We have a few minutes before we go live here and we just kind of want to get people seated and this meeting will be broadcast. But before we get there, we were going to show you a little video from our trip to New York that I thought you all might enjoy. And I think if you're in here, you could see the pictures revolving around and it was a good time and we appreciate all those participating. But I want you to know we don't feel that it's going to be the last time we're up there. So anybody that missed it can have a rain check and plan to go up there with us again because we're going to be going back sometime between the stock is $50.60.
So stay alert. We're moving up from there. Matt, ready? Couple of things that Hollywood's been calling me to get you some of your names and addresses. And any cost associated with this endeavor, we hope to recover by the sale of pictures and videos.
But it was a very nice time. And Mac, have we gone live yet? Okay. He says we've gone live, so now I have to watch what I say. But I'm going to formally now call the meeting to order and ask that Craig Adams serve as Secretary.
So officially, I'm Joe Foray, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Founder and Chief Executive Officer. I wish 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. I will act as Chairman of this meeting and Craig Adams, Executive Vice President, Land, Legal and Administration, will act as recording secretary of the meeting. Craig, will you accept your appointment?
Yes, I will. Okay, great. Thank you, Craig. At this time, I would like to introduce the members of our Board of Directors of the company in attendance today. It is a superb group that is professional, knowledgeable, works well with each other and has great personal integrity.
Beginning with Ray Barabaugh, our Lead Independent Director. Ray is a petroleum engineer from LSU, worked for Netherland and Sewell before going out to start for Exxon, then Netherland and Sewell before going out to start his company that works in the Bakken. Then Gaines Beatty. Gaines is here, been associated with us for over 25 years and graduate of tech, worked for IBM and now has a headhunting service. It's more than that for C suite people, primarily in the tech business, but has helped us for over 25 years hire people.
If you were interviewed wait, wait just a second. If you were interviewed by Gaines prior to your formal employment with Matador, would you please stand? This is just a partial. All right. Thanks.
He is also the author, champion of the barrio about his father, who played was outstanding running back in Texas in 1940, went to A and M, called the service, served in the military World War II, came back, played in that those years afterwards against Don't Walker and Tom Landry and all of those and then went into coaching and I recommend if you haven't read it already, give it a try. Craig Burkert, Craig. Craig's been a shareholder since 1984, helped get us our IT group going, graduate of Harvard Business School. He's been in the heavy equipment business in various forms and is what we call the floater on the board that whenever we have a special need, we just put Craig in there. So he served, I think, almost all the committees, all the shareholder committees.
So we're pleased to have his experience. Bill Byerle, Bill was one of the heads of the oil and gas practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, did Exxon and Conoco. And we are so delighted when he retired that he gave us the opportunity to get him to our Board first and has just done an outstanding job and not only from within, but I hear from KPMG too that you've done some remarkable work. So thank you, Bill, for your service. Next is Julie Forrester, a hometown girl from Amarillo.
Julie now teaches at SMU Law School. She served as Assistant Provost and maybe very top grade on the state bar exam for which we're really proud of her and is an electrical engineer undergraduate. So Julie, thank you very much for your service too. Tim Parker, Tim has been a special friend for about 15 years. He was part of one of the co heads of the Energy Practice and Portfolio Management Analyst.
And really he and his team make themselves experts in the oil and gas business and they would go out to the field and to the shows and really learn the technology and the formations and figure it out. And I went all over the country. We've been all over the country and he is certainly one of the ranking portfolio managers in the country with his outstanding record. And we're just so honored that he would join our Board and has added immensely in our discussions and has raised the bar for us and we appreciate you being here, Tim. David Posner, David came on in the midst of as our marketing midstream was emerging and graduate of Brown and then to the Colorado School of Mines for a master's.
And we came on at a time as our midstream marketing were emerging and has learned a lot of help in making sure we stay on the right track. And then another long term friend, Ken Sturek. Ken is was formerly the Global Head of Northern Rose Fulbright, a firm of 5,000 lawyers and which is no easy task. As you imagine, hurting that many lawyers at once. But Ken has been a shareholder and involved with us since 1990 and has come on to the Board with the kind of experience.
He has midstream experience, representing midstream clients as well as oil and gas clients and clients of all kinds in corporate. He was the one that was going to take Matador public when back before 9eleven happened and has stayed a very close friend and neighbor through time and we appreciate you being on the Board too. And at this time, I was going to ask if you might say a few words for George, who is whose term is expiring, but we're going to George, just a word of warning, we're not letting you go. This is our way of getting more for less.
When Joe first asked me to make some remarks about George, I said, Joe, I'm not the right person to do that. We need to find somebody of George's own stature to make the remarks. And we thought about it for a minute and quickly concluded there wasn't anybody of George's stature to make the remarks. George is one of a kind, George stands alone. So I humbly agreed to make a few remarks about George.
I could stand here and do the normal trail of reading a long list of accomplishments and successes and accolades, but quite frankly, list is far too long and Joe would give me the hook long before I got halfway through the page. So I'm going to pick 2 or 3 touch points from George's long career in life and if I can have the luxury of making a few personal observations at the end. The first touch point, let's wind back way to the early years. George is a proud graduate of the New Mexico Military Institute. And although he has certainly other august institutions on his resume, the likes of University of Texas and Harvard, I know he's proud of his graduation from New Mexico Military Institute because of the stories he tells of his time there and all he's done for the Institute over the years.
But maybe most importantly, I know the Institute is very proud of him because he stands as one of the members of the Institute's Hall of Fame, a great accolade for all of the stuff he's done. And as a second touch point, let's wind forward toward the other end of George's career. After all the successes, the accolades, he's been President of this institution and Chairman of that and President of this and Chairman of that, the list goes on and on. But as a testament of that, a few years ago, George was inducted into the prestigious Rocky Mountain Oil and Gas Hall of Fame, a testament to all he's done over the years, not only for his own business, but for the industry, the region and nationally. So there we have sort of 2 bookends, Hall of Fame bookends for a man who certainly deserves that kind of recognition.
The 3rd and final touch point I want to talk about really I think spans George's entire career and that's that George is an old school oil and gas man. And by old school, I mean, he operates with integrity and you can depend on his work. And the best example I have of that is the stories that Joe and George tell about when George decided that his very successful company, his expertise, his experienced management team and his 60,000 really high quality acres in the Permian would match up good with Matador and that's the way he wanted to go forward. George and Joe sat down, looked at each other and asked that if you'll do this, I'll do that and shook hands. And that's the old school way of doing an oil and gas deal and that's the deal.
And okay, the management teams did their due diligence and the law years back into stuff from top to bottom and probably back
to the top again.
Being a lawyer, I know that we sell by the pound. But the deal stood and the deal behind that handshake is the deal was done. So you can depend on George's work. And now if I could a couple of personal observations. George is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced oil and gas operators I've had the pleasure to deal with over my 40 year career.
And he has been kind enough to share that knowledge with the Board and with the management, but he does it with a style that is not intrusive and doesn't lord over you his knowledge, but does it with insightful questions. Does it when he gives praise, going deep into the technical things that somebody said to him to let him understand, George really understands what you just did and he really meant you did a great job. So that is something that I appreciate and the knowledge you've passed on to me been very helpful in my role on the Board. Second thing that I've noticed is that George brings an enthusiasm and an excitement to the Board that is infectious. When one of the management team members comes in and talks about a new well or a new prospect or something that geoscience team has come up with, George's eyes light up.
He's like a kid in the candy store. He leans forward, gets animated, peppers questions, he's curious, and it just infects the room with the excitement for everybody. So he's been a big part of the momentum of driving this company forward for the time he's been on the Board. So George, I think I know I can speak to the management team, the entire Board, thank you for the great service and valuable service you've given to the Board. And we are all very happy that you're going to be on the Advisory Board and continue that in the future.
So thank you for your past and future service. George Yates.
Quick yes, please. Always get a rebuttal.
