Morning, everyone. I'm Jeff Elliott with Three Part Advisors. I'd like to introduce our next presenting company, Vitesse Energy, ticker is VTS. Here with us from the company today, we have Jimmy Henderson, the CFO, Ben Messier, Director of Investor Relations and Business Development. Vitesse is actually a Three Part Advisors client, so if anybody would like a meeting, follow-up meeting, or a call, please reach out to me directly. Happy to help set that up. With that, I'll just turn it over to Jimmy.
Thanks, Jeff. Thanks to Three Part Advisors for having us again. This is the third time we've been in Dallas, so I see some familiar faces. Hopefully, I think I'll try to direct this towards what's changed over the last year. I think most of you are pretty familiar with our story. I'll try to hit the fundamentals as well as kind of think about what's happening in the current environment and really what's changed over the last year or two. Just a refresher real quick, Vitesse is a non-operated, primarily non-op now, which we'll get into, but we participate in wells being drilled in primarily North Dakota, the Bakken Play of North Dakota. We've got some exposure to in Colorado, where we've participated in wells in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, the DJ Basin there.
Primarily those two plays, but North Dakota is still by far our home. Long-duration asset, we talk about having over 50,000 net acres of leasehold that we have acquired historically that gets drilled, and we participate in those wells. That is kind of our base asset. Then we layer on top of that, we do acquisitions pretty consistently that we can kind of lever up and down depending on what the environment is. Those acquisitions tend to consist of just buying people out of their AFEs. Or when an operator does not want to participate in another operator's wells, they will sell their interest in that. There is a very robust market for that. That is how we kind of control our capital spending, how much we want to participate in that. We do pay, we just say 10% dividend here.
I think it's a little over 10% right now, given our current stock price. From day one when we started, when we became public back in January of 2023, that's been our most important capital allocation. We think about paying the dividend first and then what can we spend on capital and still maintain a very ironclad balance sheet at the same time. That's kind of the balancing act for us. We do think it's inflation protected with being oil-based primarily. We do have a lot of natural gas, but the Bakken Play is really an oil revenue-producing play. Definitely leverage to technology that we'll talk about a little bit. The advancements in this industry just continue to be amazing, what operators are able to do.
The big story in North Dakota is longer laterals doing three and four miles out where we used to be one mile. It's just being able to produce more out of lesser rock, if you will, and get the same kind of returns. We are leveraged to that. We participate in that upside. Just a little bit about our capital allocation framework. As I mentioned, first and foremost is our dividend. It's very important to us to maintain that dividend through the thick and thin as much as we can. What are the levers to protect that? We can reduce capital spending by reducing acquisition. We can not participate in organic, which is unlikely because it's a pretty high-return business. We can do transactions to try to shore up our cash flows, use our equity to add cash flow.
We look at all different levers to try to maintain our dividend. It is first and foremost our thought about our business plan. Then, as I mentioned, we participate in wells that are being drilled on our acreage. What we are seeing today in rig activity is pretty consistent. The nice thing about the Bakken is people call it a mature play. We like it because it is very predictable. The rig count does not spike up and down over the last couple of years. It has maintained pretty consistently. I would say going into this next year, there is some uncertainty about what operators are going to do. I do not know of any of our operators that have really come out with, "This is our plan." Everybody is sort of wait and see at whatever oil is today, $58, $59.
It's sort of on that edge of, do we drop a rig or do we just maintain? We are waiting to see. We expect it to be a little bit diminished from what we've seen the last couple of years. We are planning lower capital spending for next year. We really do not know. We have not put any guidance out at this point. Kind of waiting to see how everybody responds to the environment that we are in. On the near-term development, those are the acquisitions of AFEs and other people's interests. Right now, that is a pretty slow market for us. The market is still pretty robust, but we have backed off on it. We have seen a lot of private money come in that space, and it has gotten a little frothy.
Both for protecting our cash flows as well as protecting the returns that we receive on those acquisitions, we're backing off on that a little bit. The bigger thing is asset acquisitions. What we're talking about there is kind of the bigger, chunkier acquisitions. We spend a lot of time, and Ben can tell because he's directly involved in the business development side. We spend a lot of time and resources internally looking at bigger deals. We really look at stuff all over the U.S. We're kind of focused on producing properties at this point. If we can use some equity to buy producing properties, that helps protect our dividend. Kind of comes back to that. Do not be surprised if you see us pull down another acquisition similar to what we did earlier this year with Lucero. We have share buybacks on here.
