Black Stone Minerals, L.P. (BSM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Black Stone Minerals September 2025 Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Mark Meaux, Director of Finance. You may begin.

Thank you. Good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us either by phone or online for the Black Stone Minerals September 2025 Investor Presentation. Today's call is being recorded and will be available on our website along with the presentation that was posted last night. Before we start, I'd like to advise you that we will be making forward-looking statements during this call about our plans, expectations and assumptions regarding our future performance. These statements involve risks that may cause our actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. For a discussion of these risks, you should refer to the cautionary information about forward-looking statements in our presentation and to the Risk Factors section of our 2024 10-K. We may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe are useful in evaluating our performance. Reconciliation of those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure and other information about these non-GAAP metrics are described in the appendix of our presentation distributed yesterday, which can be found on our website at www.blackstoneminerals.com. Joining me on the call from the company are Tom Carter, Chairman, CEO and President; Taylor DeWalch, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer; Steve Putman, Senior Vice President and General Counsel; Fowler Carter, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development; Chris Bonner, Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer; Travis Frazier, Director, Corporate Development; and Natalie Liddell, Director, Corporate Planning. I'll now turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, Mark. Good morning to you all, and thank you for joining us on this investor presentation, which is a somewhat new or revitalized effort by us. And we are excited to share with you some of our excitement about the future of our company. We seem to have -- we're going to go a little bit beyond the relatively short-term focus that generally public -- which public companies generally focus on and look at a bit of a more long-term nature because we think we're pretty comfortable that we find ourselves in a relatively unique position of having some really stable core assets in key areas as well as a very substantial inventory of growth assets that we own at this time without a whole lot of necessity for additional capital expenditures that very well could see our production and distributions substantially increase over the next 5 to 10 years. And I know that's a long time in public company land, but we wanted to share some of this with you. And with that, I will turn it over to Taylor.

Thanks, Tom. Just to reiterate, echo what Tom said, really appreciate everyone joining us this morning. We're excited to walk through our detailed strategic growth initiatives and really excited about where that takes us on a great trajectory for our unitholders. Turning to Slide 4. This really starts with the pillars of our strategy being embedded organic growth and extensive asset development and inventory across the major basins, which we're going to go into in quite a bit of detail throughout these slides. We've talked about it quite a bit recently and more so in the recent quarters. But the Black Stone team has spent considerable time in the last couple of years really delineating and acquiring acreage in the expanding Shelby Trough and putting it into play with operators via these contractual development agreements, as well as staying focused on activity across all of the assets and really across all of our vast leased and unleased mineral footprint to see where there's opportunities across the Lower 48. And I just want to take a minute to really commend the Black Stone team on all these efforts that lead to production doubling over the next 5 to 10 years, resulting in just tremendous growth that we see for the Black Stone unitholders and notably while maintaining very conservative and peer-leading leverage. I think those are some of the key tenets that we want to hit on today. So as outlined, like I said, on Slide 4, it starts with a firm technical understanding of the subsurface, which our team has spent quite a bit of time on, moving to targeted acquisitions of undeveloped minerals at very competitive prices, and then partnering with these operators on development agreement to provide that certainty on long-term development on high interest acreage and then providing that line of sight to annual well commitments as a baseline as we're thinking about our forecast and excited to really spell that out later in the slides as we've done. And so in addition to those organic growth efforts and primarily focused in the expanding Shelby Trough as well as some opportunities that we're looking at, not quite ready to go into as much detail today, but we've also got substantial embedded inventory that Tom was speaking to across the major basins. And really want to touch on where that inventory exists and how we're aligned with some of the top operators and their plans in those major basins. I think that really provides a diverse foundation for the company as we're thinking about this long-term trajectory for our unitholders, balanced with both gas growth and oil growth, ultimately leading to growing distributions to greater than $2 a unit over the next 5 to 10 years and just continuing to prioritize that long-term value for all of our unitholders. So with that, if we flip to Slide 5. We really remain focused on our assets across the Lower 48, which is colored in red and blue on the map here. And today, we're going to focus on some of the core basins being the Haynesville and the expanding Shelby Trough, the Permian, both in the Midland and the Delaware and then also the Williston, all of which we continue to monitor all of our inventory there and see how that's going to inform our long-term strategy. Again, because of our expansion efforts, along with that substantial inventory, we look at about 20-plus years of inventory life, which we think just continues to provide that foundation for a lot of growth for decades to come. So next, we'll walk through this strategy a bit more numerically. So like we said, today, we sit at about 33,000 to 35,000 Boe a day with sub 0.3x leverage. We talked about that at second quarter earnings. I want to expand on that. And as we mentioned, the team has delineated a focus area of approximately 700,000 gross acres in existing and to-be-contracted areas that along with some of the incremental bolt-ons leads to production doubling to 60-plus MBoe per day out in 2035, while maintaining very conservative leverage because of the acquisition strategy. So in addition to, like we've said, the expanding Shelby Trough, looking at just all of our inventory across the basins really built the foundation for this. Within the Shelby Trough, specifically speaking of that inventory, we see greater than 2,000 gross wells that have been unlocked and strategically positioned really with the current and coming sources of natural gas demand. So we're pairing both the inventory with the gas demand that is both here and growing. That boost in production leads a significant uplift in revenue and distributions over the next 5 to 10 years, as mentioned, leading to $2-plus per unit from about $1.20 per unit LQA right now. I want to speak to the acquisition strategy for just a minute. Notably, this strategy is much different than the historical BSM acquisition strategy or other marketed acquisitions. In the past, Black Stone spent upwards of $800 million to produce about a 5% CAGR pre-COVID while also participating in working interest investments, which led to over a 1x leverage. The philosophy now is to bolt on to existing assets with the subsurface technical analysis and maintain a conservative leverage ratio because we're only utilizing about half the capital needed previously while substantially increasing production volumes to the tune of about a 10% CAGR. So taking existing assets that Black Stone has held for a while now, bolting on some incremental assets and then placing those with an operator to provide substantial production growth. So ultimately, Black Stone has line of sight to double production, maintain low leverage, partner with operators on high interest development agreements that provide more certainty on activity levels and maintain a diverse substantial set of inventory across all the major basins. With that, I'll hand it over to Fowler.

