We have a few minutes before we go live here, we just wanted to get people seated. This meeting will be broadcast. 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. I think if you're in here, you could see the pictures revolving around. It was a good time, we appreciate all those participating. I want you to know we don't feel that it's going to be the last time we're up there. 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 and 60. Stay alert. We're moving up from there. Matt, ready? A couple of things.
That Hollywood's been calling me to get a few of your names and addresses. Any costs associated with this endeavor, we hope to recover by the sale of pictures and videos. It was a very nice time. Mac, have we gone live yet? Okay. He says we've gone live, now I have to watch what I say. I'm going to formally now call the meeting to order and ask that Craig Adams serve as Secretary. Officially, I'm Joseph Wm. Foran, 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, 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 Baribault, our Lead Independent Director. Ray is a petroleum engineer from LSU, worked for Exxon, then Netherland & Sewell, before going out to start his company that works in the Bakken. R. Gaines Baty. Gaines is here, been associated with us for over 25 years, a 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, has helped us for over 25 years hire people. Wait 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 of "Champion of the Barrio" about his father, who was the outstanding running back in Texas in 1940, went to A&M, called to service, served in the military, World War II, came back, played in those years afterwards against Doak Walker and Tom Landry and all of those, went into coaching. I recommend if you haven't read it already, give it a try. Craig Burkert. Craig's been a shareholder since 1994. Helped get us our IT group going. Graduate of Harvard Business School. He's been in the heavy equipment business in various forms, is what we call the floater on the board. Whenever we have a special need, we just put Craig in there.
He's served, I think, almost all the committees, all the shareholding committees. We're pleased to have his experience. Bill Byerley. Bill was one of the heads of the oil and gas practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, did Exxon and Conoco. We were so delighted when he retired that he gave us the opportunity to get him to our board first, has just done an outstanding job. Not only from within, but I hear from KPMG too that you've done some remarkable work. Thank you, Bill, for your service. Next is Julie Forster, a hometown girl from Amarillo. Julie now teaches at SMU Law School. She served as assistant provost, made the very top grade on the state bar exam, for which we're really proud of her, is an electrical engineer undergraduate. Julie, thank you very much for your service, too. Tim Parker.
Tim has been a special friend for about 15 years. He was one of the co-heads of the T. Rowe Price energy practice and portfolio management analyst. Really, he and his team made themselves experts in the oil and gas business, they would go out to the field and to the shows, really learn the technology and the formations, figure it out. Went all over the country. We've been all over the country, he is certainly one of the ranking portfolio managers in the country with his outstanding record. We're just so honored that he would join our board, has added immensely in our discussions, has raised the bar for us. We appreciate you being here, Tim. David Posner.
David came on in the midst of as our marketing midstream was emerging, a graduate of Brown and then to the Colorado School of Mines for a master's. He came on at a time as our midstream marketing were emerging, and has lent a lot of help in making sure we stay on the right track. Another long-term friend, Ken Stewart. Ken was formerly the global head of Norton Rose Fulbright, a firm of 5,000 lawyers, which is no easy task as you can imagine herding that many lawyers at once. Ken has been a shareholder and involved with us since 1990 and has come onto 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 one that was going to take Matador public back before 9/11 happened and has stayed a very close friend and neighbor through time, and we appreciate you being on the board, too. At this time, I was going to ask if you might say a few words for George, whose term is expiring, 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." 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. I humbly agreed to make a few remarks about George. I could stand here and do the normal drill of reading a long list of accomplishments and successes and accolades, quite frankly, the list is far too long, Joe would give me the hook long before I got halfway through the page.
I'm going to pick two or three touchpoints from George's long career and life, if I can have the luxury of making a few personal observations at the end. The first touchpoint, let's wind back way to the early years. George is a proud graduate of the New Mexico Military Institute. Although he has certainly other august institutions on his resume of 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. 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.
As a second touchpoint, let's wind forward toward the other end of George's career. After all the successes, the accolades, he's been president of this industry institution and chairman of that and president of this and chairman of that. The list goes on and on. As a testament to 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. There we have sort of two bookends, Hall of Fame bookends, for a man who certainly deserves that kind of recognition. The third and final touchpoint 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.
By old school, I mean he operates with integrity, and you can depend on his word. 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 each other in the eye, said, "If you'll do this, I'll do that," and shook hands. That's the old school way of doing an oil and gas deal, and that's the deal. Okay, the management teams did their due diligence, and the lawyers papered the stuff from top to bottom and probably back to the top again. Being a lawyer, I know that we sell by the pound.
The deal stood, and the deal behind that handshake is the deal was done. You can depend on George's word. 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. 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, or 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.
