How much cash does Frontera 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.

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

The producing assets were sold to Parex on 1 June 2026, so past cash flow is not a base to grow from; the growth dial defaults to 0 and this page should be read as history plus a what-if, not a forecast.

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 US$118M; divide by 70.77M 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

• The overriding caveat: on 1 June 2026 Frontera completed the sale of its Colombian exploration and production portfolio to Parex for a firm value of about $750 million ($500 million cash up front, $225 million of debt obligations assumed, up to $25 million contingent) and paid a US$430 million return of capital, C$8.34 a share, on 23 June 2026. The cash-generating assets behind every bar on this page are gone. What remains is infrastructure: 35 per cent of the ODL pipeline, 99.97 per cent of Puerto Bahia, about $64 million of cash at closing, and Guyana exploration. The valuation dials here describe a business Frontera no longer runs.
• Country risk is concentrated and real: essentially all of the historical cash flow, and all of the remaining pipeline and port earnings, come from Colombia, with its currency, security, tax and counterparty risks. Smaller Ecuador and Guyana interests do not change that.
• The company in its present form dates from the November 2016 restructuring of Pacific Exploration and Production, in which creditors took the equity. Years before 2019 are excluded: figures around the Peru exit were restated and consistent balance-sheet detail was not reachable outside SEDAR+.
• Operating cash flow, interest, leases, capital, dividends, buybacks and acquisitions for every year from 2019 to 2025 were hand-checked on 1 September 2026 against the audited consolidated financial statements Frontera published on its own website, and each year's financing and investing sections were cross-footed against their printed totals. The fiscal 2020 and 2021 statement files, which the current site no longer links, were retrieved from Internet Archive captures of fronteraenergy.ca.
• Interest is the interest and other charges line from the audited financing sections in every year, so the series is consistent from 2019 through 2025; the supplementary cash-interest-paid disclosure runs a few million lower in some years because the financing line folds in bank charges.
• Lease payments are the audited financing-section figures and they matter here: $33.3 million in 2019 and $24.5 million in 2020, falling to the $5 to 7 million range by 2022 as pipeline and vessel leases rolled off. Earlier drafts of this page showed zero, which overstated true cash in the COVID-era years.
• 2024 uses the original fiscal 2024 audited statements, in which Colombia was still a continuing operation (cash flow $510.0 million, capital $350.7 million, interest $48.2 million). The fiscal 2025 statements re-present 2024 with Colombia as discontinued, which shows lower capital ($323.5 million) against almost the same operating cash; the original presentation is the comparable one for this history.
• Net debt for 2019 and 2020 uses cash including restricted cash as the company disclosed it, which flatters those years (2019 shows net cash); 2021 onward uses unrestricted cash from aggregated data. The $118.1 million at 30 June 2026 is after the Parex closing and the shareholder distribution.
• Dividends and buybacks are the audited financing-section figures: $100.8 million of dividends plus $21.8 million of buybacks in 2019, and a final $20.5 million dividend plus $10.1 million of buybacks in early 2020 before returns were suspended. Dividends paid to non-controlling interests (roughly $15 million a year in 2019 to 2021) are not in the dividend column, which tracks only what common shareholders received.
• The 2025 net loss of $1,063 million is dominated by non-cash impairments on the announced Colombia sale ($603 million) and the Guyana interest ($17 million), not by operations.
• The acquisitions column is the audited cash on subsidiary purchases, non-controlling interest buyouts and asset sales; the 2021 to 2023 figures fold in investments in vehicles such as CGX in Guyana, and 2019 is a small net inflow from cash acquired with Infrastructure Ventures and asset sale proceeds.
• Capital spending is the audited cash additions to property, plant and equipment plus exploration assets. In 2019 a further $48.5 million of intangible additions and $24.3 million of other asset additions sat in investing outside those two lines, so that year's total investing outflow was larger than the capital column shows.
• Per-year production is omitted because a consistent 2022 figure was not reachable; for context, Frontera averaged 70,875 boe a day in 2019, 47,800 in 2020, 37,818 in 2021, 40,919 in 2023, 40,288 in 2024 and 39,011 in 2025. Year-end 2025 2P reserves of 133.8 million boe were sold with the Parex deal, so the reserve-life dial defaults to a notional 20 years.
• Weighted share counts for 2019 and 2020 are basic or derived from per-share figures; a large block of shares also sat with post-restructuring creditor funds for much of this history, and the float was thin.

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.