Go ahead and get started. Really pleased to have SM Energy at our conference here. And presenting is going to be Wade Pursell, CFO. We've also got Lindsey Miller, IR, here in the room as well. Wade's going to give a little overview of the company, and then we'll start with some questions. I'll lead off with a few questions, and feel free if anybody has any questions to interrupt and ask away. So with that, I'll turn it over to Wade.
Thank you, Michael. Hey, thanks for joining us this morning. I'm happy to kind of take you through a quick overview of the SM story real quick for those of you that might not know us. But I'll go pretty fast, but then we'll, as Michael said, have plenty of time that way for Q&A. So here we go. Hopefully, you have the slide deck in front of you. Slide two just says, as usual, I'm not a prophet. I'm sure I will be talking about the future. But just keep in mind those that warning. So slide three, if you haven't, it's a very exciting time for the company. I'll just start by saying that. I know there's you know there's always uncertainty with the macro and nervousness here and there, what's gonna happen, a lot of different scenarios.
But we feel really, really confident where we are now, and you know no matter what the macro throws at us. This this picture kind of shows you the basins we're in, and that's what I'll talk about. If you haven't heard our tagline, just remember we like to say sustainable and repeatable. Those two words, I think, describe the company pretty well. The sustainable part, we're a premier operator of top-tier assets, generating a sustainable return of capital. And then the repeatable side, empowered with a world-class technical team, I think that's a differentiating part of who we are. And a strong balance sheet. We're always poised to repeat the success. So slide four, the sustainable part, is I could just kind of generalize and say that's Texas.
Those are the core assets of the company over the last several years in the Midland Basin, 111,000 net acres, and then down in South Texas, which has become the story of the Austin Chalk the last four or five years. I'll talk about those. And then the repeatable part is the recently closed acquisition in the Uinta Basin in Utah. I'll talk about that last. So real quick, slide five, in the Midland Basin first. Kind of recent, you know Midland Basin is going really well, really consistent, high-return wells. Kind of the the the breaking news stuff recently, we have a few slides on that, I guess. Some organic inventory adds, hopefully. Firstly, on slide five, a couple of wells in the Woodford Barnett, a new zone. The technical team has done a fantastic job of identifying this.
And this and we actually have drilled a couple of wells and showing showing the results so far here, very encouraging. You can see the blue line and the green line, that's the cumulative production plots. Significantly better than peer wells so far in this area. So very early days, but we're pretty excited, and there'll be more to come in 2025 as we drill some more wells here. High potential, right? This is down in our Sweetie Peck area, and so l ot of lot of potential, a lot of perspective, 20,000-plus net acres exposed to this to this zone. So very exciting. Next slide, slide six. This is up in the north area, up in what we call the Rockstar area of our acreage. The Klondike acquisition, the Reliance acquisition from a little over a year ago. We have, I don't know, we have eight wells online. Two of them have reached IP30.
We gave you those results at the call last month. Very encouraged. These are all Dean wells, the Dean zone, and these are the good news is both of these wells are performing slightly better than what our acquisition economics assumed, so 918 BOE per day average, very oily, which is good, 93% oil. Just moving to the Austin Chalk real quick. Continued positive results here. I mean, remember this interval, for those of you who don't know, sits on top of the entire position, the 155,000 net acres sits on top of the Eagle Ford. This was an Eagle Ford story for us for over a decade. It was a great asset. A gassier, a wet gassier asset. The Austin Chalk is much oilier. Economics are fantastic, very similar to our Midland Basin economics, and the well results have been very consistent.
I mean, we're we're well over 100 wells in now in the Austin Chalk. And they've all been very consistent, very high returns. A couple of recent results on the right on this slide, and you can see these are far to the east in the liquids-rich area. I mean, Boomer wells, over 2,300 BOE per day. Then the oilier oilier acreage is over to the west, the northwest. On the on the left side of the slide, we're excited about the Briscoe C and these these seven fully bounded wells, which have been closely watched recently, continue to perform well. And you can see from the chart they're actually better than the average Austin Chalk well last year and the year before. So things continue to go really well in the Austin Chalk. I remember we last year reported 465 total locations in the Chalk.