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 the geoscience team has come up with, George's eyes light up. He's like a kid in a candy store. He leans forward, gets animated, peppers questions. He's curious. It just infects the room with the excitement for everybody. He's been a big part of the momentum of driving this company forward for the time he's been on the board.
George, I think I know I can speak for the management team, the entire board, thank you for the great service and valuable service you've given to the board, and we're all very happy that you're going to be on the advisory board and continue that in the future. Thank you for your past and future service, George Yates.
Do we have time for a rebuttal?
Quick, yes, please. Always get a rebuttal. I just want to say that, Ken, thank you very much for your kind words. Thank you, Joe. It's been an honor to serve on the board. As I was sitting there listening to Ken, I was mostly thinking, how do I get even? How do I get even for this? 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 does it as well as Matador does it. You own a company that is at the highest level of performance, using the best energy technology there is in the world. 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 Matador. 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. See the leadership that's coming up in this company. I'm glad you're stockholders. You have a lot to be proud of. 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. Saying time. 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.
The people make the difference. 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 boards, Dr. Steve Onimus, who is unable to attend today's meeting due to health reasons. As we announced, Dr. Onimus is needing to step down from the board, effectively concurrent with the election of the new nominees for the directors. 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 Unocal's Indonesian operations, and I think he and his wife had the best attendance of any board member we've ever had. Without wanting to steal 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 in moving Matador greatly over these last four or five years. We've come a long way together. As you said, we've got a lot more to do. Ray?
Thank you, Joe. I do have some scripted comments, being an engineer, not an attorney, I will read from those. It's been an honor and a privilege to have served alongside Dr. Onimus as a Matador director for the last four years. Steve's been 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 Dr. Onimus is an engineer's engineer, and it 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 29 dedicated years at Unocal.
Among his many accomplishments there were Gulf Coast assignments based out of Unocal'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 Unocal's Indonesian venture in offshore waters, offshore Indonesia, and a general manager of Unocal's joint partner ventures group, which ultimately led to his directorship appointment at Matador in 2004. That preceded Unocal's merger with Chevron in 2005. During his service in Louisiana earlier in Steve's career, Dr. Onimus moonlighted as a petroleum engineering assistant professor at University of Southwestern 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.
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 Dr. Onimus' bio in the prospectus or on the company's website or on a Google search are his accomplishments as a longtime elite senior triathlete. Hard to believe. 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 a team of Matador fellow endurance enthusiasts at the DFW Tough Mudder competition, which is a five-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 by the look of our jerseys there we're not quite the crystal clear white that we started out as. 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. 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.
We're carrying the torch for you, awaiting your recovery and return as a board advisor. Would you please all stand with me and give Steve a cheer and a round of applause and his dedication?
Thank you. Nicely done, Ray. I can't really improve on that. Get a little bit out of order, but on the count of three, I'd all ask, do one additional, everybody say together, "Get well, Steve," because I think he'd appreciate that, too. Ready? One, two, three. Get well, Steve. Get well, Steve. Great. There 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. Appreciate him all those years. Rick Fenlaw, who helps us with land. Rick is another Amarillo boy. Had a very extensive land brokerage business and helping teach our young people how to take a lease. Wade Massad. Wade, there you go, has helped us in our capital events and marketing since we went public.
Wade was formerly the syndicate manager for Dain Rauscher here. Has been involved with us back at old Matador and this Matador and every other way. Greg McMichael, who was an 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 geophysicist from Princeton University, who was the chief geophysicist for ARCO, that worked under Marlan Downey, who meant so much to us. We appreciate all of your contributions. Now I'd like to thank the additional shareholders who served on the shareholder advisory committee that include Barry Banker. Barry is one of our original shareholders back to 1983. He came here to Dallas for a wedding and made the mistake of calling me as we were getting started. It's very dangerous to know me back then, as Barry discovered.
Bobby Pickard 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. Joe Coleman. Joe? Around? He slipped out. They had something to get back to. I don't think that was a boat. I think it just was obligations. I do want [Bob Twinkle] and Paul Gosselin, Jim to please stand. Original shareholders. Barry. All original shareholders. Our bell ringer back there, the guy who pushed the button on ringing the bell, Paul Flowers. Paul, will you please stand with them? These are all key people that were involved in the founding of 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 or forever hold your peace. Laura, if you will please stand. I got a deal done on the day my daughter was born here. You can see how it's progressed. Yeah. My wife, Nancy, induce her because she didn't ask too many questions when I went out on my own, like, "How are you going to make it?" We appreciate all that faith and action and support and a long time. When we go across the country and people talk about being a long-term shareholder, which means to them often six months or a year, we've got people to easily point to that have been in here 30 years or more. This is just a bunch of people pushing on the rock, 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. 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. With Matt Hairford, 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 Deal Maker, and a little bit of everything else. Brad Robinson, Senior Vice President of Reservoir Engineering and Chief Technology Officer. Brad has come somewhat of our floater. Wherever there's a problem, we plug Brad in there. He's kind of also head of, what do we call it, [plan and potentiality] or something along those lines. Gregg Krug, Senior Vice President of Head of Marketing and Midstream.
