Daily Energy Blog

Another day, another mega-deal between top-tier oil and gas producers — or so it seems. Now, it’s ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil’s turn, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more logical pairing among the ever-shrinking list of big E&Ps that hadn’t already found a partner during the ongoing frenzy to consolidate. In today’s RBN blog, we examine ConocoPhillips’s newly announced, $22.5 billion agreement to acquire Marathon Oil with a look at their similar histories, their complementary assets, and what will now be their joint effort to boost shareholder returns. 

U.S. E&Ps’ dramatic strategic shift from prioritizing growth to focusing on cash flow generation and shareholder returns has resulted in more earnings-call talk about dividends and share buybacks and less discussion about efforts to replenish and build their proven oil and gas reserves — a critically important factor in establishing company value. The emphasis on financial results has largely masked a sizable increase in the costs E&Ps are incurring to organically replace their reserves and a significant decrease in the volumes replaced. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll analyze the weakening in reserve replacement metrics over the last two years, a trend that has led many producers to grow their reserves through M&A. 

Growth for growth’s sake. In the early years of the Shale Revolution, that’s what it was all about. Backed by billions of dollars in Wall Street borrowings, E&Ps plowed vast piles of cash into increasing production. It was the era of “Drill baby drill!” And we all know what happened next. Rabid production growth contributed to oversupply and crude oil prices crashed. But resilient E&Ps clawed their way back by adopting what we now know as capital discipline, initially in fits and starts. Then, after the COVID price meltdown, they went all-in, elevating free cash flow generation to Job #1 and returning a significant portion of cash flow to shareholders. It worked! Financial markets started to think of E&Ps more as yield vehicles than growth plays. But it is in the DNA of oil and gas producers to grow. And now that U.S. crude prices are above $85/bbl, could we see a backslide toward organic growth — a 2024 rendition of “Drill baby drill”? In today’s RBN blog, we’ll explore the historical context of E&Ps’ transition to capital discipline and what it tells us about what’s coming next. 

When legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal was asked how he approached important games, he frequently said, “You dance with the one who brung ya,” which meant sticking with the strategy that produced previous success. After struggling through a period of extreme price volatility in 2014-20, U.S. E&Ps finally locked onto a game plan that works: They wooed back investors and regained financial stability by focusing on generating free cash flow and returning a lot of that bounty to shareholders. In today’s RBN blog, we analyze E&Ps’ 2024 capex and production guidance, which shows that producers have embraced Royal’s concept of sticking with what works. 

A Super Bowl game (and halftime show) for the ages followed up only hours later by a made-in-heaven combination of two of the largest, most admired E&Ps in the super-hot Permian? It doesn’t get any better than this, unless you’re a Taylor Swift fan too — in which case, it may be impossible for you to “shake it off.” In today’s RBN blog, we examine the newly announced plan by Diamondback Energy and Endeavor Energy Resources to combine into a Travis Kelce-sized Permian pure play with more than 800 Mboe/d of crude oil-focused production and more than 6,000 well locations with breakevens of $40/bbl or less. 

A lot of energy-industry M&A activity lately has been focused on the acquiring company gaining scale in a shale play or region where it’s already very active, usually the Permian. The latest multibillion-dollar deal in the energy space is different: Sunoco LP (stock ticker symbol SUN), which is primarily involved in fuel distribution east of the Mississippi and in Texas, is buying NuStar Energy (ticker NS), a midstream company with a mix of pipelines (crude oil, products and ammonia) and terminals, most of them within the U.S.’s midsection. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, the combined company will have a massive footprint, with all kinds of opportunities for synergies and growth. 

Permian this and Permian that. For several years now, acreage and production in that sprawling, crude-oil-focused shale play in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico have been at the center of so much M&A activity. And the deals keep coming! Just last week, APA Corp. — the international E&P formerly known as Apache — announced that it will be acquiring Callon Petroleum, which in recent years has become a Permian pure play with significant holdings in both the Delaware and Midland basins. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the APA/Callon deal, the drivers behind it, and why the acquisition makes sense for both companies.