They don't trust me anymore. They give me scripts now. Launching with the script, I'd like to simply begin by calling the meeting to order, asking Brian Willey if he'll serve as secretary of the meeting. I'm Joe Foran, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer. I'd like to welcome the shareholders, guests, employees, and friends who are in attendance today. I would also like to welcome those listening in via our live webcast. Before we get to the items to be considered and acted upon, I would like to make a few opening remarks. For those listening in, we have it on the screen here. For you that are inside, we have it, bear with me, through the screen. Those at home can't see us, but they can see the slides. All right?
You now see why they put me on the good hands team in high school. All right. I love this chart, because you can see last year, it wasn't so long ago that the strong correlation between oil prices and Matador's performance. You can see, the day in May that it went down to $80.37. It didn't stay there long, quickly rallied, and we rallied with it. There was a fairly close coordination until just recently. Matador is the blue line. You can see it departed from the green line, which is oil prices, and then surged on that based on our performance and our BLM, Bureau of Land Management, federal lands that we did. Those wells have done very well. There are more zones than we originally predicted.
The performance has been better. Our timing really, in a way, couldn't be better because when we were drilling those wells, that's when oil prices were low. The drilling cost and completion costs were low, about half price in many instances. Now that these wells are coming on, we're getting the benefit of $60 prices. It's been a very good time. We've made substantial reduction in our debt, and we'll have further reductions this year. Look forward to announcing in July the progress that the team has made. I'd like to emphasize that it's been a Matador team from all groups doing their part. Now, this line shows you the performance of Matador, which is the blue line, compared to the XOP and the oil price.
XLP is a ETF that reflects the various companies that combined, and of course, the oil price is the oil price. You can see it's been a wider and wider differential in how much we've outperformed the peer group and the price of oil in recent months. This is another one that we look at each month, which is Matador's relative performance to its peers, since the Russian-Saudi price war in March of last year. From that day forward, we've been the number one performer. I was hoping that might get a round of applause there. Yeah, if you ever went to the old Johnny Carson show, they would tell the audience every now and then, they will hold up a sign that says, "Laugh," or, "Applause," and not going there yet. That just shows you that the team has remained competitive throughout.
Here's another one. This is the relative performance against our peers year to date, you can see we're in a third standing. The two ahead of us were two companies that had a lot of issues. They got them worked out, they were in tougher circumstances and have rallied some. We've been kind of the slow and steady to keep moving up. From a couple of those critical dates, the Saudi price war, we've been the best performer. Here's another one David Lancaster, our CFO, and I like to talk about, that you can see where Matador has performed under the Russell 2000, that among E&P companies, we're number four. Among the whole Russell 2000 companies, of the 2000 companies, we're 24. Thank you. A correction like that, I'll never turn down. All right.
To those viewing at home, we did not have to raise the applause sign. That was spontaneous. This is a chart showing Matador's performance since the XOP, which is the peer group high in July of 2018. At that time, that's when the XOP, the peer group combination, was at an all-time high. Since then, again, we've been the number one performer and have appreciated the long-term outlook that our shareholders have. We've had people ask us, how did we get the institutional following, the blue-chip mutual funds and the like, rallying behind us and keep our individual shareholders involved? Again, we want you to know we're always open to you. Please call us if anytime you have questions or would like more information.
We really do like to hear from you and really do like for you all to come by to see us. This is a chart done by Scott Hanold, the chief analyst at RBC. David and I and the executive team like to look at it to see how we're doing relative to others, and I think I've sent some out with shareholder letters. In the bottom line is that's how we started off the year. It's a chart that measures your current value to your net asset value as well as your cash flow, your EBITDA. You see we began the year in that bottom right-hand quadrant. We were good on EBITDA, but our net asset value wasn't being recognized, because it hadn't yet gotten a bunch of those Bureau of Land Management, the federal lands online.
Today, you can see that we're in a top position, well-positioned for further growth and value. It's happening. We had, of course, a great fourth quarter where we began to have free cash flow, followed by a very strong first quarter with surging production. Our drilling completion and production crews can tell you it only gets better from here now through the rest of the year. Our group, in particular, during the cold spell, were all out there. They were in their trucks, sleeping. They gave up their trailer homes to start spending the night in the trucks. Our marketing group was getting about an hour of sleep each night, continuous, and everybody did their part. It was really extraordinary, and we'd like to ask you to give a round of applause to our field men who operated through that storm.
We had, of course, good results. We probably wouldn't show you this slide in depth as we are. We accomplished all of our targets, all of our goals. David will explain in greater detail some of what we did. We had record earnings, we had record production, we had record reserves, and we were reaching new highs. I'm confident that we've not peaked. We're far from it. If we look at our backlog of A-plus locations, that's grown and continuing to grow. As we reduce cost, we find different zones, our marketing group meeting challenges, and also our midstream becomes more and more important part of our operation and values. I like to put in this chart, and always show you that I've had a couple of very experienced shareholders that say, "I'd like to know, well, what do I own?
What does one share own?" This is intended to show you the growth of Matador. When we went public in 2012, we had about 1 million barrels of oil in reserves, and we were making 500 barrels a day. Today, we're making over 57,000 barrels of oil, plus the gas. Great growth. Through that, it's raised it to the point where you have almost two barrels of oil. Each share represents about two barrels of oil and a near equivalent in gas, as you can see, red represents gas and the green represents oil. It's just been steady. George Yates and I, when we combined our companies, started working together, we both were of the view it's better to be safe than sorry, and do that steady upward movement was better than trying to go out and just buy something to be bigger.
We wanted quality growth, were more interested in that than just trying to grow for the sake of growth. Matt Hairford, our President, is very good help coming up. I tend to get wordy, but Matt is pithy, and he's tapped me on the shoulder one time and said, "Joe, just say, 'Profitable growth at a measured pace.'" I want to say it one more time. Profitable growth at a measured pace is what kind of governs the way we try to grow from here. The midstream, which was suggested to us when we first drilled out and went back out to the Delaware Basin and resumed our operations out there. We drilled the first well, called someone up and asked them if they could connect their pipeline to us, and said, "We can, but you probably won't like it. It's old and very leaky.
You put gas in, not all of it's going to come out because it's going to leak along the way. Well, that inspired us to consider setting up a pipeline, our own midstream system with Gregg Krug, and that's turned in from something that was going to be 10 mi. We sold the first one to EnLink, took the profits from there, reinvested it around Rustler Breaks, where we had a big program going, and today it's worth over $1 billion. We think of a lot of opportunities for further improvement from there, and we feel we built a really strong team. We have a three-pipe system going where we gather gas, water, and oil. We're a one-stop shopping, and during that cold spell, there were only 5% of the gas plants in New Mexico still operating, and we were one of that 5%.
Our guys really kept the trains running, so to speak, during that difficult time and just working together. This is our executive team or a good part of the executive, not all. One thing that we've tried to do, and it's been important when we've dealt particularly with institutions, is to show that we've put our money where our mouth is, that we've bought the stock. During that time when it went low, one thing the market saw that we were continuing to buy, and this group of five is, we've never sold a share out of this.