Rob Macalik, Senior Vice President and Chief Accounting Officer. Matt Spicer is not here, but he's the head of our midstream. Kathy Wayne, VP, Controller, and Treasurer. She and Yvonne Hoover. Where is she? Yvonne? There you go. Those two have worked with me longer than anyone else. As the saying goes, if you work 30 years with me, then one of you has to be easy to get along with. Brian Willey, Vice President and Co-General Counsel. Bryan Erman, Vice President and Co-General Counsel. Ned Frost, Vice President of Geoscience. Tom Elsener, Vice President of Engineering and Asset Manager. Tom and Jim Basic, Vice President and Managing Director of IT. How about a nice round. I think it's the best. I think it's the best team in the country. There's just such tremendous depth, and 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 five years. I think it's gone splendidly with Bill. They're all really professionals. 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. A 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. She just does a tremendous job. Mac Schmitz. Mac is back here taking care of the logistics of this meeting. Again, you can go around the room. A lot of people. Bruce Keplinger from 1984. I see the Biggers family here.
The Biggers, please stand, Steve, and all of you here. They've been important. Bruce, did you stand? Okay. Stay up. 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. Of course, I have two sisters here who have promised to keep themselves well-behaved. Ronda and Donda, if you'll wave to everybody. All right. You know Jack Vogel. Matt Spicer's gone today, but his father-in-law is here. You know you must be doing things right if you can get your father-in-law to attend in your place. Jack, thank you. 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 an Amerada guy. Chris Bear, trying to quickly. My eyesight is not quite as good. If you haven't been recognized, please stand, and we will- Help me along. Oh, Florence Mullins. How could I miss that? Florence, would you please stand, who's on our original board of directors. We have the Florence Well that is really doing exceptionally well, and we give her great credit. So appreciate all this, and I met a few new shareholders out there.
If you come back a time or two, 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 Rayburn, two of our really outstanding lawyers. Larry Wolfish, who I first met first day of law school, who got me through procedure. The first 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. I continued that practice after I got out and when we started Matador of trying to find the A players like Jim Hunt over here and hang out with him and learn from him, who used to run Regency Energy Partners and others.
So we may be one of the last of the companies where we're started truly by friends and family as opposed to private equity. We're proud of that. With everybody pitching in, we think it's given stability to our shareholder group. A lot of inspiration. Steve Woods back there. Steve, you're trying to slip away. You moved around on me, but Steve is another long-term friend and shareholder. I see some of the Harveys over there. Now, the Harveys, when we said stand, you should've waved, okay? Wave back there from Tyler. Part of our Tyler roots go back to '83 and '84. Friends with the Upchurchs. It's very exciting to have all of you here together and everybody working to make something better. We're proud of the growth that Matador has had. The first Matador was 18:1.
This Matador, as I said, we had gotten up there in the 30s. When we did, it was a 10:1 type return for people. 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. Would be delighted to include you in those mailings. With that, I want to move along to some of the formal requirements of the annual meeting. The first is that this meeting is being held pursuant to the notice that we mailed each shareholder of record as of April 13, 2018.
I present a complete list of the shareholders of the company entitled to vote at the 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 present. Further, I present a notice, proxy statement and proxy, and an affidavit that such notice, proxy statement and proxy, together with 2017 annual report of the company, were mailed 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 was one of our early attorneys here in Matador One. We're glad to see you keeping your affiliation with us.
Kyle Ellis, who we have appointed as the Inspector of Election at this meeting. Kyle, will you stand and be recognized?
Yes, sir.
As Inspector of Election, Kyle will ascertain the number of shares of common stock outstanding and the voting power of each to 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 of 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 109,263,103 shares of common stock outstanding and entitled to vote as of the record date, April 13th, 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 of the Inspector of Election, I declare that a quorum is present for the purpose of conducting business at this meeting. The meeting is legally convened and ready to transact business. The 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, four matters will be considered enacted upon this meeting. To expedite the actions to be taken, all matters of business, as reflected in the notice of this meeting, will be presented first. A ballot will be taken afterwards for voting on each matter. The first order of business is the election of five directors.
