Murphy Oil at J.P. Morgan Conference: Strategic Exploration Insights

On Wednesday, June 25, 2025, Murphy Oil Corporation (NYSE:MUR) presented at the J.P. Morgan 2025 Energy, Power, Renewables & Mining Conference. CEO Eric Hambly outlined the company’s strategic direction, emphasizing their robust exploration programs and financial discipline. Despite challenges, Murphy Oil’s diverse asset base positions it uniquely among peers.

Key Takeaways

• Murphy Oil’s 2025 capital program is set at $1.2 billion, with a focus on development in the Gulf of Mexico and exploration in Vietnam and Cote D’Ivoire.
• The company has successfully reduced general and administrative expenses, enhancing its competitive edge.
• Significant discoveries in Vietnam, including the Hai Su Vong and Pink Camel, underscore Murphy’s exploration success.
• Murphy Oil maintains financial discipline, capable of sustaining operations with oil prices in the $60s per barrel.
• The company is poised for future growth with ongoing projects and a strategic focus on maintaining a strong balance sheet.

Financial Results

Murphy Oil’s financial strategy is focused on disciplined capital allocation and cost management. The 2025 capital program is budgeted at $1.2 billion, with 85% dedicated to development activities, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico. Exploration efforts are allocated 10% to 15% of the budget.

The company has achieved significant general and administrative savings, reducing expenses from $243 million in 2019 to approximately $107 million to $110 million in recent years.

Murphy Oil’s production strategy in the Eagle Ford region aims to maintain a range of 30,000 to 35,000 barrels per day, while total operating expenses are expected to be in the $10 to $12 per barrel of oil equivalent range for the latter half of the year.

Operational Updates

In the Gulf of Mexico, Murphy Oil is advancing several projects. The Mormont No. 4 Well came online in Q1 2025, and workovers for the Samurai-3 Well were completed in early Q2 2025. Additional workovers for Khaleesi-2 and Marmalard-3 are progressing, with production expected in Q2 and Q3 respectively. The company plans to drill two exploration wells, Cello and Banjo, in Q3 2025 near the Delta House facility.

In Vietnam, the Lok Da Vang development is on track for first oil in Q4 2026, with jacket installation planned for Q3/early Q4 2025. The Hai Su Vong appraisal well is scheduled for Q3 to assess reservoir continuity.

In Cote D’Ivoire, a three-well program is set to begin in Q4 2025, starting with the Sivet prospect.

Future Outlook

Murphy Oil is committed to advancing its development projects in the Gulf of Mexico and Vietnam, with new production expected to come online in 2026. The company’s exploration program in Cote D’Ivoire could further enhance its resource base. CEO Eric Hambly emphasized the potential for opportunistic mergers and acquisitions, supported by a strong balance sheet.

Murphy Oil’s diverse portfolio, including onshore and offshore assets, positions it well for continued success in the evolving energy landscape.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, CEO Eric Hambly highlighted Murphy Oil’s unique position with both onshore and offshore capabilities, international exploration, and a substantial inventory of shale locations. He reiterated the company’s commitment to maintaining a solid balance sheet and its ability to adjust capital programs if oil prices remain low.

For a comprehensive understanding, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - J.P. Morgan 2025 Energy, Power, Renewables & Mining Conference:

Arun, Presenter: Okay. We’re gonna keep things moving. Our next presenter is Murphy Oil. Delighted to have Murphy’s new CEO, Eric Hambly, to participate in our fireside chat with us today. Even though he’s the new CEO of Murphy, he’s he’s been at the company for quite a bit of time, around twenty years, and he’s really grown up throughout the organization leading the operations since 2020.

And he joined, like I said, Murphy in 02/2006 and has been leading the company forward since January. And the excitement here is just a few days after he became CEO, he had the pleasure of announcing a world class discovery in Vietnam. So a great and and and amazing start to your tenure, Eric. Before diving into our fireside chat, was wondering if you could just start off with some introductory comments around the company, Eric.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: I appreciate that, Arun. Thanks for having us to your conference. I think I heard today that we are at your tenth, 10 out of 10 conference from Murphy, big supporter, and we appreciate your support of us over the years. I think we have an exciting future ahead of us at Murphy. I think we’re a very different company than many of the companies that are kind of our scale.

