PetroEquity analysis
Clear-eyed analysis of the strategic decisions that create—or destroy—shareholder value across the oil and gas sector.
34 analyses in the archive
01BW Energy has financed Maromba with unusual skill, drawing on its shipping heritage and Asian relationships. But the $1.5bn project is huge relative to BWE. We ask whether shareholders are carrying too much financial, execution and subsurface risk.
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02Ian Tyler is now BP’s permanent chair and Amanda Blanc is leaving. But Tyler’s promise to “lead the board’s evolution” points to a deeper issue: BP’s problem is bigger than strategy. Elliott has pushed hard, yet BP has retained control of the process.
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03Energean turned discovered East Med gas into a financeable public-market success. The harder question now is whether the same commercial skill can support a broader E&P company when debt, dividends, reservoir risk and geopolitics all matter.
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04The US Treasury’s rather fruitless attempt last week to take up some of the slack in demand for long-dated government bonds followed a sharp move in a market that normally sits quietly beneath almost every other cost of capital. Gross US federal debt recently passed $40 trillion. The broader OECD sovereign picture is not especially comforting either, with many governments carrying much larger debt burdens than before the financial crisis. It would be an exaggeration to describe the present situ
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05Talos Energy’s move from founder Tim Duncan to former Shell executive Paul Goodfellow raises a wider question: what really prepares someone to lead a small or mid-cap E&P, where individual judgement on assets, capital and M&A can shape the whole company?
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06Oil and gas investors have spent a decade demanding more cash back. Tourmaline and Karoon show why that discipline was necessary — but also why exceptional management may sometimes create more value by keeping some financial capacity intact and waiting for the right opportunity.
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07Kosmos Energy found Jubilee, opened a major gas province offshore Mauritania and Senegal, and built a much larger E&P. Shareholders were left with something very different. This is the story of how exploration success failed to become shareholder value.
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08For decades, upstream was assumed to be the cash engine of the integrated oil company. But the post-separation performance of Marathon, Murphy and ConocoPhillips suggests the harder question is not where the cash is generated, but what management does with it.
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09Murphy Oil was once an unusually complete and technically ambitious oil company for its size. Over the past decade, much of that business has been sold, separated or reshaped. This article looks at what Murphy built, what changed, and why the shareholder outcome has been far less impressive.
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10ConocoPhillips has announced Ryan Lance’s retirement as CEO, with Andy O’Brien taking over. The succession does not prove PetroEquity’s earlier argument, but it sharpens it: COP got bigger. O’Brien now has to show whether it got better.
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11EOG Resources began as Enron Oil & Gas. This is the story of how successive management teams turned technical insight, capital discipline and industry crises into one of the finest records of value creation in upstream.
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12Who is the best explorer? Comparing ExxonMobil, Eni, TotalEnergies, BP, Shell and Chevron, asking who preserved the capability to find new resources, who lost strategic continuity, and who ultimately had to buy barrels discovered by somebody else.
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13Shell wants investors to place greater value on its trading and supply business, but outsiders still cannot see clearly how much it earns, how risks are controlled or how durable its advantage really is.
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14Before I began researching this article, I assumed ConocoPhillips was a relatively simple corporate story. It had spun off Phillips 66, disposed of much of its international inheritance and concentrated on unconventional oil and gas in the Lower 48. Successive purchases of Concho Resources, Shell’s Permian assets and Marathon Oil then turned it into a larger version of the post-separation business. That captures the rough direction of travel, but it is an inadequate description of what ConocoPh
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15Occidental Petroleum's 2014 spin-off of California Resources Corporation was more than a corporate separation. It was a high-stakes capital allocation decision that unlocked value for some shareholders, transferred risk to others and exposed the dangers of leverage in a cyclical industry.
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16Tullow Oil built one of the industry’s most admired exploration franchises, but debt, development risk and operational underperformance eventually overwhelmed the company’s discoveries.
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17Albert Manifold was hired to help remake BP and removed just thirty-three days after shareholders confirmed him as chairman. His fall exposed a deeper struggle over the company’s strategy, board and future direction.