Our directors serve staggered three-year terms and are grouped as Class One, Class Two, and Class Three. Class One board of director nominees are Bill Byerley, Julie Forrester, and Ken Stewart. If y'all would please stand, just let people see you. The Class Three directors are Tim Parker and David Posner. The directors continuing in office and not up for election today are Gaines Baty, Craig Burkert, Ray Baribault, and myself. More information with respect to each class and 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, as 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 third order of business is a non-binding vote on the frequency of Say on Pay votes, known as Say When on Pay, as set forth in your proxy statement. The board of directors has recommended that you vote for a one-year frequency as opposed to a two-year or three-year frequency, so that each year you get a chance to vote on Say on Pay. The fourth 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 that KPMG is the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31, 2018. To review, there are four orders of business, election of five directors, the non-binding advisory vote on the compensation, the non-binding advisory vote on the frequency of Say on Pay, and fourth, 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 five nominees of the board of directors, Bill Byerley, Julie Forster, and Ken Stewart as Class I directors, and Tim Parker and David Posner as Class III 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, the company, when we come back, we want it to be a little better each year. That's your challenge, and hope you will accept that challenge and serve. If I could Like sitting on the exit row of an airplane, you're supposed to verbally let me hear, "I will" or "I did." 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 third motion on the frequency of Say 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 one-year frequency. Finally, the fourth motion ratifying the selection of KPMG LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the year ending December 31st, 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.
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-K 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. So moved. Thank you. I wasn't sure I was going to get one there, but thank you. Thank you. I need a second, too.
Second.
All right. Thanks for the second. Having heard the motion and 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 take any questions that you may have. First, are there any questions from the audience? Then we'll move into comments. Seeing none, we'll move into comments, again, then give you a chance at the end of those times to ask further questions. All right. 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. 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.
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. 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. The current crisis is working to our advantage in that deals are easier to make because everybody is moving around to try to improve their position and find those win-win deals. 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, we're not done.
There are more agreements, as they're on our way, they'll further mitigate and enhance what we have. The oil production is down by a third from where it was, 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. We recently passed that 50,000 barrels of BOE per day, which is a big marker within our industry, and delighted to do that. Proved oil reserves have grown from 1.1 million to 87 million, and the total reserves of the company are above 150 million BOEs or almost 1 trillion gas equivalent. The Delaware acreage itself has grown from 7,500 acres to 115,000, and that's the best area of the country.
What is happening in the transportation is every so often there is some aspect of our business that has bottlenecks or is tight. You all can remember when rigs were short. The laws of supply and demand work, there are plenty of rigs now. Then you heard, well, frac crews couldn't be had. Well, you can have them. We're not experiencing that shortage. Sand, then brown sand versus white sand. This is just something else that'll be solved over a relatively short time. When you have a 30-year producing history of these wells, a year or year and a half is not critical to them. It's the whole 30-year period.
Another very key fact is this, is our marketing group made some good trades, roughly 55% of our crew will be taken away at a $1 differential because of the financial hedge and not $10. Anything the differential is, we will experience only about half of that. We still have to pay transportation, for the differential itself, it will only affect us by half. Jason, I want to thank you before you leave and recognize you. I don't want you upset that some lawyers are recognized and not you, so catch you going out the door.
No, I'll drive out.
Okay. This kind of meeting you like where people just tell you what they're actually doing. 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 million, and we've taken out over $300 million in cash by selling parts of it. That's been a great money maker for us, and I think it'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. The leverage is 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, that's a good spot to have options at a time of volatility to make some deals or further improve our position. This shows you on the day we went public, there were 150 companies that were public that were being compared. If you put us all at zero at the same number, which ones have had the best performance and have increased in value the most. Of those 150, 70 are no longer in business. The Matador, you can see right over here is third, and through the years has always been one of the top performers.
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, it just begins to show you what you've gotten for your investment over the years and how we've compared to the oil index. Here's the same thing, is trying to look at the notion of proved reserves, how many shares we have, you can continue to see that even though we have taken on additional equity at times, the amount of reserves per share and production per share all have favorable trends.
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. We've really taken this to try to be good stewards of your investment. Again, trying to just see 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 would achieve. We further expect that that trend will continue for us. David does a fantastic job modeling. Matt, Billy, and production group make sure that the production is there. Everybody's working together, the board, to make all this happen. I like that it's 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, you can see is 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. 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, 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. Our average costs are less than $10,000.
Van and his group have done a fantastic job of getting acreage for a weighted average cost of less than $10,000. You're supposed to. Moving on, midstream, Matt's going to address, this is the point that I made earlier of how strong our balance sheet is. Something we can be really proud of in a time of volatility to have cash in the bank, nothing borrowed on a line of credit, our bonds are selling at above par at 105. 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 to about 200 plus, 220, so. 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, more than happy to walk through. David and I are going to do the typical, we call it Lewis and Clark, we're going to tag team through this thing. Before we get started, I just wanted to thank everybody for coming. Historically, this has been a very special meeting for us, this year is no exception. Thank you all for joining, I do want to make a couple of introductions. My wife, Cricket, sitting back here. Most of you know Cricket. My youngest daughter, Sadie. Sadie's been to some of these meetings. My oldest daughter, Sasha, she wanted to be here with her young son, her family, unfortunately, he's sick, she sends her best wishes, too.
