Good day, everyone, and welcome to the EON Resources Special Conference Call to discuss acquisition of the South Justice Field and the Permian Basin. At this time, all participants are placed on a listen-only mode. If you have any questions or comments during the presentation, you may press star 1 on your phone to enter the question queue at any time, and we'll open the floor for your questions and comments after the presentation. If you're listening on webcast, you can submit a question by clicking on the Ask Question button on the left of your screen. Type your question into the box and hit the Send button to submit your question. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Michael Porter. Sir, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Matthew. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our special conference call. To get the legal stuff out of the way, this conference call includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what is expected. Words such as expect, believe, anticipate, intend, seek, and various other similar words and expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. The company's expectations are disclosed in our corporate documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and placed on EDGAR, and we follow all the laws and disclaimers that are involved in that. Without further ado, I'd like to turn the call over to our President and CEO, Dante.
Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Mike. Welcome, everybody. Yeah, we called this special call because we did close on a nice piece of property in the Permian in New Mexico. It's called the South Justice Field, and it's a short drive from Hobbs, New Mexico. Just as our current property in Loco Hills, we also refer to it as Grayburg-Jackson Field, or that we purchased from Pogo. It has a lot of attractions for us, and frankly, it was just a deal too good to pass up. On the call is our team, our CFO, Mitch Trotter. You'll hear from Jesse Allen, our Vice President of Operations, and we have our general counsel also online. I'm on the slide with acquisition highlights. We purchased it and closed it on June 20. It's located in Lea County. It's part of the big, prolific Permian Basin.
We purchased it for a million shares of Class A common stock, or if you converted that to cash, roughly $500,000. It's cash flowing $100,000 a month, $1.2 million in net annual cash flow. There's really, I'll say, nil impact to our G&As. We're not going to hire anybody. We're just going to do a little more work with the same G&A folks that we have. We've purchased a 94% working interest, net revenue interest of 82%. It's similar in some ways and different in other ways from our current field, and I'm going to ask Jesse to kind of go through that. Also, we bought it from Team Operating. We have a relationship with that company, and we're also going to use one of their pulling rigs. Before we bought this property, it was making 50 barrels a day, which did not interest us.
I asked the owner, "Put a rig on these wells, and let's put some wells back on production because it has something like 70 idle wells, and let's see what they do." He got the production to double by just repairing tubing leaks and changing out pumps. The field is not in an area that suits him because he doesn't have any other operations in the area. It's just not big enough. For us, where we have a center of gravity with our current property, this thing's a nice fit. With very little expense, this property was doubled in production, and I said, "Okay, we're interested." We'll just continue in that same vein, taking it from where they took it from 50 - 100 in just a few months. We'll take it from 100 - 250, we believe, in probably another quarter.
With that, I'm going to turn it over to Jesse to talk about how we do that.
Yes. Good morning. Yes, this is Jesse Allen, VP of Operations. What I'm going to do is kind of give you an overall profile of the property to give you an idea of just what we're acquiring here. As Dante said, it's in Lea County, New Mexico, just outside of Jal, New Mexico. If y'all take a look at a map once you get off the call, it's about 60 mi from our field office there outside of Loco Hills. We're getting almost 5,400 additional acres, and currently, there are 208 producing wells and injection wells. As Dante has said, current production is just a little over 100 barrels a day from 19 active wells. This is very similar to our property there outside of Loco Hills, the Grayburg-Jackson Field.
There's a lot of oil in place, and most of it is still there, and that's what we're going to exploit. Production to date has been about 30 million barrels. You can see there in the slide that current PDP, Proved Developed Producing, is about 150,000 barrels of oil, and Proved Developed Not Producing about 361,000 barrels. We believe that we can recover another 15 million barrels of oil with recompletions, returning idle wells to production, and maybe even doing some drilling. We feel like there's a horizontal drilling potential here like there is in our Grayburg-Jackson Field. What's different about this field is we will be producing deeper horizons here in the South Justice Field at about 5,000-7,000 ft. Those intervals are known as the Glorieta, the Blind Brae, the Tubb, Drinkard, and the Fusselman.
