Welcome everyone, Jeff Elliott with Three Part Advisors. Thanks for coming to check out Vitesse Energy. VTS is the ticker. They're based out of Denver, Colorado. With us here from the company today, we have Jimmy Henderson, CFO, and Ben Messier, VP of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Vitesse is actually a client of Three Part Advisors. If anybody would like a follow-up meeting or a call with management, I'm happy to help set that up. Just give me a shout. With that, I'll turn it over to Jimmy.
All right. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks to Three Part Advisors for setting us up. Another great conference, great lineup of investors so far today. I really appreciate what you guys do for us. As Jeff said, Vitesse Energy, we're primarily a non-operated participator in oil and gas development, mostly in the Bakken play of North Dakota. That's kind of our bailiwick where we got started. Still over 95% of our production and our asset base is in North Dakota, with a little bit of the remainder in Colorado and up into Wyoming, but primarily a Bakken player. As a non-operated owner, what we do is participate in other operators' wells. You think of it as being an ETF across the entire Bakken play as we're exposed to just about every operator that's up there. We're under over 7,000 wells and have an average somewhere around 2.5% - 3% ownership.
It's just kind of a differentiated story about how we play in the oil and gas world. Earlier this year, we closed on an acquisition of a company, Lucero Energy Corp., which gave us a little bit of an operated position. We do have the capability to operate if need be, just another lever to pull should opportunities present themselves. We'll get into all of that here in a little bit more detail in one minute. From a high level, we'd kind of like to walk through how we think about the investment criteria for us. Because of the maturity of the asset and how we've participated, we generate significant free cash flow. We take advantage of that by returning a large dividend to shareholders. Right now, we're yielding right around 9% given our current stock price with a dividend of $2.25 per year.
That's really our focus and our mantra about how we return capital to shareholders. Every decision that we make, how we invest money internally is how well it supports or allows us to grow the dividend. We talked a little bit about that and how we thought about that in the Lucero acquisition in a bit. Again, we are a dividend payer and, very importantly, from an asset standpoint, it's a long-duration asset with still 80% of our assets undeveloped. Even though the Bakken itself is very developed, call it a mature basin, we still have a lot of locations left on the map that will get drilled over the next 20 years or so. We're very excited about how technology has improved on drilling and completing these wells. Most significantly, we're seeing three 4-mile lateral wells.
We're going down a mile, mile and a half, and then going out 3 miles, 4 miles, just incredible technology that's just changed the face of shale plays, and particularly in the Bakken. Many years of development on our existing platform, and we constantly are acquiring interest in additional well bores and buying people out of their own positions so that we can add to that existing platform that we have. We've done over 200 of these small acquisitions, spent over $750 million doing that and building what we have today. We've also done larger acquisitions. We've done four major acquisitions in the life of the company. The most recent one was the Lucero Energy Corp. acquisition, basically about a $200 million acquisition using our equity as currency. It was a little bit different because it did come with operated properties, but pretty limited operating requirements.
Most significantly, it came with free cash flow that allowed us to increase our dividend and continue to support that, as well as cash on the balance sheet that kept our leverage in a really good position going forward, which is the next tenet of the company's strategy, trying to keep the balance sheet in a very conservative position. The only components of our capital structure are our equity and the use of our reserves-based lending revolver. We have always targeted less than one times debt/EBITDA. Right now, we're pro forma 0.6 times, so a very good position from a debt standpoint. It gives us the ability to support our dividend through thick and thin, continue to fund our capital requirements, and continue to keep growing the company. We also protect ourselves by hedging.
Daniel will get into the specifics of our hedging program, but we're very careful with any acquisition we do. We want to hedge out as best we can. Everything's protecting the dividend and being able to reinvest capital as needed. Very process-oriented by that. We're really talking about taking all the data that comes in from participating in these thousands of wells and putting it into a very robust database that allows us to very carefully and accurately underwrite acquisitions that we're acquiring within the basin. We're kind of a huge database that we're bringing in information from the public, whether it's from the North Dakota Industrial Commission website or Enverus or other public sources, and adding that onto our proprietary data about how operators behave and how they write down to how they bill and how quickly they require payment and how they perform versus AFE cost.
