Good day, welcome to the 2020 annual meeting of shareholders of Matador Resources Company. I will now turn the meeting over to your host, Mr. Joe Foran, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer.
Thank you, good morning. As the operator said, I am Joe Foran, Chairman and CEO of Matador Resources. With our stock up this morning as it is at over $10.40, I think maybe I should just say thank you again, and adjourn the meeting. In any event, I will serve as chairman of the meeting, and I recommend Craig Adams, our head of land and legal, to serve as secretary, and our Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Kyle Ellis, to serve as the inspector of the elections. Hearing no objections to these recommendations, I will call for an immediate vote. All those in favor say aye.
Aye.
Opposed same sign. I now formally call Matador's 2020 annual meeting of shareholders to order. At the outset, the board of directors and I wish to welcome and to thank each of you listeners for taking the time and trouble of learning how to access this webcast and to participate in Matador's 2020 annual meeting. We very much appreciate your interest and virtual presence. We will do our best to address the plans, the issues, the challenges, the concerns, and the opportunities before us that are of most importance to you. I will now turn the meeting over to Craig Adams for some procedural matters. Craig?
Thank you, Joe. I am Craig Adams, Co-Chief Operating Officer with Billy Goodwin and Head of Land and Legal. Please note that if you have not already voted your shares, you may do so now by clicking on the voting button on the web portal in the lower right-hand portion of your screen. You must be logged on to the web portal with your 16-digit control number to vote. If you have already mailed in your proxy or voted via the telephone or the internet, you need not take any further action. Voting will end promptly after we have reviewed the matters of business for this meeting. Shareholders may also submit questions for our consideration by typing any question into the Ask a Question box provided in the lower left portion of your screen.
If you do ask a question, please include your name and contact information so that we may follow up with you after the annual meeting if necessary. Out of consideration of the shareholders in attendance, we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up, and further limit questions to those germane to the matters of business before this meeting. You can always call afterwards with your other questions. In order to ask questions during the meeting, you must also be logged on to the web portal with your 16-digit control number. Joe, back to you and your report.
Thank you, Craig. As the board, the staff, and I were preparing for this meeting, we wanted to make clear upfront three fundamental commitments all of us have always tried to do for our shareholders. Our first priority and commitment is to protect and strengthen our balance sheet and asset base, particularly during this time of crisis and uncertainty. Second, we are working hard every day to find ways to increase the value of your stock. Third, we are dedicated to getting better every day at our jobs and helping our teams and departments make Matador better every day, too. In light of these commitments, we feel we have a lot of good news to share with you today.
Before we go any further, let's take a few moments on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe to recognize and express our appreciation to all of our veterans who have served faithfully in various conflicts to protect us and to provide us with our way of life. May our nation's veterans enjoy good health and all the blessings that this country has to offer. I would also like to extend these same wishes and blessings to the new heroes of today, the first responders and healthcare workers trying to contain and cure the coronavirus pandemic. Let's take a moment of silent prayer to express our thanks and appreciation for all the efforts and sacrifices of these heroes wherever they are, then and now, to help others and to preserve our nation's freedom. Thank you.
Usually at this point in our meetings, we review last year's results, which in this case, 2019 was full of good news and record results, and then offer some outlook to you for the current year, 2020. Discussing last year, 2019, is fairly easy. As you can see, full year 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2019 were simply the best year and the best quarter in company history. In 2019, we had $0.75 of GAAP earnings per share and record cash flow per share. We also set new records in production and reserves. All that is good, but also that constitutes yesterday's news, so to speak. At the moment, however, we are living in an entirely different commodity world and working in an entirely different economic and domestic setting.
At our March 2020 board meeting, both our board of directors and executive committee realized the world had changed, and we needed to change, too. We immediately started revamping our plans and targets for 2020 and stopped talking about 2019 achievements. During this time came the days of coronavirus and the start of the Russian-Saudi price war on or about March 19th. Our stock and bonds took a dramatic fall in price. Others fell with us, we fell to the bottom of our peer group. It was a humbling experience for us at Matador. I'm pleased and relieved we have rebounded since then. Ironically, on the day we went public in 2012, we were producing just 400 bbl of oil per day, yet we were selling for $12 per share.
During the worst of this recent crisis time, in the middle of March, we were producing 40,000 bbl of oil per day, but selling for only $1.11 per share. Looking at this situation a little differently, since 2012, Matador has increased its proved reserves 10 times, but we were only selling for one-tenth of our original $12 IPO price. Even though the stock has rebounded, it is still painful to think about how little it was selling for in the middle of March. It feels much better today. When that happened on March 9th, two days later, in response, the board, the staff, and I had an emergency meeting and put into effect a new plan for 2020, which included salary cuts, rig cuts, staff cuts, and staff rotations to the field.
This plan is working and is working better than almost anyone had expected, as you can see in the chart on your screen. This stock chart shows we have made up a lot of ground since March 9th, moving up from number 12 in our peer group to today, during which time we've been the number one performer in our peer group. Our peer group is an impressive bunch, mainly bigger companies like Parsley Energy, Cimarex, WPX, Diamondback, Devon, and Marathon. The challenges of coronavirus, low commodity prices, storage and transportation issues, investor uncertainty, and other potential black swan events are still out there lurking for us to overcome.
We believe, as we execute on our three-rig 2020 plan and address these challenges head-on, we'll not only steadily improve the quality of our assets and expertise and commitment of our team members, but we'll also be significantly increasing the number of A+ locations we have in our inventory and asset base. Locations of this caliber are key to our recovery and continued value creation. In the meantime, we are making steady progress in all other phases of our business in conserving capital with the immediate aim of being free cash flow by the end of the year. Overall, we're building a Matador that will emerge from the current situation a company more profitable, more valuable, and a Matador better in asset quality and better in operating processes and execution. As most of you know, Matador has had a consistently improving operational history and reserve base through its 40-year history.
Today, each shareholder or each share has 1.3 bbl of oil behind it and one BOE in gas per share behind each of your shares. Matador also has a very unique history among public oil and gas companies. It's been around in one form or another for 40 years, focused on the Delaware Basin, and has a long-standing management team that has worked together for an average of 17 years. It also has a midstream business growing in value. There are a lot of assets here and a lot of opportunities for us to take advantage of. Importantly, Matador was not founded by private equity, but by friends and neighbors, most of whom are still shareholders.
In fact, due to the continuity of Matador's executive team and its founders and legacy shareholders like Jim Rolfe , Charlie Sweeney, the Boros family, Bob Pickard, Jeff Hart, the Cones, the Charles Ling family, and others, Matador has a lot of institutional memory. In the past 40 years, we have experienced as a company and as a management team, plenty of unexpected black swan situational events. There has always been a close alignment between the management team and the shareholders at Matador and in addressing and resolving such matters, as well as generating good outcomes at the same time for all shareholders and stakeholders. For example, at the last open period, two-thirds of the Matador directors, officers, and staffers, almost 200 individuals altogether, bought stock and put their money where their mouth was. No question, the Matador staff and board have plenty of skin in the game.
Each time over the past 40 years when Matador has experienced headwinds like today, Matador has consistently met the challenge and emerged a stronger company with a more committed workforce, better results, and a more positive outlook going forward, as well as a better stock price for the shareholders inside or outside the company. The results speak for themselves. Today's situation appears in many ways to be like the challenges we faced in 1983 when we first started First Matador. You may have heard me tell this story before. That's okay. I like to tell it anyway. In 1983, oil was then selling at an all-time high of $34 a barrel. A year later, in June of 1984, the price had declined to less than $10 a barrel. For a startup company like Matador with no staff and very little production, one would think that would be a disastrous event.
As events turned out, it was one of the most fortunate times for Matador. I'm from Amarillo. Mr. Boone Pickens is from Amarillo. Our families were friends. His three senior oil and gas people elected to retire because Mr. Pickens wanted to take Mesa in a different direction. I flew up to Amarillo the next day and met with these three gentlemen and invited them to join our board of directors on the premise they would help us grow Matador into a high-quality E&P company. I said that I didn't have any money to pay them, but if they were willing to join our board and take stock, we would split profits, in which case, I thought we could build a pretty good company. These three gentlemen all agreed to those terms. They all provided enormous credibility and expertise to First Matador in its infancy.
