Marathon Oil Corporation (NYSE:MRO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Lee Tillman: Yes, Subhasish, this is Lee. Just in terms of gas views, we’re not in the business of predicting pricing. We’re a price taker. We do have, though, however, a very natural hedge by virtue of our portfolio. I want to keep in mind that our portfolio is about 50% oil, about 50% gas and NGL. So even though prices will inevitably exhibit volatility. We’ve seen that on the gas side, we don’t anticipate radical changes within our capital allocation program for this year. Could we see some small optimization here and there, well absolutely? But again, we’re not going to try to predict or chase pricing because inherently, we have a very balanced portfolio that gives us a very broad exposure across the whole commodity deck.

So we feel very good about that. We talked about some of the sensitivities within our portfolio. We still are very leveraged to oil. We like that. We think that, that is — I’m very constructive on oil now and in the future. And I like the fact that for every dollar change in WTI, that’s a $70 million uplift in cash flow for us. So I don’t anticipate any major shifts in capital allocation as a result of gas volume. On your other question just around the Bakken, obviously, typically, as we have moved into the Hector area, et cetera, we will see some natural variation in GOR. But again, we’re driven by profitability. I won’t say we’re fully agnostic to commodities. But again, we’re going to be driven by economics.

Michael Henderson: Yes. I think, Subhash, I’ll just chime in as well on the Bakken. What you’re seeing there is maybe just the improving gas capture situation in the basin as well and for ourselves. We’ve progressively each year got better and better and expect that to continue. So there’s probably an element of that playing into it as well.

Lee Tillman: Yes. And that’s been a conscious investment on our part to improve that gas capture to capture that value in the field as well as obviously the emissions benefits that come with that.

Operator: The next question comes from Nitin Kumar with Mizuho Securities. Please go ahead.

Nitin Kumar: Hi, good morning. And thanks for taking my question. I’ll limit myself to one question, one-part question. Can you talk a little bit about how do you see capital allocation amongst your four key U.S. resource base going forward? As you did pointed out, you had fewer wells in the Eagle Ford, but you’re also doing a few more in the Bakken than we expected for 2023. So just how should we think about the allocation of capital between the 4 plays?

Lee Tillman: Well, maybe I’ll say a couple of things, and I’ll let maybe Mike fill in some of the details. But — and this year’s capital allocation, about 80% of the capital allocation is flowing to the Eagle Ford and the Bakken. But we also have an uplift year-over-year in allocation to the Permian as well based on the outstanding results that we experienced in 2022. And so that’s what we’re looking at this year. I would expect that as we march forward in time, the Eagle Ford and the Bakken are still going to compete very, very heavily for capital allocation. But there’s no doubt that Permian now coupled not only with the Northern Delaware position, but with the Texas Delaware, Woodford, Meramec is going to start stepping up and competing more directly for capital.

There are obviously some other subtleties within each basin in terms of how the capital allocation is flowing. And maybe I’ll let Mike give a little bit of color on specifically what’s happening at a basin level.

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