Also sitting next to Sadie here is Serita Goodwin, and I've actually known Serita longer than I've known Cricket. 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. Thanks to everyone that's not here, and thanks to the people that are here as well. 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 three different buckets. We are in the E&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. That's the E&P bucket. Joe was just talking about the land acquisition strategy. 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 the market. That's adding a lot of value in that bucket. The third bucket is midstream, and we're going to talk a bit about that here as we start through this. Just the typical around the horn we talk about. We'll start in North Louisiana, East Texas. That's one of our legacy assets. We've got 25,000 or 26,000 gross acres there, 23,000 net. We consider that our gas bank.
Everything there is held by production. It's very economic to operate this gas. That's, again, I 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." We've done that. We've drilled a number of wells there. Last year, we actually drilled five additional wells in the Eagle Ford. They were very good wells. The rates of return were very good on those wells. We've got a few hundred locations left yet there that we could go drill.
The main focus for us for the last few years, and will be the primary focus for us, is the Delaware Basin. 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 207,000, almost 208,000 gross acres. A very nice position and a very nice piece of the world to be drilling oil and gas wells. We've got about 88% of oil production that comes out of this area. Primarily focused 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, if you look down in the reserve portion, about 57% of the reserves are also oil. That's really where we're comfortable. We think the 55%-60% range oil is kind of where we want to be. 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. I'd also mention the Eagle Ford, which is an option for us. We've got a number of locations there. Also in the 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 Voodoo. There's a number of opportunities there for us too.
The message is that's a pretty rich set of wells for us to be able to go drill. Let's talk a little bit about reserves. At the end of the year 2017, we had 153 million BOE reserves. If you look back a couple of years, you go back to the year end 2015, you can see we were at 85 million BOE. You can see the Delaware Basin there was about 55% of the production, the remainder was kind of split between Eagle Ford and Haynesville. Fast-forward one year, we get to 106 million BOE. By the way, before we go there, if you look at the PV-10 in 2015, we're a little over half a billion dollars, you can look at the commodity prices there. We went to 106 in 2016. Delaware's growing.
We're now three-quarters of our reserves are in the Delaware Basin. Again, the remainder is split between Haynesville and Eagle Ford pretty equally. Year end 2017, we're at 153 million, for which 87 million of those are actual barrels of oil. The Delaware now is 84% of the reserves, again, Eagle Ford and Haynesville split the remainder. If you look down at the bottom there, the PV-10 is now $1.3 billion, the commodity price is a little bit higher that that's calculated on. Nonetheless, in any scenario, you've got twice the amount of PV-10 that we had even two years ago. I think that's a pretty attractive reserve base. If we look at production, there's a lot of things going on this slide. If you look at the top left, that's total production BOE per day or BOE per quarter.
If you look at Q1 2014, we're at 96,000 BOE per quarter. If you go to Q1 2018, we're at 3.3 million. That's a, you can see the calculated annual growth rate there is very significant. When we look at this, 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. We had 81,000 in Q1 2014. We had 2.1 million in Q1 2018. 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. This graph on the bottom of this page, David's heard me say this before. I think Peter Piper must have written the title to this slide. I'm going to go through it.
It's Permian production growth per debt-adjusted share versus Permian pure-play peers. That's hard for me to say, but I understand what they're talking about. This is kind of some of the better Permian players out here too. What you see at the bottom here, this is compared to up here. Sorry, Joe, I'll try not to blind you with that. You can see Matador twice on this chart. This is production going back to Q1 of 2016 and then Q1 of 2018. We fit in here kind of in the middle of the group. We're at 58%, they're 78%, they're 7% on the top and the bottom. This includes our Haynesville and our Eagle Ford assets. If we split that out and actually compare apples to apples with our Permian peers, we're at 212%.
Significant growth compared to our peers. Again, we're doing this profitably, so we take a lot of comfort in that. With that, I'll hand it over to Dave to walk around the basin and then talk about our activities.
Very good. Good morning, everybody. I'm David Lancaster. Before I take 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. Shirley, I have come to have close relationships with many of you, and I value them all. My favorite shareholder is sitting right there in green this morning, and that's my wife, Sue. Next to her is Debbie Robinson, Sue's best friend. Excited to take you around the horn a little bit and show you some of the recent successes that we've had. We're currently running six rigs in the Delaware, and you'll see them denoted by the little rig symbols. Three of them are here at Rustler Breaks. One 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. So far, we have four wells completed there, three of which we released the results for. One of them, not shown on this map because we had released that in the first quarter, was the Florence Well, named after Mrs. Mullins right there in the back.