Again, I appreciate the way that the group has shown their commitment and their belief in building Matador, and as I said, put their money where their mouth is, and we make more from our stock appreciation than our salaries, and I think that's the way it should be. Thanks to There is no doubt about the commitment of our staff or our board. Our board, again, has a strong lot of skin in the game, and we appreciate that, too. I'd like to just give you a feel for the directors. They have expertise, and they have stewardship, and it begins with our lead director, Tim Parker. Tim was head of energy investments at T. Rowe Price
Has been a good friend for almost 20 years now, that we bounce things off of each other, has been a tremendous strategic advisor to us because when he was at T. Rowe, saw all the oil companies come through, has helped guide us and navigate us through some of these really challenging times. Our deputy lead director is Gaines Baty. Gaines is a C-suite recruiter. He has a lot of common sense. We coached our boys together in Little League, is how we met. Since he got involved with us and helped us interview, learn how to interview, that our selections have been better. Would all the ones who were interviewed by Gaines Baty when they were applying to Matador please stand? Gaines. Thank you. Thank you, Gaines. I've learned a lot from you. Ray Baribault has been a lead director.
He is a graduate of petroleum engineering from LSU, worked for Exxon for a number of years. Then for Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Inc., we thought enough of Ray's work that we asked Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Inc. to do our reserves each year. Also recognize Craig Burket when I talk about long-term shareholders. Craig's not our longest term. He's only been a shareholder for 39 of our 40 years. What can you say, Craig? He's been a very steady influence. He's been a CFO. He's owned a business and a graduate of Harvard Business School. Bill Byerley. Bill has come in and taken over the audit committee. He was the head of the energy practice at PwC, and has brought a professionalism that I think is remarkable.
As we were kidding yesterday, he was our navigator as the market rolled last year, going up, down, and amidst all the volatility, a very steady hand. For the shareholders, two things we've always tried to be since inception, we've been very fortunate to have men of very high integrity, making sure the reserves are there, head of our engineering committee, and also the audit committee. Because while y'all are close friends of mine, you want to be sure there are no surprises, either to the accounting numbers or the engineering numbers. We've always had great confidence in that. Thank you, Ray, and thank you, Bill. It's great to have you up there and to have men of your capability and men of your integrity.
I said men, but I want you to know, we fully expect to have women doing that someday too. I don't want to be discriminating in that we just wish that we'd have more opportunity, and that we'll see more as the years go by, engineers and the like. We really try to stress that we look for the best talent, and that we can. I'm going to take us just a little bit out of order and talk about Monika. Monika came to us. Most of the directors we have, virtually all, were shareholders first and then joined the board. I listened to Monika. I never had met her, but in a continuous legal education seminar, and I'm so impressed, and I told the guys that, look, she's got a perfect background. She's a petroleum engineer.
She's been an officer in a public company. She's worked midstream. Now she's the head of the oil practice at University of Oklahoma and now at UTD. We said we need to meet her and just see if she might be interested, because she had everything what we do, midstream, E&P, law, and we're so fortunate to have her. Julie, who worked. Julie and I grew up together in Amarillo, a couple of years apart. Wave the hand. Julie's been acting dean of the law school at SMU and provost, and has just done exceptional work all through there. Again, you've known her for a long time, so we appreciate their being involved with us and helping us along. I want to talk to Bo Howard. Bo's been another longtime friend.
We've been friends over 20 years, and has been an original shareholder of this Matador. We benefited from his wisdom and a lot of marketing and knowing people. Lives in Houston and gives us a foothold there. Kenneth L. Stewart. Kenneth has been another shareholder going back to 1990. He was the head of the Fulbright & Jaworski firm and has been another great advisor, and he is the one that helped incorporate this Matador. Every day of Matador, he's been there. I can look on their faces and say they sure want to say something in rebuttal, but they're not going to get the opportunity today because of the broadcast. I want to make sure I got everybody, all the directors, James, up here. Well, great. The Shareholder Advisory Group is a group that we use for nominations.
If people want to nominate somebody for a director, we've found that a good group to vet. They're knowledgeable of business. They're longtime shareholders. They're big shareholders, and they're very, very valuable in giving us advice. If anything comes up and you want a good barometer of how the shareholders might react, they're good ones to go to. The management team goes deep in the company. We have an open door policy. We get together. There's a lot of exchange between the various groups. I'd like to begin with the members of the executive team, please stand. Now would the senior vice presidents please stand? Now would the various vice presidents please stand? Now, if you've got any questions, these are the people that can really answer them, and I hope you can see the depth that we have going across the company now.
If you think about it, we started in 1983 with First Matador out of a windowless office, $270,000, which would be in today's terms, one frack stage, as I like to remind people. We would've started at 6:00 A.M. in the morning, and we would've finished at noon. They say, there's the year. We would've spent all of our capital, that $270,000. Today, we're approaching 300 people. When we went public, we were about 150th in size among all the E&P companies in the country. Today, we're in the top 20. Grown from, in these nine years, from around 150 to the top 20, and in New Mexico, we're in the top 10. It was that group that I showed you and others, long-term, and our support people.
If you like this meeting, be sure to tell Amanda and Janie and Mitzi and Allison all did a tremendous job. Would y'all please stand? Amanda Crawford. So many other support people throughout. I keep saying this, and I know it gets old, broken record, but it really has been a team effort. When the price went down, the Saudi war, very proud of the staff. We had a board meeting, I said to the board, we would take salary cuts. We were the very first company to announce salary cuts, the board responded to me. I said I'd take a 25%, they responded to me, if I was going to take a 25%, they were going to take a 25%. Throughout the organization, there were cuts, we were the very last one to restore those cuts.
we still didn't take any bonuses for last year. just, again, we wanted to get the stock back up, and that was our main interest, and glad to see it's happening. we wanted to make things easy on Gaines's compensation that we would cut and thought people would make him a hero for so doing. We have four new vice presidents. It's always a pleasure to recognize them so that you can see our depth is continuing, and would ask at this time our new vice presidents to stand and just be recognized. There they are. if you're here, you can see where they were sitting, and I want you to know now that you're a vice president, you can move to the front so we can better call upon you.
I'm going to turn this back to you, Tim, for the three issues that need to be discussed in just a moment. First, we had one of our special advisors, original shareholders, pass away this year, Jim Rolfe. Many of you heard how did we get started. I had a handball group at the downtown Y, and we walked off the court one day and they asked me what I was thinking about, and I said I was thinking about starting a company. My venture capital group was that handball group. They all pledged. Jim was one of them. He was the U.S. attorney. Also in the group was a federal judge, and they told me if it didn't work, it'd be okay. They'd bring me soup at Leavenworth.
Fortunately, we didn't get to that point, and all those 40 years, Jim was an integral part of it and a great friend as a U.S. attorney. Then when we were up in New York ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, we named a well for him. He fought cancer for 20 years. He loved life, gave it his fullest. Any important sporting event in the country, whether it was basketball or Kentucky Derby or anything else, you were likely to see Jim there, with others around him. Love of life. We're going to miss him. Another original shareholder was my uncle that passed away this year. Greatest generation. Graduated from high school, and within a week, he was drafted and sent in for training, finished the training, and came home to Amarillo at Thanksgiving.
They shipped him out on a train and on the Queen Mary, and he was in the Battle of the Bulge. You go from high school in late May, early June, and you end up on the battlefields of Europe, Battle of the Bulge. By the time your Christmas after graduation came home, got his degree, had the same business for 70 years, same house for 70 years. My cousin Kelly and his wife Sherry are here to take his place, make sure things are run right from a family point of view. Thank you, Kelly and Sherry, for taking time to be here. He's a mechanical engineer with patents, and so we had a really good group in that original group and feel that this shareholder group still achieves that standard. This is time for Tim to take over. Tim.
Thanks very much.
All right.