Thanks, Taylor. So here, you can see that our assets are well positioned to take full advantage of the LNG and growing power demand story. Our significant footprint in the Haynesville/Bossier with close proximity to export terminals as well as data and industrial centers that coupled with vintage and newly minted development agreements that Taylor just mentioned with folks like Aethon, Revenant and others supports the 10% CAGR on production that you can see there at the bottom, while keeping debt and EBITDA metrics attractively low. Next slide, please. So active management and organic growth. So we own approximately 40% blended across 20 million gross acres of which 2 million of that is currently under leasehold or contracted otherwise. These acres account for our current cash flow and substantial inventory, as you can see in the pie chart right there. The remaining balance or roughly 5.4 million net acres is where our organic growth opportunities like HEX, KLX and some other ones that are in the pipeline will come from. They are the end result of a lot of hard work by our land, technical, legal, commercial teams, and that combined work is what is going to get us to identify market and ultimately partner with operators and non-ops to delineate and further develop all these new areas. Next slide, please. So this slide highlights the visibility of our inventory pipeline. We average about 10% exposure to the Lower 48 rig count or 1 out of every 10 rigs at any given time being on BSM assets. This ultimately leads to a total of about 1,244 WIPs on our acreage over the last 5 quarters. A breakdown of that is 744 DUCs and 500 permits, all with -- a lot of those with marquee operators. And those are kind of just the highlights on that, and we can take more deep dive questions at the end of the presentation, if anybody wants to dive deep on that later. And now I'm going to hand it off to Natalie and Travis to talk more about the Haynesville and other plays.

Thanks, Fowler. Page 10 highlights the importance of the Haynesville and Middle Bossier as the cornerstone of our portfolio. From an activity perspective, there have been 2 trends that have materially shaped the direction of development over the past 5 years in the basin. First, while the core of the play has historically been in DeSoto, Red River and Bossier Parishes, full-scale development has expanded into Shelby Trough and Western Haynesville, unlocking hundreds of locations with attractive breakevens. And then second, heavy M&A has consolidated the basin into a few gas-focused independents, namely Comstock, Aethon, Expand, TGNR and Apex. Each is pushing the limits of technical design with long laterals, refracs, specialty wellbores, steadily expanding the economic footprint in both the NFC and Shelby Trough. While the legacy core inventory is largely exhausted, the Shelby Trough now represents the engine of future growth in the basin, accounting for over 50% of remaining locations in the play and positioning the Haynesville as a durable long-term driver of Black Stone's portfolio. And importantly, the Haynesville is now directly tied to LNG export growth, linking its long-term economics to global gas demand. And as the Haynesville is shifting from a regional gas play into a global supply source, Black Stone's material position in the Haynesville extension area will be a contributing force behind that shift. So Travis, I'll turn it over to you to get more into the specifics of the HEX play.