So we have an onshore and an offshore business. We’ve maintained the capability of doing international exploration and development, and we have a large inventory of remaining shale locations. And I think that as we head toward the end of this decade, I think it sets us up to be really differentiated compared to companies that are really anywhere close to our scale. We’ll talk probably more in this Q and A, but I think we have an exciting exploration and appraisal program in front of us. We’re on the cusp of building what looks to be a material business in Vietnam with a development project, Golden Camel, the Hai Su Vong, Golden Sea Lion recent discovery and another pink camel discovery that we just made.

I think we’re setting up for a really successful future for Murphy in Vietnam as we head toward the end of this decade. And I think over time that will increasingly make us look a lot different than other companies and a compelling story in terms of investing in.

Arun, Presenter: Eric, before diving into the fundamental story here, I mentioned how you just started as the CEO just a few months ago, which has given you perhaps a fresh license to look at the organization, your leadership team, and strategy. I’m wondering, any kind of perspective and any thoughts on tweaks to the organization or strategy?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Yeah, that’s a great question. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to work over the last few years to help shape the Murphy strategic priorities, key objectives and focus areas. That’s something that Tom Morales, our CFO who’s here, and Roger, our prior CEO worked on quite a bit with our board. And so as I start my tenure as CEO, I look and see that the things that we would like to be doing better or do differently, I was able to help shape the implementation of that over the last few years. And I think we’re starting to see some success from that.

For example, I think that our exploration organization, worked over the last two years to significantly improve the capability of our team, our process around acquiring and analyzing data before making decisions about which wells to drill from an exploration perspective. And I think you can see over the last year or so the results that we’ve demonstrated are showing that the success of that work has come to bear. The other thing, I had a little bit of a discussion at dinner last night around some companies, some of our peers that are really focused on cost reduction efforts. And I’ll just point out that in 2020, Murphy had a major cost reduction effort that we significantly streamlined our organization and our cost structure. In 2019 we had annual G and A of $243,000,000 The last few years we’re running about 110,000,000 to $107,000,000 So what companies may now be doing to cut costs out of their structure, we really did in 2020.

It’s an effort that I worked on with our senior HR leader Maria and kind of led an implementation of that in my prior role. So a lot of the things that you might look to say a new CEO may do, we’ve already kind of done, and I was able to help shape it. So I feel really good about our organization, our capability, and really, really happy of the recent success in improving our exploration organization.

Arun, Presenter: Okay. Let’s dive into the 2025 program. Your budget is earmarked to spend about $1,200,000,000 of capital with 85% of the budget earmarked for development. Can you talk about how you’re thinking about kind of the macro picture and where Murphy stands in terms of kind of executing its original program?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: We’re very happy with the capital program that we laid out for this year and our longer term guide of a typical year being between 1,100,000,000.0 and $1,300,000,000 capital program. We’re happy with that with oil basically in the 60s. We easily cover our dividend and our capital program with oil prices in the 60s. We highlighted in our first quarter earnings call recently that if we saw oil prices that were lower for a sustained period of time, like maybe say $55 a barrel WTI, that we thought would be a long duration that we might make adjustments to our capital program. The reason to do that would be to basically protect our balance sheet, which we think is currently industry leading really solid balance sheet.

We want to keep that to be able to be opportunistic to fund successful exploration to potentially go after M and A opportunities that other people may not be able to do. So we’ll be a bit careful. But with the prices we’re seeing now and what we think looks like next year, we should pretty much stick with that type of capital plan. When the capital plan that we put together, that 1,100,000,000.0 to $1,300,000,000 kind of in a typical year, we allocate about 10% to 15% of that for exploration. And then the rest of the business is a combination of sustaining basically a steady performance of production level from our onshore business.

So Eagle Ford, we’re managing in a 30,000 to 35,000 barrel a day net to us range. Our Tupper Montney business, we’re periodically refilling to our plant capacity. And the rest of the investment other than exploration, which I highlighted, is development activity for the Gulf Of America primarily. We have a steady plan of activity through the end of this decade to continue to develop our assets in the Gulf Of America, which should provide single digit low single digit growth in our business. And then you add our Vietnam new production coming online in 2026 of that, see little step ups over time between now and the end of the decade.

Arun, Presenter: Great. Well, I’m going to dig deeper a little bit on the portfolio. Let’s start with The Gulf. Can you provide kind of an update on your plans and with the drill bit in 2025?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Sure. Let me go back to the beginning of twenty twenty five. So in the first quarter, we brought online the Mormont No. 4 new development well. And then in the first early part of the second quarter, we completed a workover on the Samurai-three well.

