I just don't get it. Why purchase another company when you're in cost cutting mode? To please the shareholders?
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Texaco Exploration made the only large discovery in the combined company for 25 years - Agbami.
I was there when SC was Texaco Int'l Exploration head. Very short tenure, nothing accomplished, no discoveries. She took the 'best' of Texaco with her? There were no 'best' in Texaco Int'l Exploration, unless you count all those CO2 discoveries in Myanmar. SC strikes me as an very good opportunist and job-hopper.
Don't know why you think Cunningham was savy? Everyone who ever worked for her knows otherwise. Literally had to be spoon fed the simplest of concepts. Indecisive in the extreme. Rejected Tamar multiple times. Fortunately, it got drilled anyway. As for taking Texaco's best with her, that never happened. There were only 2 ex Texaco alum that I know of. Both worked for other companies before and after Texaco, then hired into Noble through channels independent of Cunningham.
It's true SC was mainly Amoco heritage. However, it's also true she did serve a very short stint with Texaco and similarly with Statoil. In fact, SC Shepherded Statoil's first attempt at entering the GOM, right off a cliff.
She did the same with nearly all of Noble's exploration efforts (Nicaragua, Suriname, The Falklands, etc, etc, etc. Duster after duster after duster. Only the EMed and EG were successful, and as @mbc said, the discoveries were all farm-ins. That applied to West Africa too.
Yes, BG was the originator for the EMed. Everything stemmed from them. The surrounding step outs were easy too. When you have four-way closures with flat spots it's a piece of cake! The only real challenge was the local politics and that hasn't changed. Good luck sorting that out.
Cunningham was the technically savvy VP of worldwide exploration at Texaco before joining Noble. She took the better Texaco staff to Noble with her. Those left behind joined Chevron and began a 20 year dry spell marked by shooting stranded ducks in a barrel in Australia and chasing Shell around the Gulf. GENV was formed, based on a Cunningham idea, and squandered a fortune on technically loose misadventures around onshore Europe, Africa, equatorial margins, and elsewhere. Most of the American staff gave up and left behind a ragtag group of odious Brits led by a talking head of hair.
Susan had been formerly with Amoco, not Texaco.
BG group did the technical work on Tamar, then exited Israel for political reasons.
Noble eventually assumed the political risk and drilled BG's prospect (after passing several times).
Noble's real exploration expertise was in the Gulf of Mexico, but that's been gone for years in favor of shale blunders and C-suite chicanery.
Mostly because Chevron exploration hasn’t been able to discover anything significant in a decade. Noble has found massive gas in Israel. The tech work was mostly ex Texaco. Susan Cunningham and her crew.
Because this is going to be so much better than Atlas in Appalachia when that was the place to be. We’ll know in 2-3 years if the results will be similar.
My FA told me that chevron and Noble were in talks about investing in the leviathan asset in Israel. After covid, Chevron decided to buy the entire company and Noble had no choice to sell be Use they could not borrow anymore money to develop it.
It seems the Noble acquisition process started months and months ago maybe even early this year it was known that it was happening. Did all the cost cutting at Chevron happen after CVX knew the acquisition would happen?
Also, Chevron has always had a thing for those Eastern Mediterranean discoveries. Big and big potential market. They kept a small team (2 or 3) watching those developments for at least the last ten years. John Watson was personally intrigued by those projects.
We need 5 more Nobles. Assets we can work on and add value too. First glimmer of a growth mindset in quite some time and an entry in to a region Chevron does not have much presence in. Great move!
Noble was not purchased or bought. It was acquired via stock transaction and the assumption of a relatively small debt. It was acquired for pennies to the dollar. It’s a brilliant move, probably the next best transaction since the TCO venture in 1990s, although at smaller scale. Do Chevron shareholders love this acquisition? You bet your a$$ we do; now kindly get your lazy a$$ back to work, per favor.
This is the new business model
Mostly to show they did not lose the battle to OXY. It is more of face saving and bragging about how wise and careful they are not to get into bidding war and patience saved them by getting into a better deal.
Secondly, the exploration efforts had been a disaster, with no exploration adding reserves, they need to add reserves by merger or acquisition at lower price and diverse portfolio. They wrote off bunch of gas assets, and needed to replace it with Eastern Mediterranean asset.
Additionally these efforts will lead to big pay to the executives as major accomplishment, so personal gain on higher up is a big motivation.
Nobel was purchased as a fire sale 🔥
We got it for pennies on the dollar. Yes dumb.... but some had to make their PMP
Because laying off a good percentage of a company's workforce is the only thing that provides Joe G with something that can last up to 4hours.