Without having to spend money, which we did not have much of, we substantially increased Matador's chances for success. These men helped establish the culture of Matador and the professionalism that you see on both the board and staff today. Although two of these gentlemen have passed, notably, their families are still active shareholders today. Along the way, these men, along with other key directors and shareholders like Florence Mullins, Carl Modick, Gene Edwards, Urban Wall, and Jack Sleeper, helped turn Matador I's original capitalization of $270,000 in 1983 into a $388 million sales price in June of 2003. That sale occurred on a Friday. We started this Matador, Matador 2, on the following Monday. Matador 2's technical work, its execution, and its properties are acknowledged as some of the best in the business.
Matador 2's board and its staff have continued that tradition of doing what we say we would do and performing best in tough times. I can point to a number of successes this year noted in our prior guidance that lends substance to the fact that Matador's future looks very promising. As I mentioned earlier in 2012, when we went public, we were only making 400 bbl of oil per day, while today, we're making over 40,000 bbl per day. Matador's proved reserves have grown 10 times since the day we went public, from 27 million barrels of oil or natural gas equivalent to 260 million barrels of oil or natural gas equivalent today. The Matador team has developed a large multi-year inventory amounting to over 775 gross locations of A+ wells to drill.
An A+ location is defined as a future drilling location with a projected minimum rate of return of 15% at $30 per barrel West Texas Intermediate oil price and $1.75 per 1,000 cu ft of natural gas. Each of these kind of wells are expected to produce over 1 million barrels of oil or natural gas equivalent. Matador has grown from a standing start in 2012 to at least the number eight oil producer in New Mexico in just six years. When these statistics are updated by the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association for 2019, Matador should move up another notch or two in the rankings. Isn't it kind of fun to say that you own stock in a company that's producing more oil in New Mexico than Apache, Chevron, Marathon, WPX, and Conoco? We're having a good day on the market.
It was tough to arrange, but I was glad our IR department really came through in that regard. The Matador team has reduced CapEx over 35% this year and reduced G&A spending by 30% to a point where by the end of this year, we should be cash flow neutral. Innovative processes like the 24/7 MAXCOM room have continued to enable the operations group to drill better wells for less money, saving millions of dollars and earning millions of dollars in drilling incentives for Matador from its midstream joint venture partner, Five Point Energy. This room is a collaboration of the operations group and the outstanding geological group we've been developing. Frac costs have declined from 2012 to present, so that today's frac cost per stage is only about 20% of what such fracs cost per stage just a few years ago.
The executive team has established a number of training programs for its staffers, such as MaxOps for operations, MAXCOM for directional drilling, MaxPro for production, LandPro for land and legal activities, and a special leadership program for our young professionals who are showing leadership potential, taught by two Marine colonels on Matador's staff. We're proud of the boost all this training has provided our young staffers and expect benefits from these extra training programs for years to come. Matador's capital efficiency has clearly come a long way in the past two years. Matador's average lateral length is getting longer and longer. This year, 83% of our laterals are longer than a mile, and at least 72% will meet or beat the criteria for A+ locations. The board and the staff have all done their part to make Matador stronger fiscally and better operationally.
Matador was the first public oil and natural gas company for everyone involved to take pay cuts. The board and I each took a 25% pay cut. The senior officers took a 20% pay cut. The vice presidents of various departments took a 10% pay cut, and the rest of the staff took a 5% pay cut. Everyone, from board members to team members, has looked for other ways to cut costs and improve capital efficiencies too, from drilling wells faster to creative and scrappy marketing arrangements. One of the best operational ideas to increase efficiency and further reduce G&A costs came from Billy Goodwin, the head of our outstanding operations group. Billy is rotating 27 of our more promising young engineers, geologists, landmen, and other professionals to the field, where they can learn other aspects of the oil and gas business.
These young professionals are replacing non-employee contract personnel so that our young professionals are learning different tasks in the oil field and broadening their skills, so that when they finish these rotations and return to Matador's headquarters, they will be more capable and more seasoned about the intricacies of field operations. At the same time, they will have saved Matador millions of dollars in salaries and other expenses while increasing Matador's capabilities and operational efficiency. Meanwhile, this group of diverse disciplines has set 86 drilling records to date by working together and saving over $9.4 million during their, quote, on-the-job training. San Mateo's growing midstream business has been very complementary to our E&P business.
In February 2019, Matador formed San Mateo II, the second joint venture with Five Point Energy, to expand the three-pipe system for Matador's oil, natural gas, and produced water to Greater Stebbins Area and the Stateline asset area, which will result in a three-pipe system stretching 43 mi over some of the most prolific oil and gas fields in the country. This expansion of midstream services is currently on budget and on time. This three-pipe system could provide up to $240 million in direct value to Matador through a $50 million capital carry and various other performance incentives.
This project is expected to be completed in September 2020 in time to receive first production in what we expect to be our prolific Stateline wells. Despite the challenging environment of COVID-19, San Mateo is off to a great fiscal start in 2020, achieving approximately $26 million of EBITDA during the first quarter of 2020, with higher than expected revenues and lower than expected operational expense. San Mateo is on track to exceed $100 million of EBITDA for the full year 2020, and soon will be free cash flow positive. The potential value of this system is further enhanced by the fact that the Matador is the anchor tenant and continuing to feed the midstream system with its current drilling results.
The San Mateo Group is working busily this summer to complete the build-out of the three-pipe system at Stebbins and Stateline, and complete the 200 million a day of gas processing plant by September, at which time the total design capacity of our two gas processing plants will expand to 460 million cu ft a day. We believe our industry-leading saltwater disposal system, with capacity of 335,000 bbl of water, also adds significant value to Matador. The other two parts of our three-pipe system, the oil facilities and the gas gathering and processing plants, not only provide a tremendous business opportunity in a growing oil field area, but also adds significant operational and competitive advantages to Matador. We appreciate working with Plains Energy and Plains All American Pipeline for the way they've worked with us in creating our oil field pipeline system.
A word of thanks also to our JV partner in San Mateo, Five Point Energy. Five Point has been a great partner in the conception of these projects and helped significantly in the strategy and execution of our midstream plans. We appreciate this relationship with them very much, both personally and professionally. Our 2020 production outlook has already been announced. I reaffirm it now. At the 1st of January, we made the commitment at Matador Resources to bring the six Rodney Robinson wells on the 1st of March. We did so. These wells are some of the best wells we've ever drilled. As a group, have the capacity to produce over 15,000 barrels of oil per day and 25 million cubic feet of natural gas per day at present.
We also pledged to complete the five Ray wells by the end of June this year, and I'm pleased to say that all five are already producing today. We are confident that these wells will be completed and will turn out to be A+ wells. Similarly, we have announced our plan to bring on five Leatherneck wells in August, which we also feel highly confident will be A+ wells and will happen as predicted. Finally, we are planning to have 13 A+ wells from the Stateline area from the Boros and Voni leases on production in September of this year. We expect these 13 wells to be individually stronger on average in reserves and production than the highly prolific six Rodney Robinson wells. Even better, we will have twice as many Stateline A+ wells in September coming online as we did from the Rodney Robinson leases.
All of these Stateline, Leatherneck, and Ray wells will be connected to our second San Mateo planned expansion project. Why continue to invest in Matador? As we all know, there are no guarantees in life, and certainly not in the oil and gas business. We like our chances. We believe all the necessary ingredients are there to make a great company. Good luck, good finances, good people, good execution. Matador's board and executives and staff need to just keep executing as we have for the past 40 years. Please continue to give Matador your consideration for investment. We think you'll be glad you did. With that, I'd like to begin the introduction of our directors, special advisors, and the shareholder advisory committee. All right.
In our directors, Tim Parker is our lead independent director. I'll have a further introduction of Tim as he has a few remarks for us today as lead director. Gaines Baty is our deputy lead independent director. Gaines has been a friend for close to 30 years, has been a C-suite recruiter, has really helped build the team that's here at Matador. Ray Baribault is a degreed engineer, worked at Exxon, worked at Netherland and Sewell, started his own oil and gas company, worked in the Bakken, has lent great expertise to our board and to our staff. Craig Burkert's been involved since 1983. He's the CFO of ROMCO. Helps out with our Audit Committee. Bill Byerley has been our Audit Committee Chair.