Over in our Grayburg-Jackson Field, we're producing the zones above this in the Seven Rivers, Queen, Grayburg, and the San Andreas. There is the difference there. We're just a little bit deeper. If you'll go to that next slide, what you'll see there is the decline curve. What you'll notice is that the production over the last three or four years, or as COVID hit, production just dropped off dramatically. Previous operator stopped doing work, was not putting wells back on production as they went off. Had to do a little bit with COVID and just the ability to work, but that's where the potential is. We feel like we can get back up there to 250 barrels oil a day from the current 100 barrels oil a day. That is very significant for us.
As Dante said, it's mostly well service, changing out any if there's an issue with the tubing or the pumps. It should be relatively inexpensive to do that and get this production back up to around 250 barrels oil a day. Let's go to that next slide. What's been the history of this property? I'll talk a little bit about that. It was developed in the 1960s, and production was as high as 6,000 barrels oil a day. Historically, it's had a low decline rate, which we like. As I said, from that production curve, it was around 250 barrels oil a day before COVID, and it fell off very rapidly, as you could see in that decline curve, mainly down hole issues with the pumping wells. We feel like we've got, again, we have 15 million barrels of reserves that we believe we can develop.
We plan over the next quarter, maybe a little bit longer, to activate 30 additional idle wells. And at 5-10 barrels oil a day, you can do the math there. We'll do like we've been doing over in our Grayburg-Jackson Field. We'll do some little acid cleanup jobs, and we feel like we've got a great formula that's working really well over there in Grayburg-Jackson Field. And again, to highlight what's really important here is getting oil production up. And so we feel like with not a whole lot of effort and a whole lot of money being spent, we can get production up to 250-400 barrels oil a day. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mitch. Mitch.
Hello. Thanks, Jesse. Oh, Mitch Trotter, CFO. It's always great to talk to you, and thanks for attending today. In this call, I'll give you insight into, one, the reasonableness of the purchase price and the shares issued, and two, the economic impact of our business over the next few months. The purchase price is compared to the market value of price per flowing barrel. A more developed field could easily run $30,000-$50,000 or more per flowing barrel, but given the number of wells to reactivate, the lower amount is reasonable because of the unlocked potential. The price paid, of course, is a function of the stock price since we're issuing 1 million shares, and everyone on the call has their view of what the stock price is or should be or will be. We use three versions.
One is the analyst target price at the moment of $2 a share, and that produces 20,000 flowing barrels, $20,000 per flowing barrel. At a very short term, we should be the dollar, in our view, it's $10,000 a barrel. At a closing date, as Dante noted, at the 50 cents, it was $5,000 per flowing barrel. Any which way you look at it, the number of shares is appropriate and not excessive. The field is priced appropriately. On the economic impact, the estimated cash flow from operations are about $100,000 a month or $1,200,000 annually, as Dante had noted. The incremental increase of production, I used 100, reflects about half of the reactivations that Jesse talked about over the next few months. The current and economic estimates we. Just assuming $70 a barrel when we put it into the thing, we all know it changes daily.
We did use their historical LOE averages, and we kept that as the same per barrel for the increase in production because it's just too early to forecast driving it down. The chemicals and acids to pop some production that Jesse talked about, we thought that was appropriate. As Dante noted, there should be minimal impact to the G&A cost. There will be some, but not a lot. It is not worth forecasting in there. The estimated cash flow from operations results, both currently and on the incremental basis, when we double production or higher, is a good contribution to the company's business. Thank you, and back to Dante for wrap up in the Q&A session.
Yeah. It summarizes pretty easily, folks. Really, the Grayburg-Jackson Field's got a billion barrels in place. About 7% has been recovered. We're looking at doing drilling over there to get the lion's share of the reserves out. Over here, this field actually did better on primary from drilling, producing 30 million, roughly, over its life with 207-208 million barrels in place. Overall, this increases the oil in place in our, I'll say, portfolio by 20%. It increases our acreage in the Permian by 33%, adding 5,000 acres to our, say, 16,000 acres. It increases our production by 10% immediately, and it would increase our production by 20% near term. We think there's significant upside just because this field was owned by others that had portfolios that were larger than this field. It just became a field overlooked, which was ideal for us.