Well, I just want to say that,
Ken, thank you very much for your kind words. And thank you, Joe. It's been an honor to serve on the Board. But as I was sitting there listening to Ken, I was mostly thinking, how do I get even? How do I get even for this?
But it's very kind. To the stockholders, let me share this. It is an inside view that I have. I've never worked with a company, certainly in the unconventional oil and gas industry that doesn't as well as mandatory does. You own a company that is at the highest level of performance using the best energy technology there is in the world.
And that's something to be really proud of. That technology can only be used
by the best possible human resource.
That best possible human resource is here at Mavenport. And it's been a fabulous thing to hang around these really bright people that get it done every day
and look around, see the youngsters.
Of course, at my age, everybody looks young and see the leadership that's coming up in this company. So I'm glad you're stockholders. You have a lot to be proud of. And finally, my role may be changing, but I'm going to be here. I'll be around and I'll help however I can to help see this company succeed, continue to succeed.
Thanks.
George, I just want to make sure you know that's a deal. It's a handshake on that one too, same time. But thank you, Ken. And we may be to the listeners out there, we may be introducing some of these people, but it's important for all the technology and all the capital this business requires, it still is a judgment business and a business of execution and the people make the difference. So this once a year, I like to get in, offer the shareholders a chance to see the depth of the Board, the depth of the staff and how this all works together and the great teamwork that occurs out there between the staff and the senior management, the Board and everybody else.
In that regard, one of our directors who came on at inception has been one of the great team players on our Board, Doctor. Steve Bonimus, who is unable to attend today's meeting for his health due to health reasons. And as we announced, Doctor. Bonomis is needing step down from the Board, effectively concurrent with the election of the new nominees for the Directors. And Steve was just a fabulous director.
He served on the Board since 2004 and we will miss him greatly. He was a PhD engineer, was the Head of Unical's Indonesian Operations And I think he and his wife had the best attendance of any Board member we've ever had. So without one that's still any of that, I want to pass on to Ray, our Lead Director to say a few words and say once again to George what a pleasure it was to work with him as a teammate and moving Matador greatly over these last 4 or 5 years. We've come a long way together and as you said, we've got a lot more to do. Ray?
Thank you, Joe. And I do have some scripted comments being an engineer, not an attorney. So I will read from those. But it's been an honor and a privilege to have served alongside Doctor. Onomis as a Matador Director for the last 4 years.
Steve's been in and will continue to be a stalwart shareholder. He served as Director for 14 years and has been 100% committed to Matador and its continued growth as a leading operator in industry and in the Delaware Basin. As a 33 year petroleum engineer myself, I feel qualified to say Doctor. Onomos is an engineer's engineer and takes a lot for one to say that. After obtaining his chemical engineering degree at Missouri Rolla.
He completed the master's and PhD programs there and continued on to work at 29 dedicated years at Unical. Among his many accomplishments there were Gulf Coast assignments based out of Unical's Houston office, including drilling, production and reservoir engineering disciplines that covers the gamut in our business, service as an operations manager in Anchorage, Alaska and Southeast Louisiana. He was Vice President of Unical's Indonesian Venture in Offshore Waters, Offshore Indonesia and a General Manager of Unical's Joint Partner Ventures Group, which ultimately led to his directorship appointment at Matador in 2004 and that preceded Unical's merger with Chevron in 2,005. During his service in Louisiana earlier in Steve's career, Doctor. Onomis moonlighted as a Petroleum Engineering Assistant Professor at University of Southeast Louisiana Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette.
He was a Director with the API, American Petroleum Institute, very active in many positions with the Society of Petroleum Engineers. And since 2015, he's been VP of the Chevron Retirees Association for the South Texas area. So you can see Steve has always been all in and he's always had his head in the game. His service as Chair of the Board's Operating and Engineering Committees and on other committees over the years has been instrumental to Matador's success. His mentorship and interaction with the management team and the professional staff has been invaluable.
What you won't see on Doctors Anonymous bio and the prospectus or on the company's website or on a Google search are his accomplishments as a long time elite senior triathlete, hard to believe. But Steve is a dedicated athlete. He's an original and he's a man with no enemies. He and I had the opportunity to participate last summer with the Matador with a team of Matador fellow Endurance enthusiasts at the DFW Tough Mudder Competition, which is a 5 mile course with 12 obstacles to maneuver through. I'd like to share this photo with you on the screen during that race.
And this is a shot of Steve helping yours truly over one of the hurdle obstacles towards
the end of the race. You can
see that by the look of our jerseys there, we're not quite crystal clear white that we started out as, but quite a bit of mud puddles through the race. We got to this obstacle and I think this is a beautiful representation of Steve that I'd like you to take away today. Steve's always in the game. He always has been in the game and he always will be and he's always ready to lend a helping hand. So this is a shout out to Steve and his wife, Daisy.
We're praying for you and we're praying for your full and complete recovery. And we're carrying the torch for you, awaiting your recovery and return as a Board advisor. So would you please all stand with me and give Steve a cheer and a round of applause and his dedication.
Nicely done, I can't really improve on that. It's a little bit out of order. But on the count of 3, I'd all ask to one additional everybody say together, get well, Steve, because I think you'd appreciate that too. Ready? 1, 2, 3.
Get well, Steve. Are other special board advisors, Scott King, one of the founders of Matador that got us started back in 2003 that's always been involved, Jim Rolfe. Jim is one of our original shareholders back to 1983 and appreciate him all those years. Rick Finlaw, who helps us with land. Rick is another Amarillo boy and has a very extensive land brokerage business and helping teach our young people how to take a lease.
Wade Massad, Wade, there Joe has helped us in our capital events and marketing since we went public. Wade was formerly the syndicate manager for Dane Rousher here and has been involved with us back at Old Matador, at this Matador and every other way. Greg McMichael, who is the analyst prior and was also going to be the lead analyst when we were thinking of going public back at Old Matador. Jamie Robertson, a PhD geophysics physicist from Princeton University, who was the Chief Geophysicist for Arco, worked under Marlon Downey, who meant so much to us. And so we appreciate all of your contributions.
Now I'd like to thank the additional shareholders who served on the Shareholder Advisory Committee with that includes Barry Banker. Barry is one of our original shareholders back in 1983. He came here to Dallas for a wedding and made the mistake and called me as we were getting started. So it's very dangerous to know me back then as Barry discovered. Bobby Pickert here, another one of our original shareholders back in 1983.
Bob, would you please stand? It's hard to get him to stand. You'd think the way he handled that gavel on the screen there that there'd be no problem. But and then Joe Coleman. Joe?
He slipped out. They had something to get back to. I don't think that was a vote. I think it just was obligations. Then so I do want Bob, Twinkle and Paul Zosslink, Jim to please Stan, original shareholders, Barry, all original shareholders.
And our bell ringer back there, the guy who pushed the button on ringing the bell, Paul Flowers. Paul, will you please stand with him? And these are all key people that were involved in the founding of the Matador and getting this rolling as other people came along. I hope I haven't missed one, have I? I'm scanning the room.
Speak now forever, hold your peace. And Laura, if you will please stand, I got a deal done on the day my daughter was born here. So you can see how it's progressed. Yes. And my wife, Nancy, induced her because she didn't ask too many questions when I went out in my, oh, fuck.
How are you going to make any? So we appreciate all that faith and action and support in the long term. So when I go across when we go across the country and people talk about being a long term shareholder, which means for them often 6 months or a year, we've got people to easily point to that have been in here 30 years ago. So this is just a bunch of people pushing on the rock and if you get a good idea and you get enough people then it seems to work. I would also like to recognize the officers of Matador.
And again, this is a great I feel it's a great team that's only getting better in the years to come as we promote more of our young people to these ranks. We have Matt Hereford, President, if you all would all stand. So I have an idea. David Lancaster, EVP and Chief Financial Officer Craig Adams, EVP of Land, Legal and Administration Billy Goodwin, EVP and Head of Operations Van Singleton, EVP of Land Chief Dealmaker and a little bit of everything else. Brad Robinson, Senior Vice President of Reservoir Engineering and Chief Technology Officer.