Bill had a great career at Pricewaterhouse, and headed up many of their top oil and gas audits, including Conoco and Exxon. Matt Clifton is a former CEO of Holly Energy, and brings to our board great experience in the midstream business. Monika Ehrman is our newest director. She's a petroleum engineer, been active in the private law practice as well as the corporate law practice, and is now a tenured oil and gas professor at OU. Julie Forrester Rogers is an electrical engineer, made the high grade on the bar exam, was associate provost at SMU, and is a tenured professor there. David Posner has been a marketing specialist and a member of our board who's been willing to help in every area possible, and has really been a great team player on our board.
Ken Stewart is an attorney and the former head of Norton Rose Fulbright, and heads up our nominations committee. Special advisors include Jim Rolfe, who was one of our original 17 shareholders, a former U.S. attorney, and one of my closest advisors. Rick Fenlaw from Amarillo is a legendary landman, and has been a 50-year friend, and also is willing to pitch in and help with staff training. Shareholder advisory committee. First, I'd like to recognize Scott King as co-chair, who is also the co-founder of this Matador Resources. He was a great oil finder at First Matador and was a great oil finder here, and a special friend through the years. I'd like to extend special thanks to you, Scott, for helping out in all the different areas you have. We've worked together over 25 years.
Jim Rolfe co-chaired this advisory committee too, again, helps us find really qualified directors who really try to look out for the best interest of the shareholders. This group also includes Barry Banker, another one of our original 17 shareholders, Joe Coleman, Kevin Greevy, George Yates, and Bobby Pickard. Bobby's another original shareholder back to 1983. Also in attendance today, or his presence is online, is Nathan Milton of KPMG LLP, the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2020. Mr. Milton will be available to respond to any questions you may have about audit and accounting matters. I'd also like to make one administrative comment. If any of you are not receiving correspondence from us in the mail or routine investor alerts via our website, please email investors@matadorresources.com.
Note that our press releases and investor presentations are also available on our website, www.matadorresources.com. Copies of my remarks are also available on request. I would like to introduce more formally our lead director, Tim Parker. Tim was appointed to the board in 2018 and serves as Lead Independent Director and as Chair of the Board's Capital Markets and Finance Committee. He is one of the ones really protecting my back. Tim retired in 2017 as portfolio manager and analyst, natural resources for T. Rowe Price Associates . Mr. Parker joined T. Rowe Price in 2001 as an equity analyst before becoming a portfolio manager in 2010. He managed the New Era fund from 2010 to 2013 and managed the energy and natural resource portions of T. Rowe Price's Small-Cap Value, Small-Cap Stock, and New Horizons funds from 2013 to 2017. Prior to joining T.
Rowe Price, Mr. Parker was an investment banking analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated. Mr. Parker holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Commerce from the University of Virginia and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Tim's experience with a large institutional shareholder, his extensive familiarity with capital markets, and his knowledge of Matador 2 and Matador 1 provide the company with value insight. Tim?
Thank you, Joe, and everyone listening. I just wanted to let everybody know a little bit more about myself and a little bit more about why I'm on this board and how we function. As Joe said, I spent almost 17 years at T. Rowe Price, a large investment manager in Baltimore. During that time, I was an investor in Matador in the funds I owned, but I'd actually met Joe almost, I think, 19, 20 years ago at First Matador, when they were nearing a public IPO process, but ultimately sold out. I was impressed then with how Joe was trying to build a company, and it was great to reacquaint several years later at Matador Two. I'd been in contact with the team and visited with them and visited headquarters, and I was always impressed with the culture.
The teamwork, the accountability, their desire to grow their knowledge base, to share that knowledge, work as teams, and overall, integrity, which isn't always there in every company. Those are big reasons why this was the board I chose to join when I left T. Rowe and not another player in the industry. It doesn't hurt that Matador also has some really great acreage. They have these great people to execute on this acreage. This Northern Delaware acreage really is world-class. Largely owing to the fact that Joe and the team have been working this area of the Permian for about 40 years. They were able to move in New Mexico when everyone else was working on the Texas side, in the Midland Basin or in the southern Delaware.
As other operators zigged and did the predictable things for very expensive costs, the Matador team zagged and amassed this commanding acreage position for much lower costs than peers. One third or one quarter of what some other operators paid, $10,000, $11,000 an acre for us, $30,000, $40,000 for them. It's extremely hard to make good returns when you pay top dollar for acreage. The returns on these Delaware acres, which were acquired at competitive costs, very low cost comparatively, they can compete with virtually any well drilled in the U.S. As Joe referenced earlier, these A+ locations are battle-tested and ready at today's prices, which I don't think $30 will be the price forever, but it is the price today, and we don't want to drill wells that don't work.
We have at least, I think we've referenced 360 operated locations that we can drill, but there's more than 700, 800 if you would consider both our operated and non-operated locations. We're constantly moving our non-operated locations into our operated count as we acquire more working interests because we're a good operator. If you combine these great assets with this great culture, these great people, I think you have what is going to be a long-term leader in the U.S. oil and gas industry, and that's what really attracted me to this board. I want to talk a little bit about this company, and you probably already know this if you've been a Matador shareholder for a long time. These are pretty special people.
Two of my favorite aphorisms that I hear the executive team throw around are, "We reserve the right to get smarter," and, "Profitable growth at a measured pace." I'm really happy with the first one because not everybody can look in a mirror and realize they don't have every answer. This Matador team realizes as smart as we are, there are plenty of other smart people, and let's have a healthy dialogue. No one has the right answer, but together, we're going to generate the optimal solution, and we work hard as a team as a result. The other aphorism, "Profitable growth at a measured pace," speaks to the fact that we do not chase growth for growth's sake.
We chase cash flow growth that generate returns at a measured pace because we don't believe investors are served by growing unprofitably, nor do we believe that they are served by drilling unprofitable wells, low return wells. In short, we're focusing on what we can control, and this team is very good at execution and operations. As a board, we help to keep them in the guide rails, and together, we're working to make sensible financial decisions to ensure the best outcome for shareholders in this volatile price environment. Another aspect of this culture I enjoy is its focus on delivery. They do what they say. You can see this with the consistent delivery of operating results. We've had better than expected production and cash flow for most of Matador Two's life, 20+ quarters in a row. We're working hard to manage the balance sheet right now.
I would argue it's our top priority right now is to get the balance sheet back into shape because it is tested at a low price environment like this, not to the point where we're in danger, but to a higher level than we want it to be. Speaking of the balance sheet, we plan to both organically delever over time as our cash flow grows and we spend in line with our cash flow. Also inorganically through asset sales, which you've seen us do in recent years, acreage and non-core positions, for example. We're constantly evaluating offers for acreage, for our royalties, even for our midstream business. There are definitely interested buyers for all of these assets at surprisingly strong prices given the price environment, and we're constantly evaluating them.
Ultimately, we will decide what makes the most sense for shareholders, the combination of repairing the balance sheet and selling assets, then I think you'll be happy with the choices we make to bring our leverage back down to a much more reasonable place. Whether we're talking about strong execution at the wellhead or delevering the balance sheet, if Matador says it's going to do it, expect it to be done. Then I want to highlight one thing that Joe mentioned in his remarks. These programs like MaxOps and MAXCOM and leadership development that Joe referenced, these are not just tools for performance improvement and cost savers for the company. These are great retention tools.
Matador has higher retention of its employees than most because it's giving them opportunities to grow and learn and become more well-rounded people and better oil and gas people for that matter. Employees enjoy wide exposure to board meetings and personal interactions with the board. I think those are the sorts of things that help to keep Matador competitive in retaining its employees, but also just making them into the best employees they can be. As a firm, we're working hard to provide more disclosure on ESG, environmental, social, and governance issues. Safety's always been a priority, and we haven't had a lost time incident in over five years for our employees. We also have water recycling in several areas, and most of our oil, gas, and water is on pipe, avoiding traffic's inevitable spills and accidents. We're already doing a lot of those things.
