A plain-cash valuation · Rubellite Energy Corp. (TSX: RBY)
How much cash does Rubellite really make, and what is a share of it worth?
Rubellite Energy produces heavy oil from the Clearwater and Mannville Stack plays of northern Alberta, alongside the natural gas assets that returned with the October 2024 Perpetual Energy recombination. Sales averaged 12,494 boe a day in 2025, about two thirds heavy oil and liquids, and 2026 guidance is 13,200 to 13,800 boe a day. The company was built almost from scratch in late 2021 and is one of the fastest growing juniors on the TSX. This page counts only the cash that was actually left over each year, after every bill was paid and every well was drilled, then asks the only question that matters to an owner: what is one share worth, and how does that compare with the price? The rules come from the calculations economists and engineers use to decide whether a project is worth building, applied to a whole company.
figures to FY2025 · price C$4.47 (close of 28 August 2026) · all figures Canadian dollarsWhat Rubellite really earned, and what you are assuming it will earn
Solid bars are reported history: the real cash left each year after every bill was paid and every well was drilled. Negative years are when the owners put cash in; positive years are when it came back out. Striped bars are your projection.
Table view: every year, C$ millions
| Year | Status | Real cash left | Per share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | reported | −16.2 | −$0.72 |
| 2022 | reported | −70.0 | −$1.33 |
| 2023 | reported | −14.2 | −$0.23 |
| 2024 | reported | −6.3 | −$0.09 |
| 2025 | reported | 7.5 | $0.08 |
| 2026 | projected | −21.4 | −$0.23 |
| 2027 | projected | −23.1 | −$0.25 |
| 2028 | projected | −25.0 | −$0.27 |
| 2029 | projected | −27.0 | −$0.29 |
| 2030 | projected | −29.2 | −$0.31 |
| 2031 | projected | −31.5 | −$0.34 |
| 2032 | projected | −34.0 | −$0.36 |
| 2033 | projected | −36.7 | −$0.39 |
| 2034 | projected | −39.7 | −$0.42 |
| 2035 | projected | −42.8 | −$0.46 |
| 2036 | projected | −42.8 | −$0.46 |
| 2037 | projected | −42.8 | −$0.46 |
If you bought one share today
The red bar is what you pay. Yellow years pay you back, including the return you asked for. Green years are pure profit on top. If there is no green, you paid more than the cash is worth.
At these settings you never get C$4.47 back with a 9.0% return within 12 years. Buying at C$4.47 loses you $8.19 a share in today's dollars.
What a share is worth under different assumptions
Your required return down the side, ten-year growth across the top. Your current setting is outlined; the dashed cells are within 10% of today's price. Blue means worth more than C$4.47, red means worth less.
Growth after year 10, the well life, the starting point and the switches above all carry through. Every cell is the same arithmetic as the big number at the top.
Three honest answers from the same cash
Three answers from the same accounts and the same arithmetic, at your required return, long-run growth and well life. The gap between them is the growth you choose to believe in, and nothing else.
From the reported figures to the cash in the bank, FY2025
Reported profit is an accountant's number, and the "cash flow" companies quote usually leaves the drilling out. Here the reported figures are worked down to the cash that was actually left after every bill and every well. Figures in C$ millions.
| FY2025, C$ millions | |
|---|---|
| Profit, as reported (the headline number) | 32.6 |
| Cash generated by operations, as reported | 128.8 |
| + Interest paid, put back | 9.6 |
| − Rent on leases | −0.4 |
| − Every dollar spent on wells and plants | −130.5 |
| = Real cash left for owners | 7.5 |
| Per share (96M diluted) | $0.08 |
| For comparison: dividends paid in 2025 | 0.0 |
| For comparison: assets bought and sold, net | −7.8 |
What we take out, and why
- Depreciation, depletion and every other paper charge: accountants spread the cost of past drilling over years. We ignore that and count the cash actually spent on wells and plants in the year it went out, so nothing is counted twice.
- Interest paid: put back. Interest is the price of borrowed money, and your required return already charges for the price of money, so every company is judged the same way whether it borrows or not.
- Rent on leases: small and short leases are treated as a cost of producing, like fuel.
- Every dollar spent on wells and plants: taken out in full, including the drilling that grows production. That spending buys the future cash the dials project, so it is counted where it happens.
What 5 years of accounts say
Every line the model uses, every year, with the latest year highlighted. Dividends and buybacks are shown as money leaving for owners.
Every year, C$ millions
| C$ millions | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Profit, as reported | 7.7 | 24.6 | 18.6 | 50.0 | 32.6 |
| Cash generated by operations, as reported | 1.1 | 23.9 | 55.4 | 95.8 | 128.8 |
| + Interest paid, put back | 0.0 | 0.3 | 1.9 | 6.9 | 9.6 |
| − Rent on leases | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | −0.1 | −0.4 |
| − Spent on wells and plants | −17.4 | −94.2 | −71.5 | −108.9 | −130.5 |
| = Real cash left for owners | −16.2 | −70.0 | −14.2 | −6.3 | 7.5 |
| Real cash per share, C$ | −$0.72 | −$1.33 | −$0.23 | −$0.09 | $0.08 |
| Assets bought and sold, net | 55.3 | 0.0 | 25.2 | 62.7 | −7.8 |
| Dividends paid | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Debt after cash, year end | −15.3 | 10.1 | 29.3 | 129.9 | 116.5 |
| Shares, millions (diluted average) | 22.7 | 52.5 | 61.1 | 69.7 | 96.0 |
| Production, barrels of oil equivalent a day | 593 | 1,670 | 3,302 | 6,349 | 12,494 |
How the maths works, and what to be careful about
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. At 31 December 2025 Rubellite reported 32.9 million boe of proved reserves and 53.1 million boe of proved plus probable. Against 2025 sales of 12,494 boe a day that is about 7 years proved and 12 years on a 2P basis. Fast growing plays turn their reserves over quickly, so this reads shorter than the big producers; the model uses 12 years.