Thank you, Joe. I'm just going to take a couple of minutes to look back at last year, look forward, and then proceed to the business of the day. This is a busy slide, but it shows that they've been busy. As usual, this is a company of delivery. They said they were going to do these things. They did these things. As challenging as this year was, very nimble operations to slow down but still drill record wells, finish your midstream expansion, earn your FM incentives, generate free cash flow. They really hit all the high notes. I'm really impressed with the delivery from this company in the most challenging of times. Looking ahead to 2021, I think we're off to a great start. You can see our priorities in the upper left.
Well, the first three priorities we've already accomplished, and we're going to continue to push on these fronts. That's to deliver free cash flow, pay down our debt, and initiate a dividend. We've already done that. We're going to continue to be efficient in drilling our wells, and you can see how much more cost efficient in the bottom left our drilling and completion cost per foot are. That's both because we're drilling longer laterals, and those are more efficient, and because service costs are lower than they were a few years ago. They're also the learnings we've made in figuring things out, like reducing the number of casing strings in wells, things that are structural cost savings that we get to keep. They fall to our bottom line, and they're not going to be subject to cost inflation.
I really am very impressed with the drilling costs and the completion costs that Matador's been able to achieve, and most of those learnings can continue into the future. This is also a year where we're going to focus on our federal lands, and also that happens to be a lot of San Mateo properties. All but four of our wells will feed into the San Mateo expansion. That will then drive San Mateo's cash flow higher but also earn us the incentives. To focus on that just a little bit more in the next slide, you can see how linked the two arms of the company are. As our E&P cash flow and production grow, it's growing San Mateo as well. We like that because it's a great asset that we own 51% of 51% of its cash flow comes back to us.
There's also incentive structure set up that can earn us well over $100 million over time if we execute. It's really the efficient linkage between those two units. Think about how hard it would be to bring on 13 wells at the Stateline properties all at once with a third-party midstream in the middle of the pandemic. Instead, we have dedicated people on both sides drilling the best wells, completing the best wells, and tying them into infrastructure and getting them on sales very fast. We have one of the fastest put on production times that we're able to start drilling a well and getting on the production faster than most of our peers. That brings cash to our bottom line faster, allows us to return some of that cash to you as well.
On that point, this is sort of a summation of what we're trying to do this year. We want to generate free cash flow, which we've already started doing. We want to repay our debt, and we'll continue with that, and we've initiated a quarterly dividend, and we'll look to continue those and perhaps raise them in future years. I want to take one moment to talk about our environmental, social, and governance stewardship because ESG has been a priority for Matador for a long time. It's not only beneficial to society, it's economically beneficial. If you look at those two charts on the top, you can see that almost 90% of our water and 60% of our oil are now in pipes instead of being trucked around. That's a great environmental win because there are trucks off the road, less pollution, less accidents.
That's all great, it's also cheaper to move your oil and water that way. That's one reason our LOE, our lease operating costs, have been trending down in recent years. That's one of the many things we've done to lower our operating costs. You can find more information about ESG on our website, where we have the tab set up for that now with more detail.
You can also access a press release from last month where we made our initial outlay of SASB metrics. That's a third-party environmental, social kind of standards where we will continue to update that over time to keep everyone aware of what we're doing to progress on the ESG front. With that, let's turn to the business of the day. As stated in the notice of this meeting, three matters will be considered and acted upon this morning. To expedite these actions, all matters of business as outlined in this notice will be presented, and then a ballot will be taken afterwards on each matter.
The three orders of business for consideration at today's meeting are as follows: the election of five directors to our board, the approval of a non-binding advisory vote on 2020 executive compensation, also known as say on pay, and the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as our auditor for 2021. Speaking on behalf of the entire board of directors, we recommend that you vote for the election of all five directors and for the two additional proposals being considered today. Let me pass this back to Joe.
Thank you, Tim. Tim, Come. Oh, yeah. Okay, Tim. Tim's daughter is graduating from high school tonight. We want him to be there. This meeting is being held today to give formal notice to you pursuant to the notice that we mailed each shareholder of record as of April eighth, 2021, which is the record date for this meeting. The secretary has made available a complete list of shareholders of the company entitled to vote at this meeting, alphabetically arranged and certified as of the close of business on the record date. Further, the secretary has provided a notice, proxy statement and proxy, and an affidavit that such notice, proxy statement and proxy, together with the 2020 annual report, were mailed to the shareholders of record as of the record date. These documents will be filed with the minutes of this meeting.
Brian Willey, Senior Vice President and Co-General Counsel, has been appointed to act as Inspector of Elections at this meeting. As Inspector of Elections, Brian will ascertain the number of shares of common stock outstanding, the voting power of each, determine the shares of common stock represented at the meeting, and the validity of proxies and ballots, count all votes and ballots, and certify and declare his determination of the number of shares of common stock represented at this meeting and its count of all votes and ballots. All holders of record of common stock at the close of business on the record date are entitled to vote at this meeting, either in person or by proxy. Brian, please present the attendance report.
Thank you, Joe. As Inspector of Elections, I report that there are present at this meeting, in person or represented by proxy, the holders of approximately 104,271,621 shares of common stock of the company. Out of a total of 116,781,445 shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote as of the record date. The holders of approximately 89% of the aggregate outstanding shares of common stock entitled to vote are present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting. Each share of common stock outstanding on the record date is entitled to one vote.
Thank you, Brian. On the basis of the report of Brian as Inspector of Elections, I declare that a quorum is present for the purposes of conducting business at this meeting, and the meeting is legally convened and ready to transact business. A certified report of the Inspector of Elections will be attached as an exhibit to the minutes of this meeting. Before we ask you to vote on the auditor, Nathan? Nathan here? There you are. Okay. Nathan is here, with the head of the auditor, KPMG. Do you want to just Please stand, the other auditors that work with you as part of your team. We're honored to have the head of the KPMG office here too. Thank you all for taking the time to come.
I'd be amiss if I, at this time, right before votes, as you're thinking about how to vote, my wife and co-founder, Nancy. There she is. Okay. No, you got to kind of wave. We're just big crowds these days. After all, we've already noted our staff, Mac Schmitz, who is intimate in the arrangement of this meeting and many of the others. I'd like to just have all those Matador staffers who also own Matador stock. Would y'all please stand? You can see that everybody's a part of the team. At this time, those three points of order, I'd like for Gaines to please, as the Deputy Lead Director, take over from here.
Thank you, Joe. I have two orders of business today. One is as the nominating chairman to talk about the candidates for board membership, then we'll talk about say on pay. Our directors have staggered three-year terms, grouped in class one, class two, and class three directors. The class one board nominees are Bill Byerley, Monika Ehrman, Julia Forrester Rogers, and Ken Stewart. I'll take just a second to talk about these guys. Bill Byerley is the chair of our audit committee and a CPA and former partner. You've seen his qualifications. There's no better steward of the organization, the financial issues in the organization, or the shareholder interest than Bill. He's a terrific leader on the board, and he's a great guy to be around.
Monika Ehrman is a relatively new member of our board. As you've heard, she was a law professor at University of Oklahoma, in-house legal counsel, petroleum engineer. What kind of qualifications are those? She contributes a great deal to all of our discussions. She knows a little bit or a lot about everything that we talk about. She's been a great addition to our team and is a great human being. Julie Forrester Rogers is chairman of our ESG committee. She has taken that committee to a new level. This woman has taken that on passionately and has really Our process and our output from the ESG and governments and so forth has really been extraordinary. Julie is a great person. You won't see a nicer person than Julie. Ken Stewart brings corporate governance and leadership experience to the board.
