Oxy to sell old Conoco headquarters
It will keep Anadarko towers — for now
Occidental Petroleum plans to sell the old ConocoPhillips headquarters it bought several months ago and maintain a major presence in the Anadarko towers in The Woodlands at least for now, Oxy’s chief financial officer said at a Denver conference this week.
That means Oxy will at least temporarily keep its Greenway Plaza headquarters in Houston after acquiring Anadarko Petroleum last week in a $38 billion mega deal.
Before Oxy became a bidder for Anadarko this spring, the company planned to move into the old ConocoPhillips campus in Houston’s Energy Corridor. The ConocoPhillips campus, however, can’t accommodate the combined local workforces of Oxy and Anadarko, said CFO Cedric Burgher.
“Conoco’s campus is not big enough,” Burgher said. “So we’ve put that on the market. We’re going to sell that.
That leaves us where we are at Greenway in Houston.”
The old ConocoPhillips headquarters is a sprawling campus of low-rise buildings on 62 acres. The CBRE Group will market the old ConocoPhillips campus on behalf of Oxy.
The remaining question is what to do with the twin-tower Anadarko campus in The Woodlands. Gil Staley, CEO of The Woodlands Area Economic Development Partnership, said last week that Oxy would sell the campus but lease much of the space back.
Burgher confirmed Oxy would stay in The Woodlands for now but didn’t address selling and leasing back the property.
“Then we have The Woodlands footprint. That’s very large. We don’t need it all,” Burgher said. “So we have to figure that out. But, in the short term, we need the space.”
Burgher said it could take several years before the company ultimately decides its long-term plans for the real estate.
“For the moment, we decided to make real estate not the focus,” he said. “We have too many other bigger fish to fry.”
Oxy spokesman Eric Moses said Thursday that the company has informed its employees of the intent to keep a presence at both the Greenway Plaza and The Woodlands locations for the foreseeable future.
The Oxy-Anadarko sale is the biggest deal in the energy sector in three years. But making it happen
“For the moment, we decided to make real estate not the focus. We have too many other bigger fish to fry.” Cedric Burgher, Oxy CFO
involved taking on close to $40 billion in debt for Oxy. That means asset sales and cost cuts are forthcoming. Oxy already plans to sell Anadarko’s Africa assets to the French energy major Total for $8.8 billion.
A lot of the low-hanging fruit, Burgher said, is selling duplicate real estate. That means selling the ConocoPhillips campus, either the Oxy or Anadarko campus in Midland, one of their two offices in Singapore, and Anadarko’s London office, Burgher said.
Oxy moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Houston five years ago, expanding upon its existing Greenway Plaza office space and making that its headquarters. Oxy has maintained an office in the area for roughly three decades.
As for ConocoPhillips, the Houston oil and gas producer closed out 2018 by completing its move into its new headquarters in the new Energy Center Three and Four buildings in Houston’s Energy Corridor, just a short drive from its old campus. The new headquarters has since been renamed the ConocoPhillips Center.