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18🎧 Prefer to listen? Chevrons different bet0:00/2309.549661× We previously examined how Shell changed after acquiring BG Group in 2016. The deal deepened Shell’s exposure to natural gas, LNG and the increasingly complex markets through which gas molecules are produced, traded, transported and sold. Over the following decade, Shell’s commercial reach expanded while its production, proved reserves and reserve life declined. The question was not whether Shell had generated shareholder returns, be
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19The oil majors have spent the past decade responding to one major disruption after another. The collapse in oil prices in late 2014 forced deep spending cuts and portfolio repair. Then the energy transition pushed management teams to decide how quickly the industry would change, what that meant for oil and gas demand, and how much of their existing businesses should change with it. The roller-coaster continued as the pandemic brought an extraordinary collapse in demand, followed almost immediate
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20Two oil majors reporting similar earnings per share, dividend yields and apparently respectable shareholder returns may look the same, but their overall performance can still be fundamentally different. One may be growing in value, and therefore increasing its future earning capacity, while still paying shareholders returns that are competitive with its peers. Another may be doing the opposite: appearing to compete by generating enough cash to support dividends and buybacks, but with little evi
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21The Financial Times recently published a substantial profile piece of ExxonMobil and its chief executive, Darren Woods, under the title The King of Big Oil. The title suggests a conventional story about operational success, scale and corporate recovery. Those elements are there to begin with, but the article then becomes about power: who sets the strategy, how much freedom management should have to pursue it, and how far a company can go to insulate itself from activist shareholders pressing oil
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22Genel Energy has announced a recommended cash offer for Capricorn Energy, valuing the company at approximately $360 million on a fully diluted basis. Shareholders have been offered $4.74 per share, comprising $3.75 in cash from Genel and a $0.99 special dividend from Capricorn. The total package is worth 357p per share, a 34% premium to Capricorn’s closing share price on 10 March 2026, the day before the start of the offer period. If the Genel offer completes, it will mark the final act in Pall
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23I have written a lot recently about what oil companies got wrong: the retreat from exploration, the confusion of transition strategy with corporate identity, and the tendency of boards to mistake a fashionable market narrative for durable industrial reality. This article is about the other side of that argument. Eni is interesting because it did not choose between being an oil and gas company and having a transition strategy. It did not pursue transition businesses in a way that deprived the up
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24I left the upstream oil and gas industry and joined my first investment bank in February 2014. After more than 20 years in the industry, I knew the sector from the inside, but the first few months in banking were still a different kind of education: learning how companies, strategies, talking points and investor concerns looked from the capital-markets side. Then the oil price collapsed, and the sector I thought I was starting to understand from that perspective turned inside out. Client convers
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25European oil majors treated the extraordinary conditions of 2020 and 2021 as evidence of a durable industrial future. This article examines how cheap money, inflated valuations and policy momentum distorted strategy.
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26Gunvor has backed Western Natural Resources, an Oklahoma City-based private oil and gas producer, as it builds a portfolio of US natural gas assets. Reuters reported that Gunvor provided capital to support Western’s roughly $300 million acquisition of gas-producing assets in the Haynesville shale, one of the key US basins connected to LNG export infrastructure. Gunvor is not a conventional E&P company looking to add production for its own sake. It is a commodity trader, and traders tend to move
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27On 12 October 1964, a ship called Methane Princess sailed up the Thames Estuary and berthed at Canvey Island, a low-lying stretch of reclaimed marshland better known for sea walls and mudflats than making energy history. She had sailed from Arzew, Algeria, with a cargo of liquefied natural gas. It was the first commercial LNG cargo ever delivered anywhere in the world. The voyage took six days, but its significance would take sixty years to become clearer. By cooling gas into liquid form, prod
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28Reports that ExxonMobil is evaluating acquisitions are not really about any single target. Woodside Energy is one name in the headlines today, but the bigger question is Exxon itself. After Pioneer, Exxon has been rewarded for discipline and visible growth from the Permian and Guyana. Its 2030 plan leans heavily on those two growth engines, alongside LNG. If Exxon is looking again, the issue is not whether it can afford to act. It can. The issue is whether another material acquisition would make
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29BP is reportedly marketing minority interests in two of its most important future Gulf of Mexico developments, in what appears to be a farm-down with BP retaining operatorship. The assets are substantial and both are prestige pieces within the BP portfolio. Kaskida, targeting first oil in 2029, is BP’s sixth operated hub in the US Gulf of Mexico, with a planned floating production platform capable of producing 80kbopd from six wells in its first phase. Tiber is BP’s seventh operated hub, also de
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30There was a time when AIM was one of the natural homes for junior oil and gas companies. It was a market where exploration stories could get funded, overlooked acreage could find an audience, and small companies with big ambitions could raise meaningful money. In the years before the financial crisis, AIM was vibrant. It had liquidity, retail enthusiasm, specialist brokers, active institutions, and a willingness to back high-risk natural resources stories. For oil and gas companies, particular
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31EnQuest announced today a major acquisition of Malaysian production assets. The enlarged group is expected to produce more than 100 kboepd, with Southeast Asia representing 69% of 2025 production on a pro forma basis. This is a hugely significant event for EnQuest. It has clearly taken years of work to get to this transaction, and the company deserves a great deal of credit for pulling it off. It is also important for the UK North Sea more generally. Malaysia has been a natural counterpart to t
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32The final phase of UK North Sea consolidation is surely approaching fast. BP has reportedly been reviewing its UK North Sea upstream business as part of a broader portfolio reset. BP’s UK upstream business is special because it is not just a run-off package. A large part of the UK North Sea’s remaining strategic value sits West of Shetland, and BP has dominated that region from the start. It is, by far, the least mature part of the UKCS and still has huge remaining potential, especially in the
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33The UK North Sea is out of favour. Assets are being valued under a fiscal and political cloud. Sellers are under pressure, capital is scarce and public market valuations reflect little obvious upside. For companies with scale, liquidity, operating capability and shareholder return policies, that environment can be an opportunity rather than simply a problem. The best North Sea mid-caps are not just waiting for a better fiscal regime. They are trying to use the current trough to build larger, mo
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34The rise and fall of Hurricane Energy offers one of the most revealing case studies in modern upstream oil & gas investing. At first glance, the company appears to represent a familiar narrative: a technically ambitious exploration company that attracted substantial investor enthusiasm before ultimately disappointing on reservoir performance. Viewed through the lens of fund management, however, Hurricane’s history reveals something far more sophisticated and instructive. Over nearly a decade as
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