As you heard, he's run organizations of 3,700 lawyers, that's probably a handful at least. He's got a lot of experience in representing public companies and oil and gas companies, the man knows what he's talking about. He always has the right thing to say. Ken is a gentleman and a scholar. Fifth on our list is Bo Howard. Bo Howard joined in January of this year. He was a trader. He's been a trustee. He really knows the oil and gas business. He's already, in just two short months, added a great deal. Again, just the nicest guy you'll ever meet. He's really a joy to work with. I will say that I am personally honored to be in the same room with these guys.
More information with respect to the qualifications of these nominees is included in the proxy statement. The board of directors recommends that you vote for all of these nominees. The second order of business is the non-binding advisory vote to approve the 2020 compensation program of our named executive officers, also known as say on pay, as set forth in the proxy statement, page 36, if you're looking. Before I go into that too much, I want to say a couple things about this. As we've talked, and everybody knows, 2020 was a pretty unprecedented year. Just a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of it was bad. In March, late February, early March, I forget exactly the dates, everybody was talking about this black cloud that we had over us. We being everybody in the world, but we in the oil business for sure.
Dire circumstances, we had a board meeting, Joe and the executive team walked in and said basically that there's a lot of stuff going on today. There's a lot of it that we cannot control, there's a lot that we can. We know that we've got a strong program, we've got a strong organization, we've got a lot of positive benefits. We are going to get better, we're going to grow. Sure enough, as you've heard, you've seen in the slides, they did. These guys on this team probably worked harder than they've ever worked in their lives, they accomplished maybe more than they've ever accomplished. It's really a testament to the character and the grit of everybody in the room here that works for Matador, is involved with Matador, and the leadership team for sure.
I'll talk a little bit about say on pay, and I'll come back to that. Today, we're celebrating those results, but we're not going to rest on our laurels. We're going to keep our pedal to the metal. Be calm about that. Matador prides itself in being a pay-for-performance company, and I think everybody that works there will agree to that. Despite that, in response to the challenges that we just talked about, the executive team, when they walked into that meeting, and Joe mentioned it, I think somebody else may have mentioned it, the leadership team volunteered to take a pay cut. We were the first company that we can find, at least within our peers, that took a significant pay cut. Along the way, we didn't pay any bonuses.
Despite this, we met all of our expectations, all the performance objectives. Not to cover up the ball. The company is in a stronger position today than it was in February of last year. Our people, named executive officers, took pay cuts. Our compensation consulting firm calculates that our named executive officers took anywhere between a 75% and a 79% cut in compensation last year. That's in target compensation. We were clearly an outlier standing out among our peers and probably most of corporate America. This was done because it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do for the shareholders, and I think it demonstrates the executive team's commitment to shareholder value and shareholder interest. I think we'll have to hold that aside today on this.
On behalf of the board and shareholders, I'd like to thank Joe and the leadership team and ask for some gratitude and a standing ovation for what these guys did. More information regarding the 2020 compensation program of our named executive officers is included in the proxy statement. The board of directors has recommended that you vote for the non-binding resolution approving the 2020 compensation of our named executive officers. Now I'd like to introduce Bill Byerley, the gentleman I spoke a minute ago, chairman of our audit committee.
Thank you, Gaines, and good morning. The third proposal before us today is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm, otherwise known as the auditors. KPMG has served as Matador's audit firm for the year ended December 31, 2020, and has served the company's auditor since 2014. The audit committee of the board of directors has appointed KPMG as Matador's auditors for the year ending December 31, 2021. In turn, the board of directors has directed that such appointment be submitted to our shareholders for ratification at this meeting. Our decision to appoint KPMG was based on many factors, including our review of their firm's independence from Matador, our interaction with KPMG engagement leadership throughout the 2020 audit, our understanding of their audit plan, and our understanding of the results of their audit procedures in the significant audit areas.
As disclosed in the proxy statement, KPMG provided only audit services to Matador in 2020. The Board of Directors recommends that you vote for the ratification of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2021. With that, I'd like to turn the meeting back over to Mr. Foran, the Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Chief Executive Officer. Joe.
Thank you, Bill. Thank you all for that standing ovation. I've got to settle up with you later, Gaines, on that. Who really deserved all of that is just the staff and the shareholders here and all that. That's just the way Matador does things. It was the right thing to do with prices where they were, and we don't deserve any special recognition, but appreciate all those roses that you throw at us. On behalf of everyone on the board and the Matador staff, we thank you for the rigor and expertise you and the auditors bring to Matador. Gaines, and I greatly appreciate all your hard work and extra efforts and expertise in your various board and committee assignments as well.
Those three orders of business, election of five directors, non-binding vote on say on pay, and the ratification of KPMG as the company's auditor for next year. We'll distribute ballots to any shareholders present who wish to vote in person. To avoid confusion in counting the votes, you will have to revoke the proxy previously given to you, and if you're now revoking a proxy or any proxy presently in your possession. If your stock is held in a brokerage account, in order to vote this time, you must first provide us with a legal proxy that would've been given to you by your broker granting you the right to vote. If under those circumstances you now desire a ballot, please raise your hand and we will provide you with one.
Seeing none, it appears, Brian, as Inspector of Elections, that you should be ready to report the results of voting.
Yes, sir. I am pleased to report that each of the five nominees for director has been elected to the board, as each nominee has received a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting.
Entitled to vote on the election of directors. I'm also pleased to report that the second proposal regarding the non-binding resolution approving the 2020 compensation of our named executive officers has received a favorable vote of the majority of the shares present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting, and entitled to vote on this matter. Finally, the third proposal ratifying the appointment of KPMG LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2021, has also received a favorable vote of the majority of the shares present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote on this matter.
Therefore, each of the director nominees and proposals voted upon today, as described in the proxy statement, has, consistent with the recommendations of the Board of Directors, been approved by the shareholders and will be recorded as such in the minutes of this meeting. We remind our shareholders and other stakeholders that specific information regarding the number of votes cast for or against each proposal will be included in our current report on Form 8-K that will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the days following this meeting.
Thank you, Brian. It's my understanding, correct me on these figures if I'm wrong, that 89% of the ownership of Matador have voted in this election.
Yes, sir. That's correct. 89% have voted.
The voting of the directors, they all received approximately 98%?
Yes, I think for all the proposals, sir. We'll put the specifics in the 8-K. They all received over 97% approval. It was a great turnout.
Thank you very much. Thank you all for that expression of support, and we'll get out and do our best this year to not just get it back to 33, but into some new highs this year. With Brian's report, this completes the scheduled items of business to be conducted at this meeting. Any new business? Seeing none, the formal portion of the 2021 annual meeting is now adjourned. At this time, I would like Matt Hairford, Matador's President, and San Mateo's President, and David Lancaster, our CFO, to provide some remarks and color on our recent and current operations. Before introducing Matt, I have a long history together, and our families do. We have farmed together in the Hooker, Oklahoma area now for over 100 years, it's been a delight to have that kind of friendship and time together. Matt?
Thank you, Joe. Joe talked about the 100-year relationship. I think it's an important part of the Matador culture, Joe. That's all been done on a handshake. Not never a single document created from that. It's just my grandfather working with his grandmother and down to where now it's Joe working with my nephew. Very proud of that. Joe, David and I are going to do our normal Lewis and Clark thing here. I'm going to try to be 50, but I can't promise anything. Because we really like to talk about Matador. Before we start that, I want to introduce my wife, Cricket, sitting here next to Nancy, and thank you, again. Thank you, Cricket. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you, all the spouses, all the family members of the board, the staff, and the shareholders.