So those are already online. In the second quarter, we’re progressing workovers at Khaleesi-two and Marmalard-three, which should have first production in the second quarter and the third quarter, respectively. And that should be the end of our offshore workover program, which as you’re familiar with has been a bit of a sore point for us over the last few well, last eighteen months or so. Rounding out the rest of 2025 in The Gulf Of America, we have two exploration wells planned that we’ll drill in the third quarter. They’re called Cello and Banjo.

They’re near our Delta House operated facility and with success we’ll have the ability to fairly quickly tie them in and bring them online. So they’re not expected to be really large resource opportunities, but they’re highly accretive and quick to bring online. In The Gulf, we round out the year drilling a new well in Samurai, which will come online and be completed in the early part of twenty twenty six. And on top of all of that, in The Gulf, we have some long lead acquisition of equipment, long lead equipment in 2025 to support operated and non operated wells in 2026 and 2027. So that’s kind of how we’re spending our money and what we’re developing in the offshore space.

Arun, Presenter: Okay. Maybe a quick update on the St. Malo waterflood project with Chevron. Where do you stand with that? And when can you start to see some production from that project?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: The St. Malo waterflood project was substantially completed last year and water injection began. What we expect to see over time is the water injection will provide pressure support in the reservoir, which will help sustain a production level that’s sort of steady. So the water flood contribution over time will be larger and larger. At this point right now, we’re not yet clearly able to distinguish what is sort of base performance from waterflood performance.

We do expect throughout 2025 to start to see a contribution from the waterflood project and increasingly in future years, more and more of the total production will be from that. What’s interesting about sort of typical deepwater fields, if there is a typical one, decline rate of without activity is typically somewhere around 18%. We’re basically not seeing decline at the San Maollow field. So the water project, while early, it’s probably starting to show some performance.

Arun, Presenter: Okay. It sounds like the workover program is largely in the rearview mirror. How do you think about kind of normalized workover? Obviously the last, call it, twelve to fifteen months you’ve had a little bit higher of a clip on workovers, but it sounds like you’ll be moving to more of a normalized level of workover spend.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: I sure hope so. If we look at a typical year, we don’t expect to have any offshore workover activity. If you look back over the period of time from 2023 back to say 2018, we might have had one offshore workover in our deepwater Gulf Of America business. So it’s normal for us to expect to have a year without any workover activity. We have, as I just mentioned, had a quite a year plus of quite a few high rate wells that needed to be worked over.

What’s interesting about them is the wells all had issues with different pieces of equipment. There’s not a commonality. There’s not the same type of equipment or the same failure mechanism for the well. So once we if we feel like once we get past the work that we are aware of, that it’ll be normal to expect no repeat and kind of get back to lower operating expenses.

Arun, Presenter: Yeah. One of the things that I think you did have to do is replace some subsea safety valves on a number of wells. Where are you in terms of that process?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Yeah. So the Dalmatian well, we had a safety valve repair in 2024. That well has been back online and producing. The Khaleesi II that we’re working on in the second quarter is also a safety valve repair. What’s interesting is there are two wells of completely different vintages and totally different types of safety valves.

So safety valve failures are not very common in The Gulf. We were quite surprised to have them. The Dalmatian well produced I think for eight years or so before having any type of issue. Whereas the Khaleesi II well was about two and a half years old. And again, totally different types of safety valves, fundamentally different designs.

So fairly unusual to have something like that happen. I think, like I said, I think we’ve turned the corner and we’ll get back to the kind of normal run rate. Our total company operating expenses when we don’t have a significant offshore workovers are kind of typically in the $10 to $12 per BOE range. And I think you should see us get to that kind of level in the latter half of the year.

Arun, Presenter: Okay. One maybe final question on the Gulf Of America. Love to get an update on Chinook and maybe you could set the stage because I think that could be a really interesting well for you for next year, I believe.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Sure. The Chinook Field, the Cascade and Chinook Fields produced to an FPSO, which we purchased early this year for a little over $100,000,000 That sets us up to have a lot better creative economics of a development project there. We’ve been aware of a development opportunity to replace a well which was previously producing from one of the Chinook reservoirs for quite some time, but we weren’t moving it forward because we had a fairly high day rate under a lease agreement for that FPSO. And now that we’ve purchased the FPSO, we have a lot of flexibility in what we want to do. So what’s interesting about Chinook is we have quite high ownership.