That's perfect. Thank you, Natalie. As we go to Slide 11, you can see a little bit more of a zoom in on the acreage position and really the substantial progress that we've done expanding upon our previously substantial legacy position. And really, as you look into this map on the southern side of the Shelby Trough and into the HEX position, you can see a substantial inventory of what Taylor pointed out, about 2,000-plus Haynesville and Bossier locations located within that Southern Shelby and HEX area. And really, this is all a product of a lot of the hard work from the technical team and really delineating using our geologists, engineers and so forth of really honing in on what we perceive to be a large asset for operators going forward. As you look into this, as Taylor also mentioned, the contracts and the relationships that we have with operators, the high-density nature of this position really points to our ability to bring in operators that have -- that we can provide a good element of control for them and be able to provide them good line of sight to an expanding inventory count that everybody in the industry is looking for. And as everybody has mentioned, obviously, clearly, the growing LNG story is something that everybody is looking forward to expanding their positions within, and we feel like we're a premier mineral company here to provide that feedstock for LNG providers. As we move over to Slide 12, you can see a lot of the offset wells that we continue to focus on and helping delineate the acreage position that we currently have, you'll see on the right -- on the bottom right side, really good well results that are holding in quite well with strong EURs. Those well results have helped solidify our position here and continue to expand upon the growing density of our acreage position. And one thing that you'll point out -- that I'll point out is as you see the Shelby Trough going into HEX and then over into the Western Haynesville, we firmly believe that there is a connection and, call it, a river or so that goes into the Western Haynesville, and so that pilot well that we point out here is another marker for us in helping to substantiate that belief through our science and geology work going forward. So everybody continues to push the extent of the plays, and that's another point that you see within the Western Haynesville also with this pilot and other activities from operators. Go to the next slide, please. And really, so on Slide 13, a key core element of how we think about the Haynesville and a lot of our assets is this element of control in high-density acres. As we look through the existing agreements that we have, as we call out, with both Aethon and Revenant and KLX over here. The idea is to really hone in on large swaths of acreage that we have delineated internally through all of our technical teams and so forth to provide an operator a significant amount of running room as everybody is continuing to clamor for locations. We identify the acreage that is of interest and prospective. We go in using our grassroots acquisition team to go and acquire as much as we can through a substantial amount of landman. And through that, by getting these large swaths of acreage, we're able to provide an operator like I said, a significant amount of running room and which is highly attractive to them at a low cost for them. And so that provides efficiencies on the front end and allows them to plan accordingly. And so with those agreements, providing some flexibility for them to ramp up, and you'll see in this chart on the bottom, the idea is for them to build into this position and grow into a good line of sight for us to be able to see well commitments on a growing scale out into the future, which provides us a lot of visibility into our own production growth and the operators the ability to efficiently and effectively build into their position, which is a good core tenet of our relationships with both parties. With that, I'm going to turn it right back to Natalie to dive into some of our other core assets.