We couldn't do what we do without your support, thank you. We'll get into the presentation here, but I just want to make a couple comments about some things that Joe and Tim Parker talked about. We were here at this meeting last year. We were talking about the fact that we had started the year with a six-rig program. The Russian-Saudi thing happened, COVID happened, and so we pivoted to a three-rig program. The goal for the six-rig program was for us to get to free cash flow, and we were very confident with that six-rig program because the team did a fantastic job pivoting to a three-rig program. As Tim and Joe said, we've achieved that free cash flow with just three rigs. Hats off to the entire team. We're also going to talk about cost efficiencies.
We're going to get a little into the weeds there that Tim was talking about. Team's done a great job there. On the San Mateo front, last year, we were talking about the San Mateo II expansion and how that was going to be complete, that's all done. We look forward to updating you on that. All in all, I think the back half of 2020 and the first five months of this year, I think have been very good for Matador. I think we like what's happened. We like what we've got planned for the rest of the year and into 2022. With that, we'll jump off into this. Just a quick trip around the horn like we usually do. There in North Louisiana, our Haynesville and Cotton Valley assets, we got around 18,000 net acres there. It's all held by production.
It's all gas. There's very little oil production there, but it is a great gas asset, and it's all held by production. Moving down into South Texas, you get to our Eagle Ford asset. We've got around 26,000 net acres there. A couple of days ago, I asked Phil or John sitting over here somewhere, if it was all held by production, and John said, "I think most of it is, but I'll get back with you." About five minutes later, he sent me an email, and it says it's not 100% held by production, but 99.7% of it is. That's a great asset for us. It's oily. It's about 74% oil, 26% gas. Moving into the Delaware, that's where we're really focused right now. We've got 125,000 net acres there. We've got four rigs running, two running down at Stateline, two running at Stebbins.
It's the primary focus for the company for the last few years, and it's going to be the primary focus for the next few years. If you look at the production volumes there, the 89,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, 95% of that comes out of the Delaware. On the reserve side, of the 270 million barrels of oil equivalent, 97% of the reserves are in the Delaware. This is where we planted our pick, and we're excited about doing that. You see the March snapshot. We won't go through those numbers, but just to say it again, for the first quarter of 2021, there was $64 million in free cash flow. We're very proud of that. We used some of that to pay down debt, and then also the dividend.
We're very happy to be in a position that we can pay the dividend, and we're happy to return that to the shareholders. David?
Good morning, everybody. It's always a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad we could do this in person this year. It feels a whole lot better. My wife, Sue, is a little under the weather this morning, so she wasn't able to be here, but I know that she's listening because I set her up on her iPad before I left. I just want to tell Miss Sue I love you, and I hope you get to feeling better soon. Anyway, I wanted to just start off by saying that we reported really very strong results in the first quarter.
I'm sure you saw your earnings release and the information that we put out, but it was really a very strong quarter and a great start to the year. Our first quarter production was a little better than we expected. It was about 74,000 barrels of oil equivalent, BOE, per day. In the second quarter, we think that's going to go up about 20%. You're going to see us approach about 90,000 BOE per day in the second quarter because we bought a lot of big wells at the end of the first quarter and early part of the second quarter at the Rodney Robinson leasehold and at the Stateline. We were pleased to announce that we had record oil and natural gas revenues.
We had over $300 million in oil and gas revenues in the first quarter alone. It's not too long ago that I remember that that was more than we had in a year. It was really quite an achievement to see us have over $300 million of revenue. As Matt said, we'll talk about it a little more, we just continued with our capital efficiency improvements in the first quarter. The drilling and completion teams, production teams have just done a marvelous job of getting our well costs down. We actually brought in some wells that were just about $600 a completed lateral foot, which was an all-time low. Our capital expenditures were about 11% below our expectations. We achieved record high EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation. That was almost $200 million.
That was the all-time best we'd ever done in a quarter, and as Matt just mentioned, we generated about $64 million of free cash flow, which was what we had left over after we paid for our capital expenditures. We're really happy to report that we repaid $100 million in debt in the first quarter. That was awesome. On top of the $35 million that we'd repaid in the fourth quarter, we'd repaid $135 million against our revolving credit facility that are based on reserves in Q4 and Q1. We're still making progress on that, and I'll show you that a little bit later. As Matt said, we did initiate and pay the first dividend to Matador shareholders. Happy to do that. I think you got your second check yesterday. I hope you've seen that.
If you didn't, well, I guess I'm the guy to come tell. We'll be sure that you do get it, but it's nice to do that. I'm also pleased to report that the company beat Wall Street estimates in Q1 of 2021, which marked the 27th consecutive quarter that our team has either met or exceeded the Wall Street estimates. Believe me, that's a team effort, and it's one that we're all very proud of. Thank you all for that. This is a slide that we usually show at this meeting. I show it a lot of the time at any kind of meeting or conference that I'm at. This is just the acreage position in the Delaware Basin, which, as Matt said, is where we're doing most of our work these days. It shows the key asset areas.
In past years, we've talked to you about what we're doing at the Wolf Asset area down there in Loving County, Texas, or up in Antelope Ridge, or Rustler Breaks, or the northern assets that we acquired a lot of that acreage when we did the merger with HEYCO back in 2015 with George Yates' company, and we call those areas Arrowhead and Ranger. Last year, we started talking to you a little bit about the acreage that you'll see right on the New Mexico-Texas border that we call Stateline. We're currently running two rigs there. We were running two rigs there at this time last year, but we hadn't turned our first wells to sale. That's been a great project for Matador. It's one that we were very excited about, but we just didn't have any of the wells turned on.
We turned the first wells on, 13 of them in September of last year, then 13 more in April of this year. The wells that are on the eastern side of that leasehold, which we acquired from the Bureau of Land Management, are called the Boros wells, the wells that are on the western side are called the Voni wells. Like all the wells that you saw, I hope, out there in the map on the Delaware Basin, many of them are named after longtime friends and shareholders of Matador. That's kind of our tradition and one that we enjoy. The Boros and the Voni wells have been terrific wells for Matador, and they've been responsible for a lot of the growth, as well as the wells that you see there in the western part of Antelope Ridge that we call the Rodney Robinson wells.
All these have been some of the best wells that Matador's ever drilled, and most of them have come online since the last time we stood before you and got to talk to you. This morning, since we don't have time to talk about everything, I wish we did, we're going to focus on the Stateline, and Matt and I are going to tell you a little bit more about what's going on with the Stateline.
Thanks, David. Tim mentioned the step change for capital efficiency, and that's what we're going to talk about here on this slide. You can see in the upper left, the bar graph there. If you look back to 2018, we were spending a little over $1,500 per completed lateral foot.
We set out on this mission to drive those costs down, and Billy and Cliff and Chris and Josh and Patrick, and the entire operations team have done a really fantastic job. You can see in 2020, we got those costs down to around $850. The goal for the year for 2021 is $730. You can see in the first quarter, we're off to a good start. We've gone from $850 down to $785 per foot. As David mentioned, the 13 Voni wells that we just finished came in at just a little over $600 per foot. I think we're pretty excited about maybe actually beating the $730 target. Cliff, I'll put you guys on the spot here. Anyway, the operations team's done a fantastic job. A big portion of this is going to these longer laterals, these 2 mi laterals.
