ExxonMobil’s oil and gas portfolio has undergone a significant transformation over the past several years, including divestiture of $15 billion in assets and refocusing its spending on the Permian Basin, Guyana, and LNG. In 2024, the supermajor’s total production was 4.3 million BOED. The target for 2030—just 5 years from now—is close to 5.4 million BOED.
"These are fundamental areas where we think we have unique advantages: Permian, Guyana, and LNG, and those are the areas that we'll be investing in significantly, obviously, including the acquisition of Pioneer last year,” ExxonMobil Upstream President Dan Ammann said speaking at CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston last week.
In the Permian Basin of west Texas, ExxonMobil currently produces around 1.5 million BOED. That number is expected to grow to 2.3 million by 2030. The acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources combined Pioneer’s more than 856,000 net acres in the Midland Basin with ExxonMobil’s 570,000 net acres in the Delaware and Midland Basins,creating the industry’s leading undeveloped US unconventional inventory position.
“When you have the position like ours with the continuous acreage that we have, it allows you to do things that others are unable to do, like the very long laterals, 4-mile laterals and the next generation of cube development, deployment of technology like lightweight proppant that we're starting to deploy now,” said Ammann. “All of those things are driving greater recovery of resource and greater opportunity. We bring unique capabilities to the table."
ExxonMobil currently has around 35 rigs operating in the Permian. Of the around a dozen layers of targeted oil resources in the region, most operators are probably developing only seven to eight of those today.
“You need technology and an ability to unlock that resource in a way that hasn’t been realized up to this point,” he added. "The big focus is on innovation in technology. Today, we’re recovering somewhere between 6 to 8% of the total resource, and so the ability to unlock increased recovery of that through technology is a great way to continue to grow production.”
Guyana and its prolific Stabroek is the gift that keeps on giving for ExxonMobil. Since the first field came on stream in 2019, the company has added four more projects (Liza Phase 2, Payara, Yellowtail, and Uaru) with the sixth project, Whiptail, coming sometime in 2027 and adding 250,000 BOED to production capacity.
“In Guyana today, we have three boats operational, and we have an eight-boat plan,” confirmed Ammann. “We're at 650,000 BOED (of production) today, and we see that at least doubling. That's been, in some ways, a similar program where it’s been the most successful, fastest deepwater development in the history of the industry, and the ability to take the learnings from the first boat to the second to the third and so on.”
ExxonMobil expects to essentially double its LNG business over the next several years as new projects get approved, and others come online. Volumes will increase through the Golden Pass LNG project, where the operator holds a 30% stake with QatarEnergy as a partner. The project's estimated export capacity of around 18 mtpa will produce its first LNG toward the end of the year.
A final investment decision for its PNG Papua LNG project in Papua New Guinea was expected by the end of 2024. However, the decision was pushed to 2025 and is still pending. ExxonMobil holds a 37% stake in the project.
Engineering and design work continues on the Rovuma LNG project in Mozambique. The 18-mtpa facility will host gas from the deepwater Area 4 discoveries. The project is 70% owned by an incorporated joint venture comprising ExxonMobil, Eni, and CNPC.
The supermajor expects oil to remain a vital part of the energy mix through 2050 while demand for energy grows by 15% over the same period. Oil and gas currently account for around 56% of the total energy mix, and the operator sees that number dipping only slightly to 54% over the next 25 years. Over that time, ExxonMobil expects there will also be growth in renewables and a decline in coal.
“If you just go back to 2018, ExxonMobil, at that point in time, as a result of the global outlook process, had a point of view that the world was going to be short (of oil and gas) and that the industry needed to invest as the corporation invested at that point in time,” said Ammann. “That was not a popular point of view at the time, but it turned out to be the right goal.”
