the main producing area. We have a significant production there, currently over 15,000 barrels per day. We would be 60+% of that. You can also see, in the orange and in the blue, those new license areas that we partner with BW Energy and Panoro.
Those are exploration areas that we jointly went into with our partners. Panoro operates the Dussafu Marin field, which you can see to the south of that chart. We see an excellent opportunity for oil plays across Niosi and Guduma with our partners. Not only do we have upside potential in our existing producing fields, but we have exploration potential and tieback potential to that existing infrastructure, which gives us a great opportunity for low-cost production barrels. Côte d’Ivoire, we have two assets in Côte d’Ivoire. You can see right in the middle of the map there, Baobab and Kossipo. That's the main producing asset at the moment. It's operated by CNRL. We have 27% working interest. It's a very significant asset that has a production base that can continue in economic production well into the late 2030s and most likely into the early 2040s.
The FPSO is currently under refurbishment. It's in Dubai Dry Dock, being refurbished right now. It came off production back in February of this year. We plan to have it back on production around March or April next year. The acquisition that we achieved with Svenska was significant in 2024. I think the net cost to the company was somewhere in the region of $44 million. During 2024, I think our free cash flow generation from the asset was somewhere north of $60 million, so piggybacking in less than one year. We find the area in Côte d’Ivoire equally as the bond very attractive, both from a contracting standpoint and the host government standpoint for investment. Earlier this year, we acquired a 70% operated interest in CI-705, which you can see out to the west there of Baobab. That's a substantial block. It is close to 3,000 square kilometers.
We see some very exciting prospects inside that block for development. Right now, we're looking at the interpretation of the seismic data that we've just received. From that interpretation, we'll look at key opportunities to drill in CI-705 and look for, again, similar to Gabon, we've got a footprint with exploration upside to enhance our asset base. Egypt, so you can see here in Egypt, again, a very mature field. Currently, all onshore, we're doing around 11,000 barrels per day. Again, from this particular field, it's been in production since the late 1980s. There's probably somewhere north of 150 million barrels extracted from this area. When we look at what can we bring to this particular operation and what we brought to this operation with planning, efficiency, and obviously capital to go and continue the development around these fields.
We'll see from the drilling position, we've reduced drilling times, DMC times by over 66%. What does that mean? It means when these wells are quite shallow, they're low-cost wells. They're about $1.5 million a well. We've reduced the drilling completion from 38 days to an average of around 12- 15 days. That does a number of things. One, it greatly enhances the economics. It gives you a faster payback when you invest the money in the ground. It's coming back much quicker, and it allows us more time to have a much larger program for development and therefore arrest the natural decline that we see from the field. We've just spotted a well in Southwest Ghazalat, which is on the Western Desert side, and that is, again, an exciting area for us in acreage.
We're hopeful, this is an exploration well and an appraisal, and we're hopeful that that will yield a further development. It aligns with our strategy, not just globally, how do we de-risk our cash flows and our position, but also for the countries we invest, how do we de-risk our position to ensure we're not locked to a single point of evacuation or a single point of producing assets. Equatorial Guinea, you can see there our position in Venus offshore. We are the operator of Block P. We have a 60% working interest, but a 96% economic interest because we carry the partners. You can see the key discovery there in Venus to the south of the block. That is a proven discovery. It's a very prolific reservoir. At the moment, we've put two development plans in place.
One is approved by the government to look at off-shelf drilling, which, again, the opportunity here looks very encouraging from a production standpoint, given the porosity levels in the reservoir. Further studies are taking place to see if there's more around Venus or slightly deeper than Venus to perhaps enhance even further the economics. This particular field, when it comes on production, it really comes on very prolific. We're estimating probably between 18,000- 20,000 barrels per day. Bear in mind that when that starts, we're 96% of that volume, and the payback on this particular project is extremely fast. The key areas around this project are really around the engineering, design, and development. That's where we've been spending a lot of our time, and a little bit deeper interpretation around the seismic analysis for what opportunities lie around or beneath Venus to enhance the evacuation opportunity.
