The next presentation is going to be Granite Ridge Resources, the ticker's GRNT. We're pleased to have Michael Ott, Vice President of Corporate Development, with us today to discuss the company. Just as a quick reminder before we get started, if you have any questions, please type it into the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen, and we'll try and get to as many of those as we can at the end. Now I'll go ahead and turn it over to Michael, so please go ahead.
Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, everyone, for your interest. It's a pleasure to be here. It's the first time for me to participate in this conference, first time for Granite Ridge to participate in this conference. We've had some great meetings so far today, so we're happy to be here and participate. Granite Ridge, we are a non-operated strategy. We've got assets across the Lower 48, in the Bakken, the DJ, Haynesville, Eagle Ford, and predominantly most of our asset base is in West Texas. Within West Texas, within the Permian, most of our assets are in the Delaware Basin. We've got enterprise value of about $950 million. We've got trailing EBITDA of about $300 million. We've got a yield close to 7% right now.
One thing I want to note and make sure it's clear, we currently hold, as of the time of publish, about $60 million of Vital equity on our balance sheet due to a tag right we exercised on their acquisition of Henry Resources in 2023. Who are we? What are we? We're an income stock. We pay close to 7% yield on a fixed dividend. We're a growth company. In 2023, we grew almost 23% year-over-year. We're forecast to grow around 7% year-over-year this year at the midpoint of our guidance. We have a strong balance sheet. As of the end of the last quarter, we had a 0.4 turn of leverage. That excludes the Vital equity that I mentioned earlier.
On a trailing basis, relative to our peers, we're also a value stock, trading about three times relative to our peers at about four times. What have we done as a public company since our IPO in 2022? Our operating partners have helped us achieve over $300 million of Adjusted EBITDA. We've grown our asset base both on a reserves basis and a production basis year-over-year. We've returned close to $100 million to shareholders via dividends and share buybacks. And these last two points are focused around our executive team's support of the shareholder transition post-De-SPAC, where we have a relatively concentrated share ownership. And as those shares are pushed out to their LPs and then hopefully out into the public forum, we are doing everything we can to educate folks on who we are and what we're doing and where we're doing it.
So the reported shareholders are up 5x. We've increased our research coverage from one to now six after Roth picked us up last month. And our daily volume has increased substantially as well. This is sort of a broad overview of how we think investors win right now and in the future with Granite Ridge. Where we are right now with regards to the shareholder base, we've got some concentration there that we feel like is more or less compressing our value relative to peers. So our transitioning shareholder base, we believe there is value to be unlocked as that progresses over time. Shareholder returns, we pay a fixed dividend. We're going to protect that.
We want that to be a foundational aspect of our company as we show that we can grow production, grow asset value, and return capital to shareholders and be sort of a win-win for the folks supporting our name. The last thing, strategic partnerships: the non-op space broadly has low barriers to entry. With our 10 years of history, our relationships, we feel like we have the ability to grow and build strategic partnerships in a way that differentiates us from our peers and the other folks that compete in the same space. And I'll talk more specifically about those partnerships soon. But I think it's also important to highlight the fact that all of these things, our future, our strategy is all underpinned by the fact that we want to maintain leverage around a half turn. We as a team have been in this business a long time.
There are a lot of ups and downs, a lot of cycles. In order to effectively manage our assets in the best interest of our investors, we feel like targeting a half turn of leverage, which is about a full to a half turn lower than our peers, is the right place to be as it affords us strength in the downturn as well as the chance to be an opportunistic acquirer when things get tough and folks need to run for the hills. We want to be there with our capital so that we can jump on high-value opportunities. Diversification. That's the name of the game in non-op. We present investors an opportunity to invest in a company that has interests that are diversified from a commodity standpoint. We're roughly 50/50 oil and gas on a basin standpoint.
We've got interests in the Permian, the Eagle Ford, the Bakken, the DJ, and the Haynesville. And from an operator standpoint, we've got over 65 operating partners between these five basins. We're excited to work with all of them. We love what they're doing, both public and private. The public guys have their advantages from the scale and the ability to execute with a permanent capital source like ourselves. And then we've got the private partners who are pushing the boundaries on the edges of plays, the depths of plays, and really focusing their capital in ways that we feel like these public guys come on the back end and help them execute on their exit and their value. And we really like being alongside them as they execute their strategy and also the assets they acquire within their private equity strategies. It is their baby. It is their focus.
