So, you know, I guess if you think about us and think about ourPV-10 and our history, you know we started as an upstream MLP and that PDP base was just perfect for an upstream MLP asset. But we all know the downturn came and it wasn’t so friendly for us upstream MLP companies to say the least. I think the market fairly quickly lost confidence in that business model and as we turn to slide 5 here, you’ll see that many of our peers began to fail. And as they failed and lost that confidence we very quickly realized that we needed a change. I think our high quality assets and the hard work of our employees afforded us some time to make those changes, but we definitely realized we needed a change. I’m reminded of that H.G. Wells quote, if you guys have heard it, he says “Adapt, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” We realized we needed a change and we identified six things – six key aspects of our business that we needed to modify.
Number one is our land position. We’ve made like 140+ acquisitions of PDP and we weren’t really focused on undeveloped potential because that wasn’t our model. We needed to turn around and go through all those land files, go through the engineering, go through the geology and understand what we already owned.
Secondly, we needed to expand our technical team. So the team we had in place was great for a very cost efficient production of our PDP base, but that’s different than drilling horizontal wells. So we really needed to branch out from a technical perspective.
Number three, we needed liquidity because you can identify all you want, but if you don’t have liquidity to go pursue it, you know it’s not going to help you very much. So we were focused on not theon-balance sheet but anoff-balance sheet structure, kind of a safeguarded asset level structure to fund our business.
We needed to reduce our leverage, our leverage was getting very high and we could see it was going to get higher.
We needed to reduce our costs—our operating costs—and we were able to slash a lot of LOE out of the business. Thankfully our service providers helped us a lot in that regard.
If we could do all of those five things, then we felt like we had a good shot at becoming a successfulC-Corp. So we needed to develop that plan to actually become aC-Corp. As I flip to the bottom here, I won’t go through all the points on this timeline, but we have accomplished quite a lot over the last couple of years. And I am really excited about the progress we’ve made. I just think it’s been—it’s definitely been a tough road – but I think we’ve positioned ourselves for success as aC-Corp.
And a key part of that is our horizontal development. So I want to talk about now the success we’ve had in our horizontal development across the Permian. Since we raised that asset level funding, we’ve brought online 76 horizontal wells. And if you think about it, right, we’re all the way from the west side of the Permian Basin in Lea County, New Mexico, all the way over to the east side in Howard County, Texas. And as we look at that, you know in Howard County we’ve been focused on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Bone Springs – in Lea County – excuse me – and in
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