Our next presenting company is EOG Resources. They're based in Houston, one of the largest exploration and production companies in the U.S., span most basins, international as well, and certainly been active recently with acquisitions. Here to talk about EOG is Pearce Hammond, their VP of Investor Relations.
Thank you and good morning. I want to thank the intercom team for inviting EOG to participate here today. We really appreciate the opportunity to tell you a little bit about the company and why we think EOG is a compelling investment. I'm going to start by highlighting EOG 's value proposition, which is sustainable value creation through industry cycles. Our mission statement is to be among the highest return and lowest cost producers committed to strong environmental performance and playing a significant role in the long-term future of energy. It's underpinned by four pillars. The first is capital discipline, the second is operational excellence, the third is sustainability, and the fourth is culture. To address capital discipline, EOG is very focused on returns, focused investments at bottom cycle prices.
For us, bottom cycle prices is assuming $45 WTI and $2.50 to HH and holding that forever, even though that's unlikely to happen, but holding that forever to justify the economics of a project. The second thing is we want to maintain a pristine balance sheet, which we're very proud of, and generate significant free cash flow. Thirdly, we want to deliver a sustainable, growing regular dividend. We've been paying a dividend for 27 years, and we've never cut or suspended it. That's very different than some of our peers when times got tough in 2016 or in 2020 did just that. We want to return to investors a minimum of 70% of our annual free cash flow, and we've been returning a higher percentage than that the last couple of years. Very importantly, we want to reinvest in the business at a pace that supports continuous improvement.
Basically, we want our assets to continue to get better. We don't want to overcapitalize them, give them too much capital where they're not getting better. That means they need to slow down. It tends to be when they slow down, they improve. We'll show some slides here today that illustrate that. Under the operational excellence pillar, we're focused on our organic exploration, and that allows us to maintain a low-cost, high-quality multi-basin inventory. Having that low-cost inventory helps us deliver peer leading return on capital employed within the industry. We also utilize superior in-house technical expertise, proprietary information technology, and self-sourced materials to support well performance and cost control. We're very focused on cost. Lastly, we are a multi-basin portfolio that gives us a lot of geographic, product, and pricing diversification, which enhances margins.
On the sustainability side, we were focused on sustainability before it became popular or something that everyone needed to focus on. First, we want to focus on safe operations, leading environmental performance, and community engagement. We're ahead of our path, and we recently set new emissions targets. Finally, culture underpins the whole thing. Our culture is very different than some other companies. The headquarters in Houston that's led by CEO Ezra Yacob, he's not sitting there telling the Permian, "Here's how you need to drill, here's where you need to drill, here's the completion design." Everything's pushed down to the local level, and that really makes a difference. It's out in the field where the value creation really occurs. This decentralized approach is a real difference maker for EOG.
We also have collaborative teams that work across the multi-basins, and we share information that may be something that works well in the Permian is going to work well up in the Utica. Lastly, very strong technology leadership allows us to communicate with each other as well as share best practices. How did the second quarter, how did we shake out there? It was an outstanding quarter. We had volumes, capital expenditures, and per unit operating costs all better than targets. We updated our full-year guidance following the Encino acquisition, which we announced on May 30th and closed on August 1st. We had pure leading U.S. price realizations. Importantly, we continue to bolster our multi-basin portfolio. We acquired Encino, and that's created a premier Utica position, totaling 1.1 million net acres.
We were also awarded an onshore concession in the U.A.E. to explore and appraise a 900,000-acre unconventional oil prospect, which we're very excited about. We delivered very strong financial results off of that operational performance in the second quarter, as we had $1.3 billion of adjusted net income. Our earnings per share and cash flow per share beat consensus estimates, and we generated $1 billion of free cash flow. We continue to return cash to investors and our commitment to them as we increased our regular dividend rate by 5%. We announced that in connection with the Encino acquisition. We returned $1.1 billion to shareholders, $500 million in the form of regular dividends, and $600 million of share repurchases. How did we look for this year's plan? Our CapEx is $6.3 billion.
That's up 5% from what we had outlined at the end of the first quarter earnings, which was $6 billion. That increase is primarily related to the Encino acquisition and having the Encino assets for five months. As you can see, our full-year production, Black Oil, 521 MBOD average production and 1.224 MBOED of equivalence production, and that's up 9% year- over- year. This overall plan delivers $4.3 billion in free cash flow, assuming $65 WTI and $3.50 HH for the year. We have committed $3.5 billion of cash return year to date to our shareholders, assuming the full regular dividend and the share repurchases we did through the first half of the year. As we look at our cash flow priorities, the first one is that regular dividend, which we've never cut or suspended in 27 years.