If you just simply think about it, if you're going to drill two miles worth of laterals, you can do it one of two ways. You can do two vertical portions and two horizontal portions, or you can just do one vertical portion and a longer horizontal portion. You save all the cost it takes to drill that second vertical section. That's a huge benefit to us. There's lots of efficiencies that we gain along with that. The land and legal team are primarily responsible for what you see on the right side of this graph, and that's moving to the longer lateral. You can see last year we had about 74% of our wells that were two miles or greater. That's up from 8% the year before.
It takes a while to get some steam, get these things going, but the land and legal team has done that. For 2021, we anticipate that 98% of all the wells we are going to drill are going to be two miles or longer. There's one well down at Wolfcamp in Loving County that is a mile and a half. It's a mile and a half because of the geometric shape of the lease. We couldn't put a two-mile lateral in there. The team, I think they're like, "Well, we'll show you." It's a mile and a half lateral. They drilled it in 9.8 days, so less than 10 days. That's a $300,000 savings right there. As we go into 2022 and beyond, this is gonna be more the norm. Somewhere in the high 90s % on longer laterals.
Tim also talked about service cost, we don't have much control over that. When oil prices go down, service costs go down. When they go back up, service prices go back up. What we do have is control over the efficiencies that the team was talking about. I think the team has done a fantastic job in not only drilling the longer laterals, but pushing technology. Patterson, our drilling rig partner, we work very closely with them. It's really a partnership that creates value. They provide the rigs. They're the most high-tech rigs they have. Our operations guys push those rigs. They hit the gas and try to make them drill as fast as they possibly can. That's good for us. It's good for Patterson. Patterson loves it when we announce drilling records, and they can tell their other customers.
It's really how we create our vendors. We're looking for vendors that are going to help us create value, and that's what we're doing there. On the technology side, on the bottom hole assemblies, the bits, the motors, the measurement while drilling tools that we use, the team has continued to push that envelope too, making more and more robust tools to the point where not always, but on occasion, we're able to drill one of these 2 mi laterals all with one bit, one motor, and one MWD. That saves a lot of time, which saves a lot of money. My favorite example is on the top left of this chart. You can see we had drilled some Wolfcamp B wells in and around the Stateline, and they were averaging about 38 days. It's a bit deeper, a little bit harder to drill.
The operations team, working with the geoscience team, Ned and his group, they identified a target in a little different interval, still within the Wolfcamp B, that thought, "Well, the rock is probably as good. Maybe it's even better than what we had drilled before, so let's try that." This Boros 228, they drilled in that interval, and they went from 38 days to 16 days from spud to TD. That's really important. That's over 20 days. We've talked about it in the past. When service costs are where they are now, a day on the rig is about $50,000. In that 20 days, you've saved $1 million already. If the rig count goes up, service costs go up. Maybe that number is $100,000 per day. That 20 days is now $2 million.
We talked about is this just the transition in the reservoir that's drilling faster? The subsequent Wolfcamp B, we came back and drilled later. We drilled in 19 days in the same interval as the ones that were 38. That's pretty sticky. The drilling guys are knocking it out of the park here. Chris and Cliff, Billy, the guys on the completion side, they are also working on efficiency. For the past several quarters, we've moved to a technique with our fracs we call zipper frac. We'll have a frac crew working on one well, we'll have a wireline crew working on the other, and when they get in, they just switch. It's a very efficient way to get that done. Moving even to more and more efficiencies, we've recently gone to what we call a simul frac.
With a simul frac, you're actually fracking two wells. You have enough frac equipment on location to pump into two wells at the same time. You've got two wireline units that are out there working on two other wells. You just go back and forth. It eliminates what Chris calls white space. We're busy all the time with the frac crew, busy all the time with the wireline crew. We estimate based on our first effort here, around $250,000 per well in savings. About 60% of the wells that we've got for 2021 will be able to do the simul frac. Looking forward to seeing those cost savings. Down at the bottom here quickly, you can see the photograph there is a picture of our MAXCOM room just down the street on the 11th floor of our office building.
If you haven't seen this and you're in town, we would love to show it to you. It's something we're very proud of. We've got drilling engineers, geoscientists working 24 hours a day, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. They're real-time geosteering these wells. We talk a lot about better wells for less money. The cost saving is the less money side. The staying in zone is the better well side. We're up over 95% of the time we're in zone, and very often a lot of these wells are 100%. Hats off to that team. Additionally, they set 123 internal drilling records. When I opened my email on Tuesday, Joe, we had 119, and then they added four over the weekend. That saves us money, too. There's $15 million in savings just with those drilling records.
This is a photograph of one of our production facilities at the Stateline. It's actually the Voni East Tank Battery. In the background, you see the Patterson rig that's running on our Voni spot four, I think it is. We talk often about the drillers have these wells for two or three weeks. The completion team comes in and does their thing for two or three weeks. Glenn and Christian and Ben, the production team, they've got these wells for 20 or 30 years. It's incredibly important that up front you get the design, the construction, and the operation of these facilities right. Get your ducks in a row, because when you're bringing on 12 or 13 of these Stateline wells, there's a lot of volume coming into these facilities. On the first tank battery we built the Boros East.
We brought several wells into that facility, and at one time, we had over 10,000 barrels of oil a day coming into that facility, over 55,000 barrels of water, and over 62 million cubic feet of gas in that one facility. We've got four of those on the Stateline. I think the production facilities team has done an outstanding job, again, designing, building, and operating these facilities. Hats off to them. What you can't see in this photograph is the San Mateo contribution to this effort. We've got the three-pipe system installed at Stateline. It was there when we were ready to start pulling the wells back. You can't see the pipelines because they're underground, but we were there.
We started pulling the wells back, the first barrel of water went into pipe, the first barrel of oil went into pipe, and the first MCF of gas that we sold was also on pipe. A good example of both those teams working together. There's a lot of value created there. I'll let David talk about the wells.
I want to show you a few of the well results that we've received or that we've gotten out here. A lot of the wells that you see there in the green are some of the first results we disclosed from the Voni wells. In particular, I wanted to point out that the Voni 216H, which was a Wolfcamp completion. Actually, we had a 24-hour initial potential, which means we tested the well over a 24-hour period, and we achieved 5,000 BOE per day. That was an all-time record for Matador and represented the best IP test that we had had. Even though that was the best one, there's plenty of threes and fours and fives in that group. We're really excited about the results.
In addition to the cost, I want to focus your attention on the lower right-hand corner of this screen, because it really shows how strong the performance of these first 13 Boros wells that we put on last fall has been. Those wells have been producing for about eight months now. If you look at that slide, what you'll see are two dotted lines. Those two dotted lines are what we call type curves or estimates of how we think those wells are going to perform. The lower one says, if we follow that curve, we think these wells would make about one and a half million BOE, barrels of oil equivalent, in their lifetime. If we follow the upper curve, that's about 2 million BOE.
That's sort of the range that we were projecting for these wells when we made our investment decisions and got started. The actual performance of these wells, then, is shown with the red and blue and purple lines that you see there. As you can see, none of them are below our one and a half million estimate, and some of them, quite a few of them, in fact, are above the $2 million estimate. We're extremely pleased in the early performance of these wells. The other thing I'd say is if we were fortunate enough this morning to be in Professor Ehrman's petroleum engineering class, she would tell us that these lines look awful flat. What we're projecting here is cumulative production over time.