And Brad has come somewhat of our floater wherever there's a problem we put Brad in there. So he's kind of also head of what we call it plentypotentiary or something, something along those lines. Greg Krug, Senior Vice President of Head of Marketing and Midstream Rob Micalick, Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer Matt Spicer is not here, but he's the Head of our Midstream Kathy Wayne, VP, Controller and Treasurer and she and Yvonne Hoovers. Where is Yvonne? There you go.
Those 2 have worked with me longer than anyone else. And as the saying goes, if you work 30 years with me, then one of you asked for you to get along with. Brian Willey, Vice President and Co General Counsel Brian Erman, Vice President and Co General Counsel Ned Faust, Vice President of Geoscience Tom Elsner, Vice President, Engineering and Asset Manager. Tom and Jim Basic, Vice President and Managing Director of IT. How about a nice round?
I I think it's the best team in the country. It just sets tremendous depth, and they've got I haven't seen a limit to their potential. Finally, I'd like to introduce Jeff Andrews and Nathan Milton at KPMG. Jeff, I saw you earlier. Nathan, good.
They've been on our audit team for the past 5 years, and I think it's gone splendidly with Bill. They're all really professionals, and that's something we've always tried to emphasize to get the numbers right, to give credibility and confidence to the shareholders that things are going along the right way. Couple of other people to mention in putting together this meeting, not only my wife, Nancy, but Amanda Crawford, our Chief of Administration, the one we call the big chief, I mean the nice chief, that she just does a tremendous job. Mac Smith. Mac is back here taking care of the logistics of this meeting.
And again, you can go around the room, a lot of people, Bruce Keplinger from 1984. See the Biggers family here. The Biggers, please stand, Steve. And all of you here, they're very important. Bruce, did you stand?
Okay. Stay up, don't. Let them get a good look at you, the biggers. I'm trying to go through the rows a little bit here. Forrester is one of our key vendors, has really made things work during the pipeline shortages.
And of course, I have 2 sisters here who have promised to keep themselves well behaved. Rhonda and Donda, if you'll wave to everybody. All right. And Jack Vocal is Matt Spicer is gone today, but his father-in-law is here and you know you must be doing things right if you can get your father-in-law to attend to your place. So Jack, thank you.
And there's others I know, other visitors in here that I do want to recognize Greg Glosser. That's somebody else I'm trying to locate him out there. Greg, there you are, who heads up our friends and family with RBC. So often we have an offering or bonds and people need to find a place, we recommend Greg as he's done a fantastic job taking care of them there. Looking around, I don't want to miss anybody.
I see in here, I know Chris Storm was here, Chris was Amarillo guy, Chris there and trying to quickly my side is not quite as good. So if you haven't been recognized, please stand and we will You know, help me along. I've got Florence Mullins, how could I miss that? Florence, would you please stand, who's on our original Board of Directors. And we have the Florence well that is really doing exceptionally well.
And we give her great credit. So appreciate all this and there's a I met a few new shareholders out there. If you come back a time or 2, we'll be sure to recognize you as well because all of you are important and want to know everybody here and everybody listening in. Preston Bernheisel is here and Doug Gravern, 2 of our really outstanding lawyers, Larry Wolfes show our 1st day of law school and got me through procedure. And the 1st day of class, I always had a process of going in there, looking around for the people I thought would be A students and try to sit by them and make friends.
And I continued that practice after I got out and started when we started Matador of trying to find the A players like Jim Hunt over here and hang out with them and learn from him. He used to run Regency Top Lines and others. And so this is really we may be one of the last of the companies where we're started truly by friends and family as opposed to private equity. And we're proud of that with all everybody pitching in. We think it's given stability to our shareholder group and a lot of inspiration.
Steve Woods back here. Steve, you're trying to slip away. You moved around on me, but Steve is another long term friend and shareholder. And I see some of the Harvies over there. Now the Harvies, when we said stay and you wave, okay?
Way back there from Tyler and part of our Tyler roots, we go back to 'eighty three and 'eighty four and friends with the UP churches. So it's a very exciting to have all of you here together and everybody working for to make something better. We're proud of the growth that Matador has had. The first Matador was 18:one. This Matador, as I said, we had gotten up there in the 30s.
When we did, it was a 10:one type return for people. We're headed past that and as I said, plan to go back to New York. One last thing, if you're here today or on the webcast and you're not receiving occasionally I'll write a letter to the known shareholders, please let Amanda know or email us your contact information and we'll put you on the mailing list for what we call our legacy shareholder and would be delighted to include you in those mailings. With that, I want to move on to some of the formal requirements of the annual meeting. And the first is that this meeting is being held pursuant to the notice that we mailed a shareholder of record as of April 13, 2018.
I present a complete list of the shareholders of the company entitled devoted to meeting alphabetically arranged and certified as of the close of business on April 13, 2018, which is the record date for this meeting. The list will be kept open during the entire meeting subject to the inspection of any shareholder who may be pressed. Further, I present a notice, proxy statement and proxy and an affidavit that sets notice, proxy statement and proxy together with 2017 annual report of the company will mail to shareholders of record as of April 13, 2018. These documents will be filed within the minutes of the meeting. I also saw Daryl Robertson, who is one of our early attorneys here in Matador 1.
So we're glad to see you keeping your affiliation with us. Now, Kyle Ellis, who has been who we have appointed as the Inspector of Election at this meeting. Kyle, will you stand and be recognized? As the Inspector of Elections, Kyle will ascertain the number of shares of common stock outstanding and voting power of each, determine the shares of common stock represented at the meeting and the validity of proxies and ballots, count all the votes and ballots and certify and declare to this meeting his determination of the number of shares of common stock represented at this meeting and his count all votes and ballots. All holders of record of common stock at the close of business on April 13, 2018, are entitled to vote at this meeting either in person or proxy.
Kyle, will you accept your appointment as Inspector of Election and present the attendance report?
Yes, sir, I will. As Inspector of Election, I report that they are present at this meeting in person or by proxy, the holders of approximately 99,640,000 shares of common stock of the company out of a total of 109,000,000 263,103 shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote as of the record date April 13, 2018. Thus, the holders of approximately 91% 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 at the Inspector of Election, I declare that a quorum is present for the purpose of conducting business at this meeting and the meeting is legally convened and ready to transact business. A certified report of the Inspector of Election will be attached as an exhibit to the minutes of this meeting. In the interest of time, we will first deal with matters to be voted on by the shareholders. As stated in the notice of the meeting, 4 matters will be considered and acted upon this meeting to expedite the actions to be taken.
All matters of business is reflected in the notice of this meeting will be presented 1st and then a ballot will be taken afterwards for voting on each matter. The first order of business is the election of 5 directors. Our directors serve staggered 3 year terms and are grouped as Class 1, Class 2 and Class 3. Class 1 Board of Director nominees are Bill Byerley, Julie Foster and Ken Stewart. If you all would please stand just let people see you.
The Class III Directors are Tim Parker and David Posner. The Directors continuing in office and not up for election today are James Beatty, Craig Bercur, Ray Baerabaugh and myself. More information with respect to each class in terms thereof and qualifications are included in the proxy statement for this meeting. The Board of Directors has recommended that you vote for all of the nominees. The second order of business is the non binding advisory vote to approve the compensation program of our named executive officers known as say on pay is set forth in your proxy statement.
