Scott D. Sheffield
Chief Executive Officer at Pioneer Natural Resources
Thank you, Neal. Good morning. I think, obviously, you can see from the headlines on slide three, that's probably one of the best quarters in Pioneer's 25-year history, which is coming up next year, our 25th year anniversary. It's hard to imagine a company like Pioneer thrown out just in one quarter, $1.1 billion in free cash flow, obviously, during the quarter. And returning $880 million of that in regard to a dividend, including base plus variable.
Our dividend payments from the third quarter is $3.58 a share made up of $3.02 variable and $0.56 on the base. Probably the big headline from the quarter, tremendous transaction for Pioneer divesting of our Delaware assets for $3.25 billion. Expected to close by year-end. And when you add the $250 million recent divestiture from Glasscock County, that makes a total for the quarter of about $3.5 billion. We're increasing our base after talking to a lot of our shareholders over the last several weeks. I think it's very important to continue to increase our base.
So we're increasing at over 10%. That will commence in January with that base dividend payment. And we continue to look at the significant increases over the next few years as our balance sheet continues to improve and if commodity prices continue to perform like they have been. Then lastly, again, Neal talked about it. We released our two reports. We'll talk about it later. But again, increasing our goals to 50% in greenhouse gas intensity reduction and 75% in regard to methane intensity.
Turning the next on slide number four. Again, production in the upper half of the third quarter guidance. Rich will give you more detail in a few minutes in regard to the effect of what the Delaware sale does to us. I think the most important point here with the -- both divestitures of Glasscock County and the Delaware, obviously, we're now focused on the high-margin, high-return Midland Basin. We'll end up having the strongest balance sheet in the company's history. A debt-to-EBITDA of 0.4 by the end of the year. Going to our long-term thesis on slide number five.
Again, our focus to deliver mid-teens total return. When you look at one of the later slides, with a dividend yield of about 11% going to 2022, growing at 5% a year, that gets us to that mid-teens total return. When you look at just return on capital employed and ROCE going into '22 and beyond, we're in that low to mid-20s on both of those numbers. That's really unheard of in regard to the change in the strategy to keep production fairly flat, minimal growth and return most of the cash flow back to the investor. Reinvestment rate of 50% to 60% when you look at next year.
It's really down in the 30% to 40% range. When you look at free cash flow generation, our free cash flow generation next year will be up 88% from 2021. When you look at a five year strip, we'll generate over $25 billion of free cash flow. If you just take current oil price today in the low 80s. The mid-80s, and keep it flat for the next five years, we're over $35 billion of free cash flow. When you just look at the strip pricing by the end of next year, we'll essentially, for the first time, be essentially debt-free by the end of 2022.
So Pioneer will end up continuing to have one of the best balance sheets in the industry. As I mentioned in regard to our strong and growing annual base dividend, we went up over 10%. And we see, as long as our balance sheet stays in great shape, which we expect, commodity prices continue to stay strong. We'll continue to look at increases over and above our growth rate of 5%. Again, the variable dividend, up to 75% of previous quarter's free cash flow of deducting the base dividend. We'll be distributing about 80% of free cash flow back to the shareholders.
Again, we restated we had a share repurchase program where we had spent about $900 million in 2019 and 2020. We actually are one of the few companies that bought during the pandemic, our stock back in the energy sector. We spent about $900 million and bought the stock back around $130 million. If you go back in history, the other time we bought our stock was back in 2005, 2006 after we sold our deepwater assets. We spent $1.1 billion at 45%. We do think it's important over the next five years if we do generate $25 billion to $35 billion of free cash flow that we significantly reduce the share count over time.
But it is going to be opportunistic during market dislocations. I think the last key point here is that the fact our EBITDA will be up about 45% to 50% next year, primarily due to the full year of both acquisitions and secondly, with very minimal hedging in 2022. Going to slide number six. Again, significant increases in our variable dividend and also our base dividend. Basically, a nine times growth from '22 annual dividend over the 2020. Returning $1.6 billion in dividends in 2021, a three times increase from 2020. So we're estimating something near about $20 per share total payout in 2022. When you go to slide number seven to show Pioneer's dividend yield. It will exceed all peers and majors in the S&P 500.
We're already at 8% just based on the one we declared for the fourth quarter of 2021. When you look at next year, we'll be 11%. The other two strong companies below us, obviously, are DeWitt and Cotera with strong variable dividends. But then you see a significant drop to the U.S. majors, European majors. Our dividend yield is over two times versus the U.S. and European majors. And when you look over the rest of the peers, excluding DeWitt and Cotera, we're basically a 10 times dividend times or 10 higher over the rest of the peers. When you look at the S&P 500, which is around 1.6%, we're over six times to seven times the S&P 500.
I'll now turn it over to Neal to talk about our base.