Good morning.
Thank you very much for inviting us to participate today. I'm going to come at it from a different perspective.
Seven Generations is an oil and gas and energy company. We produce natural gas with associated condensate. Our name comes from the law of the Iroquois, which compelled their leaders to consider the decisions they were making not only for the current generation but for seven future generations. With that in mind, that is how we established our company in 2008.
At that time we were a private company. We are now a publicly traded company as of 2014. We have grown tremendously, very organically, from having production around the 4,000-barrel oil equivalent in 2012 to about 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent, so it's a tremendous growth story.
We couldn't do that without our stakeholders. We have a code of conduct that lists the seven stakeholders we serve, and we see ourselves as not just an oil and gas company looking to make profits for its shareholders but as a company that is here to serve the needs of society and all its stakeholders. That includes the communities where we live and work, our environment, our shareholders, our capital providers, our supply and service providers, as well as our employees, and of course government and regulators.
We are among the top 10 producers. Right now we currently rank about eighth in our production, and we're about a $9 billion company.
We have about 800 square miles of leased crown mineral rights from Alberta. We are located in northern Alberta about 100 kilometres south of Grande Prairie.
That level of activity and growth doesn't come without investment. On an annual basis we can create jobs for about 2,500 people, with an average of nine drilling rigs running during the year. A lot of that is local, particularly working with all the communities within the region, including Grande Prairie and Grande Cache, as well as first nations communities.
From that procurement perspective we are striving to make a difference, providing economic benefit and providing benefit also from the social perspective. We are very active within the communities. It's about partnerships and building relationships. We want everyone who is working within our region working with us to see our project as part of their project. It's not just a single company. It's a whole community. For us, if it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a region to develop an oil and gas project.
When it comes to our first nations and how we engage with them, it's about having that building capacity and having training. This is where I think the government can help us. We do our own training through operator training. We provide some education, but that's only a part of the solution. We need to have everybody pulling on all fronts to assist with that.
In developing indigenous businesses, we have worked very hard on that personal level to go above and beyond. As an example, we had a logging company. They were losing out on the bids time after time, so we said they needed some assistance in how to bid and asked what we could do to help. We had one of our guys work with the company that was consistently losing these bids. We had them do some work on an hourly rate, and then they were able to get to the point where it wasn't just through working with us; they were getting contracts from major pipeline companies that were much larger.
For us, that is the way to engage to help those businesses elevate to the level where they need to be, but government can step in with some financing because capital is needed to build their businesses.
To carry on, what did we spend? Well, we've only been in existence since 2008. I'll just use the last three years, because that's where all our growth has occurred.
On average, it's about $32 million a year. That's with about 15 indigenous businesses with the five nations that we work with. There are many more beyond those five nations that are not captured here, but this at least gives you a sense of where we're at. If we're looking at spending $2 billion per year, it may seem like a small amount, but it's growing from where we started, so we believe that's a huge success.
We've seen some of the businesses go from being small, with trucks hauling maybe three to four loads, and now we're over 55 on a daily basis. Again, it's huge growth, taking a company that was less than a million dollars in value to somewhere around $4 million. It's a huge success story.
Another issue is the challenge of getting off of the reserve and getting to the jobs where they need to go. They're isolated. We worked with the City of Grande Prairie, their local Rotary, and business people to develop a transportation initiative with one of the local communities. That has been in operation since the end of 2015, and it currently continues to run. There's still some work in progress on that, but again it's trying to approach things from a personal way and making an impact. It may be small, but we know it affects all the community members.
We've been working with first nation communities for over nine years on education, training, mentorship, and all of those things that we're trying to provide to make a difference.
We'll just leave you with a few quotes here. Some are taken from the Assembly of First Nations. Then I think the last slide has a couple of really good quotes in terms of what the oil and gas resource provides. There are several local communities where our resources exist that will benefit from that resource development. They're tied to the land almost more than any other group of people, so from the environmental perspective, they can assist in helping to elevate resource development. We see it as a partnership, and we have to develop those relationships. That's so important.
I think government can play a role by helping to provide maybe lower interest rate loans to help develop those businesses. We can help provide them with opportunity, but we also need some assistance to get to that level.
Thank you.