How much cash does Petrus really make, and what is a share of it worth?

The words on this page

Real cash (true cash)

What was left in the bank each year after every bill, every tax payment and every well drilled. Not profit, and not "cash flow" as companies usually quote it, which leaves the drilling out. The strictest number there is.

Required return

The yearly return you insist on for taking the risk. A dollar promised in ten years is worth less than a dollar today; this rate says how much less. 9% is a common professional figure for a large Canadian producer; the reserve engineers use 10%.

Well life (reserve life)

How long the wells keep producing. After the life you choose, nothing is counted. Insite evaluated 60.9 million boe of proved reserves and 93.4 million boe of proved plus probable at 31 December 2025. Against 2025 production of 9,371 boe a day that is about 18 years proved and 27 years on a 2P basis; against the 11,500 boe a day midpoint of post-acquisition 2026 guidance the 2P life is about 22 years. The model uses 27.

What a share is worth

Every future year's cash, shrunk back to today's dollars at your required return, added up, less the debt, divided by the number of shares. Pay less than this and you earn more than your required return; pay more and you earn less.

Where the default growth comes from

Petrus guides 2026 production of 11,000 to 12,000 boe a day, about 23 per cent above 2025, but that jump comes from the February 2026 Cardium acquisition rather than the drill bit; underlying production was flat from 2023 through 2025, so the growth dial starts at a modest 3 per cent.

The arithmetic, step by step

1. Count the real cash each past year: cash generated by operations as reported, plus interest paid put back, minus rent on leases, minus every dollar spent on wells and plants. Buying and selling assets is shown separately.
2. Project it. The starting cash you choose (an average of the history, or the latest year) grows at your growth dial for ten years, then at the long-run rate for as long as the wells keep producing. Nothing is counted after the well life ends.
3. Bring it back to today. Each year's cash is shrunk by your required return, counted at mid-year because cash arrives through the year rather than on 31 December.
4. Turn it into a share value. Add up the shrunk cash; take off net debt of C$80M; divide by 149.9M shares.
5. Work it backwards. "The growth today's price assumes" is the ten-year growth rate at which this start is worth exactly the share price.

Where the numbers come from

• Operating cash flow, cash interest paid, lease payments, capital spending, dividends, buybacks and asset sales for every year from 2021 to 2025 were hand-checked on 1 September 2026 against the annual financial statements in the audited annual reports on petrusresources.com; each year's statement of cash flows was cross-footed against its own subtotals.
• The history is five fiscal years, fewer than the eight this model prefers, because aggregated coverage for Petrus starts at 2021. Averages therefore use five years. The 2021 and 2022 figures reflect the tail end of a debt restructuring era, when capital was rationed and the share count roughly doubled through equity raises.
• Interest is the cash interest paid from the audited supplementary disclosures.
• Lease payments are the audited financing-section repayments of lease liabilities, between 0.1 and 0.3 million a year; lease liabilities are under 1 million dollars.
• Net debt is total debt less cash and includes small lease liabilities. Petrus' own measure also counts the working capital deficit: 60.1 million at year end 2024, 62.5 million at year end 2025 and 84.3 million at 30 June 2026, versus the 56.7, 62.3 and 80.1 million used here. The 2026 rise funds the Cardium acquisition.
• 2025 dividends are corrected to the company's reported 15.5 million (twelve monthly payments of one cent); the aggregated figure of 4.6 million does not match the company's releases. 2024 uses the aggregated 14.4 million, consistent with the same monthly rate.
• No acquisitions ran through 2021 to 2025; the acquisitions column shows only asset-sale proceeds, chiefly 9.1 million of dispositions during the 2021 restructuring. Capital spending includes the small exploration land purchases the company counts in its own capital figure. The 34.8 million Cardium purchase closed in the first quarter of 2026 and sits outside this history, though it raises current net debt, the share count and 2026 guidance.
• Diluted weighted shares are the aggregator's rounded counts; the 149.9 million current count is basic shares, about 152.6 million fully diluted in the second quarter of 2026. The public float is only about 43 million shares, so the stock trades thinly.
• The decommissioning liability is not captured here, so the model does not subtract a clean-up cost.
• No analyst consensus target is published for Petrus on our aggregator, so the model shows none.

For the technically minded

The method is the one used to evaluate capital projects, from Ted Lawrence, The Business Guide to Economic Evaluations: Projects, Leases, Tariffs and Acquisitions (2017). "Real cash" is the book's project cash flow (chapter 3) with depreciation, debt servicing and debt-like leases restructured out (chapters 4, 5 and 19); short operating leases stay in as a cost of producing, a chapter 19 judgment. The value per share follows the share-purchase evaluation of chapter 20: present value of the company's cash flows at the cost of capital (chapter 10), mid-year discounting (chapter 12), plus non-required assets, less net debt and the decommissioning liability. "What you gain or lose" is the bid-curve NPV of chapter 20; "when you get your money back" is the discounted payout of chapter 13; the bars follow the project profile of chapter 6. The reverse solve on growth is a plain reverse DCF.

Discount-rate anchors: 9% is a common cost-of-equity figure for a large Canadian producer and 10% is the reserve-report convention (PV10). The long-run rate defaults to 0% here: a depleting resource should not be assumed to grow forever, so anything above zero is a judgment you make with the dial.