Just trust me, because I've attended her class, and I know that as long as these lines stay pretty flat or pretty straight, and you can see how straight they are, not really bending yet. That means that on a daily basis, the production is staying very flat, not declining a lot. That's what we're seeing with some of our longer two-mile laterals out there in the basin. They don't have quite as much decline early on. We put them on, we cut them back a little bit, put them into our facilities, and then they just rock along at fairly constant rates for a number of months. That's a very encouraging sign and something that we like to see. I think I got that right, Professor, didn't I? Very good. Matt.
Okay. We'll switch back over to San Mateo now. Last year at this meeting, we showed a slide very similar to this, and we were talking about we were going to expand our three-pipe system up into the Stebbins area and down into Stateline, and I'm happy to report that's done. There's no longer San Mateo I and San Mateo II. They've been merged. It's just San Mateo. These assets have been built, and they're operational. What we did in the greater Stebbins area up to the north, we added our three-pipe system. You can see the black line on the map there. That's actually a gas pipeline, a trunk line that runs from Stebbins down to our Black River plant down at Rustler Breaks. All the gas from Stebbins gets compressed and sent down to the plant.
Additionally, in that same right of way, we put an oil pipeline. We've got a central delivery point down close to the plant at Rustler Breaks that all the oil from Stebbins goes down to that CDP. The water gathering and disposal is done locally. You can see the two blue dots there. Those are actually saltwater disposal wells. We've got all that three pipe system is up and operational. Down at Stateline, we did something very similar. By the way, the pipeline from Stebbins down to the Black River plant, it's the Belleau Wood pipeline, which will make a little more sense here in just a minute. At Stateline, we built the same type of trunk line from Stateline up to the Black River plant. We called it Tripoli.
With D-Day here a couple of days away, I think it's appropriate that we talk about these pipelines. All the gas from Stateline going up to the Black River plant, we have an oil gathering system there. We actually have another Central Delivery Point. That's our second one at the Stateline acreage where we sell into Plains Pipeline. That takes care of the oil. The water we gather, and we move it a few miles to the east to drop load on a third party. At Wolfcamp, it's about the same as we talked about last year. We have the gas gathering. We don't have the processing any longer. We'll talk about that. We sold that to EnLink here in 2015.
We still have gas gathering, we've got water gathering and disposal, and we have a third CDP, Central Delivery Point, on the acreage there at Wolfcamp. Like I said, it's done. Since it's done, we thought it might be interesting to actually look at what this is. What you'll see here in the top right is actually plant number three at the Black River plant. It's a 200 million cubic feet a day facility. There's one right across the road looks just like it for another 200. There's the first one we built, which is 60 million. A total of 460 million cubic feet of gas processing capability we have. In the bottom right, this is a noisy place. This is where we've got gas compression down at Stateline.
All the gas, whether it's high pressure, low pressure, or intermediate pressure, comes into this compression station, gets compressed, and sent on up to the Black River plant. The photograph in the bottom left. By the way, James Meyer sitting back here, we asked James to put these pictures together and told him, "These are like your kids." He's like, "Well, I'd like to show photos of my kids." That's why you see this photograph here. In the bottom left, this is interesting because it's actually electrical substation. You wouldn't think, that's not saltwater gathering or disposal or oil gathering or gas processing. What it does is it provides power to our Black River plant and also to our saltwater disposal facilities in the area.
The San Mateo team came to us while they were building the plant and said, "Look, we can get power. There's power in the area. If we build this electrical substation, we'll have more reliable power, there'll be better power, we'll have more control over that." We did. Thank goodness we did. It turned out to be a great asset. Joe was talking about the Winter Storm Uri, and through that time period, there were lots of rolling power outages out in New Mexico. We didn't have that. Since we had the substation, we were able to keep up and running. It turned out to be a great asset. Like Joe said, the truly golden plated asset are the people that were out there running this thing.
The storm coming, the San Mateo team, they're like, "We're not going to shut down. We're going to keep going." They called out to the field guys and said, "Whatever it takes to keep that plant running, those saltwater disposal facilities, the oil gathering, keep it going." They worked day and night to keep those things up. As Joe said, we were 1% of 5% of the plants in the basin that stayed operational through the whole time. At the same time, the E&P guys, the production guys are over here keeping the wells going, doing the same thing. Joe said they were sleeping in the truck. I've argued with Joe about this. I don't think they were sleeping much. I think they were out there working. It takes both, right?
If you're a midstream company, you have to have a tenant, a customer that's going to provide you volumes to run through your plant, to run through your facilities, to keep them operational. If you quit moving that gas, it just doesn't work. They had that in Matador. Matador looks for a midstream company that's going to be there when they need them. That's kind of our slogan. We're there when you need us. Both those teams kept going, and there's a chart, we didn't show it here, but about other midstream companies that really just shut down. Anyway, hats off to the team there. These are water facilities. The top right is the first saltwater disposal facility that we built at Rustler Breaks. It's a Black River SWD number one. Most of the volume that comes into this system is on pipe.
That being said, we do have, and you can see the sun setting there in the west, and there's an overhang over that's actually covering truck lanes. We have the capability not only to bring water in on pipe, but also for people to bring it in on trucks, which they do. If you look at the one on the bottom right, and I'm going to try something maybe a little tricky, but if you can see around this corner there, this looks like a fence around these tanks. What that actually is is a concrete containment system. We're required to build a containment system around these facilities so if in case there's a leak or when a tank runs over or something like that, it stays within that containment. What we're not required to do is build those out of concrete.
What we decided early on was we're going to go ahead and take the environmental safeguards that these concrete containments provide for us and spend the extra money and build our facilities right. That's paid off because we try to attract blue-chip customers, and often they come and say, "The rate sounds good. Looks like you guys provide a good service, but we want to come and make sure what your facilities look like." I can tell you 100% of the time it's been thumbs up. We're proud of these facilities. On the bottom left there, that's a booster station at Stateline for water. I mentioned we were moving it a few miles to the east. All the water gets produced at Stateline, goes through this booster station onto another one, and ultimately gets disposed.
This slide really has two things on it to talk about. The top is a timeline, the progression for San Mateo, and we won't go into a lot of detail, but just going back to 2015. The first thing we did as a midstream company is we built a small cryo plant down at Wolf. It was 35 million cubic feet a day. Not a big one. We spent about $32 million building it. Before we ever sent a molecule of gas through it, EnLink paid us $143 million for that plant. That was a really nice bump for us. We took some of that money, went up to the Rustler Breaks area, and built our first Black River plant, and it was 60 million cubic feet a day. We met our friends at Five Point Energy.
We created San Mateo I, added another 200 million to that facility, which got us to 260. What we were just talking about, the San Mateo II expansion added another 200 million. We're at 460 million cubic feet a day, which is roughly half a BCF per day of gas processing capacity. We've got 335,000 barrels a day of saltwater disposal capacity. We've got the Noah system to complete out the three pipe system on the acreage. The bottom part of the chart, and Joe, I'm going to do it. You said I was probably going to do it. We were talking about profitable growth at a measured pace, right? I think that's what you see here. This is EBITDA at the bottom.
If you look at 2015, we had about $4 million, and you can see how that's ramped up over the last several years to where last year it was $113 million in EBITDA, and we're projecting to get to $130 million for 2021. Confident that we'll get there. The red bars are gas, the blue bars are water, and the oil is green, which the oil's starting to pick up some steam a little bit. Anyway, you throw all that together, and what ends up happening is San Mateo contributes $66 million to the EBITDA story for Matador. We see huge advantages that I'd like to talk about for longer, but I won't. We see huge advantages to being both on the E&P side of the oil and gas business and on the midstream with the San Mateo. Okay?
