Why did we give up on the GOM? Our competitors continue to develop. We have nothing there
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In the next few years EM will be the most active company in the GOM.
All the 800+ platforms we sold to small operators will need to be salvaged and those small operators are declaring bankruptcy so EM will be held responsible as the previous owner.
Thousands of wells to P&A, hundreds of platforms and pipelines to decommission/ remove.
XOM underinvested in GOM seismic in the 2000 to 2008 period (investing in Qatar LNG, West Africa, PNG LNG, Gorgon LNG and Kearl instead)...Blocks are small in GOM so hard to build big presence after being data poor when competing with others like Shell, BP CVX who maintained a GOM presence). Lower Tertiary (Julia, Shenandoah, Kaskida etc) were very high cost and high pressure wells...hence lower priority vs XOM's international opportunities.
FYI, Hoover is being decommissioned.
Wasn’t Julia a disappointment from the beginning? Wasn’t even big enough to get its own platform and had to settle for a tie back to a competitors platform. Hard to make money that way. How much is Diana Hoover making after 20+ years. Must be easy down on decline curve
We gave up on the GOM because we have not been as successful as our competitors. We would ramp up and down exploration activities based on other success and did not continue to learn and explore but exited the minute we drilled a dry hole. Shell, BP, and Chevron have stayed consistently in the GOM trying new plays and ideas and learning from dry holes. Exploration success requires a long term commitment and institutional knowledge of the basin. We had neither. Production assets became old and no longer profitable and we sold them. We operate Hoover/Diana but the structure needed to be recertified by the Coast Guard in 2020 and the last I heard we did not pay to have that done so I am assuming abandonment plans are working. Julia is tied into Chevron's Jack platform and still going strong. We still have OBO in Thunder Horse and some small assets but those too have limited life. Our management always stated that the GOM fields were not that profitable and used that as justification to exit the basin.
Risk vs reward in GOM. EM seeks opportunities where competitors are limited at times. A good example would be Guyana.
You also have to look at what the GOM assets were tied to and see if there was a market. As of current we still have Diana Hoover/GA 244 which I believe ties into one of the DOE facilities in TX.
Because exxon knows that the other operators are more competitive in those areas and willing to take risk!