Ryan Todd: Maybe if I could follow up on some earlier Permian conversations. You talked a little bit about some of the New Mexico well performance. But on well performance overall that you disclosed, it appears that first half results are showing improved performance across much of the basin, as you expected. What have you seen to date in terms of addressing some – I know you don’t have a lot of data, but in terms of addressing some of the concerns from last year? Particularly, what have you learned regarding spacing, single versus multi bench approach, et cetera, on the wells that you’ve done so far this year?
Michael Wirth: The performance is really consistent with our expectations and what we outlined at our Investor Day earlier this year, Ryan. There are a couple of things just to remember. I mentioned earlier that, in New Mexico, we saw some infrastructure and third party constraints, and you can have that – we’ve got that in some other parts of our portfolio as well. So there are things that will show up on these curves that are not necessarily – just a reflection of the geology and the well performance. And as we continue to change our development strategy on well spacing, profit loading, well length, et cetera, those will continue to be reflected in these curves. The thing that is really important is production – we put production out there because everybody likes to see it.
We’re not optimizing the production. We’re optimizing the returns. And so, fluid mix, EUR, capital investments are all important parts of what we’re optimizing to. It’s harder for you to see all the things that we’re looking to optimize to drive returns when you’re just looking at production. The high level answer is performance in line with the expectations as we’ve continued to evolve our program.
Ryan Todd: Maybe if we turn to the Gulf of Mexico, as we think about your Gulf of Mexico deepwater portfolio, you’ve got an impressive string of project startups coming over the next few years. How exposed are you to escalating trends in deepwater drilling and development costs? As you look across those projects, do you have costs locked in across some of those projects, rigs under multi-year contracts, et cetera? I guess, how much are you able to mitigate cost escalation as we think over kind of CapEx requirements over the next few years?
Pierre Breber: Yeah, those projects were contracted at a different time. So they reflect mostly locked in rates, as you’d expect. Procurements well behind us as we’re getting – as projects are pretty far along. So new exploration activities, we’ll get exposed to some of the higher rig rates on that, but for the existing major capital projects, that’s largely locked in.
Michael Wirth: We came into the year with three rigs under contracts that were contracted back in a different environment.
Operator: We’ll go next to Paul Cheng with Scotiabank.
Paul Cheng: Maybe two questions, if I could. One, you’re talking about you submit a development plan in Cyprus discovery? Can you give us a little bit in terms of the timeline? What should we expect? And also, what is the preliminary design of the development that’s going to look like and the scale? And what kind of time that it’s going to see the first oil? The second question that you haven’t talked much about, Argentina. And, over there, the government seems to be pretty excited with shale oil development. And you have a position there. Can you give us an update? What is your thinking over there?
Michael Wirth: Paul, in Cyprus, we’re pleased with the outcome of the recent appraisal well. We’ve submitted our development plan to the government for their approval and it involves a capital efficient way to take the gas to market via subsea tiebacks to existing infrastructure. But this is all pending government approval. If we get that, we could be into FEED later this year. But it’s a little early for us to really lay anything out on first gas. So as we get through the government approval process, we’ll get back to talk to you about the timeline on that one. On Argentina, we remain very positive on the resource there. There’s an election coming up. The country’s got its some kind of macroeconomic challenges that it’s facing right now.
But we like the block, particularly our El Trapial area where we’re doing some more development work now with some increased capital that flows with that. We’ll talk to you about that at Investor Day and beyond. But no real changes there. It’s going to be part of the growth story.
Operator: We’ll go next to Doug Leggate with Bank of America.