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 Marlan Downey, our former advisor, and who we miss very much and wish was here with us today. I know he's watching us, and that was also a great well, and about 1,900 BOE per day. The one that is on this map right here, named after Leo Thorsness, a 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. Antelope Ridge is off to a great start, and we're real happy with the results that we're seeing there. If we come counterclockwise, we'll come down to the Wolf asset area and 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. 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 XY, the Wolfcamp A lower, and even last year, the Wolfcamp B. The two wells that we've noted on the map today actually both have IPs greater than 2,000 BOE per day, and they're the two best wells that we've drilled to date in Wolf. Real excited about those results. We're also drilling some longer laterals down in that area this year, of which these were two. 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 about a 60 million a day plant. We told you we're in the process of adding to that, and since we've seen you the last time, we actually added 200 million 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 noted here in Rustler Breaks, and 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 first quarter. They had IPs ranging anywhere from 1,500 to about 2,200 BOE per day in the Wolfcamp XY, the Wolfcamp A lower, and also in the Wolfcamp B. 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. Here just recently, and we put this in the press release, the Arrowhead team just recently drilled a couple of wells just north.
This was our Stebbins block, which we had drilled some really good Second Bone Spring 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%. That whole Western Arrowhead area is really coming into its own and developing into a very exciting area for us. We're real pleased with those results. Finally, up at Twin Lakes, 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. We're currently drilling our second well in this area.
That's a Wolfcamp D test, so a little bit deeper portion of the Wolfcamp to what we call the Kenneths. That well's just been cored and logged. 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 Elsener. Up in the Ranger and Arrowhead area, Trey Goodwin. 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 eight or nine here that we have identified, and lots of locations in each of them. As Matt mentioned a minute ago, a little over 4,600 gross, about 2,000 net locations. 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. A lot of good choices going forward in the future. With that, I'll pass it back to Matt.
Great. Thanks, David. I'm an operations guy. I love this operations stuff, 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 it a little bit differently. What we're looking at here. I actually went one too far. I think it's not in there. Sorry. Here we go. What we've got here is actual rate of penetration. When we're on bottom with the bit and we're rotating to the right and we're drilling, this is how fast we're drilling. What you're looking at here, if you look on the left, it's 2014. The blue bars are the actual footage drilled, that's 188,000 feet. That's about 36 miles that we drilled in 2014.
As you progress your way up, you see in 2017, we're going to drill, or we have drilled over 1 million feet. That's 200 miles basically. A lot more footage, you can see the gray bars here are penetration rates. In 2014, we averaged 41 feet per hour. Every hour that we're on bottom, we drill 41 feet. That's increased to 88%, up to 71 feet per hour or 77 feet per hour. Why that matters is because when these operations are ongoing and drilling rigs, you're somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 per day. Every day that we can save, that's significant to the bottom line on the rates of return on these wells. Hats off to Billy and his drilling team, Josh Beshear and Patrick Walsh. I think they're back over here. Nice job, guys.
The drillers are charged very much with drilling these wells as cost effectively as they can. They do have one caveat. We want to make sure when we pick an interval to drill in, say it's a 25-foot Wolfcamp X or Wolfcamp Y zone, that we stay within that interval. 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. The completion guys, their charge is a little bit different. 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.
Chris Calvert, working under Billy's leadership, is in charge of the completions team, they've done a great job in doing that. They also don't want to get left behind in the efficiency discussion. 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 frack two wells at the same time. We're doing wireline work on one well while we're fracking on the other, then we just flip back and forth. We're able to get not quite twice the number of stages, but pretty close to that in each and every day. 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." They're working on the cost side too. If you look at this graph, what you'll see, the blue bars are actually pounds of proppant pumped per year. Starting in 2013, we didn't do a whole lot. Estimated in 2018, that's 1.2 billion pounds of sand. That's a lot of dirt to be pumping into the ground. If you look at the green line there, that's the number of stages for years. Just go all the way to 2018. That's over 1,900 stages. That's well over 5 stages a day, 365 days a year. There's a lot of effort that's going there.
Once the completion guys get done, and I say this often, 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. Kristin Welch sitting over here and John Romano sitting back there, they're our area production managers. They've got these wells for 20 years. What they'll start doing as soon as the completion guys move off, they'll start monitoring the flow back on these wells. 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. John and Chris are going to be working on these wells for a very long time, and they're doing a nice job as well. Let's jump to midstream.