The Board of Directors has recommended that you vote for the non binding resolution approving the 2017 compensation of named executive officers. The 3rd order of business is a non binding vote on the frequency of say on pay votes known as say win on pay as set forth in your proxy statement. The Board of Directors has recommended that you vote for a 1 year frequency as opposed to a 2 year or 3 year frequency, so that each year you get a chance to vote on say on pay. And the 4th order of business is a vote on the ratification of the selection of KPMG as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2018. Further information about the services provided by KPMG is set forth in your 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, 2018. To review their 4 orders of business, election of 5 directors, the non binding advisory vote on the compensation, the non binding advisory vote on the frequency of say on pay and 4th, the ratification of KPMG as the company's auditing firm. We will now distribute ballots to anybody who wishes to have a ballot that hadn't already voted. Is there anybody desiring a ballot form? Seeing none, Kyle, will you please give us the results of the
voting? Yes, sir. 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 Election, I report that the 5 nominees of the Board of Directors, Bill Byerly, Julie Forrester and Ken Stewart as Class 1 Directors and Tim Parker and David Posner as Class 3 Directors each received a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders at this meeting.
Congratulations to each of you on your election. Be careful what you wish for. We've got a lot to do. I think we can get it done. And the company, when we come back, we want to be a little better each year.
So that's your challenge and hope you will accept that challenge and serve. In fact, like sitting on the exit row of an airplane, you're supposed to verbally let me hear I will or I guess. Okay. Thanks. Kyle, please proceed with the announcement of the results of the remaining
business matters. Yes, sir. The second motion regarding the non binding resolution approving the 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. With respect to the 3rd motion on the frequency of stay on pay votes, the greatest number of votes present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote on this matter were cast in favor of the 1 year frequency. Finally, the 4th motion ratifying the selection of KPMG LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2018, has received a favorable vote of a majority of the shares present in person or represented by proxy at this meeting entitled to vote on this matter.
Therefore, each of the director nominees and proposals voted upon today, as described in our 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. Specific information regarding the number of shares cast for or against each proposal will be included in our current report on Form 8 ks that will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Thank you, Kyle. This completes the scheduled items of business to be conducted at this meeting. At this time, if there are not any other motions for business to be brought up, I will entertain a motion that the formal portion of the meeting be adjourned and move to comments from the Executive Officers. Thank you. I wasn't sure I was going to get one there, but thank you.
I need a second too. Thanks for the second. Having heard the motion in the second, all in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed, same sign.
The motion is carried. Hearing no objection, the motion is carried and the meeting stands adjourned. At this time, the senior officers would like to discuss some recent and current operations and any questions that you may have. Our first, are there any questions from the audience? And then we'll move into comments.
Seeing none, we'll move into comments and again and give you a chance at the end of those times to ask further questions. All right. So now we move into the Chairman's remarks on the screen. I think I have the clicker technology is always a challenge for me. There you go.
The first thing, I'm just going to move over this way, move to my mic, so I can see the screen better, not that I need a magnifying glass or anything, but there's a little screen here that helps mind where we are. And always like to give a comparison of what the baseline was when we went public in February of 2012 and where we are today. The price is up 134%. A few days, it wasn't long that we were in the mid-30s and there's these questions that have come up about takeaway and transportation in the Delaware Basin and elsewhere in the Permian and we're going to address those and let you know that we think we've put together one of the finest platforms of any company out there to address the takeaway and the capacity of your water, your gas and your oil, each of which need to be treated differently. But we started on this years ago as we were building the midstream team and those years ahead of time have given us a platform which we've built upon and the current crisis is working to our advantage and that deals are easier to make because everybody is moving around to try to improve their position and find those win win deals.
And we're very confident that we're not done. We made an announcement earlier this week on many of the improvements that we've made to our position, but we're not done. There are more agreements that are on our way that will further mitigate and enhance what we have. The oil production is down by a third from where it was, but we've still managed to increase oil production from 400 barrels a day at the time we went public to over 28,000 barrels of oil. And we recently passed that 50,000 barrels BOE per day, which is a big marker within our industry and delighted to do that.
Proved oil reserves have grown from $1,100,000 to $87,000,000 and the total reserves of the company are above 150 1,000,000 BOEs or almost $1,000,000,000,000 gas equivalent. So the Delaware acreage itself has grown from 7,500 acres to 115,000 and that's the best area of the country. And what is happening in the transportation is ever so often there is some aspect of our business that gets as bottlenecks are as tight. You all can remember when rigs were short. The laws of supply and demand work and there are plenty of rigs now.
Then you heard where frac crews couldn't be had. Well, you have them. We're not experiencing that shortage. Sand and then brown sand versus white sand. This is just something else that will be solved over a relatively short time.
When you have a 30 year producing history of these wells, a year or 1.5 years is not critical to them. It's the whole 30 year period. And another very key fact is this, is our marketing group made some good trades and so 50% roughly 55% of our crude will be taken away at a dollar differential because of the financial hedge and not $10 And so anything the differential is, we will experience only about half of that. We still have paid transportation, but for the differential itself, it will only affect us by half. Jason, I want to thank you before you leave recognize you.
I don't want you upset that some lawyers are recognized and not you. So catch you going out the door. Okay. This kind of made me like where people just tell you what they're actually doing. So the Delaware locations have continued to grow to where we have over 2,000 net locations.
That's not gross location, number of locations, but net when you net them to our interest, that's also growing. We feel the range of our midstream business has grown to $500,000,000 and we've taken out over $300,000,000 dollars in cash by selling parts of it. So that's been a great moneymaker for us and I think it has that's clearly we've got further deals in line and I think we'll have more good news to report between now and the end of the year. And the leverage is, it's one of the best in the business. As you'll see among our Board peers, we're tied with one other company for having the best balance sheet and that's a good spot to have options at a time of volatility to make some deals or further improve our position.
This is this shows you on the day we went public, there are 150 companies that were public, they were being compared. And so if you put us all at 0 at the same number, which ones have had the best performance and have increased in value the most. And of those 150, 70 are no longer in business. But the Matador, I can't you can see right over here is 3rd and through the years has always been one of the top performers and we've been able to do that without taking the financial risk that many of those other companies have done because we've always kept our balance sheet strong and stayed under that 2 times your debt to EBITDA ratio, which is people think if you have 2, then you're okay. But most of the time, we've been around 1 to 1.5.
This is again on our website, but it just begins to show you what you've gotten for your investment over the year and how over the years and how we've compared to the oil index. Here's the same thing, just trying to look at the notion of proved reserves, any shares we have and you can continue to see that even though we have taken on additional equity at times, the amount of per share, the amount of reserves per share, production per share all have favorable trends. And in doing that, by taking that equity, not only do we continue to increase the per share reserves and per share production, we're reducing the risk and giving ourselves more opportunities to add value to the shares. So we've really taken this to try to be good stewards of your investment. And again, trying to just say that performance has been very steady.
We've enjoyed 14 or 15 straight quarters where Matador's results have met or exceeded the industry consensus of what we have achieved. And we further expect that that trend will continue for us. David does a fantastic job modeling. Matt, Billy and production group make sure that production is there. So everybody is working together, the Board to make all this happen.
So I like these that is steady and consistent. Matt likes to say profitable growth at a measured pace. We get some questions sometimes on our acreage and how it's developed, but you can see as looking at the acreage on a year to year basis that you can see that it gets blockier and blockier every year. Van and his group have done an excellent job blocking it up and getting into the right areas. And you'll see in David's presentation, all that acreage that you see around there is productive and we're making good wells in every one of those blocks across that.
And we're really excited about the choices we have for these coming years. This also just compares Marathon, others have WPX have come in and bought acreage and you can see their acreage is not any blockier than ours, but we've been in all these good areas where they've been paying $30,000 or more an acre. But our average cost are less than $10,000 Van and his group have done a fantastic job of getting acreage for a weighted average Moving on to midstream, Matt is going to address and this is the point that I made earlier of how strong our balance sheet is, something we'd be really proud of in a time of volatility to have cash in the bank, nothing borrowed on a line of credit and our bonds that sell it at above par at 105. It's just given how much growth that we've had from that 400 barrels to over now approaching 30,000 barrels of oil and the growth of the staff from 30,000 to about 200 plus, 220,000 so. And that's all they would let me say.
