Executives from EOG Resources Inc. and Murphy Oil Corp. spoke at the Barclays 40th Annual Energy-Power Conference in New York this week to discuss inflation pressures, service costs, capital allocation, and the strategic priorities shaping future investment decisions.

OGJ also reported on comments from Chevron Corp. and ExxonMobil Corp. at this year's conference and compiled a similar roundup from the 2025 event.

EOG Resources

Barclays analyst Betty Jiang said chatter is growing about inflationary pressures among service firms as oil prices continue to push higher (and help drive commodity production). Speaking with Jeff Leitzell, chief operating officer of EOG Resources, she asked if those cost trends are essentially devouring efficiency gains EOG is producing via various channels.

“There has been some slight inflation but we really haven’t seen a huge shift,” Leitzell told the Barclays audience. “We’ve got very strategic partners […] We don’t gouge them for the lowest cost whenever it’s a downturn and they don’t gouge us for the highest cost whenever it’s an upturn.”

One area to watch, Leitzell added, is steel.

“We’ve leveraged our inventory where we normally keep kind of a 6- to 12-month inventory […] so we can opportunistically purchase ahead of time,” he added. “We’ve already started purchasing well into ’27 to try to insulate ourselves.”

For reference, the price of US Midwest domestic hot-rolled steel has surged roughly 40% year to date and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says the year-over-year increase in producer prices for steel pipes and tubes has been at least 7.8% since August of last year.

Murphy Oil

Eric Hambly, president and chief executive officer of Murphy Oil, and his team have been favoring their offshore portfolio in recent years, including in adding $300 million to their 2026 capex plans earlier this summer. With Côte d'Ivoire, Vietnam, and the Gulf of Mexico set to be the focus of exploration work for a while, Jiang asked Hambly about the role of Canadian assets in Murphy’s portfolio.

When it comes to Murphy’s Tupper Montney natural gas operations (which produced 347 MMcfd in the second quarter), Hambly was clear. It’s a solid producer for two gas plants but has limited near-term growth potential with natural gas prices where they are. But look out further and the strategic equation changes.

“While you might say, well, you’re not really investing heavily into it, you’re not generating massive free cash flow from it today … If you’re a believer in long-term North American natural gas, we have one of the most capital-efficient dry gas assets in North America with huge optionality for the future,” Hambly added.

Murphy’s assets in the Kaybob Duvernay, which this spring produced about 7,000 boe/d, might well be a different matter. “Basically an appraised and not developed shale oil play,” Hambly said the operation was set up to be the next big(gish) thing once Murphy was ready to move on from the Eagle Ford basin. Given that the Eagle Ford also received extra capex this summer, that timeline has pushed Kaybob further down the list.

“So that’s an asset where you look and say, ‘If we were to transact something nearer-term, that’s probably the one that would be most likely to go,’” Hambly said. “It’s valuable in the market and it’s not supporting a lot of our free cash flow now, which, of course, we need to fund all of this activity.”