Yes. So shifting gears a little bit to the remainder of our portfolio on Page 14. The Permian Basin is not just a premier oil basin, it's Black Stone's strategic hedge. It diversifies us away from gas concentration, stabilizes cash flows across cycles and ensures we remain positioned to capture upside across both oil and gas markets. This is the busiest U.S. basin by rig count with consistent development through cycles due to core Permian breakevens that are among the lowest onshore at $35 to $45 a barrel. Wells are primarily oil weighted, but they deliver meaningful associated gas, and this dual commodity exposure gives us balance. Oil drives durable returns and associated gas creates upside as U.S. LNG export demand grows over the next decade. Our runway in the Midland Basin clusters along the core from Martin through Midland County and up into Upton Reagan County with 75% of our remaining inventory concentrated in the Central North and Southwest subplays. Meaningful development in areas with the basin's highest location, NPV and deepest stacked pay underpins the reliability of our oil-weighted forecast in this area. The post-M&A consolidation wave, namely Exxon Pioneer and Diamondback Endeavor has created highly capital disciplined operators capable of drilling increasingly long laterals, efficient multi-zone co-development and the appetite to consistently keep pads turning and tills flowing through cycles. Rigs on Black Stone acreage started the year elevated and drifted modestly lower into the midyear, but the mix stays stable. Exxon and Diamondback carry the bulk of the rigs and other operators still in the remainder. Black Stone saw an average of 17 rigs a month on our acreage between these 2 operators in the first half of 2025. So what we're seeing is that the scale operators are still setting the operational cadence even as the basin trims rigs for efficiency. And for us, that means multiyear visibility where we overlapped with Exxon and Diamondback because operator scale plus runway equals reliability for us. And then moving to Page 15, the Delaware Basin. Our position clusters around the core Loving County fairway, the Central West and the South extensional areas with smaller pockets in the North, Western margin and Eastern margin. Our estimated inventory depth of close to 4,000 in gross locations translates to well over 10 years of inventory at current rig rates. The core of our inventory is held by a handful of scaled publics, ConocoPhillips across much of the Northern Central fairway. We have sizable contiguous blocks of Coterra and Devon around the Western Stateline, Occidental through the Central Southern trend and slightly scattered exposure to Chevron and a handful of others throughout the basin. Operationally, we've seen a modest step down in rigs since January, but the mix is stable, and we expect development to continue around current rates for the remainder of the year because even with lower headline rig total than we see in the Exxon and Diamondback pairing in the Midland Basin, the scale operators are similarly steady in cadence for the Delaware. Again, operator scale plus continuity and inventory equals reliability for us. So overlap with these operators means multiyear visibility into pad turns until. On Page 16, moving over to the Williston is a late life relative to the Permian or Haynesville. So this is our steady low decline oil play, limited runway but reliable cash flows. And this is where we think concentrating our focus on sections under top-quality operators is the best way to protect pace and realize value for our shareholders. Because inventory depth is thinner and most core acreage has already been drilled, forward growth is structurally more limited and more dependent on efficiencies for excess. So Chord, Continental, Chevron and Conoco are scaling to 3- to 4-mile laterals, optimizing cube development to lower dollar per foot cost and beginning refracs and brownfield work in Middle Bakken and Three Forks to extend runway and add barrels without large step-outs. For Black Stone, this means runway is selective, but not gone. A significant portion of our remaining units are in the best neighborhoods, but development cadence will be operator and program driven rather than basin net wide growth. Cash flows are durable but price sensitive in the Williston. As the mix shifts outside the Tier 1 areas, breakevens rise and the Bakken becomes slightly less reliable for us in a lower price environment. Although 60% of our estimated remaining inventory is held by Continental, Chord, Chevron and Conoco, and those 4 operators largely controlling the cadence of development in the basin make us hopeful that our expected returns are somewhat protected against the downturn. In a mature basin like this, we believe that reliability matters more than the headline rig count. And now I'm going to hand it back over to Taylor.

Great. Thanks, Natalie, and thanks, Travis, for walking through the different basins and different assets. So all of that really culminates again, in just a substantial growth through inventory development and the growth initiatives in the expanding Shelby Trough as outlined on Slide 17. On the left, we have the production growth going again from 33,000 to 35,000 a day to over 60,000. And as we see outlined in 2035, a substantial amount of that is from the efforts in Shelby Trough, HEX and the just general Haynesville expansion area through those contracts. As Natalie was pointing out, though, it really comes back to the diversity of our assets and we're thinking about our revenue and our forecasted revenue, both on a gas and oil basis. I think that, that's what really differentiates Black Stone and the diversity of the assets and just that foundation of oil and gas mix as we think about growing into the future. So going from about $425 million in revenue in 2025 to $650 million plus with both oil and gas playing a critical role in that growth. So important to our unitholders, as we outlined on Slide 18, is the consistency of capital return via distributions, and we've maintained that philosophy for a long time through various cycles. Of course, right in the middle of the chart, COVID was exceptionally difficult. But otherwise, we've prioritized transparency and consistency in our mindset of capital return. This is no different on a go-forward basis where limited debt and production growth leads to beneficial distribution growth for the long term for our unitholders. Of course, where we are right now, we think is just a springboard for where we're headed in the future for distributions. On Slide 19, speaking again to debt, this limited debt has been a theme for a while for us. Earlier, I spoke to the changing philosophy in our acquisition program and the implications on our debt. Currently, our elected commitment amount on the borrowing base is $375 million. And in second quarter, we had just $99 million borrowed. We prioritize limited debt to give BSM the maximum flexibility and prioritize capital returns to our unitholders. And as we said, we continue to think about that for the long term throughout this forecast and our strategy. Finally, on Slide 20, another consistent theme for us has been our hedging philosophy. We think that this kind of maintaining a strategy of 6% to 7% of volumes 1.5 years to 2 years out, really ensures that steady cash flow and limits the volatility in the commodities to provide that consistency of returns to our unitholders that they certainly appreciate. So here, we've outlined both our current oil and gas position through '26 and into 2027. So with that, I will hand it over to Fowler.