They said time's up and for the real pros to take over. Matt?
I don't know about the real pro thing there, Joe, but more than happy to kind of walk through. David and I are going to do the typical, we call it Lewis and Clark. So we're going to tag team through this thing. But before we get started, I just wanted to thank everybody for coming. I mean, historically, this has been a very special meeting for us and this year is no exception.
So thank you all for joining. And I do want to make a couple of introductions. My wife, Cricket, sitting back here, most of you know Cricket. And my youngest daughter, Sadie, Sadie has been to some of these meetings. My oldest daughter Sasha, she wanted to be here with her young son and her family, but unfortunately he's sick.
So she sends her best wishes too. But also sitting next to Sadie here is Sarita Goodwin. And I've actually known Sarita longer than I've known Cricket. But I do want to say a special thanks not only to the spouses of the employees, but of the shareholders and the board members and everybody that's in this room. We couldn't do this without the support we get at home.
So thanks to everyone that's not here and thanks to the people that are here as well. So and then before we jump off into the actual presentation, Joe touched on this, but I really want us as we go through this presentation to focus on really how we add value in what we call 3 different buckets. So we are in the E and P business. We drill wells. We put holes in the ground.
We produce hydrocarbons out of those holes and then we market those and we sell them for a profit. So that's the E and P bucket. Joe was just talking about the land acquisition strategy. So that's been fantastic for us. We've been able to add a tremendous amount of value.
Van and his team have gone out and paid significantly less than market. So that's adding a lot of value in that bucket. And then the 3rd bucket is midstream and we're going to talk a bit about that here as we start through this. But just the typical kind of around the horn we talked about and we'll start in North Louisiana, East Texas. So that's one of our legacy assets.
We've got 25,000 or 26,000 growth acres or 23,000 net. We consider that our gas bank. Everything there is held by production. It's very economic to operate this gas. And so that's again, I'd say that's our gas asset, our gas bank.
Moving down into South Texas, we've got around 29,000 net acres there. When we went public, this is how we got oil. This is what we told the market. We're going to get oil here. This is going to be how we're going to make our stand with oil.
And we've done that. So we've done a number drilled a number of wells there. Last year, we actually drilled 5 100 locations left yet there that we could go drill. So the but the main focus for us for the last few years and will be the primary focus for us is the Delaware Basin. So we've been able to go from, as Joe said, 7,500 net acres to where we're at 115,000 net acres.
That's 207, almost 208,000 gross acres. So a very nice position and a very nice piece of the world to be drilling oil and gas flow. So we've got about 88% of oil production that comes out of this area. So primarily focus there. You'll see the numbers on the right side of this graph.
We won't go through each of those, but you can see where our production numbers are significantly up year over year. We're at 45,000 BOE per day, about 58% of that is oil. And if you look down in the reserve portion, about 50% of the or 57% of the reserves are also oil. So that's really where we're comfortable. We think the 55% to 60% range oil is kind of where we want to be.
So if you look down into the inventory, the engineered drilling locations, you can see there just in the Delaware alone, we've got 4,600 gross locations, almost 2,000 net locations. And then I also mentioned the Eagle Ford, which is an option for us. We've got a number of locations there. Also in Eagle Ford, when we drill there, we drill Lower Eagle Ford. Subsequent to that, people have done Upper Eagle Ford, they've done Austin Chalk, they've done Buda.
So there's a number of opportunities there for us to do. So the message is that's a pretty rich set of wells for us to be able to go drill. So let's talk a little bit about reserves. At the end of the year 2017, we had 153,000,000 BOE reserves. And so if you look back a couple of years, you go back to the year end 2015, you can see we were at 85,000,000 BOE.
And you can see the Delaware Basin there was about 55% of the production and the remainder was kind of split between Eagle Ford and Haynesville. So fast forward 1 year, we get to 106,000,000 Boe. And by the way, before we go there, if you look at the PV-ten in 2015, we're a little over $500,000,000 and you can look at the commodity prices there. But we went to 106 in 2016. Delaware is growing.
We're now 3 quarters of our reserves are in the Delaware Basin. Again, the remainder is split between Haynesville and Eagle Ford pretty equally. Year 2017, we're at the 153,000,000 for which 87,000,000 of those are actual barrels of oil. So the Delaware now is 84% of the reserves. And again, the Eagle Ford and Haynesville split the remainder.
So if you look down at the bottom there, the PV-ten is now $1,300,000,000 So in the commodity price, it's a little bit higher that that's calculated on. But nonetheless, in any scenario, you've got twice the amount of PV-ten that we had in 2 years ago. So I think that's a pretty attractive reserve base. And then if we look at production, there's a lot of things going on this slide. So if you look at the top left, that's total production BOE per day or BOE per quarter.
So if you look at Q1 2014, we're at 96,000 Boe per quarter. If you go to Q1, 2018, we're at 3,300,000 dollars And so that's a you can see the calculated annual growth rate there is very significant. So when we look at this and if you look at the one on the right, that's actual barrels of oil. That's not BOE, that's just barrels of oil. So we had 81,000 in Q1 2014, we had 2,100,000 in Q1 2018.
So Joe said it earlier, that's what profitable growth at a measured pace looks to us. That type of growth rate, as long as we're making money, we're very comfortable with that. And so this graph on the bottom of the states, David's heard me say this before, I think Peter Piper must have written the title to this slide, but I'm going to go through it. I'm going to go through it. So it's Permian production growth per debt adjusted share versus Permian pure play.
That's hard for me to say, but I understand what they're talking about. And this is some of the better Permian players out here too. So what you see at the bottom here, this is compared to up here. Sorry, Joe, I'll try not to blind you with that. But you can see Matador twice on this chart.
And so this is production going back to Q1 of 2016 then Q1 of 2018. So we fit in here kind of in the middle of the group. We're at 58%, there's 78%, there's 7% on the top and the bottom. But this includes our Haynesville and our Eagle Ford assets. So if we split that out and actually compare apples to apples with our Permian peers, we're at 212%.
So significant growth compared to our peers. And again, we're doing this profitably. So we take a lot of comfort in that. So with that, I'll hand it over to Dave to kind of walk around the basin and talk about our activities. Very good.
Good morning, everybody. I'm David Lancaster. Before I you around the horn a little bit and share with you some of the recent well results, I also want to welcome all the shareholders. Surely, I have come to have close relationships with many of you and I value them all. But my favorite shareholder is right there in green this morning and that's my wife, Sue.
So and next to her is Debbie Robinson, who is Brad's lab. So excited to kind of take you around the horn a little bit and show you some of the recent successes that we've had. We're currently running 6 rigs in the Delaware, and you'll see them denoted by the little rig symbols. 3 of them are here at Rustler Breaks. 1 of them is down here in the Wolf and Jackson Trust area, one of them is here at Antelope Ridge and one of them is running up in the northern part of the acreage that we call Arrowhead Ranger and Twin Lakes.
The green boxes that you see there denote some of the recent successes that we've had. I might start with Antelope Ridge. It's actually one of the areas that we're particularly excited about. I think when we were all together last year, we told you we'd been building an acreage position there and we'd begin drilling it later in the year, and that's what we did. And so far, we have 4 wells completed there, 3 of we released the results for.
One of them, not shown on this map because we had released that in the Q1, was the Florence well named after Mrs. Mullins back there in the back. And it was about a 2,000 BOE a day well that was completed in the Wolfcamp XY. We had a well in the First Bone Spring up there named after Marla Downey, our former advisor and who we miss very much and wish was here with us today. But I know he's watching us.
And that was also a great well and about 1900 BOE per day. And then the one that is on this map right here named after Leo Thorsnes, Medal of Honor winner, was almost 3,000 BOE per day and it was actually the best well that Matador had ever drilled to this point in the Delaware Basin. So Antelope Ridge is off to a great start and we're real happy with the results that we're seeing there. We kind of come counterclockwise, we'll come down to the Wolf asset area. And in Jackson Trust, we continue to drill very good Wolfcamp A lower wells here in the Jackson Trust area and are in the process now of testing the Wolfcamp B.