We're talking about the third bucket here. You can see here we're talking about gas, we're talking about water, and we're talking about oil. Joe has a saying, it's a three-pipe system, and I think that's exactly right. They all work together very well. Just looking at the gas gathering and processing. We had a 60 million cubic feet per day plant at Rustler Breaks. We just expanded that. We added another 200 million cubic feet per day plant, so we've got a 200 and a 60, which gives us a 260 million cubic feet per day inlet design capacity. 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. That's the gas pipe.
The water is very important. It doesn't get near as much press as the gas or the oil, particularly this latest discussion about take away capacity. I can tell you, it's just as important. If you've got a well that's producing one barrel of oil, and it's producing three or four or five or maybe even six barrels of water for every barrel of oil that you're producing, you better have a cost-effective way to dispose of that. We now have 160,000 barrels, that's been said already today. We've got two wells that we're going to drill this year, at least two wells, which will get that capacity to 220,000 barrels per day. Based on what third party needs we may have, we may actually even drill some additional wells. That's the water side. The crude side is the final thing.
We'll talk about that here in just a minute. Now we've got three pipe systems. Matt's not here, Matt Foster's 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 third party operators and say, "We can take care of gas, water, and oil for you guys." The call out the option here that has the 400,000 acres, that's relative to the deal we do with Plains. They've identified the 400,000 acre block right here in our Rustler Breaks area for which we can go out and gather third party volumes and put them on the same contract we have with Plains. Let's talk about the Plains contract. Currently, Plains has a pipeline that comes from Midland over into the Wolf area.
This is Loving County, Texas. You've got Eddy County, New Mexico, Lea County, New Mexico. We have a CDP, a central delivery point for all our crude that we produce and gather here at Wolf. It's currently going into this pipeline. 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, an 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 pay 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. That's a huge advantage, not only for us, but for third parties. Any third party that we gather, they get the option to do the same thing. What's going to happen later this summer is the line ends now right there at the New Mexico-Texas state line. Plains is going to build that system up into our Rustler Breaks. We're hopeful that it's August, that all the barrels at Rustler Breaks will be on that same system. Not only Matador barrels, but third party volumes. And that includes the 400,000 acre block, 625 square miles that's located around here. People talk about flow assurance.
That gives us flow assurance for almost 90% of the production we have in the basin. We feel really good about this deal and really excited to have it. Let's talk about gas. Really there's two components to gas. There's the natural gas, and then there's the NGLs or the natural gas liquids. What we have currently, we have firm transport for everything we produce at Rustler Breaks, everything we produce at Wolf. We've got firm transport into Waha. Waha is a hub that's located in the area. I think I'm pointing to the right spot there. It's hard to see that map. Anyway, we have firm transport into Waha. 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.
Greg and his team are looking at accessing these other markets, again, with some sort of 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, 115 million cubic feet a day on the Gulf Coast Express pipeline that's due to be operational in October 2019. 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, we're talking about how we add value with midstream, and this is what it all comes down to. This business is all about making money. What we're looking at here is an EBITDA chart. Starting over here on the left, you can see in 2015, we made about $4 million.
That's good money, but it's not a lot of money. 2015, we tripled that to $12 million. We did the JV with Five Point Capital Partners, which is now Five Point Energy, to create San Mateo. We've really put some growth together. We're at $31 million for 2017. If you look towards the right here, you see $65 million-$75 million in EBITDA for 2018. That's the base case with an expected case that we get some third party volumes. We think for the year, we're going to be in that $65 million-$75 million range. The interesting one to me is over here on the right. This is $100 million annualized. What we're projecting is that in Q4 of 2018, we're going to make $25 million in EBITDA.
If you annualize that, you multiply it by four, that gets you to the $100 million. Whatever multiple you want to put on this thing there, you can pick any. 8's not unreasonable, 12's not unreasonable. 10 to me, I'm a simple guy, the math is easy. 10 times $100 million is $1 billion. There's an argument that this is a billion-dollar business for which Matador owns 51% of that. Again, the three buckets, E&P, the land acquisition strategy, and midstream. We think those are all very important for us. 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 Brakes area, the blue down here, 1 will run in Antelope Ridge. You see the little red dotted line here. The rig at Rustler Brakes is going to drill, as Matt mentioned, 2 additional saltwater disposal wells. They're just about ready to start. That'll be going on for the next two or three months, then we'll go back to drilling oil and gas wells with that rig at Rustler Brakes.
When you 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 Rustler Brakes area. You can sort of see the number of gross wells that we'll be completing and putting on production in all the other areas as well. This gives you an idea 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 million barrels of oil for the year, 9.9 is the midpoint of our guidance, and about 42-43 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 gas. 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.