We'll be updating that again as we go through year-end and reserves and give some inventory updates when we get to next February or March. So slide eight, just kind of a Texas combo slide here that we continue to update. We've got the Midland on the left and the Austin Chalk on the right. And and these ton of wells underneath these these lines on these charts, this is Enverus data. And you can just see that in both basins, our wells continue to outperform the averages in both areas. And this is oil. The Howard County peers on the left. And this goes back to, when I say a lot of wells, back to the beginning of 2021. And then I think in the Austin Chalk, it even goes back to 2018. So just continued outperformance, our wells versus the peers in the area.
And then finally on slide nine, we've said for a long time that you can't call yourself a premier operator if you're not a top-tier ESG performer. And we continue to be that. And that's really part of our DNA. And if you want to dig into that more, we just released our new sustainability report. It's it's on our website. Ton of data, ton of metrics there. So I encourage you to go look at that if you wish. So we say in that sustainable part to generate, I said a sustainable return of capital, that's slide 10. So the return of capital program, I'll just refresh your memory that we really began in earnest back a couple of years ago toward the end of 2022.
Leading up to that point, we said that we were focused on getting the balance sheet really, really strong before we before we kind of kicked into a bigger return of capital. And that's what we did. Got down below to one times and the debt down to $1 billion on an absolute basis. And then we announced two things. One, a fixed dividend, which we felt would be a very sustainable fixed dividend that hopefully we could grow. We announced that at $0.15 per quarter. And since then, we've increased it twice. It's now at $0.20 a share per quarter. So we're very happy about that. And on the other piece of the return of capital, we said that we would start buying back stock. And the board authorized us to buy back up to $500 million of stock.
And we we actually bought back, I think, $369 million, so reduced the share count around 10%. And then have recently discontinued that program and and kind of authorized a brand new share buyback authorization, a new $500 million, kind of reloaded it. And we will execute on that as we move forward through 2027. The near-term focus of free cash flow generation will be to reduce debt. The debt went up some with the Uinta acquisition, which I'll talk about in a second. But the focus will be on getting that back down to the one times area before we go large into return of capital again.
But it doesn't mean we won't opportunistically buy back stock along the way, especially on days of weakness. We still love the NAV of the we have a view of stock price, and we absolutely love these levels.
So that should not be viewed any differently. And then talking about the balance sheet, slide 11, the September 30th balance sheet date became stale on October 1st a little bit. We closed the Uinta acquisition on October 1st. So we tried to show people what the balance sheet looks like closer to what it looks like today. And you can see the balance sheet there. It's primarily bonds. They total around $2.7 billion, really layered out nicely year to year from 2026 through 2032. We were able to do a new revolver, which doesn't mature until 2029. The banks agreed to increase the borrowing base to $3 billion. The commitments from the banks are at $2 billion. So lots of liquidity. Borrowed $190 million on on the acquisition date.
So if you look at that total debt, you know if you take our trailing 12-month EBITDAX, and then we we we took kind of a rough estimate of XCL's trailing 12-month EBITDAX to show a real pro forma leverage number, that leverage level is around 1.2 times as of October 1st. So very very strong still, very reasonable. But as I mentioned, we have an intent to get it back down to the one times area. So over the near term, as we generate free cash flow, people ask, well, how will that look actually when you get into the details of your capital structure? Obviously, the revolver will get paid off first. And and then beyond that, the 2026 bonds will be targeted, and they're callable at par currently. So if you look ahead and take those two pieces out, then you're left with around 2.3 billion of debt.
And that number, you know depending on your estimate and commodity price assumptions for next year, is not very far off from a full year of EBITDAX. So if you think about one times and that level of debt, that's pretty darn close to where we want to get back to. A lot of people ask about hedging right now. Our hedging philosophy hasn't changed. I'm on slide 12. We tie it to to to our balance sheet, how much leverage we have. We're just protecting cash flow. We're not trying to lock in programs or predict prices any better than anyone else. We're not agnostic to price, but it's really just a means to protect cash flow. So w ith the acquisition, with the additional leverage, we've increased our targeted hedge position on the oil side because we bought mostly oil, too. It's around 37%-38% is our target for the upcoming year.