And over here in Wolf, you'll recognize that as the area that we've been drilling the longest out here in the Delaware Basin. We continue to have real good success with the Wolfcamp A X Y, the Wolfcamp A Lower and even last year the Wolfcamp B and the 2 wells that we've noted on the map today actually both have IPs greater than 2,000 BOE per day, and they're the 2 best wells that we've drilled to date in Wolf. So, really excited about those results. We're also drilling some longer laterals down in that area this year, of which these were 2. So both of these were lateral lengths of about 7,000 feet.
If you come up here to the Rustler Breaks area, this is an area that's continued to just be a very solid area for us. And one reason why we've run as many rigs as we have. You may know and may remember that last year at this time, we had built a cryogenic natural gas plant and put it here San Mateo had, it was about 60,000,000 a day plant. We told you we're in the process of adding to that. And since we've seen it the last time, we actually added 200,000,000 of additional capacity there and have also drilled some additional saltwater disposal wells here.
Altogether, we now have about 160,000 barrels a day of saltwater disposal capacity between Rustler Breaks and Wolf and Matt will be telling you in a minute why that's so important to us. The wells that are down here in Rustler Breaks and I should I could have picked many because we continue to have great success all across this asset area. These were the Garrett wells and the Garrett wells were drilled in the Q1. They had IPs ranging anywhere from 1500 to about 2,200 BOE per day in the Wolfcamp XY, the Wolfcamp A lower and also in the Wolfcamp B. So all those zones continue to be very strong for Matador all across the area.
As we go up to Arrowhead and Ranger, on the Ranger side here, we've highlighted the Airstrip well, which again was a very solid Third Bone Spring completion for us. And then here just recently, and we put this in the press release, the Airhead team just recently drilled a couple of wells just north. This was our Stebbins block, which had we drilled some really good second and third Bone Spring wells on. We moved up a little north to this SST acreage up here and actually drilled a couple of 2,000 BOE a day oil wells, very high oil cuts about 90%. So that whole Western Arrowhead area is really coming into its own and developing into a very exciting area for us.
And so we're real pleased with those results. Finally, up at Twin Lakes, Cimarex, I'm sorry, Cimarex, we had participated in a well that they had drilled earlier this year. It was about 1,000 BOE per day IP, significantly better than the first couple of wells that both we and Cimarex had drilled in this area. And we're currently drilling our 2nd well in this area. That's a Wolfcamp D test.
So a little bit deeper portion of the Wolfcamp to what we call the Kymnets. And that well has just been cored and logged. And I know that the technical staff is all very excited about that. Before I leave the slide, I just want to acknowledge the team leads in each of these areas down in the Wolf area. Glenn Stetson, if you would stand in Rustler Breaks and Antelope Ridge, Tom Elsner and up in the Ranger and Arrowhead area, Trent Goodwin.
So many of their staffs are here today as well. And we appreciate very much the work of all the teams on achieving these good results all throughout the Delaware Basin for Matador. Thanks, guys. As Joe mentioned, our inventory has continued to increase and we have quite a number of zones. That's one thing that's been very special about working out in the Permian Basin and working in the Delaware Basin in particular is that you don't just have one target that you're going after, you've got quite a few and you can see 8 or 9 here that we have identified and lots of locations in each of them.
And as Matt mentioned a minute ago, a little over 4,600 gross, about 2,000 net locations. So if you think about having 2,000 net locations and the fact that we'll probably drill up about 80 of those this year, you can see that we've got a lot of inventory and a lot of work ahead of us. So a lot of good choices going forward in the future. And with that, I'll pass it back to Matt. Okay.
Thanks, David. So I'm an operations guy. I love this operation stuff. So we're going to talk a little bit about it. In the past, we've talked about drilling efficiencies.
We've shown a slide that shows how many days it takes us from spud to TD. This year, we decided to show a little bit differently. So what we're looking at here, actually went one too far. Sorry, here we go. So what we've got here is actual rate of penetration.
So when we're on bottom with a bit and we're rotating to the right and we're drilling, this is how fast we're drilling. So what you're looking at here, if you look on the left, it's 2014, the blue bars, the actual footage drilled. So that's 188,000 feet. So that's about 36 miles that we drilled in 2014. And as you progress your way, if you see in 2017, we're going to drill or we have drilled over 1,000,000 feet.
So that's all that's 200 miles basically. So a lot more footage and you can see the gray bars here are our penetration rates. So in 2014, we averaged 41 feet per hour. So every hour that we're on bottom, we drilled 41 feet. That's increased 88% up to 71 feet per hour.
So or 77 feet per hour. So why that matters is because when these operations are ongoing drilling rigs, you're somewhere between 50 $100,000 per day. So every day that we can save, that's significant to the bottom line on the rates of return on these wells. So hats off to Billy and his drilling team, Josh Bashir and Patrick Walsh, I think they're back over here. Nice job, guys.
And so the drillers are charged very much with drilling these wells as cost effectively as they can. And they do have one caveat. We want to make sure when we pick an interval to drill and say it's a 25 foot Wolfcamp X or Wolfcamp Y zone that we stay within that interval. So they're challenged with doing that. They do a very nice job to do that, but they're also challenged to do it as cost effectively as they can, leaving the completion guys with the wellbore that they can complete in.
So the completion guys, their charge is a little bit different. I mean their charge is to optimize the dollars spent on completion to make sure that we make the most money we can out of these wellbores. So Chris Calvert working under Billy's leadership is in charge of the completions team and they've done a great job in doing that. But they also don't want to get left behind in the efficiency discussion. So what we've been able to do is generate a lot of efficiencies.
We've gone to a multi well pad drilling where we're able to actually frac 2 wells at the same time. We're doing wireline work on one well while we're fracking on the other. And then we just went back and forth. So we're able to get not quite twice the number of stages, but pretty close to that in each and every day. So on the cost side, our current vendor has allowed us a $150,000 price break per well if we just do simultaneous operations.
They're not saying we have to get X number of stages. They're just saying if you're willing to do these wells at the same time, we're going to cut you a significant break on the price. So they're working on the cost side too. But if you look at this graph, what you'll see, the blue bars are actually pounds of profit pumped per year. So starting in 2013, we didn't do a whole lot.
But estimated in 2018, that's 1,200,000,000 pounds of sand. That's a lot of dirt to be bumping into the ground. And so if you look at the green line there, that's the number of stages for years. So just go all the way to 2018, that's over 1900 stages. So that's over well over 5 stages a day, 365 days a year.
So there's a lot of effort that's going there. And then once the completion guys get done and I said this off, Billy and his drillers have the drilling well for 14 days, maybe 20 days. Chris and his guys, they've got completion for 14 or 20 days. And then Kristen Welch sitting over here and John Romano sitting back there, they are our area production managers. They've got these wells for 20 years.
So they'll start doing as soon as the completion guys move off, they'll start monitoring the flow back on these wells. And really one of the critical things to do is to identify when we need to install artificial lift and what type of artificial lift we need to install. So John and Christian are going to be working on these wells for a very long time and they're doing a nice job as well. So let's jump to midstream. We're talking about the 3rd bucket here.
And you can see here, we're talking about gas, we're talking about water, and we're talking about oil. And Joe has a saying it's a 3 pipe system, and I think that's exactly right. And they all work together very well. So just looking at the gas gathering and processing, we had a 60,000,000 a day plant at Russell Breaks. We just expanded that.
We added another 200,000,000 a day plant. So we got a 200,000,000 and a 60,000,000, which gives us a 260,000,000 cubic feet per day in the design capacity. So we're able to process gas. We also have an NGL line that's in place. We're going to talk about that here in a minute.
