JPMorgan conference notes: COO says EOG will ‘continue to be explorationist’
The leaders of EOG Resources Inc. have long prided themselves on being among the first big movers in a certain region. Chief operating officer Jeff Leitzel on June 23 told the JPMorgan Energy, Power & Renewables Conference 2026 that legacy will play a major role in the acquisition candidates the company entertains going forward.
Pointing to the success of last year’s purchase of Encino Acquisition Partners to supersize EOG’s position in the Utica basin as well as the 2016 deal for Yates Petroleum, Leitzell told JPMorgan analyst Arun Jayaram that EOG has the confidence to pursue similar growth avenues.
“Not M&A going into established basins where everybody understands exactly what the resource is; the prices have already been run up,” he added. “We’re talking about opportunities where maybe we’re going in and we have an exploration play and we’re able to take out another operator or a portion of an operator to be able to accumulate that acreage […] More of those greenfield, kind of newer opportunities.”
Other tidbits from Leitzell’s conversation with Jayaram included:
- The executive saying that the EOG team is looking for crude prices to trade in a range between $60/bbl and an average high of $80/bbl for the next few years. At the bottom end, he said, governments in North America, Europe, and China will step in to refill their strategic reserves. Leitzell said the high end of that range will be more volatile, making for a “fairly robust market.”
- Despite the Iran war this spring, EOG teams in Bahrain are still on schedule to deliver results from exploratory activity in the second half of this year. The company early last year signed a partnership with state-owned Bapco Energies to launch onshore unconventional gas operations in Bahrain. The military conflict led to some supply-chain delays, Leitzell said, but nothing severe enough to derail EOG’s timeline.
Gaspar: Devon ‘will be mindful’ of creating value through portfolio review
Devon Energy Corp. chief executive officer Clay Gaspar knew the question was coming about his team’s review of its portfolio after buying Coterra Energy Inc. last month. And he was prepared with an answer that reinforced his previous comments—while perhaps dropping a few hints about what’s ahead.
When Gaspar announced the $22 billion deal for Coterra in February, investors and analysts quickly began to question the future of the Marcellus assets that had been under Coterra’s umbrella. Activist investor Kimmeridge had been calling for Coterra’s board to divest that asset and focus on the Delaware, a push that has since landed on Gaspar’s desk and one the executive has repeatedly said will be addressed via a broader review of the enlarged Devon’s holdings.
Several times during his chat with Jayaram, Gaspar touted Devon’s prowess in the Delaware—adding Coterra’s operations has grown its footprint there to nearly 750,000 acres—and delineated the review process as covering three main points. What’s the value of the various assets on their own? What’s the market for them and who might the strategic and financial buyers be? (Here, Gaspar specifically mentioned asset-backed securitization (ABS) money “that’s really entered the space.”) And thirdly, and “very fundamentally important,” how complementary are the individual business units to each other?
Could discerning observers interpret the latter as suggesting that the Marcellus assets are indeed the odd duck in the group, as Kimmeridge has said? (See the map above.) And is the ABS reference more than a winking acknowledgment of a Reuters report a month ago that money manager Stone Ridge Asset Management had bid $8 billion for the Marcellus division using securitization as a big financial lever?
Gaspar didn’t elaborate and Jayaram didn’t press the issue. But Gaspar emphasized that clarity around the review isn’t far away: “We’ve telegraphed this is more of a months exercise, not a years exercise. […] The view with which we are approaching this, we are aggressive. We will be mindful of how do we take this moment in time to create more value for the shareholders.”
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.