And we're just layering that in as we move forward. This quarter is at that level. Next quarter is at that level. And as we move along into the into the rest of the year, we are opportunistically moving those percentages up toward that target. We've actually been hedging more gas than we typically do recently in the out years. As as you all know, the strip has been inverted with the with the hope for the future and LNG and AI in in in the gas strip. And so we've been trying to take advantage of that in 2025, 2026, and even 2027 as we as we move to the right. So onto the repeatable side of the business and the recent acquisition of of the Uinta asset in Utah, slide 13, very excited. Around a $2.1 billion acquisition of over 63,000 net acres. Very, very oily asset. That's very exciting to us. 87% oil.
I think it's nearly 4,000 feet of pay, 17 potential intervals, lot of potential, very contiguous acreage. So we can do a lot of things with it. And the technical team is frankly giddy, which is great. Some pictures here on slide 13. On the those bottom left pictures are of the sand mine, which we acquired as part of this acreage. The XCL folks, we found out were very. They're great operators, very creative, very innovative. And we're we're excited about that. The sand mine, which has you know just begun operations, so I don't want to get too ahead of myself here, but but you can imagine the benefits of that, not just from an economic standpoint, but frankly from an ESG standpoint and less less trucks on the road. And I think we're going to save over 200,000 a well using using our own sand.
It should produce about a million tons a year, we think, which would be more than enough sand for the current activity levels we're looking at. But again, it's kind of early days on that. But that's exciting. And then the the rail transfer facility in the bottom right. I think most of you know that the oil, you know about 15%-20% of our oil production will stay in Utah and go to the Salt Lake refineries, and the rest of it will be trucked will be trucked out either to to the Rockies or to Cushing or to the Gulf Coast.
We we have a lot of capacity, plenty of capacity to do that. And and we're actually actually excited to do that. It's a waxy crude. You've heard us talk about that, which actually has a lot of demand, lubricant-type demand, and and actually brings a premium to WTI because of that.
So slide 14 again, these are these are these are charts you've seen before. We'll continue to update them. And just to show you, these are top-tier assets. And and the economics are really good. Comparing on the left, you've got both you we've got the Upper Cube and the Lower Cube. And you can see that the cumulative production plots, normalized 10,000-foot laterals are very comparable to our to our Midland Basin and to our Austin Chalk. So competing for capital immediately and a lot of flexibility between the basins, I think, is the bottom line for us why we're so excited. On the right, we just show that Upper Cube and Lower Cube, how it compares to other other basins outside of just our basins. Then slide 15, I mentioned the all the intervals and the potential for inventory adds. You know you got the Lower Cube and the Upper Cube. I said 17 different intervals.
The Lower Cube is the is the better known and the area you know the area that we probably put the most value on in the acquisition, a lot of upside in the Upper Cube and the deeper zones. So it's very exciting to be able to announce three wells in the Upper Cube this this soon in the Douglas Creek area. And you can see these wells are very good wells, 870 BOE per day average, very, very oily, 94% oil. So early days, but these reached IP30 and we announced them. So a lot of lot of excitement with respect to potential inventory adds. So I think slide 16 is our last slide, a nice one to end on, three rigs working at sunrise. I've heard the phrase morning in America a few times lately. Well, it's morning at SM, I guess I would say.
And we're we're very excited about the future and kind of how we're positioned for that as we as we move forward. I mean, we're kind of in our first quarter of of this asset. I should have said we just closed. Integration's going well. It's we're under a transition agreement right now. So they're still technically doing everything. But we've been making offers to people we want to retain. And we're we're gonna I think we got just about everyone in the field coming on our payroll January 1st, which is really important.
Really excited about that. And a lot of other folks, Geos and engineers in in the office positions, we've we've got a lot of those as well. So it's an exciting time, big step change in the scale. I think our guidance for the fourth quarter versus the third quarter showed you know oil increasing 40%. I think the midpoint, 108,000 barrels a day.
So so, a big move in scale for us. And we're very excited about where about where we are. So I'll take a breath now and take your questions.