- 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
- Rubellite's 2026 guidance of 13,200 to 13,800 boe a day represents 6 to 10 per cent growth over 2025 on the company's own numbers, so the growth dial starts at 8 per cent.
The arithmetic, step by step
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Turn it into a share value. Add up the shrunk cash; take off net debt of C$120M; divide by 93.9M shares.
- 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, lease payments, capital spending and acquisitions for every year from 2021 to 2025 were hand-checked on 1 September 2026 against the audited annual financial statements on rubelliteenergy.com, and each year's statement of cash flows was cross-footed against its own subtotals.
- Five fiscal years is the entire history: Rubellite began operations on 3 September 2021, so 2021 is a partial year with almost no cash flow, and it drags the five year average well below the company's current run rate. The latest year start setting is the fairer read here.
- This is a combined entity story. Rubellite was carved out of Perpetual Energy in 2021 and recombined with Perpetual on 31 October 2024 in a largely share based deal, so 2021 through late 2024 is the Clearwater focused Rubellite alone, while the last two months of 2024 and all of 2025 include Perpetual's gas assets. That recombination, not drilling alone, drives the jumps in production, cash flow, shares and debt across 2024 and 2025. Perpetual's own pre 2021 history is not part of this model.
- 2021 net income of 7.7 million is the audited figure; it includes a 9.1 million non-cash gain from recognizing a deferred tax asset at startup, so that first stub year looks more profitable than its 1.1 million of operating cash flow really was.
- Interest is the total cash finance expense from the audited finance expense notes (interest on bank debt, the term loan and leases); the non-cash amortization of debt issue costs that aggregated data folds in is excluded. 2021 is zero because the company held net cash that year.
- Lease payments are the audited financing-section principal payments: nil until the Perpetual recombination brought office and vehicle leases, then 0.07 million in 2024 and 0.38 million in 2025. Lease liabilities have run about 4 to 5 million dollars since 2024.
- Net debt is total debt less cash and includes lease liabilities. Rubellite's own measure also counts the working capital deficit: 51.0 million at year end 2023, 154.0 million at 2024, 143.1 million at 2025 and 158.1 million at 30 June 2026, versus the 29.3, 129.9, 116.5 and 119.5 million used here. The gap is material for this name.
- Acquisitions are the audited investing-section cash figures: 55.3 million in 2021 for the September 2021 purchase of the Clearwater assets from Perpetual, the November 2023 Clearwater purchase (33.2 million, net of an 8.0 million disposition) and 62.7 million of cash outlays in 2024. The company reported 179.2 million of total 2024 acquisitions including the largely share based Perpetual recombination, so the cash column understates that deal's full size.
- Capital spending is all capital lines in the audited investing sections: development and production expenditures, exploration and evaluation expenditures, and the corporate expenditures that appear after the recombination (3.1 million in 2024, 0.5 million in 2025). The company's own capital expenditure measure excludes the corporate portion, so it reads slightly lower.
- Production for 2021 is heavy oil only over the startup months; meaningful gas volumes appear from 2024 with Figure Lake gas conservation and the Perpetual assets. On 30 June 2026 an asset swap doubled the Marten Hills working interest to 60 per cent.
- No dividends or buybacks have been paid to date.
- The 93.9 million share count is basic shares; weighted diluted shares were about 98.3 million in the second quarter of 2026. The decommissioning liability, which grew with Perpetual's mature gas wells, is not captured here.
- Analyst targets: average C$5.42 across 3 analysts (stockanalysis.com analyst consensus (S&P Global), 11 August 2026).
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.
Sources
- Ted Lawrence, The Business Guide to Economic Evaluations: Projects, Leases, Tariffs and Acquisitions (2017). Chapters used: 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 19 and 20.
- Rubellite 2025 year-end audited financial statements (2025 and 2024 cash flows, leases, finance expense) (10 March 2026, checked 1 September 2026)
- Rubellite 2024 year-end audited financial statements (2024 and 2023 cash flows, recombination detail) (March 2025, checked 1 September 2026)
- Rubellite 2022 year-end audited financial statements (2022 and startup 2021 cash flows, 2021 acquisition) (March 2023, checked 1 September 2026)
- Rubellite 2021 year-end audited financial statements (startup period detail, deferred tax gain) (March 2022, checked 1 September 2026)
- stockanalysis.com, Rubellite financials, balance sheet and cash flow (10 year view) (30 August 2026)
- stockanalysis.com, RBY quote, statistics and forecast pages (28 August 2026 close; targets updated 11 August 2026)
- Rubellite Q2 2026 results and 2026 guidance update (10 August 2026)
- Rubellite fourth quarter 2025 results and 2025 year-end reserves (10 March 2026)
- Rubellite fourth quarter 2024 results and Perpetual recombination detail (March 2025)
- Rubellite fourth quarter and full year 2023 results (2023 and 2022 figures) (March 2024)
- Rubellite fourth quarter 2022 results (2022 and startup year 2021 figures) (9 March 2023)