We're going to give it the love and attention that it needs, and we're going to get this production near term to go up to 200-250, and then keep going. We will look for a drilling partner just like we've done at the Grayburg-Jackson. We might, in the Q&A, give a little bit of update for that field as well. Reactivation of idle wells is a no-brainer. Buying this thing at the price we got it for, also a no-brainer. Potential for drilling in the future, based on what these wells did originally on primary, I think it's also going to be a no-brainer. We think we got a very good buy for very little money. In conclusion, I just put here, we got a very good deal, and we certainly did.
If there were 10 more just like it, I'd grab all 10. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Mike Porter for Q&A.
Certainly.
Matt, can you hold for questions, please? Thank you.
Absolutely. Everyone, at this time we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone at this time. We do ask that while posing your question, please pick up your handset if you are listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. We do ask that participants please ask one question and one follow-up, then re-enter the queue. Once again, if you have any questions or comments, please press star one on your phone. Thank you. Your first question is coming from Tucker Andersen from Above All Investing. Your line is live.
Good morning, guys.
Hi, Tucker.
Congratulations. Even before this presentation, I was pretty convinced you had a good deal, but after this presentation, I'm more convinced. I have several questions, but I'll follow the rules. The first question is, was this put up for bid, or did they just approach you knowing you guys were in the area and this was a privately negotiated transaction? Because the price seems incredibly low given the potential.
It was sole sourced. It was from a relationship, and we get a lot of these things. We're not going to bid for anything for the most part because we're not going to pay market. This was a special situation where the seller had other properties in New Mexico, sold the other properties, and this thing was left as an orphan.
He knew it was near us, talked to us about it, and we negotiated this with no other parties involved.
Okay. Congratulations once again. The follow-up would be, given what you expect to do with the field short-term, I'm not talking about two or three years, will you need additional financial resources or resources of any kind? What I'm wondering is, as opposed to the cash flow this might provide, will there be additional expenses against that cash flow?
Near term, no. We're going to contract with the seller to use their rig in the same way they doubled production to double it again. We're going to do it at a pace where I don't believe we're going to have net borrowing. I won't say we won't have some impact to the cash flow, but at the moment, these rigs are running $440 an hour and maybe $5,000 a day. If we run one rig out here, we could put back on production, say, three wells a week. If our goal is to put on another 30, we need 10 weeks of that rig. It's just a very quick payout. The surprising thing is these wells are quite good. I mean, they're 5-10 barrel a day wells without a stimulation.
We'll follow right behind putting the wells back on production with low-cost stimulations and see what we get. We are in a bit of a discovery. I'm looking at this to just supplement our cash flow and help us to get to a net cash flow positive before the end of the year. I don't know if I answered your question, but that's my answer.
Yeah. That's good. Thanks. I'll get back in the queue. I have some more questions, but I'll get back in the queue. Thanks, Dante.
Okay.
Certainly. There are no other participants in the queue at this time. Tucker, your line is still live if you have further questions.
Oh, yeah. Go on, Tucker.
I do. Thanks. The other question is, is it possible that you will eventually discover that there are more recoverable reserves here? How well has the property sort of been already adjudicated on those sort of things?
Yeah. We don't know the answer to that one. It's a great question. Every time we have somebody look at a Permian field, I mean, most people, they find more reserves. I think the inclination is we're going to find more reserves here than what's published. Our 208 million barrels, it's in the published documents. Atlantic Richfield was the last major owner, and they published a number of documents that you can find just on the web. We have already contacted Haas and Cobb for a proposal to study this field so that we can get the answer to your question. It's going to involve some testing. I think that the steps are going to be there's interesting areas to perforate and frack. We'll do that. We'll see what the results are.