The production there will decline off a bit this year. What I think is really exciting is that we're going to continue at a very robust growth rate of 35%-40% in the Delaware basin, and that's where we're spending the shareholders' money. Just wanted to give you a few thoughts on hedging. We do 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 swap 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. 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 have in place. 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. 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 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 IBERIABANK. These eight 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. 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 million. 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 million. We've kept our elected commitment at $400 million because we haven't really needed to borrow the money, and no sense to pay for the initial capacity. It is nice to know that we have $725 million that we could borrow against our reserve base. That's very comforting to us. Currently, we have no borrowings under the agreement, that gives us a lot of liquidity, along with the cash we have in bank and cash flow.
We've got well in excess of $1 billion of liquidity to be able to prosecute our business going forward. Just want to mention, I'll show you here. This 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, they all have businesses very similar to ours. You can see that the net debt to EBITDA or essentially cash flow goes anywhere from 0.8 up to about 3.6. You want to be to the far right, as far to the right on this curve as you can be, you can see that Matador is right down at the very farthest to the right.
What that suggests is that we have a very strong balance sheet, very good liquidity, and we're in very good financial position. 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 million at the end of the quarter. As you know, we just recently did an equity deal and brought in another $226 million in cash. We have plenty of cash in the bank, no borrowings under our credit agreement, and borrowing capacity of $725 million. Of course, oil, natural gas, and NGL prices have improved quite a bit over the last couple of years, that's definitely favorably impacted our cash flow. As we noted, these differentials have widened recently, we're doing everything we can to continue to mitigate that.
Ultimately, we've got very low debt levels, 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&P, have raised the company's corporate credit rating and their bond credit rating. We have gone up a notch or two in both of their estimations, 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 priced to yield about 5.1%. You may remember, these are eight-year bonds with a coupon of about six and seven-eighths. 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 three years now, and they continue to trade really as well as anybody's bonds in the industry. Of companies our size, anyway. 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 provide more than ample liquidity for us to continue 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. 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. 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&P efforts do, and that enables us, as someone said, to drive at the speed limit knowing that you have confidence. Mention again that the 14 or 15 straight quarters where we've exceeded the industry consensus is a good example of that. Also, 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.
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, and we have a great balance sheet. And together, over the years, we've built somewhat of a golden goose with for 34 years, first Matador, this one, we've achieved approximately a 21% rate of return. I see us keeping it up and getting better in every area. I have overlooked a few people. Emmett Murphy, who has been one of our longtime investors, has gone into the Mazda business. If you have a chance to buy a Mazda, we'd hope you'd talk to Emmett.
Our very good friend Nick Kehoe is here from Washington, D.C., 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 Vacek 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. As an example of great staff work, we have two in our regulatory group who have taken upon themselves to get federal commingling permits .
That doesn't sound like a big money maker, but it is when you can get on BLM lands, federal lands, approved that, you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in facilities. 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. To follow up into the abundance, and 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 VPs, and recognize Katie and Debbie. Debbie's not only famous for backing up Brad, but for cookies. You never know things.
I want to be sure I recognize Twinkle, with Paula being one of the original investors back to 1983, where they were really giving me a chance. I didn't have just a lot of assets then, but somehow we were all going to make it work. 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. My friend Bruce Keplinger's wife is here, Carol, who has a Hallmark store in Kansas City. If you need something in Kansas City, I highly recommend it. It has many lines and additions. Carol's there. Carol, we wave your hands, so looking, and she will do online efforts if you need it. 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, but he and his family have been involved going back to 1990 or before, and a delight to have him. When you think about it, remember the origins of Matador, where four guys walked off the handball court, Jim Rolfe and I being two of them, and kind of said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Things are starting to come. Let's do it." You end up not only on the New York Stock Exchange and 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 and 40 years later is really a nice way to end. I also don't want to forget the Semoleks 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. Wave. My father said he wouldn't invest until I got a check from somebody else in Amarillo. Fortunately, her uncles did that, or I might still be out there throwing newspapers. Appreciate this. Thank you, Sarah. 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'll be a shortage of something, and there's panic on some people. They think it's the end. It'll be solved. Laws of supply and demand work.
We're in an innovative industry that comes up with better and better solutions. That's the power of the people and the power of the team. 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 have said when you work for a really big company, you don't feel who the owners are. In this company, you all have a chance by being here, like Gary, who's from the Panhandle, too, to really know these are our shareholders. We hope your attendance will always be this strong, and know that we're always available to you. If you have to call or you have a question or some need. We want to get to know you.
We want you to feel you have some personal relations with us. That's all I have. I would entertain a motion to adjourn 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. The motion's been made, but I don't want to end without recognizing. I see Tara's here and recognize Tara as one of our special advisors. Back to the motion. Is there a second?
Second.
Second. The motion has been made and second to adjourn. A final time. 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. With these young people, the golden goose is just going to get bigger and more productive than ever. Thanks.