Thanks, Taylor. All right. Well, to reiterate and just drive home all the points here that the team has made. Black Stone remains dedicated to growing our long-term unitholder value and distributions and doing that through active asset management and organic growth initiatives, all of which are underpinned by substantial inventory and growing natural gas demand. All that culminating to ultimately a doubling of production and $2 or better per unit distribution over the next 10 years. And that's it. Any questions?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Tim Rezvan with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Thank you for the presentation out there. It's really insightful. I guess I have a few here. But as my first one, maybe for Tom, this presentation is a little bit change in tone. You've generally been pretty tight lipped about details and your strategy. So I was just curious kind of why put this out now? Is this a signal that sort of this acquisition program, about $160 million is sort of wrapping up? Just trying to kind of get some context on why the push for doing this now as opposed to with earnings or at a later date.

Well, that's a good question. And I will answer that by saying our acquisition program continues. I don't want to be too specific about where. But if you look at the maps on the HEX area, the areas that have a little bit less yellow in them, we hope to increase our density there, but we're still going to stay well below 1x debt to EBITDA in doing this, and we think we have a competitive advantage out there, and we will keep growing to a certain extent. But at the same time, we have enough critical mass in these areas to be able to have inked and are in the process of inking additional exploration agreements with folks that are capable, well-capitalized operators to drill a lot of wells on a regular basis in order -- in a drill-to-earn capacity, okay, which is different than giving somebody a 100,000-acre lease with a 5-year primary term and maybe they drill some wells and maybe they don't. We are -- we've seen -- all of us that have been in the industry over time have seen great expectations come and fall down and not be realized, and that could certainly still happen in the world we live in today, but I would tell you that I think that the reliability and the stability of the gas market as we see it going forward for the next 10-plus years is as -- seems to have as little volatility potential in it as I've seen in the past, and so we see ourselves having a very strong liquids base in the Permian and in the Williston and other areas. And we see ourselves being fortunate enough to have quite a position in a rapidly expanding, at least currently Haynesville/Bossier play in the Shelby Trough going over into the Western Haynesville. And once again, I want to capture this at about, call it, 200,000 acres in that area that we have under control, that we have science on and we know where wells are being drilled and are going to be drilled, that is -- that's -- you can drill 50 wells a year for 20 years to fully delineate that area, and I'm not talking about going out in the middle of nowhere. These are development wells and the industry is filling in. And so we find ourselves -- I mean, obviously, the Marcellus has quite a bit of inventory, but they've got other headwinds up there. And going into a global AI natural gas-fired electrical plants, I saw where Entergy got approved for 2 plants, one in Cleveland, Texas and one in Port Arthur, Texas recently, those are right next to our Shelby Trough acreage, and if there is a time when natural gas is going to be reliable, this is it. And we've got -- I don't know that there's an inventory for a mineral company that matches what we've got out there. And we now have three or more defined development agreements. So we just felt like what this looks like long term, we wanted to let the industry know about it. We get questions from existing investors and new investors all the time, and we think we have found ourselves in a unique spot. Clearly, the Achilles heel on this program is natural gas prices, but if natural gas prices are $1.40 between now and 2040, we're going to have bigger problems as a global economy than just getting these wells drilled. I don't -- what would cause that? It would be massive contraction in a global economy. And so we're putting the chips all on the table.