So that's the gas pipe. The water is very important and it doesn't get near as much press as the gas or the oil, particularly this latest discussion about takeaway capacity. But I can tell you it's just as important. If you've got a well that's producing 1 barrel of oil and it's producing 3 or 4 or 5 or maybe even 6 barrels of water for every barrel of oil that you're producing, you better have a cost effective way to dispose of that. And so we now have 160,000 barrels.
That's been said already today. We've got 2 wells that we're going to drill this year, at least 2 wells, which will get that capacity to 220,000 barrels per day. And based on what third party needs we may have, we may actually even drill some additional wells. So that's the water side. And then the crude side is the final thing.
And we'll talk about that here in just a minute. But so now we've got 3 pipe systems. So Matt's not here, Matt Spicer is not here, but Greg and Brian and Michael and a lot of these other guys have been working on this to really get this put forth so we can go to the 3rd party operators and say we can take care of gas, water and oil for you guys. So the call out box here that has the 400,000 acres, that's relative to the deal we do with Plains. So they've identified the 400,000 acre block right here in our Russell Breaks area for which we can go out and gather 3rd party volumes and put them on the same contract we have with Plains.
So let's talk about the Plains contract. Currently, Plains has a pipeline that comes from Midland over into the Wolf area. So this is Loving County, Texas. You've got Eddy County, New Mexico, Lee County, New Mexico. So we have a CDP, a central delivery point for all our crude that we produce and gather here at Wolf is currently going into this pipeline.
So the way this agreement works, Plains actually buys the barrels from us. They pay us the Midland price and they buy them, they transport them to Midland. Once they get to Midland, the interesting thing happens. We at our discretion have the option to buy those barrels back for exactly what they paid us for them at Wolf. We paid the transportation fee and then Greg, Krug and his marketing team back here, if they can access these other markets that are indicated down here, Cushing, LLS, there's even a Brent option.
If Greg can find transportation to those markets at an economic price, we can buy those barrels back and send them on and realize a greater price. So that's a huge advantage not only for us, but for 3rd parties. So any 3rd party that we gather, they get the option to do the same thing. So what's going to happen later this summer is the line ends now right there at the New Mexico, Texas state line. So Plains is going to build that system up into our Russell Breaks.
So we're hopeful that it's August that all the barrels at Russell Breaks will be on that same system. So not only Matador barrels, but 3rd party volumes. And that includes the 400,000 acre block, 625 Square Miles that's located around here. So people talk about flow assurance. That gives us flow assurance for almost 90% of the production we have in the basin.
So we feel really good about this deal and really excited to have it. Let's talk about gas. And really there's 2 components to gas. There's the natural gas and then there's the NGLs or the natural gas liquids. So what we have currently, we have firm transport for everything we produce at Russell Greggs, everything we produce at Wolf.
We've got firm transport into Waha. And so Waha is located in the area. I think I'm pointing to the right spot there. It's hard to see that map. But anyway, we have firm transport into Waha.
And so Greg assures us and I think we all believe this that that's flow assurance for our gas. Once it gets to Waha, it will move on to these other markets. So Greg and his team are looking at accessing these other markets again with some sort transportation to get us there where we can get a better pricing. We did just recently announce that we had done a deal with Kinder Morgan for 110,000,000, 115,000,000 cubic feet a day on the Gulf Coast Express Pipeline that's due to be operational in October 2019. So we've got that already in place and the team is continuing to work on short term solutions, which we think there are multiple ones and they are good ones.
Okay. So we're talking about how we add value with midstream and this is kind of what it all comes down to. I mean, this business is all about making money. And so what we're looking at here is an EBITDA chart. So starting over here on the left, you can see in 2015, we made about $4,000,000 That's good money, but it's not a lot of money.
2015, we tripled that to $12,000,000 We then did the JV with Five Point Capital Partners, which is now 5.4 Energy to create San Mateo. And so we've really put some growth together. We're at $31,000,000 for 20.17. So if you look towards the right here, you'll see $65,000,000 to $75,000,000 in EBITDA for 2018. And that's kind of the base case with an expected case that we get some 3rd party volumes.
So we think for the year, we're going to be in that $65,000,000 to $75,000,000 range. The interesting one to me is over here on the right, and this is $100,000,000 annualized. So what we're projecting is that in Q4 of 2018, we're going to make $25,000,000 in EBITDA. So if you annualize that, you multiply it by 4, that gets you to the $100,000,000 And whatever multiple you want to put on this thing there, you can pick any. 8 is not unreasonable, 12 is not unreasonable, 10 to me, I'm a simple guy, the math is easy.
So 10 times $100,000,000 is $1,000,000,000 So there's an argument that this is a $1,000,000,000 business for which Matador owns 51% of that. So again, the 3 buckets, E and P, the land acquisition strategy and midstream, we think those are all very important for us. And with that, I'll let David talk about the capital plan. Very good. Thanks, Matt.
I'll just give you a few final thoughts on the capital plan for the year and some of the financial position of the company. As I mentioned, we're going to be running 6 rigs this year, 1 will run in Wolf and Jackson Trust, 1 will run-in Ranger and Arrowhead, 3 will run-in the Rustler Breaks area, the blue down here, 1 will run-in Antelope Ridge. You see the little red dotted line here. The rig at Rustler Breaks is going to drill, as Matt mentioned, 2 additional saltwater disposal wells. They're just about ready to start.
And so that'll be going on for the next 2 or 3 months, and then we'll go back to drilling oil and gas wells with that rig at Mussel Breaks. When you sort of look around the basin, we projected we'll probably be working on in one way or the other either drilling completion or both about 100 wells this year, about 80 of them on a gross basis will get completed, which is about 65 net wells. You can see about half of those will be in the Russell Grates area. But then you can sort of see the number of gross wells that we'll be completing and putting on production in all the other wells in all the other areas as well. This gives you an idea of sort of how the growth is going to be compared to last year and a couple of years before.
On an aggregate basis, which is shown up here, this is our total oil and gas production projections and we're projecting that we will be around 10,000,000 barrels of oil for the year, 9.9 is the midpoint of our guidance and about 42 Bcf to 43 Bcf. Total production will go up about 20% for the year, gas a little less growth than oil. Oil will grow about 26% per year on an aggregate basis. If you come down and just look at the Delaware, you'll see that we're going to have a growth of about 36% in both oil and natural And you may ask why the numbers are a little less on an aggregate basis. That's because of course we have the legacy assets in the Eagle Ford and in the Haynesville.
We're not spending any money or drilling any wells. So the production there will decline off a bit this year. But what I think is really exciting is that we're going to continue at a very robust growth rate of 35% to 40% in the Delaware Basin and that's where we're spending the shareholders' money. Just want to give you a few thoughts on hedging. We do also always have an active hedging program as you know.
Really you can think of hedging as just sort of insurance if you will. We are hedged about 55% on our oil production and about 45% on our gas production. I think the key here is the one in the middle. It's become sort of the key, this Midland Cushing basis swaps that we have in place. As you hear about the differentials getting larger and approaching $8 $10 $12 continue to keep in mind the fact that we have a little over half of our production coming out of the Delaware hedged at $1.02 So that means that if the basis is $10 between Midland and Cushing, we have that kind of differential.
We're only going to be exposed to about half of that because of these hedges that we had in place. So these are financial hedges, but if the differential is $10 or if it's $11 let's say, we'll be making back $10 of that on these financial hedges. So I think the marketing group did a good job of putting those in place and that's going to really help to mitigate over the course of this year some of these differences in the differentials that we're seeing out in the Permian Basin. We got a great bank group and I don't want to acknowledge them. I don't know that any of them are here today, but I expect some of them are probably listening in.
Our bank group is led by the Royal Bank of Canada. It includes the Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, Scotiabank, SunTrust, Wells Fargo, Comerica and Iberia Bank. These 8 banks have been with us a long time and they've been very supportive of Matador ever since it went public and certainly before Comerica was our banker from the very beginning with this Matador and even for many years with Joe and the previous Matador. But we're very grateful for the support of all the bank group, not only on the lending side, but also on the investment banking side. They're all very supportive when we're doing capital market deals, be it on the equity side or the debt side.