A lot of information goes into that and allows us to very carefully analyze any investment dollar that we make. Lastly, I'll point out the strong investor alignment. About 25% of our outstanding shares are from insiders. If you're not familiar with the story about Vitesse, we were originally essentially a wholly owned subsidiary of Jefferies Financial Group. They spun us out in January of 2023, and all the shareholders of Jefferies became shareholders of Vitesse, which a lot of that has turned and changed hands. A big chunk of that was owned by the Jefferies executive team, who are now our biggest shareholders individually. No other ties directly to Jefferies now other than those individuals that are top shareholders, and two of those are on our board. They're long-term money and very interested in the long-term success of the company.
It really sets us apart from a lot of our peers that came out of private equity hands or different methods of going public. With that, let me turn it over to Ben to talk about some details on the asset base and some good statistics about how things have performed.
Thank you, Jimmy. Jimmy just gave a good highlight of our company today and some reasons you might invest in us. I figured it would be interesting to talk about our founding thesis back in 2010 and how we got to where we are today with such a unique asset base. The company actually started with our CEO and his wife sitting around their kitchen table, aggregating small undeveloped interests in the Bakken, which you can see on that map on the left. The thesis back then was that technology has always improved in oil and gas since the first well was drilled, and it will continue to improve with time. They focused on buying undeveloped acreage outside of what was then considered the core of the Bakken. The idea was that the basin would get deeper, denser, cheaper, better, expanded with time.
I would add that they probably should have also included longer, which we'll get into. That was one that has also panned out. In 2014, Jefferies Financial Group funded Vitesse, with a $450 million investment. That's what it grew to through 2018, as we made incremental acquisitions in the basin. You can see with time, drilling has expanded out into the undeveloped acreage that we bought. I thought it would be interesting to go back and see exactly how this thesis has played out over the last 15 years. Deeper, the idea was that additional benches would become viable. In 2010, most of the drilling was focused on the middle Bakken and upper Three Forks. Since then, quite a few middle Three Forks and lower Three Forks wells have been drilled.
Continental Resources even drilled a well in the Winnipeg formation earlier this year, which is deeper than all those other benches. I'd say of the five, this one still has the most room to pan out, as most of the drilling there has been exploratory and sort of trying to prove up a concept. Denser, just in each of these drilling and spacing units, the idea was that you would jam more wells in there and kind of maximize the NPV of those DSUs. In 2014, it was estimated about 1,000-foot spacing was the norm in the basin. Over the last year or so, you'll see more like 700-foot spacing. They got quite a bit denser than that in the 2018 to 2020 time frame and backed off a little bit. They feel like they've kind of optimized the ideal spacing given the current frac designs.
The next two categories to me are the most interesting because this is what directly impacts economics: cheaper and better. Cheaper, back in 2014, cost about $973 per lateral foot to drill a well. So far in 2025, the well proposals we received averaged $716 per lateral foot. That's a 26% decline since 2014, adjusted for inflation. That's a 46% decline in drilling and completion costs. That's half the equation of why returns continue to improve. The other part that's pretty impactful is better. We like to look at first-year production as a proxy for how much oil is going to come out of the ground in these wells. In 2014, in the Bakken, you'd see about 12 barrels of oil equivalent per lateral foot. In 2024, all the wells drilled in the Bakken produced 21 barrels of oil equivalent per lateral foot in their first year of production.
Quite the acceleration of cash flow and the improving of IRR metrics due to that. Expanded, I think nothing displays that better than these maps here. The black vertical lines represent producing wells in the basin. You can see as it's expanded outside the core into Vitesse's acreage, we've benefited from really what used to be called tier two and tier three acreage, producing like the old tier one acreage used to produce in terms of returns. We expect this to continue over the next 30 years of our inventory life. You're seeing a lot more four-mile laterals, three-mile lateral wells that they'll drill into the ground than horizontally. Four miles now. Back in 2010, it was a lot of one-mile lateral wells. That tends to just make the drilling quite a bit more economic.