It's something we're very proud of, and it's very important to our shareholders, and we continue to focus on growing that dividend over time. This year, the increase in the regular dividend over last year is about 8%. If we're not returning cash to shareholders, we want to invest in our business and our multi-basin portfolio, and we want to invest at the right pace for each asset. We also want to align the investment both to generate short-term free cash flow as well as long-term free cash flow. This is all underpinned by our pristine balance sheet, an industry-leading balance sheet, which is our target is a total debt to EBITDA, so not net debt, but total debt to EBITDA of less than one times at bottom cycle prices of $45 WTI and $2.50 natural gas.
Lastly, that cash return to shareholders that I continue to speak of, which is that regular dividend, and here recently has been supplemented by share repurchases, and we've been buying back roughly about 1% of our float each quarter over the course of the last couple of years. We have a deep inventory to invest in with over 12 + billion BOE of resource that on an average direct after-tax rate of return basis at bottom cycle prices, so using that $45 and $2.50 generates a greater than 55% return, which rolled up to the corporate level is going to equate to a double-digit return on capital employed. We're very proud of our inventory and the opportunities we have to invest in the company. I've already talked about the Encino acquisition. It's something that we're very excited about.
We already had a position in the Utica that we came about through our organic exploration, and we supplemented that organic exploration with this acquisition of Encino. Our assets were already on the path to becoming a foundational asset, but buying Encino really accelerated that process. Now we say with the Utica, it's a foundational asset for EOG alongside our Delaware Basin and our Eagle Ford position. As you can see on the map here, it really fits hand in glove, their acreage with ours. What we've expanded to with the acquisition is 1.1 million net acres and 2+ billion BOE of undeveloped net resource. It really enhances our liquids acreage footprint with the addition of 235,000 net acres in the volatile oil window, and it adds premium gas exposure with the addition of 330,000 net acres across the wet and dry gas windows.
Importantly, it increases our average working interest in our northern acreage. It was immediately accretive across multiple financial metrics, and we estimate $150 million of synergies within the first year of the closing of the transaction. We believe our technical expertise is really going to enhance returns. As far as the plan for this year, we have simply layered their activity on top of our own. We're running five rigs and three completion crews in the Utica through year end, and we expect for the full year to deliver 65 net completions. If we look at this asset relative to our other foundational assets, we have three foundational assets at EOG , the Eagle Ford, the Delaware Basin, and the Utica, and it just shows you how well, first of all, all three assets stack up.
If you look at the payback period in the lower left-hand side, and this is assuming $65 WTI and $3.50 natural gas, in the Utica, you have a 9.3 month payback period, which compares very favorably with the Delaware Basin at 9.3, and you see the Eagle Ford at 7.5. If you look at the well cost in the Utica, less than $650/ft , and that's with us having just completed a little over 50 wells, compare that to the Delaware Basin at less than $750/ft and the Eagle Ford less than $550/ft, and you see very compelling finding cost in all three plays. The Utica is now a foundational asset alongside our existing assets. What about our other foundational assets? We're really proud of what we've accomplished and continue to accomplish in the Delaware Basin.
One new bit of information that we put in the investor presentation with the second quarter earnings from two weeks ago was that our subsurface expertise and knowledge combined with our lower cost has allowed us to unlock nine distinct targets that we've added to our development program over the last five years. This year, we're increasing our average lateral length by 20%+, and that really makes a big difference on cost. Lastly, on the right-hand side, as you can see here on this slide, leading economics is we believe we have a pure leading break-even price in the basin. If you look at the Eagle Ford, which is our other foundational asset, we've pushed lateral lengths out.
In fact, on this slide here, if you look, we're highlighting the Whistler E #5H well, which is the longest lateral in Texas history at over 24,000 ft, over 4.5 mi in length. We did a bolt-on acquisition we announced last quarter of about 30,000 acres in the middle of our position. In fact, we're already drilling on that right now with an eight-well package. We just continue to lower the cost here in the Eagle Ford and improve this core foundational asset for EOG . If we switch gears now and look at Dorado, which is our dry gas asset in South Texas, this asset's really nipping on the heels of the other foundational assets, kind of ready to move into a foundational status itself.
This asset, again, dry gas asset, we believe is the lowest cost dry gas play in North America with a break-even price of $1.40 /mcf that's underneath the Haynesville and underneath the Marcellus. One huge advantage it has, it's only about 100 mi from the Gulf Coast. As you can see here on the slide, the Verde Pipeline is a pipeline that EOG built and owns, and that moves our gas down to Agua Dulce. From Agua Dulce, we have a lot of different options to move the gas. We can move it on to Corpus Christi , where it can go into the LNG market. We can move it further south into Mexico, and we can get on the Williams Transco line and go further north to serve industrial demand, LNG demand, or power generation demand.