We’re over 86% working interest. The well that we have in mind, which will likely include in our 2026 budget and will likely come online in the last half of twenty twenty six has the potential to be pretty high rate on a net basis it might be up to 15,000 barrels a day. So it’s a pretty compelling opportunity for us with really strong economics. And it’s a developed field so we don’t have a lot of subsea infrastructure we have to install. Thankfully Doug was talking about how much cost pressure they’re putting on us and we won’t have significant amount of that for this project.

And the timeline to bring it online would be a pretty quick drill complete tie in.

Arun, Presenter: So is that fair to characterize this more as a developmentwell versus

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: It is. It’s development well. It’s targeting a reservoir that’s been developed and is producing but we need to have another well to have another take point in the reservoir to optimally produce. There was a well that was producing in that pre-twenty nineteen which had demonstrated rates that were in that range. And so there’s quite low subsurface risk in terms of the outcome.

Arun, Presenter: And I got to think and maybe I’m getting down too much in the detail, but is it EUR for that type of well 20,000,000, 30,000,000 barrel kind of?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: That’s a fair assessment, yes.

Arun, Presenter: Okay, great. Great. And again, you plan to drill that in the second half of twenty twenty six?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: We’ll start drilling it sometime probably in the second quarter of twenty twenty six, but it will take a while to drill. It’s a fairly deep well and it’ll probably come online in the I don’t know if it’s the third or fourth quarter, probably the fourth quarter of twenty twenty six.

Arun, Presenter: Yeah. We’ve had some ebbs and flows in terms of offshore service costs. Doug, who presented how to use, has obviously been pushing margins, but it’s been a little bit of slackness in the deepwater rig market. Talk to us a little bit about the strategy and maybe where you’re seeing in terms of pricing and your contracting strategy.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Yes, great question. We’re seeing a bit of a mixed bag in terms of offshore costs. We recently extended a rig contract for a drillship we’ve been using now for a number of years out through what is our planned activity through the middle of twenty twenty seven. And the rig rate has some adjustments through time, but it’s basically the day rates are about 15% lower than what we were seeing in the market last year. So we’re seeing a softening of drillships through that period of time.

And then other significant costs. So the day rate of a drillship is about 40% of the cost of a deepwater well, a big piece of our business. Other things, other services are basically stable costs. We have of a rolling series of contracts that our procurement team works to renew through various means that most of the services have been pretty stable. Of course, diesel is a significant part of our cost which moves around with oil price.

Two areas where we’re seeing cost increases that are one modest and one more significant is the more modest increase we’re seeing in tubular goods. So offshore wells, just the casing, the steel tubing, etcetera, in our program, we’re seeing probably around 5% type of cost increases this year compared to last year. And then for major subsea projects, trees, umbilicals, risers, the things that we get from people like TechnipFMC. We’re seeing compared to our last major greenfield project, which we brought online in 2022, we’re seeing 30% to 50% cost increase. So it’s a lot of pressure there.

It’s one reason why I’m really excited to have some success in shallow water Vietnam because I don’t need any subsea trees or umbilicals or risers of that kind of nature from what’s really a hot market with a lot of demand across the industry and consolidation in that space.

Arun, Presenter: Great segue, Eric. I was going to ask you about Vietnam. The company reached FID on the Lok Da Vang development a little bit time ago. It’s about $100,000,000 100,000,000 barrel gross field. Can you provide an update on this project, which is targeting first oil in the fourth quarter of next year?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Sure. We’re really happy with our execution of the project there. When you do a new greenfield project in a country that you haven’t been active in before, it’s always interesting to get a sense for the capability of the construction yard and the people we work with and the talent. And I’ve been very, very happy with how it’s going so far. So major milestones for the project are building the Lok DeVong A platform and building an FSO, it’s a floating storage and offloading vessel, which is basically a big storage tank with a turret.

And along with that, we’ll install some sort of infield pipelines. Execution of the project is going very well. We’re very happy with it. We’re definitely on track for first oil in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty six. Sort of key milestones to be paying attention to there.

The jacket for the platform will be installed in 2025, probably in the third or maybe early fourth quarter. And then we’ll begin drilling development wells from that location. And then the topsides for the platform will be built in will be installed in 2026 along with the FSO in 2026. And then we’ll bring the field online.

