depreciation

After posting huge pretax operating losses in 2015-16, the nine U.S. natural gas-focused exploration and production companies (E&Ps) we’ve been tracking returned to profitability in the first quarter of 2017. This reversal of fortunes in peer group performance was driven mostly due to higher natural gas prices, which ended a massive flow of red ink that had principally resulted from big reserve write-downs. Now, with higher profits and cash flows, these producers are ramping up their 2017 capital budgets and planning for long-term production growth. Today we continue our series on the financial performance of 43 U.S. E&Ps, this time zeroing in on companies whose hydrocarbon reserves are mostly natural gas.

Of the 43 major U.S. exploration and production companies we have been tracking, the 13 diversified companies — the ones with a balanced mix of crude oil and natural gas reserves — engineered the most dramatic financial reversal in the first quarter of 2017, generating $4.6 billion, or $11.46 per barrel of oil equivalent (boe), in pretax operating profit after almost $65 billion in pretax losses in 2015-16. These producers, like their oil-weighted and gas-weighted counterparts, benefited from higher prices and sharply lower drilling and completion costs and lease operating costs. The magnitude of the turnaround was driven by exceptional results from giant ConocoPhillips, which generated more than one-third of the total first quarter 2017 pretax operating profits for our 43-company universe and nearly one-quarter of the total cash flow. The remaining 12 diversified companies reported $1.3 billion in first-quarter pretax profit after $54 billion in losses over the past two years. Today we look at how the turnaround efforts of 13 diversified oil-and-gas E&Ps have been paying off.