Great. Appreciate that, Wade. You talked about the the top-tier assets of the company, and I think the well results that everybody's been able to analyze would bear that out. You know Howard County in particular looks as good as anything in the Midland Basin, which is arguably some of the best acreage in the country. But when you guys got into that area, it was not viewed that way. Same could be said for the Austin Chalk.
I think the Uinta, maybe to some degree, certainly not noted as much as a focal point, very few companies operating there. So I guess, can you just kind of walk us through how that has all come about? How how has the company found these areas that did not appear to be top-tier areas at the time, but lo and behold, once you developed them, you proved up that, in fact, they were?
Yeah. No, Michael, I appreciate you asking the question that way because that is a I think that's what differentiates SM. Having the, I call it the world-class technical team, especially for a company our size. You're exactly right. I mean, if you look at you know the sustainable part, the core assets, the Midland Basin and the Austin Chalk, I remember it was 2016, those acquisitions, with that they were viewed as beyond the razor's edge. Those were some of the words we saw in headlines. And if you saw a map of the Midland Basin, everyone's map ended before Howard County. And the technical team had been doing an enormous amount of work and studying it.
And this is data analytics, geoscience, engineering, and getting very, very confident that that that this was going to be a great asset. And they were absolutely proved correct, as you mentioned. And now all of the maps obviously include Howard County. And the question is, how far does it go? And then the same thing you know a few years later, a few years after that, happened in the Austin Chalk. So you know I mentioned it earlier, but historically, that that asset was was the Eagle Ford. Eagle Ford was a great asset for us for for over a decade, wet gas asset. The Austin Chalk sits right above it. And so you can imagine, as we drilled wells in the Eagle Ford, I mean, you're probably talking about 1,000 wells. They had an enormous amount of data to study and got really excited about the Austin Chalk.
And you know that that one was doubted again because, unfortunately, everyone remembered the words Austin Chalk, but not favorably from the past. In hindsight, I wish we could have changed the name to Wolf chalk or something that would have sounded different because it was a very different asset. Yes, technology had changed and that's part of it, but it was very different rock as well. This was a different part of that. This was the western part. And the old Austin Chalk was more to the east. And and the geology was very different as well. But we've proven over time, we've proven success in that asset. And you know then you fast forward to the Uinta Basin. I mean, if if if could we add inventory in the basins we're in? Sure.
And we work hard on that and organically adding inventory and seeing that with Klondike and the Woodford interval and even in the even in the Austin Chalk with the drill to earn wells, hopefully, small organic adds, but to do something large, to do something like what we're able to do in the Uinta and the Permian would have been, as you all know, very, very expensive. And the technical team looks everywhere. I say everywhere, not everywhere around the world, but everywhere reasonable in North America for sure, and identified this basin as very similar characteristics to what we love and what we've been able to succeed with.
And that is the you know the multiple intervals, the stack pay, the the the really, really good oil content, and just was able to get really, really confident that that this would be a basin that could make a lot of money for us because we're very returns-driven, what you pay versus what you generate. And we saw this as a great opportunity to do that. And we're not afraid to look in other basins. I mean, we used to be in a lot of basins. That's not our desire, but we're not afraid of that. And we believe we can generate a lot of returns doing that in the Uinta Basin, just like the Permian.
You mentioned the borrowing base. You had the slide in there. You said you're probably gonna pay off the revolver first. Do you have a sense for for the time frame to get back to that one-time leverage target that you're talking about?
Yeah. I mean, we're we're working a lot of scenarios right now for the 2025 plan, different activity levels, running different commodity prices. You know I think I said when we first, right before we did the deal, and then when we did the deal, that that that all of our forecasting, you know if you assume something in the mid-70s on oil, I know that's lower than that now, but back in the mid-70s, you're there by the middle of next year. So depending on your commodity price, you know if you assume a lower price, then that extends it somewhat. But we'll just have to see where that plays out. But definitely, every scenario I'm looking at is you know kind of mid-year or later, depending on depending on price.
And you know i t's not a it's not a bright line. If you're as soon as we start getting confident in the you know the cash flow profile, I mean, that's kind of the main thing. If you remember back in 2022, you know we we got after the return of capital program back then as we were approaching one time because we were so confident in the in the free cash flow profile. So it's kind of a guidepost for us.