We'll refer it back to the third-party engineers, and then they'll rejig the reserve calculations. I think your hunch is right. Now, on the Grayburg-Jackson, it's the gift that keeps giving. This one here, I don't think is as prolific as that field, but it's going to increase. I'm just taking a rule of thumb that the guys were telling me, frankly, from our third party that said, "Whatever it did on primary, you probably could cut it in half, and that's what your new wells are going to do." I took that as a conservative view of it. This field was waterflooded. The results were mediocre. We don't think this is as waterfloodable as the Seven Rivers is at Grayburg-Jackson, but that doesn't bother us at all because we're mostly looking at this as a primary play.
Right. Yeah. It just seemed to me you mentioned there were several producing zones, and it seemed to me with that that maybe it hadn't been fully delineated and things like that. We'll have to.
Yeah. You're correct.
We'll have to wait and see what happens. Yeah. Talking about Grayburg-Jackson, you said maybe you could expand a little on what's happening there, and I'll take advantage of that opening.
Yeah. The last earnings call was all about that. I think of interest to everybody is the status of our funding to retire the settlement with Pogo. We have lumped in there the desire to also pay off our senior debt with FIBT. The status is about the same as what we said a couple of weeks ago. It is progressing. We have turned the crank to put more energy into this funding. We have more than one investor doing due diligence now on it to support on-s financing. We think that the timing is the end of July till the middle of August. We also extended the agreement with the seller to keep that settlement in place until mid-September. It is not our intent to drag this thing out to then.
It's our intent to get this closed end of July, first or second week of August at the latest. That's what we're working to right now.
Yeah. Just on that, it seems to me like there's a lot of good news for your company. Yet, as you're well aware, the stock price isn't reflecting that. Is there any chance that in order to get that done, you will need to suffer a lot of additional equity dilution?
I don't think so. I think it's just what you said. I've taken the time to speak to some of our major shareholders to see what's in their head, and you're one of them. Most are anxious about us getting the funding. I'll say the market as a whole are doubtful. Can we pull it off? We're as transparent as we can be about the details behind the funding to retire the Pogo settlement. All I can tell you is we're optimistic. We're betting on the future. We have sweeteners in that funding, one of which is this field. I mean, if we were scared to death, we probably would not have bought this. We're confident we're going to close the deal. I'm less confident it's going to be the end of July or the first week of August.
I feel we've got ample time to make everybody happy, including right now, we have three investors in the mix looking at On-'s deal because they have to secure their investment. Separate from them and unknown to them, we have backups to On- that we're working. We've got backups to the backups to the backups such that I feel really confident we're going to close the deal. Really, it's a $2 a share benefit to shareholders. If people believe that the stock would be soaring, they want to see it. They're going to make us work for it. We're fine with that. I don't know if that answers your question or not.
Yeah. That gives me a little flavor too. I think that perhaps the fact that you're sitting in a little delay means that people think that rather than just working it hard, you're sort of in trouble, and maybe that's part of what's happening. As you know, I'm a long-term stockholder, and I'm very patient, and I want you to do what's best for the long term and not worry about the market.
Yeah. We appreciate that. Your advice is ringing in our head not to do anything stupid. We're doing our best not to. We think this is a dynamite deal for shareholders. The other thing that's a dynamite deal for shareholders, and we've talked about it, is signing up a drilling partner. We're very close to signing with a very reputable group. They too have to secure their funding. We're unlikely to announce it until they achieve their funding just because we have a lot of investors from Missouri. They want to see the funding there. We've heard that message. I can tell you with my hand on my heart, we're very close to signing with a very reputable group. I'm very excited about the drilling potential of San Andreas.
It's a gift from God that we have those kind of reserves and that kind of potential.
You need more optimistic investors from Texas and less investors from Missouri, and you'll be in better shape.
It works because the astute investor can take advantage of this, right?
Yeah. One last question. Then I'll get you guys back to work making money. First, sort of, as you know, there's a lot of different opinion about what's happened with the price of oil recently and what happened with the attack in Iran and all these sort of things. It's pretty clear that the Trump administration sort of has two competing objectives. One is for people to drill, baby, drill, and the other is to get the price of oil down even lower than it is now. At what price of oil, one, what do you think that's going to happen to the fact that you guys are down in the oil patch and how those are going to be balanced? Because we know the lower the price of oil, the less people are going to drill.