You're even seeing some U-turn laterals where they'll drill out a mile, do a U-turn, and then come back another mile. Those are producing effectively as well as normal two-mile lateral wells will. Innovations continue to improve. We expect that to continue to happen over the next 30 years. Because our asset is so undeveloped, you'd expect us to benefit sort of disproportionately to that. Yes. I don't think total EURs have gone up quite as much as the first-year production. I think they've certainly increased, but a lot of it's just accelerating production into the first year, which benefits IRR and allows us to compound capital quicker. For a three-mile lateral, an average maybe 1,000 MBLE, would you say something like that? It just depends, right? It varies depending on part of the basin. Sorry, yeah, a million, 1 MMBLE. All right. I'll carry on here.
Part of the reason we were able to come up with so much undeveloped acreage is just the way we were founded by Jefferies. They were long-term capital. We were held within their merchant bank on their balance sheet. It wasn't like your typical private equity buy and flip model where you buy acreage, drill it as quickly as possible, and flip it in five years. We truly did have long-term capital that was more sort of focused on ROI over the life of the asset. Because we bought all this undeveloped acreage, you can see on this map on the right, we have quite a bit of running room. Our asset's extremely diversified across 7,500 plus producing wells and pretty much every operator in the basin, with Cord having our most undeveloped acreage among all our operators.
The other top ones are Continental Resources, Devon Energy, Chevron, EOG Resources, ConocoPhillips. Even though we're a $1 billion market cap company, we have exposure to these large cap operators that have a lot of drilling efficiencies and really great technology on their side. You'll see also, Jimmy mentioned the Lucero Energy Corp. acquisition we made in March, and that's the red squares on the right. That just gives us optionality to defer capital to that in years where our non-op AFEs are a little bit light. It's nice to have that as a leg to the stool, but we're still primarily focused on non-op. You'll see our asset as a whole. Here are some highlights. In the second quarter, we actually had 19 MMBLE per day of production. That was a 46% production increase over 2024. We like to say that our product is our dividend, not production.
We're happy to let production decline if there aren't economic opportunities to invest in. We do things to protect free cash flow, not necessarily production growth for growth's sake. Another nice feature of our asset is that we have extremely low maintenance capex of about $95 million to hold our production flat at the midpoint of our guidance. That represents about a 50% reinvestment rate, which is low compared to many of our peers. That allows us to support the dividend wherever we can. I'll hand it back to Jimmy to talk about our capital allocation framework.
Yeah, this is kind of the heart of how we run the company and think about what our investment strategy is. As we've hit on several times now, the fixed dividend is our mantra and how we kind of ground ourselves in all of our investment decisions. We are at $2.25 per share right now, which I think I mentioned is right around a little over 9% yield in the current stock price. We've really decided on the fixed dividend as being the return of capital to the shareholders as opposed to a variable dividend or a return or a share repurchase program. We do have capital allocated to share repurchase should it come in to be opportunistic. That's kind of out here on the right on this demonstration. If the opportunity presented itself, we would buy back stock.
Frankly, our best investment to date has been to use the dividend and use the excess cash flow to reinvest back into the ground and continue to grow the company. The capital investments that we make, we separate those into organic capex or near-term development acquisitions. The organic capex is just when we get an AFE or the operator drills on a drilling spacing unit that encompasses our existing acreage position. Those are very high returns because the acreage was bought years and years ago. It's really about the return, the well level returns that we achieve there. Almost always slam dunk AFE approval on those opportunities. Because of the operator base that we have and the wide geographic position, we kind of know about what level of activity we're going to have from year to year.
The nice thing about the Bakken for this kind of model is as a mature basin, as we say, the rig count's not changing tremendously from year to year. We see slight variations, but generally we kind of know about how many rigs are going to run and how many are likely to be on our acreage. First order of business for us is funding organic capex. We add to that with near-term development acquisitions. There's a very robust market of people selling their position in other people's wells. Whether it's an operator selling their non-op position in another operator's wells, or it's a small family office or a family that still has mineral interest, they get an AFE from the operator. They want to foot the bill, so they'll sell their position.
