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Shell’s Trading Machine
Shell 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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ConocoPhillips got bigger, but did it get better?
Before 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
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How Oxy Monetised California Without a Buyer
Occidental 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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A Fortune Too Heavy to Carry: The Rise and Fall of Tullow Oil
Tullow 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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Thirty-Three Days at BP
Albert 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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Shell’s Big Bet: Can a Focus on Gas, Not Oil, Work?
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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The Oil Majors: Strong EPS, Strong Returns — but Is the Business Getting Stronger?
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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Exxon, Shell and the Price of Strategic Freedom
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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How Palliser Reshaped Capricorn: From Cash Discount and Boardroom Battle to a Takeover Premium
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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How Eni Kept its Oil and Gas Strategy While Placing Transition Bets That Are Paying Off
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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What Stabroek Taught the Market About Exploration
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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When Big Oil Mistook a Bubble for the Future
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.