At what price of oil do you sort of worry about your fundamentals? I know you're hedged in the short term, but sort of over the intermediate term when you're looking at all these things?
Yeah. It's a perfect question. Everybody's asking that question. I'll give you my take on it. The industry, I was in this industry starting in 1979. We watched oil prices dip below $10 a barrel, and everybody thought that was the end of the world. I watched.
I was an investor then. I remember well.
I watched what the industry did because I was part of it. You just simply cut costs. You keep cutting costs. You cut drilling costs. The answer to your question today is not going to be the answer to your question a year from now or two years from now. The answer to your question today from our perspective is that we need $60. We need $60 to be attractive to a driller. As drilling costs come down, maybe that number goes down to $55. Maybe that number goes down to $50. Horizontal drilling is expensive. The estimate for our wells is $3.7 million a well on South Justice, which is another couple thousand feet deeper. That number is going to be north of $4 million. Right now, the economics look attractive at $60. The Permian, the rig count is dropping.
It was dropping before the Iran-Israel deal broke out. I do not think the amount of rigs running is going to dramatically increase because we had a blip of $8 or $9 a barrel. I think the rig count will continue to drop. However, we have exceptionally good rock at the Grayburg-Jackson, so we anticipate an aggressive drilling program there. We also anticipate reducing our costs. With our intent to retire the senior debt with FIBT and do this settlement, it is our intention to get as close as we can to being debt-free. If we go debt-free, we are living at a very low-cost basis, so we are less vulnerable to a dip in oil prices.
I hate to say it, but being a public company, if the shareholders like what we're doing, we can recover a little bit of loss from an ELOC, which is not our intent, but it's an avenue of raising capital. I think the short answer to your question is today we need $60. If oil keeps going down in price and nobody knows where it's going to go other than when the drilling slows down in a field like the Permian, which is America's best, most prolific field, and you have a very steep decline rate, America's oil production is going to decline. If America's oil production is going to decline, and if we remain one of the top producers in the world, oil prices have to go up. It's a balancing act.
I just don't see oil prices going that low when the Permian is going to self-adjust to reduce production, and then oil prices go up, and then the drilling rigs go back up. To me, we're going to trade in a range. I think it's going to be in that $60-$80 range before people had said, "Well, $70-$90." I do think that range is now $60-$80. I don't know if I've answered it for you. I invite my team to make any comments they wish. I always kind of jump in, and I like these questions. Of course, I certainly don't know any more than the guys at Exxon or Goldman Sachs who answer these questions routinely. That's my view from the ground.
They've proved that you may not know any more, but they don't know any more either. I think.
From my ignorant basis, you have my answer.
What you're saying is that long term, there's no equilibrium because any price produces some reactions that change the equilibrium. I think people don't realize in general, not just for your company, but just in general, that as you said, if prices go down and stay down, then costs go down too and stuff like that. I do think that it's important for you guys to keep emphasizing that if you can get close to debt-free, it really changes the equation for you on all these things. The word I get from Washington, from people I know who I won't say are well connected, but at least know more than the average person, is that the administration has not really resolved, as I say, this conflict between wanting oil prices.
As you say, the lower the price in the short term, the higher the price in the long term. That the president's goal, as opposed to his advisor's goal, is he would like to see it closer to $50 than $60. I think that's part of the tension you're seeing in the markets right now, that people who are plugged into Washington. I don't know if you've heard that, but I've heard it from enough people.
No, I've heard the conflict. I think his advisors are telling him, "You push it to 50, the drilling's going to dry up.
Yeah. In fact.
In a lot of fields, it's not economic. You're not going to, nobody's going to drill, baby, drill if it's uneconomic. I even think that at $70, if you don't have $70, a lot of the fields are uneconomic. Just for our particular economics, $65, $60 is economic. We have that blessing. There are other large basins. You're not going to see drilling at $70. You need more than $70.
Yeah. No, no. Yeah. No, I sort of tend to agree with you. Of course, the other wildcard is how what we have done in the Middle East affects our relationship with Saudi Arabia and what they decide to do. That is beyond my pay grade, so.