And I guess once you get to around that area where you do feel confident, you know you mentioned you know reloading the $500 million buyback, but you just increased the the dividend. I guess maybe how do you feel about at current stock price, the which form of return capital...
Yeah
would you be leaning towards?
That's a good question. We we we like I like both both the fixed dividend coupled with the stock buyback, the fixed dividend being a level that that you can count on and and then we hope can grow modestly over time. N ever wanna get too ahead of ourselves on that. But we have been able to grow it twice over the last two years. So hopefully that will continue in modest pieces. But that's kind of an underpinning of something you can count on and capitalize, frankly, in the stock, with the stock buyback being the, being we think, the right method for returning you know large percentages of free cash flow to the shareholders after we get the balance sheet to the place where we want it to be. That's that's kind of the way we look at it.
And I guess go ahead, Adam.
Can you speak to you know Woodford Barnett, how much oil, gas, NGLs, and what don't you know about growing that ?
Well, we don't know a lot. I mean, it's it's it's early days. It's it's just a couple of wells. It's very it's pretty oily. Did we put the oil content on the slide? I can't remember. I'm gonna look back at it.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'll have to get back to you on the exact percentage. You know but it's you know it's it's Sweetie Peck. It's Midland Basin. And you know it's pretty oily. Yeah.
Yeah. Is there anything particularly tricky about this zone versus ?
You know i t all seems easy to me, right? I mean, I'm sure there are challenges to it.
I think the I think the thing that I've heard that the team was able to do that really enhanced the results versus maybe some of the peer operators is is is the work [uncertain] that they do leading up to drilling the wells on on the engineering side and the geo side that enables them to really nail the landing zone. And I think that's you're seeing the result of that.
And the laterals were on these first two here.
I don't remember. We didn't state it. Do you remember, Lindsey? I don't remember.
Yeah. One was 10 and one was about six.
10 and six. Yeah. Thank you.
Do you think there's something, you know what else is deeper here that would be of interest without finding a whole bunch of gas and NGL access and necessarily what you want to do?
Yeah. I'm I'm sure there's other things we're looking at, but I'm not aware of anything deeper right now.
Yes I guess, I'll just switch over to the Uinta. I think you said when you did the deal, you had assigned 390 locations. And I think there was some pushback from some folks on that saying there's no way there's 390 locations there. You're counting too many zones. But you came out of the gate with some results out of the Douglas Creek, which I don't think you. Well, I guess I'll ask. How how many locations in that 390 were Douglas Creek? What was what was underwritten there? And and what do you see now as the the potential? And what will we get in 2025?
I think Herb said you're going to get kind of a mix of delineation and maybe some testing of some newer zones. So, I guess how do you think by the end of 2025, the naysayers will be more confident in that 390 number?
Hopefully hopefully, they will. It'll be very similar to to to the last two assets, right, that we' re just talking about. I think you you you stated it well. I'll start with the end and work back towards the day. I mean, as as we go through 2025, we're looking at different activity levels and different things to do in the program right now. But you're absolutely correct. And and Herb said that there will be a mix, some delineation and development as as we proceed next year. We're working on year-end inventory as well right now, year-end reserves. This will be our first year-end reserves for this asset and and and a view toward inventory. So I don't want to get too far ahead of myself on that. We'll talk a lot more about that come come February.
You know a s far as as far as the, what was this? I won't get too specific on on how many locations we assumed in our deal. We've we've may have assumed some, but I will also say you know we put risking on on on pretty large percentages on on on some of that acreage for sure, or some of those zones for sure. Most of the value, as as I mentioned earlier, was in the was in the Upper Cube. And but I will say we did put some on the other areas, but most of it was there.
Okay. You mentioned the sand mine that XCL put together. It sounds like you've got more sand than really what you need there for your.
Hopefully. It's early days to say that, but hopefully, yeah.
Any any plans to expand that? And because is it capable of supplying you know others in the basin? I would assume it's.
I like the way you're thinking. Just early days on that.
We'll we'll you know once we see the actual amount that we can produce and what we need, then we'll make those kind of decisions.