Frankly, we haven't pulled that lever. We thought when we came public that we'd have an opportunity to buy, but we've traded pretty well since then. Our capital allocation has been to these other things. Debt pay down, not to put it back at the end of the list, it's very important to us to maintain a strong balance sheet. Again, that allows us to pay the dividend and invest in capital spending to maintain our cash flows. We want to always stay under one times. We might go over one times in context of an acquisition if we have a line of sight to it coming down very quickly. We want to really be careful with our balance sheet. It helps support the rest of the allocation. Just a quick overview. We are up to about 17,000 Boe per day.
Average for this year, right now we're saying 17,000-17,500 Boe. With the capital spending for next year coming down, we're not sure if we'll maintain that. We're not really focused on production growth as much as getting returns on our investment and maintaining our dividend. We'll see what next year looks like. Again, mostly oil, 65% or so of our production is from oil, 90% of our revenue. Very oil-weighted. As I mentioned, over 200 locations, a lot of sticks on the map yet to be developed in the life of Vitesse in the future. This depiction of our acreage and who operators that we're under. If you're not familiar with us, we're basically an ETF on the Bakken Play right now. We're under every producer up there. It's a very advantageous position. We know how every operator behaves.
We have a vast data system where we can compare every operator to each other. It really helps in our capital investment decisions. We can literally draw a circle around a location and see what all the offsets look like, how the operator has it right down to how they bill expenses and how they pay revenues. It is just a lot of information that we get from this position. You can see we have exposure throughout the basin. What has really been important over the last year and as we go forward is the play is kind of moving west and towards Montana. What you saw here is Roosevelt and Richland is actually in Montana. We have a very concentrated position over on the west side where we have typically higher working interest and more acreage.
What's happened in the last few years and more recently going for the longer laterals, and we're seeing not just three-mile laterals, but four-mile laterals. They're going down a mile and a half or so and then out, if you can imagine, three or four miles. I don't know Dallas that well, but it's like halfway to Fort Worth or something. It's pretty amazing. I do better in New York. I can stand in Midtown and say we're going all the way past Battery Park with these laterals. It's amazing. The important thing about that is we have the economics on lesser acreage, lesser rock, then we have improved the recoveries, the economics on that acreage to be near what you saw in the core of the play years ago. It's just unlocked previously tier two, tier three acreage, they call it.
We're really excited about that. You can think about you're spending less per lateral foot and getting similar production that you got before. The economics are much better. We're excited to see that the technology is moving that way and moving in our direction. A little bit about our data. I talked about having the information on over 7,000 wells. We put all of that data and we really try to democratize all the information that we have so that every department within the company has access to that information. Accounting is using it for accruals. Business development uses it whenever they're looking at opportunities. Engineering can use that information as they build out type curves and look at modeling our reserves.
We layer on top of that more and more over the last year, the ability to use AI and more intuitive querying of that information and bringing in external information. Combining our proprietary data with publicly available data and really being able to provide better information to all users within the company. It's progressing very quickly. You all have heard stories in public about how AI is changing things, and we're seeing it real time. It's pretty fascinating. I think we're just touching the tip of the iceberg this time, but we're trying to really push that as a corporate mandate to make everybody aware of what they can do. I think it doesn't replace people. It just makes everybody's jobs easier, more productive. I've been amazed by what we've been able to do just over the last year.
I think I've maybe introduced Ben, talked a little bit about how the basin's developed a little more over the deeper, denser, more expanded. Ben's right on the forefront of this. I'd like to let him lead that discussion.
Thank you, Jimmy. Yeah, so our founding thesis back in 2013, when our CEO and his wife started the company around his kitchen table, was deeper, denser, cheaper, better expanded. The idea was that the basin would develop in that way over the next 10 years. Sometimes I like to go back and say, has that thesis actually panned out? If you look at the deeper category, that's probably the one of the five that it's panned out a little bit, but I'd lean on the other four a little bit more in terms of what would have happened.
