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The 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
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Two 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
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The 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
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Genel 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
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I 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
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I 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,
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European 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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Gunvor 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
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On 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.
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Reports 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
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BP 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’
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There 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