We're running a one-rig program here and have for the last two years. As we stated on our earnings conference call recently, we expect to be at 750 million cu ft a day gross production in this play at the end of this year, which is really amazing. As we switch gears to discuss what I'd mentioned earlier on the U.A.E. and our international assets, internationally, we've been in Trinidad for over 30 years. It's a fantastic asset for us. It's primarily a gas asset in the Columbus Basin and shallow water off of Trinidad. This year, we've announced two new ones. One earlier in the year, which was a JV in Bahrain with Bapco, which is a state oil company. It's targeting an unconventional onshore gas prospect with planned drilling activity here in 2025.
As I mentioned earlier, the U.A.E., which is massive, 900,000-acre position, planned drilling activity in 2025. That's an oil target. We have a partnership with ADNOC there. I think what's most compelling is that both of these countries want to develop their unconventional resources. Developing unconventional resources, as everyone in this room knows, can be very challenging, especially on lowering your costs, finding the right targets, et cetera. While both of these state oil companies have been very successful, I think what they see in EOG is a company that's drilled thousands of wells, has a lot of expertise, a lot of data, a lot of technical expertise to help them really unlock their resource potential. One thing we're very proud of at EOG is our marketing strategy, and we'll look at just a second how our realizations compare to peers.
In this graphic here, there's a few things I wanted to point out. First of all, we will build strategic infrastructure from time to time where it makes sense. We built a gas processing plant called the Janus Gas Processing Plant in the Delaware Basin, 300 million cu ft per day. That's already online. We built the Verde gas pipeline, which I mentioned earlier, that moves our gas from Dorado down to Agua Dulce . What's interesting about Verde is we bought the line pipe that went into that from a failed pipeline project, gas pipeline project in the U.S . We were able to get that cheaply, back when the industry was in a weaker spot a few years ago. That was very advantageous for us. As you can see here on this graphic, if you get down to Agua Dulce , I would like to highlight the Williams Transco line.
Williams is a terrific partner for us. We have a great relationship with them. They had decided some time ago to put in compression between Agua Dulce and an area called Zone 3 St. 65 Pool, as you can see up there on the map over there, right on the Louisiana-Mississippi state line. It was a little bit over 360 million a day of capacity. We took it all down. It allows us to move gas out of Texas and get to more premium markets, especially tapping into the Southeast power generation market that really bolsters our realizations. If you look at Waha, our exposure at Waha of our total gas production is less than 7%. That has also really aided our realizations relative to peers.
The other thing we've been a first mover on is signing up LNG feed gas contracts, as well as other contracts that give us exposure to prices like JKM, the Japan-Korea marker, or Brent. We have contracts with Cheniere at Corpus Christi Stage III that allows us to either, on a monthly basis, take JKM or take Henry Hub pricing. We have a contract with Vitol that allows us to get either Brent pricing or Gulf Coast index pricing. As you can see from the graphic, the numbers jump up as far as the volumes associated with these contracts to about 900 million cu ft per day by 2027. This really makes a difference. All of this translates into leading price realizations. If you look at the middle panel here, you see our gas price realizations relative to peers in the second quarter are almost double peers.
We were $2.87 in MMBtu, whereas peers were about $1.48. You see we had premium realizations on oil and on natural gas liquids. The dividend, as I said, is something we're very proud of. You can see it here, the growth in that dividend, 27 years, and the commitment this year is about a $2.1 billion cash commitment to investors. The dividend for the full year, $3.95. If you look at it on the leading edge, just take the most recent declared quarter and multiply it times four, it's $4.08. We've got a very strong dividend, you know, growth for investors. Again, something we're very proud of. This is translated into strong cash return for investors.
If you go back to 2021, so 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025, and for what we've done 2025 year to date, you add up the total cash return over that time period, it's $21 billion. The 2025 is reflective of just what we've done year to date, both the full year dividend as well as six months' worth of stock buybacks that in total were about $1.4 billion. The high-quality investments and the excellent operations are all translating into a lot of cash that we can deliver to investors. From an environmental standpoint, we're very proud of what we've accomplished there. We recently set near-term emission targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions intensity rate by 25% from 2019 levels by 2030, and to maintain near-zero methane emissions and maintain zero routine flaring.
In wrapping up, I'd say EOG is a compelling investment for investors because we deliver sustainable value creation through industry cycles underpinned by our capital discipline, operational excellence, and sustainability, but really all that underpinned by our very unique culture, which is decentralized and pushes decision-making out to the field to allow people out in the field to really make a difference. Thank you for your time this morning. I know I'll be going to a breakout session, but I appreciate Intercom's allowing EOG to present today. Thank you.