So — but certainly, we’re seeing turning the corner here with inflation and moving into deflation again.
Devin McDermott: Great. And then I wanted to separately come back to the LNG strategy. One of the other opportunities that you had talked about at the investor meeting was brownfield expansion at Port Arthur. And we’ve seen with some other U.S. Gulf Coast projects, very compelling economics on the additional trains that can get added. Can you just talk a little bit about how you’re thinking about the commercialization process there and Conoco’s appetite for taking further offtake of further expansion at that facility?
William Bullock: Yes, this is Bill. We talked about this a bit at AIM. So as we think about Port Arthur LNG, we’re pretty happy with the level of equity that we have right now in the project. When we took equity, that has some pretty unique reasons for taking it for the options that we secured there. And so as we look forward, it would have to make — there have to be some pretty unique reasons why we take additional equity. Now as we have mentioned that our agreements are structured for future phases, continue to benefit our investment in the first phase, and so we’re pretty positive on that. As you know, we’ve got some predefined options on that. We’re certainly evaluating options. But I think that you should kind of have in your mind that we’re not expecting to spend additional capital there at this point in time.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of John Royall with JPMorgan.
John Royall: Can you hear me?
Ryan Lance: Yes, we can.
John Royall: Okay. Sorry. It looks like the tax rate on your corporate segment earnings took a big step up in 2Q. So I was just hoping you could speak to the tax rate on corporate. And then I think it impacted just the overall blended rate stepped down a bit in 2Q. So just maybe a little bit of color on that as well would be helpful and just what we should expect moving forward with the tax rate.
William Bullock: Yes, this is Bill. This is really just a pretax income mix story. Our estimated annualized effective tax rate has moved down to 35% for the year. That compares to the last time I provided guidance to you all of mid- to upper 30s when we talk to sometime last year on our effective tax rates. And this reflects a shift in the mix of our forecast annual pretax income from some higher tax jurisdictions to lower tax jurisdictions. It’s really largely driven by Norway, given the reduction that we’ve seen recently in EU gas prices relative to last year. So obviously, these tax rate changes. They create some quarterly noise as they flow through as a noncash catch-up adjustment when they happen, and so that’s why you see our second quarter tax rate was 33.6% versus first quarter of 36%.
And that puts our year-to-date right at this 35% level, matching our current expectation of full year. Now that noncash adjustment, that’s going to flow through the corporate and other segment. You can see that on our supplementary disclosures. You can see it’s a $20 million positive swing quarter-on-quarter in that corporate segment. Now — so that’s pretty straightforward. It’s really just a mix story. Now when you think about deferred tax, the positive tailwind that you saw on the cash flow statements quarter-on-quarter was a bit lower. That was because of the income statement adjustment I just talked about. But the bottom line is for the second half of the year, 35% annualized effective tax rate is a reasonable run rate for book tax at our current commodity prices.
And the deferred tax tailwind of about $200 million for the second quarter, that’s also a good run rate for the remainder of the year. Now obviously, that can move around a lot if there’s some discrete items that come up. And as you know, they often do, but it’s a pretty good run rate at this point in time.
John Royall: Great. That’s really helpful. And then my next question is on Bakken production. You were up well over 100 kbd in 2Q. What was the driver of the strength there? And should we be thinking about Bakken as plateauing somewhere above that kind of mid- to high 90s that we used to think about? Or is there any stickiness to the strength in 2Q?