Arun, Presenter: Okay. And how should we think about kind of the CapEx outlay for this project? Because it is kind of a phased development with a couple platforms.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: That’s right. So the overall development we’ll spend between 2024 and 2029, we’ll spend net to Murphy about $380,000,000 $110,000,000 is what we allocated for our budget for 2025. Next year spending is probably on the order of $90,000,000 So we’ll have first oil after spending maybe two thirds of the total capital program roughly. And then in 2028, we’ll likely install a second simpler wellhead platform where we’ll drill the other half of the wells for the development. So it is sort of a spread out capital program from over many periods and production likely peaks in the 10,000 to 15,000 barrel a day net to Murphy in the 2728 timeframe.

And then as we continue to add wells through 2029, we should see relatively stable production and then start to see when we finish drilling wells, we’ll start to see decline probably at the end of the decade. Okay.

Arun, Presenter: Let’s talk about the Hai Su Long discovery. Again, just announced just a few days after you became CEO. Obviously, you’re involved with that whole process. Talk to us a little bit about what you think you’ve found thus far with the discovery well.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Yeah, what we’ve announced so far about the discovery well was that it was drilled at the crest of the structure. The main pay that discovered is a large four way structure. We drilled close to the crest. We flow tested the well at 10,000 barrels a day which is extremely high rate for a well in shallow water, 150 feet of water. What we found in the well is consistent with our pre drill range of expectations for the field, was 170,000,000 barrels equivalent to four thirty million barrels equivalent.

But we don’t know now because of where the well was drilled, don’t know how much of the structure is filled with oil. The discovery well encountered only oil and no water. So we don’t know when oil water contact is. The structure is quite large. So the appraisal well that we have planned to start drilling in the third quarter will be drilled off the crest of the structure.

The main objectives are to test for the continuity of the reservoir over a large distance and also hopefully help us get a better view for how much of the structure is oil filled and that could help us firm up our range of resources for the field. It has the potential to be pretty large. I don’t like to get too ahead of ourselves. I’d like to see the result of the well before we say more about it. But it’s pretty exciting.

The discovery that we already are aware of from we’ve in the well is a commercial development that’s a standalone scale development that we’ll be able to develop and we’re excited hopefully to potentially prove up a larger resource with some appraisal success.

Arun, Presenter: Okay, great. You did announce a discovery at Pink Hamill last quarter. Maybe not the same size as Hai Suvong, but still a great outcome for the company. Talk to us about that discovery and plans to develop that.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Yeah, that’s a nice discovery for us. We expect that that field is somewhere in the 30,000,000 to 60,000,000 barrels oil equivalent. I’ll mention that these fields for us in our Koolong blocks, they’re very oily. They’re 90% plus oil. So we give you BOE numbers, but they are quite oily.

We will likely develop the Pink Camel or Lok Da Hong Field as a wellhead platform tied back to the infrastructure of the Golden Camel development that we’re doing now. The Pink Camel field is three miles away from our infrastructure LDVA, so very close tieback. We needed to find something on the order of 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 barrels to have a commercial development and we found what we think is 30,000,000 to 60,000,000. So should be quite successful there. One thing to note that the PSCs that we have in Vietnam, they have ring fencing at a block level.

So once we establish revenue from Golden Camel or LDV field, we’ll start to recover costs from all of our investment in the block, including exploration. Pretty attractive opportunity for us there.

Arun, Presenter: Good segue. How do you think about the attractiveness of this PSV versus elsewhere that you look at globally?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: So the terms of the PSC in Vietnam have an overall government take over the life of a typical field that is pretty consistent with the Malaysia business that we built over many years, so that might be 65% to 75% take. The oil companies get a lot of their return early and then later on the government gets more. So it’s pretty typical of PSCs. Indonesia PSCs typically have a little higher government take, so it’s more competitive. If you contrast that with our business in the rest of the world, obviously the government take in the Gulf Of America is like the best system fiscally in the world.

In Cote D’Ivoire where we have five blocks, the government take is not much different than The U. S. It’s a little higher. So really compelling there if we have some exploration success or a development project there that the government take is set up to be something that we can do quite well financially.

Arun, Presenter: Let’s talk a little bit about West Africa, Cote D’Ivoire. E and I is at the conference. But your acreage position is bookended by two significant discoveries by E and I, Balin and Marine. And so maybe just talk about your plans and opportunities in Cote D’Ivoire through the drill bit.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Great. So we’re going to start drilling a three well program in Cote D’Ivoire in the fourth quarter. That program, the first well in the program will be Sivet, which is 10 kilometers away from the Moraine 1X discovery well on the field that they call Kalau, which they announced A and I announced in March of twenty twenty four. Geologically, the Sivet prospect is very similar to the Kalau discovery. It’s testing the same age reservoir, just slightly shallower interval.