We want to just highlight them more so people can understand how much we're doing there. Finally, board mechanics. As the lead director, I serve as a liaison between management and the rest of the board and with outside parties if and when we need that. Like my other board colleagues, I serve on several other committees, the Capital Markets Committee, Audit, Prospect, Strategic Planning, Compensation, and Executive Committee in my case, but all of us wear many hats on different committees. Each committee does a lot of the heavy lifting for the board. It's chaired by an expert in that committee, for example, Bill Byerley on the Audit Committee, with his accounting background. The committees will do a lot of the work and make recommendations to the full board, but ultimately, the full board ratifies all votes.
We always see what's going on, and in addition to serving on those different committees, it's always brought to the full board's attention. In my experience in the last two years or so, this is a very functional board. Everybody works well with each other. The discussions are fulsome and clinical, and I'm really happy that I've had the chance to work with these people. This has been a wonderful trip so far, and I hope to be involved with the Matador team for a long time to come. Thank you, Joe.
Thank you, Tim. You're very kind in your remarks, and we really appreciate it, but you've been a big glue for the board with not only your insights, having looked at a lot of different companies, but also helping us decide on the path forward in different situations. You're a great sounding board, and I just want you to know how much I appreciate you and appreciate your service on the board with our other outstanding directors. We now turn to the three proposals up for vote. This meeting is being held today pursuant to the notice that we mailed to each shareholder of record as of April 9, 2020, which is the record date of 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. The Secretary has provided a notice, proxy statement, and proxy, and an affidavit that such notice, proxy statement, and proxy, together with the 2019 annual report of the company, were mailed to the shareholders of record as of that record date. These documents will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. Kyle Ellis, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, has been appointed to serve as the Inspector of Elections at this meeting.
As Inspector of Elections, Kyle will ascertain the number of shares of common stock outstanding and 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 his 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. Kyle, please present the attendance report.
As Inspector of Elections, I report that there are present at this meeting, in person or by proxy, the holders of approximately 101,516,000 shares of common stock of the company, out of a total of 116,563,969 shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote as of the record date. The holders of approximately 87% of the aggregate outstanding shares of common stock entitled to be voted are present in person or by proxy at this meeting. Each share of common stock outstanding on the record date is entitled to one vote.
On the basis of the report of the Inspector of Elections, I declare that a quorum is present for the purposes of conducting business at this meeting, and this 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. As stated in the notice of this meeting, three matters will be considered and acted upon this morning. As noted earlier, if you have not already done so, you may vote your shares through the voting function on the online portal until the polls close following our review of the three orders of business. The first order of business is the election of four directors. Ken Stewart, as Chair of the Nominating Committee, will introduce our four nominees. Ken?
Thank you, Joe. As our shareholders will know, our directors serve staggered three-year terms and are grouped as Class I, Class II, and Class III directors. The current terms of our present Class III directors end with this shareholders' meeting, and we will be electing Class III directors for new three-year terms at this meeting. The Class III board nominees for election at this meeting are Reynald Baribault, Joe Foran, and Tim Parker. Joe has already given a fulsome introduction of Tim Parker, our present Lead Independent Director. I will just add a personal note that Tim's financial expertise has been invaluable to the board, and the board also very much appreciates Tim's willingness to shoulder the lead director role. Our second nominee is Reynald Baribault. Reynald was elected to the board in 2014 and has served as lead independent director of the board from 2016 to 2019.
He has a distinguished career as an executive in a number of oil and gas companies, and presently he serves as vice president of engineering and resources for NP Resources LLC, a Denver-based exploration and production company focused solely in the North Dakota area. Prior to his time in oil and gas production, Mr. Baribault served as vice president, supervisor in petroleum, consulting engineer with Netherland, Sewell & Associates, Inc. Before that, he began his career as a reservoir engineer with Exxon Company. Ray received his Bachelor of Science degree in petroleum engineering from Louisiana State University and is a licensed professional engineer in Texas. The third nominee for Class 3 director is someone that is familiar to all of our shareholders, Joe Foran, our Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer.
Joe's had an over 40-year career as an executive in oil and gas companies, and the majority of that in companies that he founded. He has served as the Founder, President, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Matador Resources since its founding 17 years ago in July 2003. He has received a number of accolades from our industry and from the business industry in general, and most recently was honored as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Southwest region in 2019. I can say without a doubt, on behalf of the board, the management team, and the entire employee base, we are very happy to have Joe as the leader of this company. In addition, in September 2019, Matador appointed Monika Ehrman to the board.
As is our policy for directors that are appointed between shareholder meetings, Monika is to stand for election at this shareholders meeting. Monika is standing for election as a class 1 board member for a term ending at the shareholders meeting in 2021. Monika is a professor and teaches at both University of Oklahoma College of Law, as well as the University of Oklahoma College of Business. She is the faculty director of the Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Center at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. Prior to teaching, she served as in-house counsel for two oil and gas companies, and prior to that, she has worked as a petroleum engineer in the upstream, midstream, and pipeline sectors of the energy industry.
Monika has a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Alberta, a law degree from Southern Methodist University, and a master's in law degree from Yale Law School. In addition to her expertise in law and engineering, which has been invaluable to the board, she also has significant expertise in environmental, social, and governance issues and is guiding the board and the company in those areas. More information with respect to the qualifications of each nominee are included in the proxy statement, and the board of directors has recommended that you vote for all of the nominees. Joe?
Thank you, Ken. On behalf of everyone on the board and the Matador staff, we want to express our appreciation to you, Ken, for your many contributions to the board and to your long time as a shareholder back to 1990, I believe.
Correct.
We look forward to your continued service and the ability to call on you in all the tight places.
Thank you, Joe.
The second order of business is a non-binding advisory vote to approve the 2019 compensation program of our named executive officers, known as say on pay, as set forth in the proxy statement. The board of directors has recommended that you vote for the non-binding resolution approving the 2019 compensation of our named executive officers. The third order of business is the vote on the ratification of appointment of KPMG LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2020. Further information about the services provided by KPMG is set forth in the proxy statement. The board of directors has recommended that you vote for approval of the ratification of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2020. To review, the three orders of business are, one, the election of the four directors recommended.
Two, the non-binding advisory vote to approve the 2019 compensation program. Three, the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm again, but this time for the year ending December 31, 2020. At this time, we will address any questions germane to these orders of business that have been submitted to us by our shareholders during the meeting. Craig, have we received any questions?
No, Sir Joe. At this point, we have not received any questions.
Thank you, Craig. The polls are officially closed. Kyle, as Inspector of Elections, will you please announce the preliminary results?
Having canvassed the vote and having preliminarily counted and determined the number of shares of common stock voting upon the nominees for director, as Inspector of Elections, I report that each of the four nominees has received a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders at this meeting. The second proposal regarding the non-binding resolution approving the 2019 compensation of our named executive officers has received a favorable vote of a majority of the shares present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote on this matter. Finally, the third motion ratifying the appointment of KPMG LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31st, 2020, 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.
Therefore, each of the director nominees and proposals voted upon today, as described in the proxy statement, has, consistent with the recommendation of the board of directors, been approved by the shareholders and will be recorded as such in the minutes of this meeting. 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.
Yes, in the preliminary vote, it's just as a general matter, we received favorable votes of 95% or above.
That's correct, Joe.
Right. Thank you, Kyle. Now, I would like to now ask each nominee to confirm their acceptance of their election as directors. Ray, do you accept your election?
Yes, I do accept my election.
Thank you, Ray. We look forward to working with you for three more years at least.
Same here, Joe.
Right. Tim, do you accept your election?
I accept my election as director. Thanks, Joe.
Well, I feel the same way about getting to serve. What an honor it is to serve with you for another three years. Monika, will you accept your election as director?
Oh, yes. Thank you, Joe. I accept my election as director. It's been a privilege to have worked with the board these past months, and I look forward to continued service with this tremendous company. Thank you again.
Well, thank you, Monika. It's our tradition when someone new is elected to the boards, we always allow them to make a few remarks about why you joined and what your experience has been so far.
Well, this company is just an incredibly dynamic one, and it has been such a privilege to see the leadership of the board, the leadership of the company, and the dedication and leadership of the staff. All of those parts, that heart, that passion, have really made this a company that I am proud to be a part of. Thank you.
