Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining today's call to discuss Mach Natural Resources' Permian and San Juan Basin acquisitions announcement. During this morning's call, the speakers will be making forward-looking statements that cannot be confirmed by reference to existing information, including statements regarding expectations, projections, future performance, and the assumptions underlying such statements. Please note a number of factors will cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, including the factors identified and discussed in their press release and in other SEC filings. Please recognize that, except as required by law, they undertake no duty to update any forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on such statements. Today's speakers are Tom Ward, CEO, and Kevin White, CFO. They will provide their remarks, and then the call will be open for questions. With that, I will turn the call over to Tom Ward. Tom?
Thank you, Donna. This morning, Mach announced two acquisitions totaling approximately $1.3 billion. These acquisitions are transformative and combined with the largest addition to our portfolio in our history. Mach will nearly double our production while increasing our exposure to natural gas from 53%- 66%. Furthermore, these assets both have less than 10% annual production decline, and both were acquired in our traditional fashion of buying producing assets at an attractive price. With the addition of these assets, we'll move our base decline rate down to 15%. We did not pay for any upside regarding the HBP acreage and the drilling locations and bought the assets at less than PDP PV-10.
As you might know, if you've ever heard one of our conference calls, our four pillars are to maintain a leverage ratio of 1.0x a debt/EBITDA or less, reinvest less than 50% of our operating cash flow, purchase assets at margin prices below PDP PV-10, while focusing on increasing our cash available for distribution. We're thankful that our two new partners recognize these traits and want to be part of a company that emphasizes cash returns. In fact, Mach has what we believe is an industry-leading CROCI of more than 30% per year over the last six years. At the current strip, Mach will expand its current operating cash flow, giving us the ability to increase drilling investment in our assets and use free cash flow to distribute back to unitholders.
We plan to move the current two rig schedule to five rigs working in 2026 while maintaining our reinvestment rate of less than 50% of operating cash flow. One of these rigs is scheduled to be drilling the dry Mancos Shale in northwest New Mexico, starting in the spring of 2026, while the remaining four are scheduled to be drilling our existing locations in the Anadarko Deep Gas, the Red Fork Sand, and Oswego formations of the Mid-Continent. These transactions allow Mach to open anchor positions in two additional basins that are ripe for further consolidation. At the same time, we have two additional partners who have taken meaningful equity positions to allow Mach to make the purchases while maintaining our commitment to low leverage. Also, both companies come with robust hedge books that protect our near-term cash flows.
We've been indicating over the last several quarters that we were seeing increased competition in the Mid-Continent, especially for larger deals. We chose to move outside of the Mid-Continent to other areas where we did see the ability to buy large free cash-flowing assets at attractive prices and to help give us additional cash flow to develop our existing two-million-acre land position in the Mid-Continent. We chose the Central Basin Platform of the Permian Basin and the San Juan Basin because the assets are large, free cash-flowing, low-decline production that also have upside potential. Both Sabinal in the CBP and ICAB in the San Juan have rigs currently running, and we see upside in the San Andreas and Clearfork formations in the CBP and the dry gas Mancos Shale in the San Juan.
In our past 22 acquisitions, we've been able to lower LOE by 25%- 35% in each acquisition. We believe we'll have ample opportunity to lower LOE in these acquisitions also. We keep a close eye on G&A. As in all our past acquisitions, we expect our G&A per BOE to have a notable decrease as our team has consistently been able to integrate acquisitions with nominal increases in G&A. Our development CapEx program will also grow. Historically, we've actualized at least 50% greater return on drilling with limited amounts of cash going to leasing programs. One of our hallmarks has been that we're able to acquire high-potential drilling locations at no cost to us, and those locations are held by production, thus available for us to drill many years into the future. These two assets also have upside potential. The area that ICAB is working is especially intriguing.
The dry gas Mancos Shale is prolific with the potential to add more than 20 Bcf per 3 mi lateral. The San Juan also has the ability to send natural gas to the west, where we anticipate a very dynamic market. We like the idea of adding to our natural gas position. Post-closing, our natural gas exposure will increase to 66% from the current 53% of our volumes produced. However, buying oil in the Permian while the forward strip is $63 is also quite compelling, where we have prospered in the past. All in all, these acquisitions continue our mission of adding free cash flow that transfers directly to our unitholders through increased distributions on a per-unit basis, with both being accretive to our cash available for distribution immediately. I'll now turn the call back over to Donna to open the line for any questions.
Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad at this time. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Again, that's star one to register a question at this time. Today's first question is coming from Charles Meade of Johnson Rice. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Tom. To you and your whole team there, and congratulations on what looks like two really good deals for you. You covered a bit of this in your prepared comments, and forgive me if I missed some of the details, but I believe I heard you say the plan is to go from a current two rigs to five rigs on the combined asset base. I'm wondering if that means we're going to see kind of a 150% increase in CapEx. That's really what I'm trying to get to, you know, and I recognize this is early, but just, you know, in broad terms, where you think 2026 CapEx will shake out and whether that will be above or below a maintenance CapEx for keeping volumes flat.
Yeah. Charles, keep in mind that we already, in our budget, were planning to add another rig in the fall, another deep gas rig in the Anadarko. That was already baked in. That was going to three rigs. They increased to two rigs into 2026. If we do that, you know, it's all predicated on operating cash flow. Everything we do has to be under 50% of operating cash flow. You tell me if the oil and gas strip go up, we can increase our drilling, and if it doesn't or if we go down, we'll decrease CapEx. Everything ties to being under a 50% reinvestment rate.