Gotcha. Anything else you can say about the integration of the the XCL deal since you've been operating in now?
I know it's been a long. Just to say that in general, it's going very well. It's not it's not easy. I don't want to overstate it, but it's going very well. And we've been happy that we've been able to hire most of the people that we that we really needed to hire and wanted to hire. There's an excitement in the company because it's created a lot of opportunities for folks to to do something different and move into those seats that that we're not replacing with XCL people. So it's an exciting time. And you know the integration is going really well. W e're looking forward to you know to to starting you know with all of our folks January 1st.
So we're on target for that.
Good.
As ever, drilling around you, have you found anything particularly interesting? You focused on on the Lower Cube, so Upper Cube or even deeper. And so why are you trucking oil out of the basin?
No no, it's it's a basin that requires the the the railing out. It's it's been that way for a while. There are refineries in Utah. But again, as as I mentioned, only only 15%-20% are available capacity-wise.
Ok.
And your peers, have they done anything interesting that?
Not that not that I've heard of recently. Yeah. Obviously, we'll be watching that closely as we move forward.
I was gonna ask about your Klondike area where you're extending essentially the Midland Basin play a bit to the north.
You actually decided to go put a rig back in there based on the results of the first couple of wells. I was a little surprised, honestly, with that decision. I know there's some infrastructure issues up there on the water side. Was that a concern at all? You know why go drill some more wells when you've got essentially some constraints in place? And what gave you the confidence, I guess, to to go back there and do that given the the early day results from the first couple of wells?
Yeah. No, we're we're as I mentioned, we're very encouraged with the two Dean wells that we that we have reached IP 30 we announced and and very oily, 93% oil, better than what we assumed in our economics. And and yeah, we did we did mention that we are encouraged enough to rig back there.
And I think we said we'll probably spud six six wells by the end of the year. You know with respect to the you know constraints, the the water, that it's we are obviously feel comfortable that we'll be able to produce these wells within a reasonable manner. Yes, they may be leveled off some at their peak, but it's deferred and it just flattens out the you know the production profile of those wells. So so we're encouraged and and we're not we're not concerned about the you know the water constraints with respect to the returns that can be generated from those wells.
I know Adam was asking you about the the Woodford Barnett play Sweetie Peck area. But any constraints there that concern you? And I guess how do the economics compare that zone versus what you were drilling originally in the Wolfcamp and Spraberry and Sweetie Peck?
Yeah. On the constraint side, I haven't heard of any issues there. So we're not not much concerned there.
And it's it's just early days on the returns. We're obviously very encouraged given the initial production profile of these wells. It's it's too early to compare the returns.
Wait. You know Initially, people were worried about the natural fractures and loss of the zone. How did everybody work their way through that? Is there any potential above the Austin Chalk?
Well I mean you know , it usually takes time to answer the first question. And then the results have just continued to to to. I mean, it's it's taken time, I think, for for investors in general to embrace the Austin Chalk as an asset that that has that much inventory comparable to the to the Permian and just continuing to show the results. You know we're used to. There for a while, we just we just showed every well. And as as that built up and showed the high returns and the consistency, as I said earlier, we're over 100 wells now.
That was the way you asked the question, how did people get comfortable? Just the continued showing of the results, I think, was the was the only way, the best way. As far as any other zones above, I I there are other zones, but I haven't heard anything that I would be ready to get excited about or talk about today. Yeah.
Are you drilling away from the natural fractures? Is that how it becomes successful?
Yeah. I'm not I'm not sure on that. I'm not sure on that.
G uess while we're on the chalk, anything more you can say about the drilled-earn area? Is that gonna potentially give you some more drilling inventory?
I hope so. Yeah yeah. Definitely encouraged. I guess I'll, yeah, nothing new to report. I guess I'll repeat. Herb said we're encouraged by the by the early results, and we'll we'll report those results as soon as consistent with how we report other well results. Encouraged.
And I guess with that Briscoe area, any potential for additional inventory there? I think you put out a number on the inventory in the 400-plus range for a while.
Yeah.
Sounds like there's maybe some potential for that to move higher.
That's fair. I would say potential. And we're we're we're working that here in the year-end process, and and we'll be updating that soon.