We can model that based on the information that we have for the entire basin and achieve a good rate of return while buying them out of their position. We do a lot of these, what we just call NTD acquisitions over the years. I think we've done 200 to this point in our life. Then we have the bigger, chunkier asset acquisitions. We throw this Lucero acquisition into that bucket where we're looking for bigger step change, more incremental, transformative type transactions. We've done four of those in the life of the company. Again, did one earlier this year with that acquisition. We really like to do one of these a year, two of these a year maybe, but they take a long time to get to the finish line. All the stars have to align from the seller standpoint.
That is something that we're very focused on, and a large part of the team is working on that. Primarily in the Bakken, most likely is where we're going to find these things because we know it well, and we can unearth opportunities. We do look at other basins. I think that's a benefit of being non-op. We don't necessarily need the technical capability to operate in another basin to step out. We can just make sure we're aligning ourselves with a good operator, and we can go into another basin. As of yet, we really haven't done that, but we've looked at a lot of different situations and learned a lot about just about every other basin in the U.S. I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen eventually. As I mentioned before, share buybacks, should we have the opportunity.
Frankly, we've traded pretty well, very well since emerging from under Jefferies. We thought we would have a period of time where we could buy back shares as our shares churned and unnatural owners of oil and gas company that were previously Jefferies shareholders might divest. We've traded up consistently since then. We've allocated very little actual capital to that. Last but definitely not least is debt pay down. I think we said before, we want to keep our debt levels low, very conservative balance sheet, again, supporting our dividend and making sure we can make investments as required to support the rest of the model. Luminous, as I mentioned before, is the database that we have where we have all the information that we can scrape from public providers to our own proprietary information. The best example is how it supports our NTD acquisitions.
When we're presented with an AFE opportunity to buy somebody out of a well, we can literally draw a circle around that location and look at how wells have performed, whether it's cost, EUR, first-year production, and from our proprietary data, how the operator has performed versus AFE. Are they consistently over or under? We can factor that all into the underwriting. It's just a tremendous asset that the company has developed over the years. Now we're layering on top of that AI capability to make it even more intuitive and usable. We're kind of in the experimental phase of that, but it's already pretty amazing what AI can pull out of and what kind of considerations AI can bring much quicker than our engineering team can pull the data out and work with it. We're making some good strides there. It's affecting everything that we do. It's for real.
The chatbot we've got on here is similar to AI. We've developed our own internal capability so that anybody within the company can access the company's proprietary chatbot and use it similar to AI. I can say I personally can analyze financial statements, compare our results to others, and compare contracts that we have with external parties against other similar contracts, pick out the differences. It's just a really nice tool to help each individual do their job better. Lastly, we talk about modeling. We're very dependent on our modeling as we want to make sure that we're paying out the best cash flow that we can through the dividend and maintaining that payout ratio.
We do a lot of modeling to make sure that what do we do in a $60 environment, what do we do in a $75 environment, and have a good plan for all outcomes. There's a very intense focus on modeling the company using all this information that comes out of this database. Now back to Ben for talking about hedging.
All right. We've talked about a number of ways we manage risk through the diversification of our asset, through keeping leverage low. I'd say the third pillar to that is our heavy hedge book that we have. Our goal is to really reduce risk-adjusted returns of our stock price. You'll see our volatility is lowest among our peer group at 35%. I think it is showing up in our day-to-day price movements. We hedge extremely heavy with the goal of protecting the dividend. You'll see we have maximum oil production hedged in 2025, equating to about 70% of our remaining production for the year, right around $70 is a price that works extremely well for our business. In 2026, we've got about half that hedged at $66.43. Oil historically has represented about 90% of our revenue. These are by far the most important hedges.
