Cabot O&G 2Q15: Production Up 8%, Net Income Down 109%
Last Friday Cabot Oil & Gas released their second quarter 2015 operational and financial update, along with holding a conference call to update financial analysts. Below is the Friday press release/update with the particulars of Cabot’s performance during 2Q15. There’s a lot to love about Cabot, one of our favorite Marcellus drillers. Production in the Marcellus year over year for the second quarter was up 7% from 2014 (total natgas production up 8% for all plays). The company continues to get leaner and meaner when it comes to controlling costs. For the first half of the year in 2015, Cabot has managed to trim the time it takes them to drill a well by four days from the time it took them just last year–meaning a 15% cost savings overall. Cabot, whose operations and drilling program is a fraction of the size of Chesapeake Energy, is worth twice as much as Chesapeake. Cabot’s market capitalization (the amount of stock issued times the price per share) is $10.96 billion as of this morning. Chesapeake’s market cap? $5.51 billion. That must really frost corporate raider Carl Icahn. 🙂 Anywho, Cabot is not immune to the brutally low prices for natural gas they receive in the northeast. In Cabot’s small neck of the woods, prices for natural gas are the lowest in the country. And that means Cabot has, finally, gone into negative earnings territory…
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With all of this talk about CONSOL Energy and Noble Energy and mergers/acquisitions and workforce reductions, we came across an interesting story and analysis by SNL Financial summarizing a Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research report issued last Friday. The Goldman report evaluates 38 exploration and production (E&P) companies on their suitability and desirability as mergers and acquisitions candidates based on asset quality, potential upside returns to the buyer as oil and gas prices improve, and low break-even operations. That is, of all the E&Ps out there, which ones are most likely to be targeted for a takeover, and by whom? The surprising answer is that Cabot Oil & Gas and Range Resources, both huge Marcellus drillers, are among the takeover targets. And the super majors interested in doing the taking over? Exxon Mobil and Statoil…
Who were the top 5 natural gas producers in Pennsylvania for all of 2014? The names of the companies won’t surprise you if you’ve read MDN for any length of time. But the order of the list may surprise you, and the number of active wells for some of them likely will surprise you…
Investment firm Topeka Capital Markets recently issued a report (for their clients) of the “most likely” companies in the oil and gas space that will be takeover targets, presumably this year. Unfortunately we don’t have a copy of the report, but we do have a list of the names they say are likely targets. The list has seven companies on it–three of which are focused on the Marcellus/Utica. Two of them are some of the biggest in the Marcellus/Utica. One of them has our eyes popping out, frankly with disbelief…