Thank you, Monika, and we've really enjoyed serving with you. It's been just a real pleasure. I would now like to ask Ray Baribault to recognize outgoing director David Posner, whose term has expired at today's meeting. We greatly have appreciated David's expertise in marketing, all of his extra efforts to get to know the staff, and his many contributions to the board and to the company. Ray?
Thanks, Joe. I'd like to take this opportunity on behalf of all of our directors to thank David for his service on our board and his dedication, his professionalism, and his contributions to Matador and its midstream and marketing business. David's career expertise, knowledge, and understanding of oil and gas commodity marketing and natural gas processing have been very helpful during an important expansion phase of Matador's Delaware Basin production and midstream operations. Hats off to David to his service to Matador. Back to you, Joe.
David, just many, many thanks to you, and we'd like to give you a round of applause, please. Please don't be a stranger, and let's stay connected, and we'll hope that you'll be a regular at these annual meetings. Thank you. Okay. Look forward to seeing you in the future when you have time, David. We'll miss you, but do want you to stay involved. Your wisdom, integrity, and friendship are much appreciated here. This completes the schedule items of business to be conducted at this meeting. There being no further business before the meeting, the formal portion of the 2020 annual meeting is now formally adjourned. In case you're interested, the directors and I have asked our president, Matt Hairford, and our CFO to provide a few remarks on the state of Matador and the outlook going forward from their vantage point.
Thanks, Joe. Thanks everyone for joining us as well. Yeah. Just to be clear on the procedure, we formally closed the formal part of the meeting. We're now moving into the two management presentations. Now I'd like to formally invite, so we stay official, that you as President and David as CFO to make some remarks. We did get a shareholder question about what the outlook was going into 2021. I would just simply address it as that a big part of what the share price will do is tied to oil, but it's also tied to what we can accomplish that the two of you will talk about. Is that the only question that we have, Craig?
Yes, sir. That's the only one.
All right. Let me turn it over to you, Matt.
Okay. Thanks, Joe, and thanks everyone for joining us. This is always a special day for us here at Matador. We greatly enjoy seeing each of you each year, and glad we get to at least do this virtually this year. Joe, I just wanted to circle back on your comments regarding our leadership program and point out that you too are sharing your leadership qualities while also leading one of these groups, and that your son, Bill, a decorated Marine Major that recently led his team during a tour in Afghanistan. I know that you're proud of Bill, and so are we. We hope that you will let him know how proud we are of him and as well as all the veterans that serve us. Thank you for that. Before we jump off into the slides, I just want to make a few comments.
Joe, David, myself, the entire executive committee, we're all very proud of the staff and proud of the company. We continue to execute well and find ways to make progress in these challenging times. At the beginning of the year, we put together what we thought was the exact plan we wanted to execute on for 2020. That included us running six rigs. It was a good plan. It still would be a good plan, one that we felt confident that we could execute on. As Joe mentioned, the world has changed. We've got the commodity price decline. Then the unfortunate COVID-19 pandemic that's affected all of us and has actually affected the demand side of our business. What did the staff do? Well, typical Matador fashion, they figured out a way to make it work.
This isn't the first time we've had to deal with adversity, and this team continues to perform. Put our heads together, came up with a great plan for the current scenario that actually involves us running three rigs instead of six, and we're very comfortable and very happy with this plan and know that we can execute on that. That being said, it's been said earlier today, we do reserve the right to get smarter and make any additional changes as we go throughout the year. We're also very excited about how we continue to develop both our business lines. That being the E&P business with Matador and the midstream business with San Mateo. We'll talk a little bit about that. David and I are going to go through this presentation kind of in the Lewis and Clark fashion that we always do.
I hope that you see as we go through this, that the teamwork, the innovation, and the collaboration of a company. That's typically in our culture, that's what we all strive to do. That's what gets us through these tough times and makes us a better company. As Joe says, we always strive to get a little better every day. This next slide is how the progress we've made since the IPO in 2012. If you look across the top of this slide, you'll see total proved reserves, net acreage position, and our average daily production. You see the set of pie charts. The little ones were at the time of the IPO, the big ones are as of March 31st, 2020. We'll jump off into the reserves.
At this point, I'd like to introduce Brad Robinson, our Executive Vice President of Reservoir Engineering and Chief Technology Officer. Brad wears a lot of hats for us, and he does a great job working with all the team members on a lot of different matters, not just reserves. Brad's report indicates that, as Joe said, at the time of the IPO, we had about 27 million BOE. Almost all that was in the Haynesville. It's gas in the Haynesville. Fast-forward now, it's almost 10 times that at 260 million for the company. What we're going to focus on here today primarily is the Delaware Basin. If you look at the time of the IPO, we had very low reserves, 100,000 in the Delaware Basin, and now we're over 240 million. A great job in getting that built up. Net acreage position.
At this point, I think I'd like to introduce Van Singleton, who's the Executive Vice President and Head of Land. At the time of our IPO, we had about 7,500 acres. We told the market we were going to establish a position, a large position in the Delaware Basin, that was met with a bit of skepticism. People thought it couldn't be done, everything was leased. We were going to have trouble putting a position together. Van and Craig and the legal team have done a fantastic job putting this 128,000 acres together in the Delaware Basin. As Tim said, they kind of did it at about a third of the price that others have done. We're really happy with the acreage we've got, really happy to be operating and executing on that acreage.
The daily production numbers, you can see, again, at the Delaware Basin, we had almost no production at the time of the IPO, where we're over 60,000 BOE per day just in the Delaware and 70,000 as a company. This slide is the one we've talked about, profitable growth at a measured pace. It comes up all the time here, and it's one of our favorite sayings. On the top three or the top half of the slide, you can see three charts that indicate our production growth. We won't go through each of these, but if you just look at the oil production growth in the last 10 years, in 2010, we had almost no oil production. 2019, we produced 14 million barrels. If you look at the next graph over, that's gas, and that's about a 6X growth over those 10 years.
You can see them combined together. The bottom half of the chart reflects the profitable side of things. You can see revenues there on the left, EBITDA in the middle. You see the dip there in the 2015, 2016 range, revenue and EBITDA is absolutely affected by commodity price. This isn't our first rodeo dealing with these low commodity prices. We had it in 2015, 2016. I think we've navigated pretty well through that. In fact, if you just look at the EBITDA growth there, I think it's interesting, in 2010, we had less than $25 million. In last year, 2019, we had over $600 million. I talked about the A-plus locations, and we just kind of wanted to resurface that up and talk about what actually constitutes an A+ location.
It's a minimum of 15% rate of return on $30 oil price and $1.75 gas price, and that includes the uplift for NGL. To get in that club, you have to have a pretty healthy EUR. These wells are going to make over 900,000 barrels of oil or 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. All these wells are longer laterals. They're a mile and a half, 2 mi laterals, which is an integral part of our strategy for this year and going forward.
Tim said, I think Joe said it, we've got 775 gross locations, A+ locations, which not quite half of those, 360, are going to be operated by Matador. You can look at the queue down on the bottom left. That shows the distribution by formation. The pie chart on the right shows it by asset area. We've got them pretty well distributed vertically and also in geographic areas with that I'll turn it over to David.
Well, good morning, everybody. This is David. Sure glad to be able to talk to everybody again this year. It's my pleasure. This first slide I was going to make some comments on today shows you our acreage position in the Delaware Basin. I just wanted to point out, and as you can see in the slide, that we continue to deliver strong well results all across our various asset areas in the basin. As Tim pointed out, it's an excellent acreage position. We've got about 236,000 gross and 128,000 net acres across the Delaware Basin today. I wanted to show this slide to just give you some orientation, in case you forget from year to year as to what the various asset areas are that we're working in, and there's some new ones on this slide perhaps this year.
Joe's talked about the Rodney Robinson wells. Matt will talk a little bit more about that specifically. Just by way of orientation, you can see that those are in the western part of our Antelope Ridge asset area. The five Ray wells that have been mentioned, well, they're going to be neighbors to the Jack Sleeper wells that we recently completed. They're up in Rustler Breaks. The five Leatherneck wells that are going to come on in August, they're up in what we call the Greater Stebbins Area, which is in the southern part of our Arrowhead asset area. They're going to be neighbors to the three Stebbins wells that you see on this particular slide. All the wells, with the exception of those initial Stebbins wells, are 2 mi laterals.