We’re really excited about it. It looks very similar geologically to what is a very close success. The Kalau discovery goes a long way toward demonstrating a working hydrocarbon system, petroleum system. It is possible that the Kalau discovery extends onto our block. We don’t know that yet, but it looks like it from assessing the seismic data.

So we’re really excited about the prospect. The size of that Sivet prospect is over 400,000,000 barrel mean with up to 1,000,000,000 barrel upside. So something of significant scale for us. And we still have some work to do to award the contract for the rig and also finalize the estimate of the cost of the wells. But sort of ballpark, we’re talking about $50,000,000 to $60,000,000 gross well costs, which is pretty compelling to spend that type of money and test something of a scale that could be 400,000,000 barrels plus with good fiscal terms.

The other prospects that we have planned, likely the next prospect will be one called Caracol, which is geologically similar to the producing Belane field that Eni discovered in 2021. We don’t think Caracol is as large as Belane, which is sort of billion barrel recoverable scale, but it does look very similar. It’s fairly close by. It has the same age reservoir and the same sort of geologic features. So we think we’re bookended by what are compelling analogs for what we’ll drill and we’re really excited about it.

The third prospect that we’ll drill is likely to be more of a frontier testing less demonstrated successful plays. Some plays that work in the larger Tano Basin including in Ghana, but a little more frontier and therefore a little higher risk. But again, large opportunities with low well costs, we’re really excited about that. And we’ll have some pretty exciting results to talk about. If you kind of step back and look at the testing we’re going to do with appraising in Vietnam and the three well program in Cote D’Ivoire, the sum mean unrisked resource of those opportunities is five times the size of our current offshore proved reserves.

So with success in any of them, it has a pretty material impact to our company.

Arun, Presenter: Market will definitely be well watching regarding Murphy.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: I’m pretty sure our share price will go down if we announce a discovery because of concerns about additional CapEx. Got it. Got it.

Arun, Presenter: Let’s talk about maybe the technical team because what type of knowledge base do you have internally in terms of your exploration with West Africa?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: The exploration team we have assembled has a diverse set of experience of quite a few basins around the world. You know, we typically have most of our senior technical hiring is from people that work at super major or other type of companies and come to work for us because they like to work for small companies that still explore and there aren’t that many of them left. So we have a team that’s very experienced. We do supplement that with some earlier career people, but we have people on our team that have a lot of experience in the Gulf Of America and West Africa. And so we’re really well positioned for executing a nice program there.

Arun, Presenter: Maybe final question on West Africa. Is Anadarko’s legacy pond discovery, I believe it’s your intention to submit a field development plan to the government by year end subject to kind of a gas sales agreement. Where do we stand with that process?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Yeah, the Pond field is very well appraised by Anadarko before they relinquished the block. It is a relatively small field. It’s a oilfield with a thin oil column and a large gas cap. So negotiating the terms of a gas sales agreement is one of the critical things in determining whether or not that’s an economically viable project. We have a work obligation for the PSC to submit a plan of development for the field by the end of this year, which we’re well on track to do.

We’re in parallel with that negotiating with various Ivorian government parties around gas sales agreement. And we may or may not come to terms with them that will lead to a commercial project. It’s of a coin toss at this point whether it’s something that happens or it doesn’t happen. In the country, Cote D’Ivoire is importing diesel and using it to generate electricity. The legacy supply of natural gas that they’re using to generate power at their thermal power plants, the legacy supply is in screaming decline.

The additional gas volumes coming from Belane, way we understand it, are not enough to meet the demand. So the country really has aspirations and needs some more natural gas, but they have to be willing to pay what it takes to make a fairly marginal project happen. We’re trying, but we don’t know if it’ll happen or not. It’s sort of a fifty fifty at this point.

Arun, Presenter: Alright. Sorry to ask you this question, Eric, but we’re the last conference before 2Q earnings season’s here five days away. How are you feeling about 2Q? How the rest of the year is kind of setting up for you?

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: I’m very happy with our operations as we progress through the second quarter. We will, as typical in our early August earnings call, give a full update on our 2Q performance and also kind of an updated view of what the full year looks like. But I’m pretty happy with how we’re executing both offshore and onshore. Great. Why don’t we cut

Arun, Presenter: it off there? Thanks, Eric.

Eric Hambly, CEO, Murphy Oil: Thanks so much.

Arun, Presenter: Appreciate it.

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