Yeah. Nobody knows. I think the best thing we can do is run a clean operation at the lowest cost, at the lowest G&A, using existing well bores to the maximum extent and drill very carefully, keeping those costs low, making sure we get big wells when we do drill. That's our plan.
You should take the recording of what you just said and write it up and put it as your goal on your website because that's a great summary. Okay? That's the.
I think this call is recorded.
That's what I'm saying. I'm saying don't expect everybody's going to listen to the call, okay? Just as your corporate goal, write that up, make whatever minor corrections you want, but say, "This is the way we are operating this company for everybody who wants the elevator speech if they're only going from the first floor to the second floor," because that's what happens.
You're a great supporter, Tucker. No, you're a great supporter. For others, Tucker and I met in New York. He made a commitment to us just after we went public. We need to have a website page just for our supporters who have seen us through thick and thin. Right now, this is thin. We really value the shareholders that we have right now today because they're hanging in there with us when our stock is, frankly, so low. Thank you for all that, Tucker.
You may guess that this hasn't been one of my best-performing stocks since I met you. Anyway, thanks a lot, guys. Thanks for answering all the questions. I appreciate it.
Thank you. Back to you, Mike. Matthew.
Okay. Matthew, any other questions?
Certainly, there are no further questions in the queue. That concludes our verbal Q&A. For those listening on webcast, you can submit a question at this time by clicking on the Ask Question button on the left of your screen. Type your question into the box and hit the Send button to submit your question. I will now turn the call over to Michael Porter for remaining questions.
Thank you. Dante, I have several questions that have come up over the web. The first one is, thank you for the details of this transaction. The deal seems accretive. What is the total well count at Justice Field? Of those, how many are SI with no future use? What is the average cost to P&A a well there in New Mexico? Thank you.
Yeah. This is a really good question. It was a major concern because we are going to pick up plug and abandonment liability for the wells that have no future. Part of the deal when we bought this was to make sure that it was in full compliance with the BLM and the state of New Mexico for plug and abandonment of any wells that the state felt needed to be abandoned. That is part of our agreement with the seller that those wells were plugged. There were something like, Jesse is on, but I think five or six wells were plugged in the last 12 months. Since field inception, maybe there is a total of 20 wells that were plugged. We did not buy the property to just plug all these wells.
We bought it to reactivate the wells and to stimulate the wells with new perfs in new zones with new sand fracks. The answer is in 2025, there are not any wells for us to plug and abandon. The cost is roughly $40,000-$60,000 to abandon a well, and another, I am going to say, $20,000 to reclaim the surface. You have to kind of rake it over, put a marker on it. You are into this for maybe $80,000 a well to abandon. We looked at the equipment value out there, which we think when Atlantic Richfield developed it, they invested in the late 1990s close to $40 million. That value today, say, is probably about the same, $40 million in equipment. If we went out there and abandoned everything today, just said, "There is nothing here.
We're just going to abandon everything," we saw a maximum liability of about $20 million. So we figured we had more in equipment than if we just had to go and abandon it. So we paid what we paid with really no premium for upside and virtually no five-month payout on current production. That's giving you, I think, the answers to your question. However, just like we think costs are going to come down, we have 550 wells today on the—I keep wanting to say Andrew Jackson, the president, but it's Grayburg-Jackson. We have 550 wells there. We've got 200, and Jesse has a 208 on this field.
Yes, that's correct. It's 208.
We have two producers and injectors total.
We have 208 here. We have 22 active producers, 7 active injectors, and the rest of the wells are idle. Our intent is really to convert everything, subject to a third-party study, to producers. I do not think the water injection does us a lot of good, but you still have to inject water. Where it does the most good is where we will inject water. The rest of it, Katie bar the door, turn them to producers. Away you go. We are going to abandon some wells probably each year as we sort through what do we have in the well, what are the operating horizons. We do not have that clearly understood yet. Other than the worst-case scenario is acceptable. Does that answer your question?
It's only typed in, Dante. Just keep moving.
Oh, okay. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. What's next then?
