Oilsands region wipes out reserves of big explorers
Values sink as majors sell assets amid expensive, unattractive investments
Oilsands investments in Western Canada that gobbled tens of billions of dollars over the past decade are proving an Achilles heel for some of the world’s biggest energy producers.
Exxon Mobil Corp. slashed proved reserves the most in its modern history after removing the entire US$16 billion, 3.5-billionbarrel Kearl oilsands project from its books on Wednesday. That followed ConocoPhillips’ announcement a day earlier that erased 1.15 billion oilsands barrels, plunging its reserves to a 15-year low.
While prolific shale plays in Texas and Oklahoma are going through an investment boom with oil above US$50 a barrel, the oilsands have fallen out of favour. Current investments in the region amount mostly to long-planned expansions by large Canadian producers like Suncor Energy Inc., while majors like Statoil ASA have sold assets. Suncor, which took over Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. less than a year ago, is down more than three per cent this year in Toronto.
The oilsands operations in northern Alberta are among the costliest types of petroleum projects to develop because the raw bitumen extracted from the region must be processed and converted to a thick, synthetic crude oil. In addition, Canadian crude sells for less than benchmark U.S. crude because of the added cost to ship it to American refineries and an abundance of competing supplies from shale fields. That’s why the oilsands have been particularly hard hit by the worst oil slump in a generation.
The combined 4.65 billion barrels of oilsands crude removed from Exxon’s and Conoco’s books are worth US$183 billion, based on current prices for the Western Canada Select benchmark. The revisions hit as both U.S. companies, along with the rest of the oil industry, strove to recover from a 2 1/2-year market slump that collapsed cash flows, wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs and prompted many explorers to cancel their most ambitious drilling programs.
Under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules, proved reserves can only include oil and gas fields that can be produced economically within the next half decade. Price trends from the previous 12 months are compared against the estimated cost to harvest crude and gas in determining which reserves are counted.
The revisions of what qualifies as proved reserves are not expected to affect the operation of the underlying projects or to alter the company’s outlook for future production volumes, Exxon said.
Exxon’s 19 per cent cut to global proved reserves amounted to the largest annual revision since at least the 1999 merger that created the company in its modern form, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That included 1.5 billion barrels of reserves that were pumped from wells across the globe. The previous record cut was a three per cent reduction taken during the height of the global financial crisis in 2008.
ConocoPhillips on Tuesday shrank proved reserves by more than one-fifth, the majority of it stemming from its de-booking of oilsands crude.
Reserves are a key metric watched by investors because they are an indicator, along with commodity prices, of future cash flow. When the 2008 reserves cut was announced in 2009, Exxon shares lost more than four per cent in a single day, wiping out almost US$17 billion in market value.
Exxon, facing a SEC probe into how it valued its portfolio amid the worst oil market collapse in a generation, signalled in October and again last month that the revision was probably coming. The world’s largest oil explorer by market value held out hope that the de-booked barrels will one day be restored to the proved reserves category. Higher energy prices or lower expenses to produce oil could improve the outlook for developing those fields, it said.
“Prices to date in 2017 have been higher than the average first-of-month prices in 2016,” the Irving, Texas-based company said in a statement on Wednesday. “These revisions are not expected to affect the operation of the underlying projects or to alter the company’s outlook for future production volumes.”