Houston’s Hilcorp buys BP’s oil and gas business in Alaska
BP has sold its upstream business in Alaska to Houston-based Hilcorp, putting the British oil major one step closer to exiting the northernmost U.S. state after six decades.
The sale, which closed Wednesday, includes all of the company’s upstream oil and gas interests in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil field. BP is still working with regulators to complete the sale of its interest in the Trans Alaska Pipeline System to Hilcorp, but the upstream asset sale makes up the vast majority of the $5.6 billion deal, first announced in August.
Conoco Phillips ready to reopen some wells
Conoco Phillips plans to ramp up its oil production in the U.S. this month after crude prices appear to have stabilized near $40 a barrel.
The Houston company, which in May and June shut down a third of its production, said it will begin reopening wells that were temporarily closed in the U.S. and Canada. The move comes after CEO Ryan Lance said in an interview published last month by industry research firm IHS Markit that the company is thinking of slowly returning to the market because of rising crude prices. Oil was trading Wednesday morning at $39.67, up 1 percent from a day earlier.
Big Oil pushed to reveal price forecasts
America’s biggest oil companies are coming under increasing pressure from climate-conscious investors to disclose their long-term forecasts for crude prices as the COVID-19 pandemic injects fresh uncertainty into the demand outlook for fossil fuels.
Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. don’t publish such estimates, meaning that shareholders are less able to scrutinize how the companies’ investment plans square with expectations for a global transition to clean energy. That needs to change, according to the New York State Common Retirement Fund, California State Teachers’ Retirement System and Ceres, a Boston-based coalition of investors with $30 trillion of assets.
Long-term price assumptions are critical because they’re used by Big Oil to determine whether or not a resource will be economically viable and at what value it’s held on a company’s books.