To summarize for you kind of what our capital plan is for the year and what we expect to achieve. You probably have seen this in some of our previous releases, basically we're going to spend between about $545 million and $605 million. In the midpoint of that's about $575 million this year. That's both for the E&P and the midstream. The majority of it, of course, will be going to the E&P side of the business. This year, since we finished up the things that Matt was just talking about at the expansion of the plant and the pipelines we're in a bit more of a maintenance capital mode for the midstream this year. We won't be spending quite as much as we have in the last couple of years. Matador's share of that will probably be on the order of about $25 million.
For that, we expect to drill and complete and turn to sales this year about 50 gross operated wells, 46 or so on a net basis. In the lower left-hand corner, you can sort of see that in the first quarter, we actually came in a little under our estimate. About $14 million-$16 million under our estimates. That was due partially to just savings that our drilling and completions teams continue to achieve with their efforts to drive down costs and also some costs that we just didn't incur that probably will be incurred later on in the year. All just to say, I just want you to leave knowing that we're right on track with the plans that we set for the year and our cost objectives and our production objectives all look very good.
This is just a slide to show you what we expected to achieve with production. Really the takeaway from here is that we expect our production to grow about 11% this year off of what it was last year. We are running the four rigs currently. We picked up the fourth one in March. We expect to run those four rigs through the remainder of the year. If we achieve the kind of results we expect, our production will be about 11% better this year than it was last year. Hopefully we'll be back next year talking about how this year or how 2021 was another record. I think of all the slides I had to show today, maybe this one's my favorite. Because it shows you the progress that we're making on paying down the debt under our revolving credit facility.
That debt peaked in the third quarter of 2020 when we had about $475 million in debt outstanding and about $40 million, $45 million in outstanding letters of credit. As I mentioned earlier, in the fourth quarter, we paid down $35 million. In the first quarter, we paid down $100 million. We ended the quarter with only about $340 million in outstanding debt under the revolver. This quarter, I didn't give you any numbers, but I can tell you that we're off to a good start. We've already paid down another $30 million of debt, and I hope we'll be able to do more than that before the end of the quarter. I hope when we report again in July, you'll see that that graph, that little dash line or dashed bar on the far right has gotten even smaller.
The number on the bottom, which is our net debt to EBITDA, sort of our leverage ratio metric. What I'd like you to take away from that is the banks don't want that number to get bigger than four. If it does, we become in default under our credit agreement. We want to keep that number as low as we possibly can. You can see it got up kind of close to three at the end of the year, and there were some nights last year that I was worried it was going to get a little higher than that. It didn't, and that's a tribute to the entire group.
This quarter, we think we'll get it back down to about two, I think if things continue to go well, you'll see that number continue to decline as well, which is something that our bankers and our creditors and all are always looking at. Just to kind of wrap up Matt's and my comments. We've listed for you kind of what we see as the current investment highlights in Matador. We know all of you are owners, this is what we tell people why we think Matador is a really great investment. We think we are positioned for continued free cash flow and differentiated production growth. We've begun to return value to our shareholders through the payment of a dividend. We really do have a pretty strong and simple balance sheet, it's improving all the time.
We absolutely have high quality E&P assets and a rapidly growing midstream business that we're working to grow together, and great people to manage and operate and grow all of that. We have made a step change in capital efficiency, and I think that Matt has explained that to you and showed you how the drilling of these two mile laterals has really helped us to reduce the cost per foot. As Tim mentioned, we are committed to and focused on the ESG initiatives, and if we're not, I know that Professor Rogers is going to make sure that we stay on that. We will be continuing our focus on ESG. Finally, as Joe mentioned, we feel like that our interests are aligned with yours. We're big shareholders too. It's important to us how the stock performs.
We're very grateful for every one of you who's an investor and an owner in Matador. Finally, just to wrap up, if you'll permit me a couple of personal comments. First of all, I'd just like to say thank you on behalf of Joe, the executive committee, to all the staff. You all gave us a standing ovation a few minutes ago for the purported sacrifices that we made. I want to tell you that every single staff member at Matador last year took a pay cut, and no staff member at Matador received a bonus last year. Joe and Matt and I and the entire executive team are grateful to all of you for the sacrifices that you made as well. We really appreciate it. We were all in the boat together.
As Joe said, some of us rolling, some of us bailing, but you all did a marvelous job of keeping your focus and kind of keeping your nose to the grindstone during a tough time. I hope you know how much we all appreciate it. Second, it takes a lot to put on a meeting like this. Joe mentioned that. We recognized Allison and Amanda and Janie and Mitzi. To the members of my team who helped put it together, Michael Frenzel and Mac Schmitz and Andrew and Charlotte, who I don't know if are here, but are probably listening at home, Matt Sorensen, I really appreciate all the effort that you put in. Certainly everybody in this room contributes a little something to the slides that we've shown to the shareholders today. We appreciate that.
Finally, I want to show you that back in May, Matador was fortunate to receive from IR Magazine their award as the 2021 Best Overall Relations for a small cap company that's traded publicly in the U.S. We were super proud to get this award. As you can see on the right-hand side, as a result of the award, Nasdaq actually lit up their tower, and we were recognized on the Nasdaq tower in Times Square. I always knew I wasn't going to make it as an underwear model on Times Square, but I am really glad to have finally made it to Times Square. To Matt and the entire team, for all that you do to help with our investor relations outreach, I really appreciate it all. With that, Joe, I think we'll turn it back to you. Thank you all very much.
As you said, it's surprising sometimes if you remember in college having that tough course and you go the first day, "I don't know how we're going to get through this." Everybody just picks it up, worked a little harder, and then we had a lot of extra little benefits to set company records in production and cost and have our name on Times Square. That's all been very gratifying, but the most gratifying thing is that you all would care enough to come today and devote your time and attention, and just want you to know how much we appreciate it. We're going to renew our efforts. We expect to provide you with more company records this time next year. I wanted to just make a couple of notes. I wanted to recognize Barry Banker. I think he gets the prize for coming the farthest distance.
Barry, thank you for being here from Nashville, one of our original 17 shareholders. He came into town for a wedding and made the mistake of calling me as I was getting started, kind of trapped him in the backyard where we wouldn't let you go home until he committed. Second thing that sometimes gives us a lot of personal pleasure is the dividend, that not only we've reduced debt, but we have a dividend for you. I want you to know it's purely coincidental that came into your accounts yesterday before the vote. Besides the MAXCOM room, which we recognize, we have a measurement room that's been overseen by Greg and Rick Alexander, and who've done great work recruiting a really good team that measures and makes sure we're being paid for the right amount, right volume, as well as the right price.
They've made a difference. In the MAXCOM room, we had two young geologists that entered the world competition for directional drilling, and I'm pleased to say that those two finished in the top 20. One finished number two in the U.S., I think that's a tremendous accomplishment. As Matt mentioned, we're at the midway point between D-Day, June 6 and Memorial Day. I think we ought to just take a moment and recognize our military veterans here. All those that have served, would you please stand and let us recognize you? Thank you again for your service and appreciate the great country that we live in. With that, Brian, is it time to offer a close? When I look at Tim and ask that, and they're going like this, I get the hint, nice job.
This completes today's meeting. Our staff will be available towards the back of the room following adjournment to meet with you and answer any further questions you may have. Thank you again for your time and attention this morning. Thanks again for being Matador shareholders. We really feel we've got the best group in the business. The 2021 Matador Resources Company annual meeting is now concluded.