Back in 2010, they were drilling the middle Bakken and upper Three Forks. Now this year, you've seen a well in the Winnipeg formation that Continental has tried to drill. They're always experimenting, always trying to find new benches, which ultimately adds value to our assets because we own all depths on these yellow blocks on this map you're looking at here. If they can uncover a new bench, then that's obviously upside to our model, our NAV, and ultimately our valuation. The next one was denser. If you look at kind of the well spacing, how many wells were you drilling in any one of these yellow units back in 2014? It was about 1,000 ft spacing. That's decreased to about 700 ft spacing in recent years. They were actually tighter in 2018, and they realized that's a little bit too tight.
It feels like they've really optimized the spacing to really maximize the NPV of any drilling and spacing unit on this map. The next few, I think, are the most interesting because that most directly impacts the economics that we get on our drilling. Cheaper is one. In 2014, it costs $973 per lateral foot to drill a well. Based on the AFEs we've received this year, it's $716 per lateral foot. That's a 26% decline. If you adjust for inflation, it's a 46% decline. Pretty meaningful impact on our economics when you can find a way to drill things more efficiently. The other part of efficient is the better category. In 2014, in the first 12 months, you would get 12 bbl of oil equivalent per lateral foot of drilling.
In 2024, first 12 months production success that we really have since that year, the average has been 21 Boe per lateral foot. So about a 75% increase in the oil and gas coming out of the ground over that time. You hold prices constant. What does this mean? That everything's just become more economics. The IRR of drilling has improved. The ROI of drilling has improved. The last category, expanded, is something we've seen an explosion in the last year, as Jimmy has touched on. About 50% of the well proposals we've received this year have been three or four-mile laterals. In the early days when Vitesse was started, it was 1 mi laterals, as Jimmy said. We don't even see 1 mi laterals anymore. We're actually seeing horseshoe laterals in units that are only 1 mi long.
They'll drill out a mile, they'll do a U-turn, and they'll come back another mile. They don't frack the U-turn, but they frack both parallel laterals that they have there. That's just another example of technology improving, people becoming creative with how they drill. Who knows where it'll be in 10 years? We're excited. We still have the same thesis today. We say we're 80% undeveloped. Even though we're drilling, we believe that we'll be 80% undeveloped for many years because we'll just find new ways to unlock reserves as an industry. That's part of the upside story here. I think it's really panning out in the Bakken as compared to other basins.
While you're up, Ben, why don't you want to talk about hedging a little bit? We had questions in the hallway about hedges.
Yeah, happy to touch on hedging.
That's obviously a key pillar of our risk management strategy. We have about 45% or so of our production hedged on the oil side next year. Right around $64 is the floor and right around $66 is the ceiling. There's a different floor than ceiling because we use some collars, some swaps to hedge oil. On the gas side, we're similarly hedged. About 45% of our gas and NGLs are hedged through the first quarter of 2027. That helps protect us. It helps make our stock less volatile. Ultimately, we can pay the dividend if oil prices go down. Thanks. Yeah.
Let me touch on the other big thing that happened for the company over the last year. In March, we closed on the acquisition of Lucero, oil and gas company.
It is hard to see on probably the screen, but we do now have some operated units that are shown in red on our presentation. Lucero was a Canadian incorporated but U.S. operating company that had operations and some leasehold and production in the Bakken right here in our backyard. In March, we closed on that acquisition. The significance of that acquisition is it gives us a little bit of operational capability. Up to this point, we have been 100% non-op where we participate in other people's operations. Now we have the ability on a very limited basis to operate. Just here recently, we completed two wells that we acquired in that acquisition that had been drilled, not yet completed, but we have completed those wells and got them on production. It gives us a little bit of another leg to the stool, if you will.
We're not really changing our stripes and becoming an operator, but we thought it was just a nice acquisition. They had cash on their balance sheet. We're generating free cash flow and had a team that could operate. Luck would have it, that team was based in Denver, so we just assimilated them into our office and continued to operate those properties. It does give us kind of that option if we find something that might need an operational aspect to it in addition to non-op. I think primarily acquisitions that we're looking at will be non-operated. We're not really looking to expand on the operated side, but we have that capability now. It has been a really good benefit to have those folks on board and have that acquisition behind us.