And we love that alignment. So public or private, we're agnostic. We love them both for different reasons. And we're really proud of them and what they've been able to accomplish for us as a non-operating partner. What do we do on a daily basis? We've got cash flow. We've got debt capacity. And we marry that with dividends and the sourcing and evaluating opportunities where we're paying a fixed dividend and we take the rest of our cash flow and we look for new opportunities to grow our asset base at return targets that we are very staunch about. We've got return thresholds that at a minimum are 20% rate of return and a 1.5 ROI. So we source and evaluate over 600 opportunities a year. Most of that deal flow is in the Permian.
We try to find the best risk-adjusted returns and invest that capital, not to win just for winning's sake, but we want to target and go after deals that we feel like give us and our shareholders the best risk-adjusted rate of returns. That allows us to then in turn grow within cash flow and return capital to shareholders. The opportunity set. This is a good chance for me to talk more about our strategic partnerships. As you can see on the right side of the slide there, we've got these partnerships where we can partner with mineral buyers. We can partner with operators. We can partner with land brokers. We can partner with operators in a number of different ways. And a lot of those are focused on long-standing relationships and economic alignment in certain basins or certain strategies.
But what we have in the middle is something that we're really excited about. We've got this controlled capital strategy where we as a firm are looking for voids. We're looking for opportunities to invest our capital at higher and higher rates of return where the competition may be less. Non-op has a lot of lower barriers of entry. And so we love the business. We love the value that it's created for this company. But we also see the opportunity out there for operated assets and the return thresholds that we can achieve with this strategy. And we've got a partner in West Texas focused in the Midland and Permian Basin. I'm sorry, the Midland and Delaware Basin. You see some stats there at the bottom where we've accumulated about 2,000 net acres and 22 net locations.
This is an opportunity for us to reinvest some of our cash flow in a strategy that we feel has more of an operative flavor to it. It's not operative in the sense that Granite Ridge is turning the drill bit or completing the wells, but we are partnering with private companies who have a proven track record of success such that they have the capital to invest alongside us in these opportunities. So they're the operator. We're technically still non-op, but we control the governance. We control what we buy, how we develop it, when we develop it, while these partners get to control their company, which in a private equity strategy, they don't always have a say or control in what happens with that company. Here, they control their company. We control our working interests. They control their working interests.
But they're investing a material amount of their own personal capital in these deals. So we love that alignment. We love the opportunities that they're bringing us. And we feel like we've created a mousetrap or strategy that we can get a lot of really successful private teams on board with as we pursue these partnerships outside of West Texas. Hopefully, South Texas and the Eagle Ford, the Haynesville, the DJ, the Bakken is something we're really excited about. The private equity void, the fundraising is down probably close to 90% over the last six to eight years. So as that capital has left the space, on top of the fact that it's concentrating behind fantastic teams like Double Eagle and Validus, we love what they're doing, but it's created an opportunity for us to come in, find really successful teams who would prefer to have a different structure.
We can partner with them to pursue these operated opportunities in all these basins that have fantastic rates of return. Also, we get to chase opportunities that have higher rates of return. The competition, the lower barrier of entry in the non-op space is a bit of a knife fight. There's a lot of people bidding on a lot of the opportunities that we see on a day-to-day basis. By elevating some of our strategic evaluation of opportunities into this operating category with these partnerships, we can chase deals and opportunities that have less competition, which affords us the chance to control timing, which is perceived as a weakness of the non-op strategy. We also get to underwrite stuff to a higher rate of return because there's less competition. We're really excited about that.
In fact, we brought on our first 8-well pad with this operating partner last week. It's an 8-well pad in Loving County. We're roughly a 70% working interest owner in that unit. And as those wells pull back, we can't wait to give more information on how that strategy is developing for us. Our 5-year plan. We talked a little bit about this controlled capital partnership, and I think that's a big direction for us. I think that's where we're going over the next 3-5 years. We're right now in the far left. We are 100% non-op from a production EBITDA contribution standpoint. Now that we've got these wells coming online with our controlled capital partner, our production is going to start to have this synthetic operator flavor to it.
Our traditional non-op from a production standpoint is going to slowly start to go down, not necessarily on a numbers basis, but on a contribution basis. So as we grow this company, as we gain scale, and we increase the controlled capital portion of our portfolio, this is how we expect things to work out. It does offer us the higher rate of return opportunities we feel, but also, as a public non-op company, where valuations of our peers are somewhere in the 4x-5x range, operators are sitting in the 4.5-6.5 range. So if we can transition our non-op base and leverage our partnerships and our relationship to create this operated wedge of production and capital, we feel that we'll be able to earn a higher multiple on our valuation. This is a good example of that.