These are some of our initial 2 mi laterals in the basin, and as you can see, all of them are doing very well. The other asset area that I want to particularly orient you to is the Stateline asset area, and that's the one down in southern Eddy County, right there on the Texas and New Mexico border. We've just completed drilling our first 13 wells in that asset area. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes, but that's certainly going to be an asset area that you're hearing a lot more about from Matador Resources going forward. Of course, we continue to have activity in our Wolf and Jackson Trust asset areas to the south.
I would also like to acknowledge the work of Van Singleton, Craig Adams, and the entire land and legal department for all that they have done to help to assemble this acreage position and to help us get wells ready to drill. Further, I want to acknowledge Ned Frost and his excellent geoscience team for all they've done to identify many, many individual vertical targets that we are exploring for developing, and I think we're up to 16 or 17 targets now, and they continue to find new ones all the time.
Our team leaders, Tom Elsener, Trent Goodwin, Chris Villarreal, Glenn Stetson, Austin Wright, have done a great job of managing these assets on behalf of Matador, and their individual team members, whether they're geologists or land men, land administration folks, engineers, whether they're drilling or completing or putting on the facilities or whether they're the accountants that are counting the barrels and the dollars that come from all these properties. We just want you to know how proud we are of each of you and all your hard work that's enabled us to put this position together and deliver such good results.
Thanks, David. Next slide, I want to talk a little bit about our Rodney Robinson wells. It was one of the milestones for 2020 was for us to get these wells drilled, completed, and online in the first quarter. We did. Maybe just to take a step back in time, we actually purchased this acreage in the September 2018 BLM lease sale. That's almost two years ago, but even in the months prior to that lease sale, the team was actively working on this project. Ned and his geoscience team, David had just mentioned, they'd identified this area to be one of our favorites and most prospective in the basin.
The BLM announced the lease sale, and Van and his team, they started immediately working with the asset team, looking at this acreage, along with the ops guys, as well as the midstream and marketing team, just to make sure that we had fully vetted the pros and cons of this acreage block before we ever decided to bid on it, and to know exactly what we would be willing to pay for it before we went into the auction. I think the team did a really nice job with that. We won the bid. We were happy with the bid. The team immediately went to work submitting drilling permits, location permits, infrastructure permits, anything that we knew that we would need to make sure that we could meet our timeline and get these wells drilled and online in time. We got it done.
We expected these wells to be very good, and they are. You can see the cumulative IP up there is over 19,000 BOE per day. Down on the bottom left, you can see we drilled two Avalon wells, a lower and an upper. We drilled two Second Bone Spring wells and two Wolfcamp XY wells, and they've all turned out above our expectations. On the bottom right of the slide, you'll see a cost evaluation. Billy Goodwin, head of operations, his team had put together cost estimates, which are the dark blue bars, and then the light blue bars on that graph are our actual costs for those wells. Over that six-well project, they saved $5.5 million, which is almost $1 million per well. That's a pretty good start on that block of acreage. Next slide is actually a photograph of those Brad Robinson facilities.
We often comment that the drillers have these wells for a few weeks, the completion guys have them for a few weeks, and then the production department has them for a few decades. It's very important how we construct and operate these facilities. You can see the IP numbers up there again. Those are big numbers. Big gas numbers, big oil numbers. The water numbers are big, too. At one point in time during the flowback operations, we had 46,000 bbl of fluid, so water and oil combined, 46,000 barrels per day. You can see the tanks in the background of this photo. There's actually 14 of them. There's two lines of seven. They're each 1,000-barrel tanks.
We have enough storage capacity for 14,000 bbl, which sounds like a lot, but if you're producing 46 during the course of a day, you've got about a third of the day that you can store on location. The point of this, it's very, very important that we have gas on pipe, water on pipe, and oil on pipe before we ever start flowing these wells back. Special thanks to Glenn Stetson, who's our Senior VP and head of production, and the entire field staff for making sure all this stuff was done right, putting it together, and working closely with the midstream and marketing teams to make sure we had agreements in place so we could get all this stuff up and going in a timely manner, which they've actually done. Yet another example of the teams working well together. Okay.
Appreciate those comments about Brad Robinson, Matt, as was once famously said, anything you can do, I can do better. Here's what we did or are doing on the Stateline asset in southern Eddy County. I hope my voice can convey just how excited I am about this asset and all the great work that's gone into it by this staff. This is a great area. It's probably the best area in the Delaware Basin, I don't think that we're the only ones that think so. Like the Brad Robinson, it was one of the key tracks that we acquired in the 2018 BLM lease sale.
We've also been working on this property for about two years, from the time of getting the bid ready through acquiring the property, which was in September 2018, then over the last 18-20 months in getting all the permits, getting the wells ready to drill. We actually initiated drilling on this property in early January 2020. There are going to be up to 88 wells, we think, and maybe more, drilled in these blocks. The wells we'll talk about is the Boros wells are on the eastern side of the track, they're all 2 mi laterals. Going forward, we'll be drilling wells on the western side of the track that will be called the Voni wells, they'll be up to two and a half miles.
As I mentioned, we started drilling on this, really, it was just around Christmas time and into the first of December. We have recently finished drilling the first 13 Boros wells. As you can see in the little cube in the lower right-hand corner, this is where the wells are situated vertically. One in the Avalon, two in the Second Bone Spring, four in the Wolfcamp A-XY, four in the Wolfcamp A-Lower, two in different zones of the Wolfcamp B. The initial tests are on six different vertical targets. We think that there are probably at least 11 or more. We've also just initiated drilling on the first of what will be 12 Voni wells on the western side of this track.
In June and July, we will be completing the first 13 Boros wells, completing the fracturing operations. In August, we'll be drilling out frac plugs, cleaning out these wells, and getting them ready to turn to sales. We anticipate that these wells will be turned to sales during early September into October, and they will be the first wells in the Stateline area to be delivering natural gas into the newly completed plant that Joe mentioned as part of the San Mateo II expansion. I think we are very excited to get these wells online. We think they're going to be as good as or better than the wells we drilled in Brad Robinson. We've been thinking about the day these wells get turned to sales for a long time, and it's not too far in the future now.
The other asset area that's an area of real focus and another really exciting asset for Matador is this Greater Stebbins Area in the southern part of the Arrowhead asset area. It also is going to deliver a lot of eight-plus locations. We always knew this area was going to be a good one for the Second Bone Spring and the Third Bone Spring, what we hoped was we would be able to demonstrate that we could push the success of the Wolfcamp A-XY northward from Rustler Breaks into this area. The initial wells that we've drilled on the Stebbins property have demonstrated that, albeit these were just 1 mi laterals.
We have drilled our first 2 mi laterals in this area, a five-well batch of Leatherneck wells, as we call them, including two Third Bone Spring tests, two Wolfcamp A-XY tests, and our first Wolfcamp B test in the area. These wells are going to be completed during the summer months. They're scheduled to come on production sometime in August. We've got about 11,000 gross, 5,000 net acres in this area. They've, again, a lot of good technical and land work that's been done to continuously block up and add to this acreage position so that we would have more one and a half and 2 mi laterals to drill. Today, we think we have over 150 different potential drilling locations in the Greater Stebbins Area.
I think if you look at the little graph in the lower right-hand corner, you can also see how well our initial wells are doing. This shows you the cumulative production per foot from the first three Stebbins wells that we've drilled in the Wolfcamp, and how that compares to the average of other wells throughout the Northern Delaware Basin that have been completed, non-Matador wells in the Wolfcamp A-XY. You can see that our wells are substantially exceeding the average. Matt?
Thanks, Dave. One of our other favorite sayings in the firm is drilling better wells for less money, and I think this slide captures a lot of that notion. If you look at the top of this, we're talking about the difference between drilling two 1 mi laterals and one 2 mi lateral. While drilling two of the 1 mi laterals on two sections of our properties does yield attractive rates of return, if you're able to drill one mi lateral on those same two sections, you've got significant advantages. Number one, you just have to drill one vertical section of the wellbore.