Got it.
Our goal is to stay flattish. We're not trying to grow the company in production necessarily. Our goal is to send back as much cash as we can to our unit holders.
Okay. That's helpful, though, Tom, that it's not really two to five, it's three to five. To your point, I understand that it's all going to depend on the way the prices actually shake out, but that would roughly be flattish. My second question or follow-up, you mentioned some of the interesting activity that's going on in these assets. I think in the Central Basin Platform, you mentioned the San Andreas and I think the Clearfork. I wonder if you can talk, are the opportunities you say are there, are those horizontal opportunities? Also, on the San Juan Basin stuff, there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. I'm wondering if you could maybe tell us how much or how many wells ICAB has drilled to date targeting this Mancos Shale?
Sure. First, with the San Andreas, I believe that Sabinal has had a vertical rig there, and in the Clearfork, it's a horizontal rig. We don't have plans yet to expand anything in the Permian, but we do in the San Juan. What the Mancos Shale has is a tremendous amount of gas. That's been proven. The question mark and the problem, the same as the deep Anadarko, is that if you're going to drill a $15 million well, you need to have 3 mi laterals. First of all, I guess the technology to do that has just come around in the last few years. The gas has always been there, but getting that done at a cost and having a price deck that allows you to get the gas out was what we needed.
Now, the forward strip, both of these areas are going to have north of 50% returns at today's strip. Anytime we look at all of these different hundreds of locations we have, they're all IRR-driven. That's how come we've had success in the past. We're very quick to move around rigs where the wells make the most money. We don't have long-term drilling contracts, and we can shift our drilling fairly quickly. The Mancos right now looks to us to be incredibly interesting and an area that does compete with anywhere else we have in our company. To answer the final part of your question, ICAB Energy has a five-well program that's currently drilling and will finish by the time that we have closed, and we will then move to complete those five wells. Three of those ar e 3 mi laterals and two ar e 2 mi laterals.
That is.
Let's say there's, and I'm not going to get that's exactly right, but in our area that we're looking at, we had approximately 80 locations that we looked at for a type curve. It has been drilled, but not extensively.
That is a lot of helpful detail. Thank you, Tom.
Thank you.
Once again, that is star one if you would like to register a question at this time. Our next question is coming from Derrick Whitfield of Texas Capital Bank. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Tom and team, and congrats on the acquisitions.
Thank you.
At a high level, could you offer color on the expected EBITDA run rate of the acquired asset just to give us a better feel for the accretion potential?
Derrick, we'll intend to cover that when we close the transaction. At this moment in time, we're not really updating any guidance on either us individually or combined. Sorry about that.
No worries. Understood. Maybe just focusing on the cost side, I know that you guys in your prepared remarks talked about the expectation to take some amount of OpEx out of the business that you see today as opportunity. Maybe could you elaborate on that a bit?
I could say that we never know going into an acquisition, and thus whenever we model, we just take the existing LOE and assume we'll do the same. There hasn't been one time that we haven't been able to lower LOE by at least 25%. I have no idea if that's going to happen here or not, it would be a first if it doesn't. Until we get into an asset and really dive in, we won't know what we'll find. I make assumptions, as in all deals, that the companies are run very well, which these are. That still doesn't mean that with a focus on cost control you can't save money. That's the hallmark of our company. It isn't being maybe the most technologically savvy or growing our company the most through different types of drilling, it is on being able to find ways to save money.
Great. Helpful color. I'll turn it back to the operator.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Selman Akyol , Stifel. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning and congratulations. A couple of quick ones for me. First of all, is there any lockups that come with this?
Yes, the sellers receiving the units will be locked up for six months, I suppose.
Got it. In your opening comments, you referenced increased pricing in the Mid-Continent, and I'm just curious, are you guys looking to sell any acreage at all?
Yeah, we have sold. It's not really our history, but we have sold a little bit of non-producing EBITDA before. I think since 2018, we've sold like under $40 million worth of acreage. I don't plan on it. I like holding HBP acreage. It didn't cost us anything. For example, in Western Oklahoma, we could have sold all that acreage for a little bit of cash, but now we wouldn't have today, not knowing five years ago the prices are going to move to $4 gas, and all of a sudden you have all these locations that came to us that we don't have to pay for. I think we didn't mention this, but our acreage is about 99% HBP. We don't really go buy leases to speak of. That is, it's very, I guess, additive to the business to not have hundreds of millions of dollars of leasing program.
Got it. Just sort of the last one for me. You guys have been pretty vocal about that there's a lot of PE out there that needs to come to market and liquidate. You know, clearly we see some examples here. Are you seeing increased interest for these kinds of transactions, and should we be anticipating more in the future?
Yes. I think it's hard to find large free cash-flowing assets where people want to and entities want to take equity when that becomes available. I think we're unique in that we provide a very good yield. We've given a long history now of sending back money to our unit holders, and I think that will be more attractive to others. The areas we're in open us up to a lot of consolidation. I believe that, and I'm open to anyone giving us a call and saying, "If you can send us an asset where it's accreting to our cash, to our CAD, and keeping our debt level under a turn, we want to buy it.
Got it. All right. Thank you so much, and congratulations again.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this brings us to the end of today's question and answer session. We would like to thank you for your interest and participation in today's event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time and enjoy the rest of your day.