I know you mentioned on hedging gas. Sounds like you're not completely convinced that gas prices are making a turn here for the better. But if, say, they did, you know maybe the we finally get these exports that have been a bit delayed, and the AI really does start driving a lot of demand. Can you talk about what's you know within your portfolio? I think you do have some some natural gas assets, dry natural gas assets. What what would it take for those to compete with the oil drilling inventory that you have?
Yeah. I I I guess I would I would say that we have a very good gas option for sure. We have lots of, which is maybe the story of the industry. I don't know, but we have gas in the southern part of the of the Austin Chalk and certainly the Eagle Ford, which a higher gas price would make very economic and would compete. Your your question would be. You know i t would be it would be a question of you know how we view the price from a sustainability. You know is it real, or you know is it just a blip? You know w e're not, we're not so we want to make sure it's real. We we I mean, historically, we have adjusted to commodity prices. It's not like we won't.
I think the last time when gas prices really jumped for a week or two or however long that was, the last time we we we got after some DUCs and completed some DUCs in the Eagle Ford, and I think those paid back in like a month. So so it it becomes very economic as gas moves up toward you know $4. So we've got lot of options there. But we'll continue to hedge as we move to the right.
No for a we ll cost. Can you give just a little comparison now that you're in a third region?
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'll generalize. Generally speaking, the cost, what we're seeing so far, and again, we're just really getting into the Uinta, but the cost so far, it's best to look at it per lateral foot to normalize all that, is is pretty similar between the three basins right now for us. The last reported number for us, I think, was around $800. I think we said in the quarterly call that's that's trended down well into the mid-700s area for us, and that's pretty consistent, looks like, between the the three basins, so that's kind of where we are. We're obviously taking a hard look at that and what we forecast for 2025. As far as deflation, deflation has been really good this year compared to what we assumed, so we we're excited about that. By the way, the Woodford is 60% oil. I just saw on my screen.
The, as far as where we are currently and where we're headed, you know it it feels like and I don't want to overstate it in case any of our service companies are listening but it feels like it's flattening some versus how it's been this year. But it's it's it's certainly not going the other way. That's kind of where we are. We're doing a lot of work on that for for the forecasting for 2025, and we'll report our assumptions when we do that.
Anything on the regulatory front to be concerned about or see as?
Less than a few weeks ago.
Yeah. Alright. I guess along those lines, anything that you anticipate could open up opportunity with the new administration?
Yeah. That's that's hard to speculate. I mean, it's it's certainly you know from a regulatory standpoint, what would happen in our industry is it's it's certainly you know probably a positive in that regard.
For us, you know we're we're we don't it's not like we're on a bunch of federal acreage that we're worried about. We're in Texas. We're in Utah, two very industry-friendly states. We have assets that generate really good returns at low prices, so we don't see a lot of change happening with respect to our business. I think the potential for LNG, that if there was a negative regulatory potential there, that might have been removed maybe, so that's a so maybe you're seeing some of that in gas prices in addition to the cold weather, so you know that's that's generally, I think, the impact to us, which is not a lot, I think. Bigger impact might be the commodity price and what happens in foreign lands and with respect to potential sanctions, tariffs, all those things that would be hard for me to predict, obviously.
Is there anything in oil field service land that you think you'll be paying more for next year? Tariffs hit tubulars.
Yeah. Yeah.
I could think of. What else ?
Well, yeah, I don't know of anything right now that I could just point to and say, "I think we're going to pay more next year for."
Just compression. I've heard compression has been maybe an area.
Maybe. Yeah, I don't. Maybe. I don't, I don't .
Anybody else? We're just about out of time.
We've got one more. Why doesn't the Uinta get the love of the Permian? You have this one, but there's the productivity of wells and comparing it. And they're, after what, two years on an oil ?
Well, hopefully, it will. It's a great question. I mean, the Permian is the Permian, right? It's been very well known for a while, incredibly productive basin.
You know m ost of the rig activity in the country is there. I mean, it is what it is. The Uinta is less known, not certainly not a lot of public companies there. And we we love the asset. So I don't I won't argue with you any longer. It should get a lot of.