Secondly, this is a little bit complicated, we'll try to make it as simple as possible, but due to different regulatory restrictions on how close we can actually drill up to a lease line, by drilling one 2 mi lateral versus two 1 mi laterals, we can complete an additional 850 ft of zone in those same two sections. That's three or four stages. That adds a lot of production, adds a lot of reserves. There's a ton of advantages, that's just a couple, to drilling 2 mi laterals. Initially, we started drilling 1 mi laterals, and there was a good reason to do that. That gets the acreage held by production, lets you delineate zones. Ultimately, we wanted to move to these longer laterals.
The land and legal team, again, has done a great job, first off, getting the 1 mi laterals ready to drill and getting them drilled, but subsequently creating partnerships with our neighbors, whether that's negotiating joint operating agreements, making trades, or whatever other things we need to do to get done to make sure that we can drill more and more of these longer laterals. Joe mentioned that we're going around 83% longer laterals. That's kind of the norm going forward. We think that almost all of our wells in some time will be these longer laterals. The graph on the bottom left is yet another representation of cost savings. In 2018, we were drilling 1 mi laterals primarily, which is about 4,700 foot of completed lateral, and we were averaging about $1,500 per completed lateral foot. 2019, we improved greatly there.
We got from $1,500 down to $1,200 per foot, increased the lateral length by about 1,000 feet. For 2020, we have estimated that we'll increase the lateral length by 3,000 ft, which gets us to 8,700 foot of lateral, and we're going to drive those costs down below $1,000 per foot. I think the ops team is already there for that. The picture on the bottom right is, we've talked about MAXCOM throughout the morning here. I really would like to spend about two hours talking about this. I think in lieu of that, we'll just invite you, if you are in Dallas, to come by and let us show it to you. It's really something. What you're looking at there in the picture is the actual room. In those screens, you can see that's real-time data coming in from operations out in the field.
These guys are seeing the same thing that the guys in the field are seeing. Some of the things that they're doing there, they're 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They're geosteering. They're determining which rock to drill in. They're optimizing drilling parameters, doing a lot of things that are very helpful. If the one thing that you can't quantify is how your geologists are going to be better for knowing a lot about drilling engineering and how your drilling engineers are going to be better for knowing a whole lot about geology. Next slide. Jeff showed this slide. I just wanted to point out a couple things about it. They have set 86 records, which is very impressive. They have saved over $9 million.
If you look at the spreadsheet down on the bottom, you can see that it's not just one geographic area or it's not just one part of the wellbore. They've been doing it across all geographic areas. You can see Antelope Ridge, Rustler Breaks, Wolf, Jackson Trust on through there. Then the up and down, the vertical portion, surface through two intermediate sections, they're setting records in all these intervals. I do want to point out one other thing on this slide before we move on, and that's up in the top right, the Jack Sleeper 201H. It's a 2 mi lateral that we drilled in a little less than 18 days. If you remember just a few years back, we came into the basin. It was us and others, and we're drilling these wells in 45, maybe 50 days instead of 18 days.
If you just assume 48 days compared to 18 days, that's 30 days less that we're on these wells. Even in today's lower service price environment, it's probably $50,000 a day on these rigs, and when costs are high, it's up to $100,000. There's $1.5 million-$3 million in cost savings there that is 100% related to efficiencies, and we get to keep that regardless of what the service costs are. Quickly, we'll move on to San Mateo. I think Joe did a really nice job going through San Mateo, but we do have two business lines, so let's talk a little bit about San Mateo.
I think one of the main objectives for us for this year is to effectively communicate to the market what the true value of this midstream asset is, and also know how it factors into our free cash flow discussion beginning as early as the fourth quarter of this year. San Mateo is going to generate over $100 million in EBITDA this year, for which Matador is entitled to 51% of that. A little over $50 million in cash is going to come in the door, and we expect that to grow for 2021. The San Mateo II build-out will be completed this year, and San Mateo combined will have free cash flow in 2021, and that's going to contribute to Matador's goal to get to a free cash flow status too. At this point, I want to introduce three guys.
Gregg Krug is our Executive Vice President of Marketing and Midstream Strategy. Greg not only runs the marketing department, but he contributes significantly to the San Mateo activities. Matt Spicer and Brian Willey, who are co-COOs of San Mateo, they've done, what I think, is a really nice job with continuing to add value to San Mateo with the ongoing expansion and successful efforts to find third-party business. With that, I'll turn it back to Dave.
Thank you, Matt. We just want to close out our comments this morning with a few numbers and a little bit of a preview of what the plan's going to look like for the rest of the year. Despite all that went on in the first quarter with the declining oil prices in March and coronavirus and whatever, we did have a very strong first quarter. Our production and our oil production, our oil equivalent production both exceeded our expectations. Our lease operating expenses were better than our expectations. In fact, they were the best first quarter lease operating expenses that we'd had since being a public company. On the G&A side, our LOE of $2.51 per BOE was actually the best quarter of any vintage we'd ever had since being a public company.
This is before a lot of the salary cuts and staff rotations and things actually took effect in the early second quarter, as Joe mentioned earlier. We think we're going to continue to do better there. Likewise, our CapEx came in lower than we expected. On the drilling side, while some of that was timing related, a good $15 million of that $25 million in savings was just due to clear cost savings due to better efficiency and better service pricing that we received in the first quarter. I'm proud to say that Matador exceeded the guidance of the analysts on Wall Street for the key financial and operational metrics in Q1 2020, which marked the 23rd consecutive quarter or almost six years in which we've been able to meet or beat the Street's expectations.
Joe presented this slide earlier, and it does show the fact that we have revamped our CapEx program. As we've mentioned, we're moving our program from six rigs to three by the end of the second quarter. Two of those rigs have already been laid down, and the third will be by the end of this month, and we'll finish out the year running three rigs. That will result in a capital savings of about $250 million compared to our original estimates. We had originally estimated about $720 million, and now we think we'll spend around $470 million at the midpoint of our guidance in CapEx. We did not make any changes to our midstream capital estimates for the year. Those remained at about $95 million.
The reason for that is that it was very important to us that we go ahead and complete the build-out of the San Mateo II expansion, including the new processing plant, new trunk lines, and the other related infrastructure. If you look at the graph on the bottom, you can see the cadence we expect in our capital expenditures for drilling and completing wells for the rest of the year. What you'll see is that we're going to have incurred about two-thirds of our budget for drilling and completion costs by the end of the second quarter. By the end of this month, we'll have spent about two-thirds of the budget, and we only have about one-third of the budget left to spend for the remainder of the year.
It's a little higher in the third quarter because we will have quite a bit of completion activity ongoing associated with finishing up the completions on the Boros wells there at the Stateline. In the fourth quarter, we expect to have capital expenditures just a little over $60 million, as it'll be a fairly light quarter for completions. I think we currently only have about three wells scheduled to be completed in the quarter. As Joe mentioned earlier, we do expect to be free cash flow positive in the fourth quarter. You may wonder, with us reducing our rig count this way, were we going to be able to continue to grow our production in 2020? I'm pleased to say that yes, we will.
We think that our overall production will grow by about 7% this year, as you can see in the graph in the upper left-hand corner of this slide. Oil production should grow around 9%. Natural gas production should grow around 5%. Our production will be a little bit more lumpy this year. By that I mean some quarters will be up, some may be flattish or even down. It's weighted to the fourth quarter. I think you'll see a significant jump in our production in the fourth quarter of 2020 as the first 13 Boros wells there at the Stateline are turned to sales late in the third quarter and impact our production in the fourth quarter. One thing I really wanted to point out on this slide, though, is the graph in the lower left-hand corner.
That shows you what our Delaware oil and natural gas production growth is going to be for the year. This is where we're actually spending the money and applying the capital. It's not surprising that we're going to have declines in production in the Eagle Ford and the Haynesville because we're not drilling any wells there or spending any capital. If you look at where we're putting the money, you can see that that production is going to grow by 15% this year, even though we're going to be reducing our rig count from six to three, 14% in oil and 16% in natural gas. We're still going to have healthy growth, even though our rig count is going to be cut by half before the end of the year. I also wanted to just briefly mention our hedging profile for the rest of the year.
There's a lot of information on this slide, but what I'd really like you to take away from it is that we restructured a lot of our existing hedges and added some new hedges since the 1st of April to protect our balance sheet and our cash flows going forward. We started the year with probably less than 50% of our oil hedged. In doing these restructurings, we had about 100% of our oil hedged in the second quarter, then probably 70%-80% in quarters three and quarters four going forward. That's given us a lot of comfort in terms of protecting the balance sheet and protecting Matador from any further decline in oil prices over the rest of this year.
