Any one heard how the sale of the XTO/EOM assets in the Fayetteville shale In Arkansas is progressing?? Is it sold ? Nobody wants to buy???
3 replies (most recent on top)
Anyone supporting these assets including engineers will be sold with the asset. Don’t say you were not warned.
11 August 2021
OilPrice.com
Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas has not been sold. Merit Energy was considering the purchase of our acreage. Good time to sell natural gas assets since Henry Hub is $5.48 today.
ExxonMobil has started marketing gas assets in the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas, the US supermajor’s spokeswoman Julie King told Reuters on Wednesday.
Since before the pandemic, Exxon has been marketing and divesting assets, focusing on key strategic operations such as the Permian Basin, Guyana, and Brazil.
“90 percent of our upstream investments in resource additions, including in Guyana, Brazil, and the U.S. Permian Basin, generate a 10 percent return at $35 per barrel or less,” Exxon’s chairman and chief executive Darren Woods said on the investor day in March 2021.
While focusing on these areas, Exxon is looking to divest assets elsewhere, and the shale gas assets in Arkansas are now up for sale.
“We are providing information to third parties that may have an interest in the assets,” Exxon’s spokeswoman King told Reuters. The company declined to comment which could be the potential bidders.
Exxon’s subsidiary XTO Energy operates more than 662,000 acres in 16 counties in Arkansas, with production at 271 million cubic feet of gas per day, according to XTO Energy.
Privately owned Merit Energy—which had acquired acreage in the area from BHP in 2018—is assessing the assets that Exxon has put up for sale, a source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
In February this year, ExxonMobil said it would sell most of its non-operated assets in the UK’s central and northern North Sea to private equity fund HitecVision for more than $1 billion.
“We continue to high-grade our portfolio by divesting assets that are less strategic and focusing our investments on our advantaged projects that are among the best in the industry,” Neil Chapman, senior vice president of ExxonMobil, said in February.
On the Q2 earnings call at the end of July, CEO Woods said:
“To strengthen the earnings and cash flow potential of our assets, our plans will continue to advance high-return, advantaged projects and high-grade our existing assets through accretive divestments.”
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
20 May 2021
Zacks.com
No word on Fayetteville, but the Lea County wells in the Permain were sold earlier this year.
Exxon Mobil Corporation’s XOM affiliate XTO Holdings, LLC recently closed the divestment of some producing oil and gas assets in Lea County to Empire Petroleum Corporation. The divested assets are located in the Eunice Monument Field of the prolific Permian Basin. The price tag of the divestment was more than $16 million.
The divested assets include about 700 wells and 40,000 net acres of land. Net production from the assets is expected to be 1,100 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Of the total, 67% is expected to be crude oil. Empire Petroleum, a Tulsa-based upstream company, also received associated gathering assets through the transaction.
The latest divestment is in line with ExxonMobil’s plan of streamlining its portfolio to increase profitability. In the first quarter, the company generated cash flow of $7.6 billion from operations and asset divestments. Last February, it agreed to divest a chunk of upstream assets in U.K. central and northern North Sea region to NEO Energy for more than $1 billion.
Divesting its non-core assets will enable it to focus on more profitable resources, including core Permian assets offshore Guyana and others. Markedly, it increased its guidance for Guyana production to 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) by 2025 from the previous projection of 750,000 bpd by 2026. Furthermore, production is expected to reach 1 million bpd by 2027. The company’s fourth deepwater project in Guyana is expected to boost output.