I think this time last year, we were probably looking at a borrowing base of about $400,000,000 pleased to report to you that over the last year, given the growth in our reserves and the improvement in oil and gas prices, our borrowing base is now $725,000,000 So we kept our elected commitment at $400,000,000 because we haven't really needed to borrow the money and no sense to pay for the initial capacity. But it is nice to know that we have $725,000,000 that we could borrow against our reserve base. That's very comforting to us. Currently, we have no borrowings under the agreement. And so that gives us a lot of liquidity Just want to mention Just want to mention, I'll show you here, this is kind of refers to what Joe was talking about, the comparison of our debt, our balance sheet, if you will, relative to the Board selected peers.
All these peers are Permian based companies, so they all have businesses very similar to ours. And you can see that the net debt to EBITDA or essentially cash flow is goes anywhere from 0.8 up to about 3.6. And you want to be to the far right, as far to the right on this curve as you can be, and you can see that Matador is right down at the very farthest to the right. So what that suggests is that we have a very strong balance sheet, very good liquidity and we're in very good financial position. So I think what I want to leave you with in closing is that we do have a strong balance sheet.
Our cash position is excellent. It was about $53,000,000 at the end of the quarter. As you know, we just recently did an equity deal and brought in another $226,000,000 in cash. So we have plenty of cash in the bank, no borrowings under our credit agreement and and borrowing capacity of $725,000,000 Of course, oil, natural gas and NGL prices have improved quite a bit over the last couple of years. So that's definitely favorably impacted our cash flow.
But as we noted, these differentials have widened recently. And so we're doing everything we can to continue to mitigate that. Ultimately, we've got very low debt levels and our debt metrics are really among the very best in the business and among our peer group. I'm particularly happy to tell you that since we saw you the last time, both the credit rating agencies, both Moody's and S and P have raised the company's corporate credit rating and their bond credit rating. So we have gone up a notch or 2 in both of their estimations and that's very important to us of course when we're out trying to raise additional money.
Today, our bonds continue to trade very strong. They're close to 105 and price to yield about 5.1%. You may remember, these are 8 year bonds with a coupon of about 6% 7%, 8%. So the bonds have continued to trade very strongly, have done so essentially the whole time that they've been out. They've been out for about 3 years now and they continue to trade really as well as anybody's bonds in the industry of companies our size anyway.
So I guess the last thought I want to leave you with is that our cash position, our cash flow, our borrowing capacity, all are going to prosecute our business through the rest of the year to do what we want to do on the drilling side, the land side and the midstream side to continue to create value for the shareholders in each of the buckets that we've been talking about. So I think we feel very good about our financial position and our strong balance sheet. With that, before I yield the stage, I do want to acknowledge the efforts of the finance team, the accounting team, the legal team. There's a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes to put these materials together, to do all the public filings that we do, to handle all the money raising that we do. And I just want them to all know that we appreciate their efforts very much.
So and with that, I'll turn it back to Joe.
Thank you, David. I appreciate your remarks. And you can see that the financial plans receive a lot of attention as our E and P efforts do and that enables us, as someone said, to drive at the speed limit, knowing that you have confidence. And mention again that the 14 or 15 straight quarters where we've exceeded the industry consensus is a good example of that. Also, I want to thank the accounting, the financial, all those groups, but also note the land groups, the asset teams, the completion, the drilling, the production, each of those groups really contribute reservoir.
The geology group have made great strides and have come up with a lot of interesting ideas. So as good as all these things are up here, our best years are still ahead of us that we've got a great combination of we're in a great area, so we have great rock, we have great staff, we have a great balance sheet. And together, it's over the years, we've built somewhat of a golden goose with for 34 years, 1st Matador this one, we've achieved approximately a 21% rate of return. So our city is keeping it up and getting better in every area. I do I have overlooked a few people, Emmett Murphy, who has been one of our long time investors, has started has gone into the Mazda business.
So if you have a chance to buy a Mazda, we'd hope you'd talk to Emmet. Also our very good friend Nick Kehoe is here from Washington, D. C. And Nick is a great friend and a colleague and advisor and we're delighted to have him here as a family friend and a shareholder and giving us a chance. I want to be sure we recognize Jim Basic on our IT.
Jim has done a fantastic job. Cybersecurity is on the minds of a lot of people. He's got a great plan. He's elevated our work there. Of course, our marketing and midstream teams, they're out there hunting for extra nickels and dimes and other savings and paying their way.
And as an example of great staff work, we have 2 in our regulatory group who have taken upon themselves to get federal co mingling permits. And that doesn't sound like a big moneymaker, but it is when you get the BLM lands, federal lands, approve that, you can save 100 of 1,000 of dollars in facilities. So they've done a terrific job. I'm just giving you one example of a lot of the individual effort that people have made to contribute to Matador and I want to recognize them. And to follow-up and in the abundance of maybe we're recognizing some people twice, I do want to recognize the wives who give so much and back us up not only for the directors, the spouses, but also the PEs that recognize Katie and Debbie and Debbie is not only famous for backing up Brad, but for cookies.
And so you never know these outfit things. And I want to be sure I recognize Twinkle with Paul being one of the original investors back to 'eighty three, where they really give me a chance. I didn't have just a lot of assets there, but somehow we're all going to make it work. And so that's been a lot of fun and so much that Nancy and I appreciate that chance and the way all of you have worked with us. And then my friend, Bruce Keflinger's wife is here at Carol, who has a Hallmark store in Kansas City.
So if you need something in Kansas City, I highly recommend it. It has many lines in addition. So Carol is there. Carol, wave your hands looking and she will do online efforts if you need it. So you young guys that are getting married and stuff, you remember this.
This is important. Just a bit of free advice, I won't even charge. Bobby Smith, another long term shareholder came in there at the back that he and his family have been involved going back to 1990 or before and delight to have him. And when you think about it, remember the origins of Matador, where 4 guys walked off the handball court, Jim Rolf and I've been 2 of them and kind of said, what are you doing? I have some things starting to come in, let's do it.
And you end up, not only on the New York Stock Exchange, you're in a room with 200 or more of some of your best friends, everybody's friends, but really friendships that are still continuing to grow 30 40 years later is really a nice way to end. I also don't want to forget the Semmelbecks and Sarah. Sarah, if you'll please stand, Right, Sarah's uncle and great uncle were the people that gave me my first check back in 1983. At Way, my father said he would invest until I got a check from somebody else in Amarillo. And so fortunately her uncles did that or I might still be out there throwing newspapers.
But appreciate this. Thank you, Sarah. And it's just such a pleasure and such a pleasure to be able to report. Despite this volatility, we're always going to have some of this in a business as complex as the oil and gas. There will be a shortage of something and there's panic on some people, they think it's still, but it will be solved.
Loss of supply and demand work or in an innovative industry that comes up with better and better solutions. And that's the power of the people and the power of the team. So please know how much we appreciate you being here. We feel it makes us sharper. We really appreciate your support.
It helps embody the culture into our young staffers that people said when you work for a really big company, you don't feel who the owners are. But in this company, you all have a chance by being here like Gary and from the Panhandle too to really know these are our shareholders. So we hope your attendance will always be this strong and know that we're always available to you to call or you have a question or some need, and we want to get to know you. We want you to feel you have some personal relations with us. So that's all I have.
I would entertain a motion to adjourn and unless somebody else has any order of business. You did this to me last time. Larry, you're going to be designated motion giver next time. So the motion has been made, but I don't want to end without recognizing, I see Tara is here and recognize Tara is one of our special advisors. So back to the motion, is there a second?
Second. Second. The motion has been made and second to adjourn. A final time and want to thank you again and tell you it's a pleasure to be here with you. Look for good things because there's a lot in the pipeline and with these young people, the golden goose is just going to get bigger and more productive than ever.
So thanks.