Canada, we have a small operation in Canada, the [Harmattan] area. It's a carrion play. We have considerable reserves that go out for a number of years. Right now, we're around about 2,000 barrels per day. It's a very efficient operation. It's a very small operation. At the moment, these oil prices, no, it's kind of flat from an investment standpoint. Certainly, when oil prices recover, it becomes a key investment opportunity. Looking at where we are, you know, we have a key growth portfolio. It's diverse. We've achieved exactly what our strategy was set out by the board back in 2020, 2021 to diversify. We have significant activity taking place in Côte d’Ivoire with the FPSO refurbishment, with a large drilling campaign due to start in the middle of 2026.
Our drilling campaign in Gabon will start in Q4 of this year and has options to drill up to 10 wells. We've completed the FEED for Venus in Equatorial Guinea, and again, a significant project with significant productive opportunities. As I mentioned, we've got a continuous drilling program in Egypt. We've also got the activity out to the Western Desert, which is a block which we find quite exciting and could open a new play for us in western Egypt. When we look at the potential upside of where we are with our cash and our 1P NAV positions and how we try to equate that to a share price, 1P NAV roughly is around about $3.66. I think, you know, currently we're somewhere around about the $4 mark.
You can see when we're starting to look at the potential upside, if we start to take in beyond the 2P NAV. The 2P NAV position, everything I've spoken about in the development phase in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon and Côte d'Ivoire and Canada and Egypt are all within our 2P position. These are not risked in any way from an oil risk standpoint. They're there from an execution risk, but I think we've already shown in this presentation that we're very experienced in successfully executing a project. You can see there on a 2P NAV, you know, getting up well over $7 a share. When you go to the 3P position, which some of these projects will touch into, you can see it exceeding up in $10 a share.
The value proposition with the catalyst activity we have, particularly over the next 12- 18 months, is a real value proposition because there's no speculative exploration out there. It's really just about getting the job done. When we look at the cash flow position, again, when we look at where we're going to be over the next 2026- 2030 for the projects that we're talking about, and we've tried to show that cash flow generation compared to the oil prices, and that kind of mixes with our current market value, again, to demonstrate the value proposition opportunity. You can see that $65 oil, the free cash flow over the next four years returns the market cap. Anything above $65 oil, we start to significantly exceed our current market cap presentation.
That's quite significant in terms of cash flow, free cash flow returns, and the opportunity to continue with that shareholder dividend and buybacks that we've been committed to in the last four years. This is just a little kind of chart to show where the production can go with these projects being executed. I'll reiterate, these are projects that are coming from our existing reserve base. You can see where we are in 2025, a slight drop in 2025 as Côte d’Ivoire comes offline, comes back online in 2026. You can start to see the impact of the drilling campaigns both in Côte d’Ivoire and then the development of Venus. You can see by the time we're hitting 2030, we're up at and in excess of 50,000 barrels per day of working interest.
If you look at that from a journey, both in the acquisition and the development of the assets that we've acquired, in less than 10 years, you've done more than a tenfold increase in production and more than a tenfold increase in reserves. This is the key that gives us the runway to continue with the shareholder returns right through into the mid-2030s and beyond. That's a significant opportunity for VAALCO Energy to show that kind of planned position that gives that cash flow security through that period. In addition to, and this is the only time I'll mention it, in addition to the exploration upside that we have inside the portfolio. The key takeaways, we've been highly successful in the last four years. We have a proven management team with a proven operator, as I mentioned, over 200 years of experience in Africa. We've diversified our portfolio.
We have excellent contractual terms with our host governments, and we have excellent host government relationships. We've got a strong balance sheet. We've been fully funded for those developments that you've seen. We've been debt-free for the last four years, and even though we've got significant debt lines available, we're still net cash as we speak today. Planned production to increase by 50% in the second half of 2026, and then go on to over 250% up by 2030. You've highlighted all the key catalysts and key news drivers with the drill that we have in multiple operations. With that cash flow generation, we've had a meaningful, sustained dividend, and we anticipate free cash flow in the future through 2026 and beyond, which allows us to maintain that position. I'll turn that back to Robert. Thank you very much for your attention. It's much appreciated.
Fantastic, George. Thank you very much for your participation in today's conference, and thank you to everybody here for watching. If there are any questions or you'd like to schedule a meeting with management here, feel free to send me an email or contact the company's investor relations team. My email, blum, B-L-U-M, at lythampartners.com. To learn more about Lytham Partners, visit our website, or make sure to follow us on LinkedIn for future events such as the presentation here from VAALCO . Thank you everyone for your participation in today's conference. We hope you enjoy the rest of the day here, and we'll talk soon. Thanks so much.