In addition, we've started looking at hedging our natural gas production, and we currently have about 45% of our anticipated production hedged during the winter months from November through December of 2020, and then in Q1 of 2021. I think you can probably expect us to hedge additional oil and natural gas production as we go forward the remainder of this year to provide further protection for our cash flows in 2021. I also wanted to just make a couple of quick comments about the bank group. First of all, we continue to have a very simple balance sheet, and we have no near-term debt maturities. I think in this time where we've had the low prices and a lot of concern in the industry among investors and shareholders, that's been particularly comforting, the fact that we have no near-term debt maturities.
Our reserve-based loan isn't due until 2023 and our bonds are out to 2026. We have a strong supported bank group. On the reserve side, it's led by the Royal Bank of Canada, but I would be remiss if I didn't note that we also have a San Mateo facility that's administered and led by Scotiabank. The bank group affirmed our borrowing base in the spring redetermination at $900 million. We chose to increase our elected commitment to $700 million. The bank group stepped up and that was actually oversubscribed, and we also added two new lenders to our commercial bank group. It was a very successful spring redetermination process. I want you to know that at the end of the first quarter, that we were well below our single bank covenant of maximum debt to EBITDA ratio of 4.0. We came in at 2.2.
We expect to remain below that covenant for the remainder of the year. We have sufficient liquidity, ample liquidity really, to prosecute the drilling program for the remainder of this year. We really appreciate the bank group for all their support over the years and particularly in times like these. I'd really like just to take a minute and acknowledge them all. RBC, Scotia, Bank of America, BMO, SunTrust, now Truist, Comerica, IBERIABANK, Huntington, CIBC, and the two newest banks, PNC Bank and Cadence Bank. They've been with us for a long time. Comerica, for example, has banked Joe all the way back to the Matador I days. I think it's probably well over 30 years at this point. We're really very grateful to everyone in the bank group.
Finally, I wanted to just close out with the slide that Joe opened with, because I think it kind of will bring the day full circle. Quite frankly, as I look at this slide, I think if there's one slide that I hope you'll take with you and kind of go back and look at from time to time when you think about this meeting or about what Matador is doing this year, because I think this slide kind of says it all. This captures all of our 2020 priorities and projects. As Joe said, clearly the first priority for this year is protecting the balance sheet.
In the upper left-hand corner, you can see all the different things that we've talked about this morning and all the different things that we've been doing to protect the balance sheet and keep ourselves financially healthy in these difficult times. In the lower left corner, we talked about the San Mateo expansion today and what an important project that is for us, and how we expect that to be completed in the August timeframe and ready to take first production from both the Boros wells at the Stateline and the Leatherneck wells at Stebbins. We're going to have 200 additional million cubic feet a day of gas processing capacity, which will get us up to almost half a billion cubic feet a day of processing capacity there in that plant in Eddy County, the Black River processing plant.
We'll begin to start to earn a lot of the incentives that Five Point has provided for us as part of the San Mateo II expansion, while continuing to earn the incentives that were part of the San Mateo I deal. This project's also been going on for a year and a half now. It's getting close to completion, and we're very excited about it. In the lower right-hand corner, as we kind of move counterclockwise, we've talked a lot about another thing that's very important over the last couple of years at Matador, and that's been improved capital efficiency and the move to longer laterals. We've increased our average lateral length, as Matt told you, from 4,700 ft to this year it'll be 8,700 ft.
Along the way, we've taken out a lot of the cost of those operations, not only through our own efficiency, but through reductions in service costs, such that we'll probably be 35% or so better than we were in 2018 in terms of cost per foot. I think you'll see that our cost per foot on average are going to be in the low 900s or below before we get through the rest of this year. Finally, in the little green box up at the top, that kind of shows you the production milestones that we've talked about on several occasions this morning. The things that we're kind of looking at to mark our progress, and you can too. We've got the Rodney Robinson wells and the Ray wells in the rearview mirror now.
We'll be happy to share with you the results of the Ray wells at our next earnings call as they're just now starting to flow back. The Leatherneck wells, as we mentioned, in the Greater Stebbins Area, are going to start producing here in August. The San Mateo expansion should be largely complete in August, near the 1st of September. In September and early October, we're very excited to have first production from the first 13 Stateline wells, which should really boost our production and serve us well for the rest of the year. These are the things that we're focused on. This is the menu, and this is what you can expect us to be doing for the rest of the year.
Finally, in closing, if you just permit me one personal note, I'd like to say thank you to Rob Macalik, who's our Chief Accounting Officer, to Michael Frenzel, and Mac Schmitz, and the other members of the accounting and the finance team for all of your work in preparation for this meeting, for all your support of me during the year. There's a lot of numbers and a lot of slides that go into putting this together. I appreciate all the help that you've given to all of us in getting that together.
Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't say thank you to Amanda Crawford, who's our Office Manager, Joe's assistant, my assistant, and a lady that helps everybody out here at Matador. Amanda, wherever you are this morning, thank you for all that you do and all the contributions you make to Matador. With that, Joe, Matt and I are through, and I'll turn the meeting back to you.
Thank you, David. You stole my thunder on.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Amanda.
She's dear to you.
I warned you, this is a very competitive staff. It works very well together. You better be quick. I just echo what you said about Amanda and the whole group up here at Matador. It's an exceptional group. Everybody works well together, and Amanda is a big part of that hub, of that wheel of everybody working and getting things done. We appreciate her and the other support staff that we have all around the office. I'm like you, I want to be sure to pass out the credit because we certainly don't do this alone. It's a team effort, and I want to thank Jim Basich and Mitzi Scott for the way they put together this first virtual meeting.
We didn't know how it'd happen, but Jim, in his Basich deal, he just pulled it off as smooth as he be, and thank you. Matt did it, both of y'all. We wanted to recognize so many people that have contributed for the midstream with Matt Spicer, James Myers, Sam Wooden. I don't want to overlook any of the field because they're the ones that have to put the wrench on it to make it happen. Thanks to Jason Thibodeaux and Doug Prejean for, as Matt pointed out, in pulling together the Rodney Robinson wells. Although there are 14,000 bbl of capacity out there, that's less than one day's volumes that you've got to deal with. Really superb job, been real difference makers on that.
The whole staff has come through each time that we've needed, and I'm glad y'all pointed out the leaders in those various groups, because they just don't get enough credit for all the good work that they do. Before I leave this subject, I got a note, and this is the interesting things of being online, from David Posner saying, "Thank you, Joe and Ray, for your comments today. Much appreciated." "I will miss ongoing involvement with the company. As you know, I have tremendous respect and confidence in the company leadership and staff. Wishing you the very best navigating the future challenges." To you, David, we say again, we're going to miss you.
We've enjoyed getting to know you and Helen and serving with you, and please let Helen know, too, that the welcome mat is always out for you here, and we want you to stay a part of the Matador family. I now turn to the part of the meeting that y'all may be waiting here. Are there any questions?
No, sir. That's it.
Now you get to hear what you've probably been waiting for. We've kept the meeting coming to an end. As several of us have said, we could stay here a couple more hours. We invite all of you, and any time you're in Dallas here, come by and have a cup of coffee with us. This is your company, too, and we want to be a little bit different from the others and make sure that you feel that it's your company and your stock holding matters to us. If we have overlooked, Matt, Dave, and I, anybody, give us a chance next year, because we really appreciate all that y'all do to make this company work.
As you see, as we've grown from the day we went public, we had about 30 people, and today we have 250, 270, in that magnitude, and it takes a lot more teamwork. Thank you to the other vice presidents and the other staffers for your excellent work, dedication, professionalism, and integrity. You're the backbone of this company. We always know that, and we appreciate your efforts to get better every day. With that, I can say this completes today's meeting.
At this time, our board of directors will meet in executive session to review the matters voted on today and carry out the business on behalf of the company and shareholders. Thank you again for your time, and attention, and support this morning, and thanks again for being Matador shareholders and part of the Matador family. Please be safe and take care. The 2020 Resources Annual Meeting of Shareholders is now concluded, and we hope to see you again next year in person. Thanks.