Our public non-op peers are about 4.1x operated E&P, 5, 5.5, and then we're sitting on the far right around 3.2. Now, that 3.2, some of that is likely due to the fact of our shareholder concentration as Grey Rock works through that. But I think there's a ton of value to earn between the more traditional non-op strategy and this controlled capital strategy going forward. Production underwriting. The non-op space, we don't control a lot of what happens in non-op. And I just talked about the fact that we're trying to increase our amount of capital and production associated with this operative partnership. But it's worth noting that historically, in this example, we have over 1,000 wells with more than 12 months of production in this analysis where we had a production forecast that we used to underwrite the opportunity.
As we look back at how those wells have performed over time, we, on average, on a weighted average basis so that we aren't disproportionately applying a better outcome than a worse outcome for something where we have 1% versus 30% working interest, we have close to 100% accuracy. Now, there's certainly some months might be higher or lower than others, but I think generally this gives us a lot of comfort in the rigorous process we go through to evaluate the opportunities we see on a weekly basis, both operated and non-operated. There are a few slides on recent quarterly performance and statistics on Q1 2024.
I will also re-mention the fact that our leverage at the end of Q1 was sitting at about 0.4x relative to our target of 0.5, but that excludes the value of the Vital shares that sit on our balance sheet, which we will be able to start liquidating those shares over the next 30-45 days as we see fit. Guidance. Year-over-year, we're showing fairly modest growth. Our production share from an oil standpoint is going to be close to 50%. We're forecasting between $230 million and $250 million of D&C capital expenditure. And a little over $100 million of that is going to be tied to our operated strategy with our partner in West Texas. We expect to turn on between 22 and 24 net wells to sales this year. And you've got LOE, production taxes, and cash G&A down below.
It's worth mentioning from a G&A standpoint, scale is the name of the game. One of our peers, NOG, they have a tremendous track record of growing their business and taking advantage of scale. That is certainly something that we admire about this strategy and this business that we fully expect to realize going forward. This G&A level is going to be a relative constant. I think we could double our production overnight, and we wouldn't need to increase our G&A by any material amount, which is a key factor in evaluating the long-term potential of non-op companies and mineral companies because we don't need to add drilling engineers or completions engineers or HSE folks. Again, here we are. Just want to reiterate our outlook. We've got a shareholder-focused strategy with our fixed dividend, opportunistic share buybacks.
We've got a tremendous amount of focus on balance sheet integrity, making sure that we've got the leverage profile to invest through cycles. We're really excited about this controlled capital strategy. We're very excited about our partner. We're having a lot of inbounds and discussions with new folks in other basins, and we look forward to growing that program going forward. I also want to mention again this transitioning shareholder base. It's certainly an overhang. Grey Rock is a tremendous shareholder. They're on our board. We share the exact same strategic outlook internally. It's a great working relationship. As they transition their shares out to LPs, we're doing our best to support that transition by being on the road, educating folks on the name, and growing research coverage as we go forward so that folks like you guys are ready to scoop us up when the opportunity presents itself.
That's all I've got for today if we want to open up for Q&A.
All right. Great. Michael, appreciate the overview on Granite Ridge. A lot of interesting developments going on. We've already got a number of questions coming in, but for anybody else who's watching or listening in, feel free to submit questions using the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. We'll try and get through as many as we can. So maybe one thing as we're looking at kind of the makeup of the portfolio, and you've got assets in different basins, but one question that's always pretty topical is just where's your focus? Are you primarily focused on adding in the Permian right now, or do you see other opportunities in other basins?
Generally, deal flow is predicated by where the rigs are. So most of the deal flow right now is coming from West Texas. But we're agnostic. We're going to evaluate the deals as they come in, the opportunities as they come in. And if we can find value and have a transaction done in a dry gas basin where we think we are protecting our downside and creating long-term option value, we're going to pursue that. But we're basin agnostic. We're commodity agnostic. If something comes up in Ohio or North Dakota or the DJ or some other basin, we'd be excited about underwriting it. And we're not going to bend over backwards just to win it, but we will look at any basin. And it just so happens that most of the deal flow is in West Texas, which is where most of our capital is going.
Got it. Got it. That makes sense. And we've seen a lot of consolidation in the industry and other deals announced this morning. Just curious, as we're seeing more industry consolidation, does that affect your acquisition opportunities?