I appreciate that.

I hope that answered your question.

That did. It's good to know you're still blocking up, but you have the core. On a related topic, you talked about the KLX being the third agreement, but you also say in the presentation that you're currently marketing that package. You have one well, looks like scheduled for 2026. Can you talk about -- are you on the one yard line of getting a deal announced? You seem highly confident that, that program will be going to 2026. So can you just talk about where you are with KLX?

I think you said it right. We're on the one yard line, but University of Texas was on the one yard line against Ohio State and didn't get in the end zone, so we -- that doesn't mean we're going to get in the end zone, but we sure think we are, and right after this call, there's going to be quite a lot of discussion about placing that ball in the end zone in a very discrete short period of time. And I told the team a little bit jokingly that when we get that one closed, we've only got to do five more before Christmas, for any of you out there that are investors, that is not a statement that you should put a lot of stock in. It was more of a -- everybody has been running hard and working hard here, and I was pulling their chain. But we're not done yet. If you look at that map, at Trinity County, we have hundreds of thousands of acres already owned in Trinity County, which is underlined by the same play that is going on in HEX and the Kirk Lake, KLX. It's just deeper, and we've got -- we'll take a short breather when we get KLX closed, but then we'll start our manic acquisition program over again.

Okay. If I could just sneak a third one in, and then I'll turn it back. Pretty intriguing this Bobby Yancey pilot that was drilled in Houston County. It looks like a vertical well, and there's some scuttle but if it's a true operator name or if that's an alias being used by a larger operator. Can you talk about why you're optimistic? Was that well fracked? Is your optimism just based on logs that you pulled? And can you give any color on who maybe drilled that vertical pilot?

I'll tell you what we see in that deal. We think Expand is the actual capital behind that. I mean that's industry knowledge. It's not anything we know, and we have talked to people who have specific knowledge about that well, and we've tried to get them to tell us about it, and they've said, they're under confidentiality and they're not going to do that, but they are -- they speak pretty -- in my experience, I've never seen a tight hole that's a dry hole be tight very long, and in addition to that, Expand and others have bought 70,000 to 80,000 acres of oil and gas leases around that well going back to the East, approaching the western end of our KLX project. And so -- and we've reviewed a tremendous amount of 3D data out there as well as 2D data, and we see the same technical footprint going from Angelina County through Houston County, through Cherokee County, all the way over into the Western Haynesville. We also see expansion in the section between the Knowles Lime and the -- you're probably getting more than you wanted to hear here and the Smackover, which is the interval that is of interest with the Haynesville and Bossier in it. And it expands as you go west by as much as 2 to 2.5 fold. And if you look at some of the subsurface control points that are available in the Western Haynesville, the Bossier section is up to 800-plus feet thick as opposed to 150 feet thick in the core Shelby Trough. And that's reserves. And you can drain probably 100-plus vertical feet with 1 wellbore. So every one of those wells may be the equivalent of 4 or 5 wells. So there's a lot of upside and there's a lot of known knowns as we move from the East to the West.

I would also add that it's long been a technical thesis that this depositional environment that created the Haynesville expanded all the way over to Freestone County, but it took quite a long time for operational efficiencies to be able to drill laterals at that depth, and so now that the inventory in the Haynesville is being exhausted, operators have the capability to drill longer, deeper wells in these temperatures, at a more cost-efficient rate, and we're seeing that delineation at this point in time.

Our exploration agreements that are in place work kind of like this. As you ramp up from, say, 10 wells a year to 25 wells a year, there's plenty of drilling for multiple years to come that is development drilling off of existing production in the Shelby Trough, like next door to stuff in Angelina County that's already under in production and moving slightly west, there's tons of inventory there, and in order to be able to harvest that inventory, we are embedding in our agreements requirements for large step-out wells to test the unknown area or the less known areas and backfill. And so -- and if these guys quit drilling these wells, what happens? They just give us all the inventory back, and we'll try to place it with somebody else. So once again, we're optimistic that we've got a lot of economic inventory at $3.50 to $4 gas, and we're also subscribing to the theory that the LNG and AI and electric -- gas-powered electrical generation will cause the next 10 to 15 years of the gas market to not be perfect, but more reliable than it's been over the past 15 years.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Derrick Whitfield of Texas Capital.