I think the other thing that's changed a lot in the last year, just remembering talking about this when I stood up here last year with Trump's mandate for drill, baby drill. It's clearly driven down oil prices, and it's kind of a level now where it's, frankly, it's tough for most North American operators unless you're a Chevron or Exxon. I think it's unsustainable at this level. I think we'll probably see oil in the high $50s, low $60s as we go through next year. I think we'll see some marginal slowdown in operations. My personal thinking is that we'll see it start to come back up in 2027. I think corporately we think let's just maintain and get through 2026 and be in a really strong position to take advantage of opportunities as we go through the year.
We see more less well-heeled brethren that need to make divestitures and be there and be ready to pick those up and really succeed as we come out of 2026 into 2027. That is really the focus on the acquisition side as we think about how we position ourselves. Keep a strong balance sheet, keep the dividend paid, and then look for these opportunities. As oil gets lower in the $50s and below $50, I think you are really going to see some dramatic slowdown, and people are going to have to make really hard decisions about capital allocation, including ourselves. I am pretty comfortable in this high $50 world that we will get through 2026 just fine.
It is quarter-by-quarter decision on capital allocation, and we'll continue to work with our board to make the hard decisions and make good investments and try to be there to take advantage of the environment as we go through the year. That is pretty much it for our prepared presentation, but I'm happy to take Q&A and answer any questions you all might have.
Yes, sir.
I read an article about six months ago that the royalty owners of North Dakota felt like the operators were holding back their royalties or they weren't paying them enough. Has that affected you or?
We haven't had any issues along that way. It's pretty regulated. Usually, it's around deducts is where it occurs. What can you deduct? Like downstream transportation costs, gathering costs. We haven't had any questions on our royalty payments. I'm not aware of any large scale.
Usually, those come out in a class action suit kind of thing, but I'm not aware of anything particularly in our area. Yes.
How has the, I guess, Chevron's closed on Hess? Is that, have they really indicated? Are they going heavier?
They dropped one rig right away, but they're still very active. The word that we've gotten from them is they're very excited about the Bakken still. Clearly, the acquisition was about Guyana and not North Dakota. I think they have a very large presence, and so I think they see it as a cash cow, and they'll continue to milk it and use their cash to go to Guyana, I guess. I'm glad you brought that up. One of the other big significant events that we had during last year is we settled a lawsuit with Hess.
Talking about royalty lawsuits, this was a non-operated suing an operator over how they paid us. There is a royalty lawsuit related to this particular instance where Hess controlled the midstream as well as the upstream, and we were behind the upstream as a non-operator. The way they allocated economics was more towards the midstream side, which hurt the upstream side, including non-op and royalties. We were able to settle that lawsuit, publicly available information. They paid us for how much they had underpaid us over the last five years and reconstructed those contracts so we're in a better position than we were before. There is a royalty lawsuit, class action suit about that particular issue. I don't know if that's what you had read about, but that one does come to mind. So far, Chevron has been pretty much steady with the acquisition. Yeah.
Is there a particular oil price where you see the dividend potentially being at risk? At what level?
Yeah. I think definitely it gets more challenging the lower you go in the $ 50s and below $ 50, for sure. Every decision we make is about maintaining it, even in that environment. It's not really a cutoff point. It's like, what can we do even at $50 to maintain the dividend? It may be that we just spend less or we do fewer acquisitions. We're looking at transactions where we can trade future drilling for current production to increase cash flow, pull that cash flow forward. We're looking at any and all possibilities to make sure we can maintain that dividend no matter what. It's a very multi-variable decision. I don't want to push your question off, but it just depends on a lot of factors.
It gets more and more challenging, and there is no doubt about it, as you would guess, the lower we go into the $ 50s.
Sir.
Under Sherrod Bobbat, are you waiting for a low price or are you waiting for free cash?
Both. Yeah. It is a capital allocation thing. A lower price, when we get into the below $20, we always kind of think, should we be buying back at this point? Then it is a matter of capital allocation. Would we rather invest in the ground and participate in drilling? Once you pull the dividend off, there is not a lot left over at these prices, so probably not going to be buying back. We certainly think about it every time we see a dip. We have the capability of doing that, the board approval, but we just have not traded at those levels.
Probably not likely to happen unless we see a much bigger dip. When we first came out public, we were trading around $13, $14 a share. That's when we thought we could put it to use, but we traded up pretty quickly and never really got any acquisitions off.