Yeah, to some extent. I don't think it has a material impact, but there are certainly commercial aspects of who's buying who that may impact our ability to operate in a specific basin. I think Exxon's acquisition of Pioneer from a non-op standpoint isn't a terrible thing. Pioneer is well-known for only drilling in units where they had at least a 90% or 95% working interest. So for us to go out and acquire a working interest that was maybe a little bit outsized in a unit that Pioneer was the operator, we'd be a little bit nervous about their willingness to develop that unit being a less than 90% working interest owner, whereas Exxon is not indifferent. I think they'd rather drill a 100% working interest than a 10% working interest unit, but they're not as discerning from a 95% to 90% to 85%.
I think for us, if we owned acreage under Pioneer before, we're excited to have Exxon controlling that acreage because we feel like there's a higher likelihood of Exxon coming in and developing that despite whatever their working interest might be.
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And earlier, you highlighted the number of different upstream companies that you're working with. Just curious if that gives you an advantage to leverage that kind of data and maybe impact your investment decisions. And if so, how are you looking at that?
Absolutely. West Texas specifically, you've got operators who own midstream companies or used to own midstream companies and spun them off into public vehicles. You've got operators that have different types of marketing arrangements all over the basin. You've got operators that have different ways of designing wells where Exxon or someone may have a thesis about the type of casing that they want to use or how many strings of casing they want to use. And a private operator next door has a totally different view, and the costs are reflected by that. So the fact that we've got the data to evaluate how operators work and function in a basin and what their realizations are across the basin is very valuable to how we underwrite opportunities. I mean, sometimes it helps us win a deal, but it definitely helps us avoid buying a bad deal.
Got it. Got it. Maybe thinking about capital allocation, if I remember correctly, I think Granite Ridge had a buyback in place previously, but just curious now if there's any consideration of alternatives beyond just the quarterly dividend or any other ways to return capital.
I mean, we are certainly mindful. We definitely consider all of our options when it comes to what the best uses of our free cash flow is going to be going forward. But the way we see the world right now, I think our dividend is certainly not the reason why folks aren't buying us. 7% yield is too high. So we don't really have any near-term plans to increase that.
Our focus right now with the opportunities we're seeing specifically in this controlled capital opportunity set that we've got, we want to try and reinvest as much of our cash flow into these assets to grow the asset base at the rates of return I mentioned earlier, which will help us gain scale, grow production, and eventually lead to where some of our peers are where we can eventually reduce our cost of capital and get more competitive and large and even smaller scale deals.
Okay. And maybe thinking about hedging, there's a question how you think about swaps versus collars. Is there a preference one over the other? Why? Why not?
Most hedge consultants or analysts will typically structure or recommend trade structures for natural gas to be swaps in the summer and collars in the winter just because of the price fluctuations and where things sit from a demand and supply standpoint. So we typically follow that construct. We did layer in some collars for natural gas in 2025 and 2026. It's just where we saw the value from a long-term standpoint versus the swaps. And then on oil, we do a little bit of both, but we prefer the collar structure to have flexibility to the upside.
Okay. Great. We're getting kind of close to time here, but maybe kind of dovetailing on that question. Just broadly, how are you thinking about liquids versus gas assets currently?
I mean, gas has rallied recently. So things are looking better from an investment standpoint in those types of assets. The long-term forward curve for gas looks great. We're excited about where that's going and the opportunities that are popping up with LNG along the Gulf Coast. And we've got some great undeveloped acreage in the Haynesville that we'll be super excited about when our operators pick up a rig. But right now, we're happy to see a decrease in activity in these gas-weighted basins, these dry gas basins. But there's a ton of money to be made. There's a lot of smart operators. We'll be very excited to invest our capital in the dry gas basins when it makes sense.
Right now, the go-forward plan as we see it from a reserve standpoint and an activity standpoint is we're going to be slightly more levered to oil projects primarily because of our partnership with West Texas and the money that we're starting to put to work out there with them.
All right. Well, that's great. Well, it looks like we're out of time. But Michael, I want to thank you for joining us today and going over Granite Ridge. Thank you, everybody else, for joining us. But Michael, I'll leave it with you if there's any closing remarks.
I'll just say thanks for having us. We've had great meetings. We look forward to following up with anyone. Our door is open. We'd love to come visit you guys, jump on the phone, and talk more about Granite Ridge and see what we can do to get you in our name. But thanks for having us, and look forward to future dialogue.
Sounds great. Thanks, Michael.
Thank you, Kyle.