Mike?
Mike Porter?
Mike.
I'm sorry. What is the average lift cost for both fields right now? When will you expect to break even post-interest expense?
All right. The average hasn't dramatically changed. Between the two fields, they're running approximately the same at the $30 lift cost. As production goes up, because I think really both of them are at base level of our expenses, as production goes up, we will leverage that down. All the Haas and Cobb reports have also estimated as we get to the different level. That's primarily, I'm talking about the Grayburg-Jackson there on South Justice. It's at $30 now. In my slide, I showed it staying in that same range as we double production, mainly for one, obviously, the unknowns and what we need to do. As I said, the acid treatments, the great pops to operations and production and all that. We will address that going forward. Now, when do we get to cover all the G&A and all the interest expense?
That's obviously in the out months. We're not forecasting to do that immediately. You're out, but that's certainly in our plans. With the on- deal, depending on how much volumetric we use, that drives out a lot of the interest expense. A lot of variables will become a little bit better known in the July-August timeframe as we wrap up Q3, actually. That's about the best I can give you as far as a forecast and all that. We're really, again, go to the disclaimers. I'm going to hand that back to you.
Yeah. It's an important metric. It's an important metric. I'm glad it was asked. We want to drive that number down. I think the best operators in the Permian, and you need more oil production. There's two ways to do it: cut costs or increase oil. We think it's possible to get that number well below 20. That's our goal.
Okay. The last question. Last question. Do you see this field purchase having any positive or negative impact on the pending in- financing deal?
It was cheaper to buy these 100 barrels a day than to do a workover to get 100 barrels a day. I mean, it's almost the same. If you look at the company portfolio, we're a stronger company from this purchase. Trust me, the discussion with on- and their investors is this is part of the portfolio that they're investing in. It definitely strengthens the attractiveness of making that investment.
Thank you. Dante, I just got two more questions that just came in. Looking into Trump's big, beautiful bill that he wants to pass, there is talk that there will be an additional tax on foreign-based oil companies that are doing business in the United States. As you're selling oil, I believe, to Chevron, if you can, please confirm that they are a U.S.-based oil company. Do you see any positive impact impacting your sale going forward?
This one, I have to go do homework and give Chevron a call. We have a good relationship with them. They want to buy as much oil as we can send them. It just occurs to me if the U.S. taxes imported oil, first of all, we do import some oil because some refiners, like on the West Coast, they may supplement their oil from Point East rather than transport it from the Gulf Coast. It just occurs to me that if you tax it, maybe we get a bump, maybe we do not get a bump. I do not know the answer. It seems like you would get a bump, but I do not know if it just lowers overall global oil prices by the amount that you tax. I just do not know the answer to this one. Mitch, do you want to try to answer?
Yeah. The tax codes and all that and what's a U.S., what's not a U.S. I own a car that everybody here would have thought that that was made in Japan. And it is the most U.S.-made car in the country because of the way the parts and the way these corporations move stuff. With tax codes, people shift stuff.
Yeah. Let's say that for this question, if that individual would reveal himself to Mitch, we will ask Chevron about it and come back with a proper answer. Okay? I just don't.
I have an email address. So we're good.
Okay. Perfect. We'll get you an answer. We will get you an answer. What else you got? I'm sorry, I just don't know the answer to that one.
Let me add something to say.
Hey, Mike, let me add something real quick.
Yeah. We do sell to Chevron. Chevron's very, as everybody knows, they're one of the big majors, one of the seven sisters, if you will, if you've ever read that book. We get a really good price from Chevron because we do have some premium oil as far as API gravity, et cetera, and so on. From that point of view, we don't get a big hit on the price of the oil when we sell it to them. That is a very big positive. Right now, when I last looked at it, it was WTI less $0.85 a barrel, which is really good, which is really good. I just wanted to add that quickly.
Yeah. We have a sweet crude. In our field, we have a sweet crude. Others in the Permian do not, so they get a bigger penalty. I think Jesse's right on. What else you got for us?
That's the last question. Matthew?
Certainly. Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's event. You may disconnect at this time and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.