Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE:OXY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Deckelbaum: That’s helpful. Maybe if I could switch just to the second quickly around Low Carbon ventures and DAC. There’s obviously some funding that’s been made available under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It seemed like you alluded to some flexibility in the budgeting around DAC for potentially other sources of funding. Can you walk us through maybe the application process and the time line for how we might think about any potential loans that would be coming through or when we might have some more information around other sources of funding?

Richard Jackson: David, this is Richard. I’ll try to answer a piece of that. Really, two pieces, as you described. I mean we continue to have good discussions with capital partners, not only for DAC 1, but as we look at capitalization over the life of our development plan. And so that’s an important part that we want to stay fresh with. The second part is, as you mentioned, some of the grant programs that are directly associated with CCUS and DAC specifically. We’re not in a position to talk in detail on that today, but we are and — have communicated before, we think our projects fit very well. The intent of that program. We think the — really the advanced design and really state that we’re in as we go into DAC 1 and then into the South Texas Hub puts us in a really good position for that type of program.

I think the South Texas Hub, as you look at that, in particular, it’s just a unique opportunity to look at sort of the large-scale build-out when we’ve contemplated the 30 DACs for that area. So to directly answer your question on updates, I think we’ll have more as we go this year, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

Operator: And our next question today comes from Jeanine Wai with Barclays.

Jeanine Wai: I have two questions, I guess, around the Permian, if we could. The first one, maybe on inventory. The second one on sustaining CapEx. On inventory, we compared your updated slide versus the prior version. And after adjusting for wells to sales in ’22, it looks like the location count for the wells that break even for under 60. It really isn’t all that different, which implies about a 16-year inventory at the current pace. So just wondering if you can talk about any of the differences in assumptions between the old and the new inventory calculations, whether it’s on cost or on development strategy? For example, we saw in the footnote there that your updated inventory uses the ’22 budgeted well cost. And how different would that look if you use current costs?

Richard Jackson: Great. Jeanine, this is Richard. I’ll try to help answer a few of those. I mean very proud of our inventory obviously good acreage position that we have and have accumulated, but very pleased with the team’s ability to continue to advance that. So as you noted, especially in Permian resources strong less than $60 breakeven with long activity, I’d say some of the changes that have occurred, we tried to highlight one even in that slide is really thinking about longer laterals. So able to continue to core up acreage where we’re at be patient in development areas to allow that to happen and really sequence our developments to accomplish the longer lateral. So as we were able to do that, obviously, that may go down one, but we’ve made a much more valuable single well inventory.