exploration and production companies

No one in North America’s energy sector is likely to forget the second quarter of 2020 anytime soon. In those months — April, May, and June — the demand-destruction effects of the COVID-19 pandemic took root; the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) bottomed out, even going negative for a day; and crude oil-focused drillers in particular shut in vast numbers of wells. In late July and August, when exploration and production companies (E&Ps) announced their results for that train wreck of a quarter, it came as no surprise that the write-downs and losses were generally immense and, in many cases, record-shattering. But WTI prices have rebounded somewhat the past couple of months, as has production, suggesting that while E&Ps third-quarter results will be far from stellar, they’ll at least show an improvement and hopefully set the stage for further gains going forward. Today, we break down second-quarter results by producer peer group and discuss the positive trends that portend improved results for the third quarter.

U.S. oil and gas producer share prices got a nice boost in mid-April from the Chevron/Occidental Petroleum bidding war for Anadarko Petroleum, which sold for more than a 40% premium to its price before Chevron’s opening bid. But the optimism was only temporary; the S&P E&P stock index has since retreated 13% to mid-February levels, during a month in which companies released their first quarter 2019 earnings reports. That suggests that, despite a 38% quarter-on-quarter increase in the pre-tax operating profit of the 44 E&Ps we track, investors found nothing in the first quarter results to dispel the generally negative sentiment that has hung like a dark cloud over the oil and gas industry since late 2014. Today, we analyze the first quarter financial performance of our 44 E&Ps and review the outlook for an industry ripe for further consolidation because of depressed equity valuations.

Once the “riverboat gamblers” of U.S. industry, executives at exploration and production companies got religion after the brutal oil price crash in late 2014 and adopted a far more conservative approach to investment based on their new 11th commandment: “Thou shalt live within cash flow.” So it’s no surprise that early 2019 guidance issued by more than half of the 45 major E&Ps we track shows them cutting back capital investment in response to last fall’s decline in oil prices from a more optimistic scenario a year ago. Nearly three-quarters of the 26 companies reporting their 2019 guidance are reducing exploration and development outlays, while only three of the remainder are budgeting increases greater than 10%. What is surprising is that these forecasts include solid production growth virtually across the board, especially for E&Ps that focus on crude oil. Today, we look at how a representative group of U.S. E&Ps are dealing with lower crude prices.

The U.S. exploration and production sector has reaped many benefits from its transformation to large-scale, manufacturing-style exploitation of premier resource plays, generating record oil and gas production while slashing production and reserve replacement costs by 50%. While increased efficiency and rising output have moved the industry solidly into the black after three years of losses, profit growth stalled in the second quarter 2018 despite a $5/bbl increase in oil prices to about $68/bbl. The cause is largely beyond the control of the producers: constraints on getting the increased output to markets. In certain producing regions, most notably the Permian Basin, production growth has far outpaced expansions to the infrastructure required to process and transport it. Today, we explain why these constraints are critical to assessing the outlook for industry profitability and cash flow over at least the next two to four quarters.

U.S. exploration and production companies (E&Ps) are generating such substantial output growth that the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates their increase in 2018 liquids production could equal the entire growth in global demand. Remarkably, they’re accomplishing this with half the capital investment of 2014. The driver has been a shift to a manufacturing mode that has transformed the E&P industry as dramatically as Henry Ford’s moving assembly line changed the automobile industry in 1913. Geophysical and technological innovations, such as multi-well pad drilling, have allowed the industry to double output per well bore at half the previous cost. With oil prices and margins rising, you’d think the E&P industry, which historically has invested like “there’s never too much of a good thing,” would be pouring every available dollar into drilling more and more wells. But that isn’t the case. Instead, mid-year 2018 guidance shows that producers have adopted the long-term investment strategies usually associated with integrated oil majors, plotting incremental increases in investment to methodically accelerate production growth to 2020 and beyond.

In the first half of 2018, the U.S. E&P sector continued to reap the benefits of its dramatic evolution from decades of “boom or bust” exploration to large-scale, manufacturing-style exploitation of premier resource plays. Upstream companies halved their break-evens and reserve replacement costs through technological innovation, financial discipline, and ruthless portfolio paring, which allowed them to generate record domestic oil production in 2018 on half the capital outlays expended in 2014. As a result, the 44 E&Ps we track reported $21 billion in pre-tax operating profits in the first half of 2018, up from $6.2 billion in the first six months of 2017, and over $50 billion in operating cash flow, up from $39 billion a year ago. Most notably, these companies are on pace to garner an astonishing $30 billion in free cash flow. Today, we discuss the ongoing effort by leading E&Ps to maintain financial discipline in a period of strong oil and gas prices.