With respect to your 2030 outlook, could you speak to what broad assumptions underpin this 50% growth through 2030?

Absolutely. This is Taylor. I think the most significant assumption that I would point you to is the Shelby Trough gross spuds ramp in activity. We really look to those contractual agreements to ramp through the next 5 years or so, which provides a significant amount of that gas production growth that leads to the 2030 and 2035 outcomes.

Terrific. And maybe just leaning in on the Haynesville extensional areas, what degree of productivity and spacing are you guys assuming in the HEX area?

We're looking at it. I mean, if you look at the well results that we outlined on the Shelby Trough and as we're thinking about the Haynesville expansion, we certainly think that, that's indicative of what the rock can do, along with some of the spacing that we're seeing out there right now going a little bit wider than has been recently tested and something in the neighborhood of maybe 4 to 6 wells per 1,000 acre unit. And I think those EURs that are in the 2 to 2.5 Bcf per 1,000 foot range, I think those are a solid assumption. I think that there's absolute room for upside above that as we think about the general productivity trend continues to follow the dip downwards, and with pressure and increasing depth, we have seen productivity increase. So we're certainly interested to see, as we -- as Tom was alluding to, kind of further delineate some of the pieces of Haynesville expansion. We could certainly see additional both productivity and wells per unit as we're thinking about the thickness of the rock, but those are how it's kind of laid out today.

Great. And probably more from a technical perspective and subsurface perspective, could you guys speak to how the geology changes from Shelby Trough through to Western Haynesville? And then as an add-on to that, is Trinity -- the acreage you have in Trinity perceived to be part of this fairway?

Depends on who you ask on the Trinity stuff.

If you ask me, I say yes. This is Fowler Carter. It absolutely is part of this, but we still have to prove that up, and we're working on that piece right now.

The section, as I said, between the upper Knowles Lime or the equivalent of that in the Western Haynesville, it's a different geologic feature and the Smackover thickens dramatically as you go from west to east across Robertson and Leon County, and we are seeing the same thing as you go west into Western -- Eastern Angelina, Houston, Trinity, Cherokee counties. And we have pilot wells that are going to be drilled out there that are required, multiple of those. We also have pilot wells that are required to be drilled deeper in the more traditional HEX area to 17,000 and 18,000 feet in Angelina County. There's something that you've probably heard us talk about a lot. There's a well that was drilled deep in Angelina County back in the '80s or '90s by Mobil, and it's called the Mobil Julian Johnson well, and it was long before the Haynesville/Bossier shale play was around, but that well penetrated both the Haynesville and the Bossier, and it has some of the best-looking rocks in it, that have been seen. There's some really good engineers around town that know the Haynesville play very well and have said that's the best looking rocks in the play, and it's at 17,000 to 18,000 feet, which is the same depth as the Bobby Yancey well. So we know it can be drilled in those pressures, and porosities that are on that well, meaningfully higher than they are in the core Shelby Trough is a great combination of attributes for potentially very strong productivity. And at the same time, we've been able to acquire acreage in Nacogdoches County that heretofore had not been developed because it was very difficult to -- for industry to put it together. We put it together, and it's going to get drilled very soon, and it's right smack dab in the middle of the core stuff that's been drilled in San Augustine County and Angelina County and to the north by Exco in Nacogdoches County, and there's just quite a number of wells to be drilled in there as well as other areas that are more traditional. So there's a lot of inventory.

I think from a geologic perspective, too, the reason we included that Smackover Shelf and Sabine Island on the map are that the Shelby Trough is really the most restricted geological environment during deposition, and so that's why you have kind of the thinnest Haynesville and Bossier in that area. But areas closer to the core DeSoto and Harrison and Caddo, you get thicker section because you had more sediment coming in. And then as you move over to Freestone County, Leon County off of the high on that side, you also had just a lot more sediment coming into that area of the basin. It was more -- less restricted. And so you'll see similarly a lot more just growth thickness across Leon and Houston than the Shelby Trough proper.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'll turn the call to Tom Carter for closing remarks.

Well, again, thank you all for joining us today, and we were excited and are excited to share our view on what's going on at Black Stone in a little bit more fulsome and long-term way. We feel like we've reached a point in critical mass of the attributes of what we've been talking about to where we could share it with you, and we're glad to do that. And we thank you for joining us today.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.