We do hedge the other streams, natural gas and NGL. You'll notice we use natural gas collars in our hedges, whereas we use swaps for oil. The reason for that is there's really good call skew in many months for natural gas. There are many months where you'll have 200% upside relative to downside when compared to a swap for the same time period. We like having a $3.74 floor and ceilings around $5 and above $5 all the way through the first quarter of 2027. That's strong natural gas prices relative to what we've seen historically. We've started swapping NGLs. Jimmy talks about the different ways we used AI. I actually used AI to analyze a multivariate regression to determine what particular NGL streams to hedge and how much of each stream to hedge.
We don't actually have, like we're a two-stream reporter, so we report oil and natural gas production, and NGL is just a subset of our natural gas production. It took a little bit of work to figure out an appropriate amount of NGL hedges to get in there. That was one tangible way that AI has helped our business. Now I'll hand it back to Jimmy to give us some closing remarks.
All right, thanks. I think we've done a pretty good job of hitting on all these points. Again, it's a long-term, long-duration asset. From the beginning, Bob and his wife, Gwen, set this up to really provide a long-term annuitized cash flow stream. That's proving to play out. I think it's grown much larger than anyone expected. It's been an amazing build-up of a beautiful asset and continues to pay off with a high yield. Now showing 10% here, now trading closer to 9%. Inflation protected with the oil-weighted asset and providing outside beta to inflation. I think oil is a great investment for that. Again, levered to technology, as we've talked about, with not only technology in the field through longer laterals and coming in and redeveloping existing areas, but also applying data analysis to our investment decisions. All very important to what Vitesse is.
With that, we have a little time for a Q&A. Any questions, Jeff? John? Yes, sir.
You said you don't grow in this growth, but really, since you're not operating for your existing acreage, it's just one of the operators.
That's right.
It's the growth that you're trying to grow, let's say, those kind of two miles.
Yep. Yeah, you've got it. We do have the other leg now with having a small operated position that came with the Lucero Energy Corp. acquisition. We can allocate capital to drilling our own wells, but that's a pretty small sliver of the pie. You're exactly right. When we think about our capital program, as we saw even in this year, when we frankly went through Liberation Day and we thought prices were going to be lower for the remainder of the year, we cut back on our acquisition activity. You're exactly right. We kind of baseload with organic activity that we know is going to occur, and then we can reduce, we'll just do fewer acquisitions or raise our hurdle rate on acquisitions, so we naturally do less. That's exactly right. I think that's a benefit of being non-op is we can be very flexible.
We can just do less of that. When you're an operator, it's kind of hard to cut back because you've got to drop rigs that you have commitments on or completion crews that you have contracted out. It's very difficult for the operators to be that nimble where we can just quickly ramp or shut things down. Yeah, you've got it exactly.
Are there examples of getting an AFE?
Yep. Pretty rare. I think we will sign 90% plus of them, but occasionally we will get one. It is usually the combination of being in a geographic area that we're not sure about and being operated by an operator that we're not sure about. Very, very rare, but occasionally. Usually we can sell that position just like we're buying others. We can usually sell that off so we don't lose it completely and maybe keep a small interest or an override so we can see how it actually performs. Yeah, that happens. Yeah, thank you.
It might be given the proliferation of private equity capitals and chasing non-op strategies.
Yeah, it's definitely gotten more competitive, whether it's private equity or it's a lot of ends at the lower end of the spectrum. It's family office money that's buying non-op. I think we have an advantage because if it's in the Bakken, definitely because we know it really well and we can underwrite it carefully and we know the players. In the right situations, we can use our equity as currency. That gives the seller the upside if they don't want to sell in a $65 world and have exposure to upside. Should oil prices recover, they can take our equity and participate that way. We've had those discussions a lot. They don't want to just sell for cash and be done. That gives us an advantage. Yeah, definitely the non-op model has become much more favored.
I think probably partly because of our success and others like Northern and others that have done well. I think some of the negatives about the model have gone away and more people are entering the arena. We still feel like we have an advantage over them in certain most circumstances, especially now in this price environment. It's become, there's a lot more players in the market now for sure. Great. Thank you for your time and support. Again, thanks guys from Three Part Advisors for having us. Appreciate it as.