David A. Hager - Devon Energy Corp.
Management
The asset sales still have to come first. And now, having said that, I recognize this is a show-me environment, and we understand that very well. But I reiterate our confidence in the asset sales that we are going to get those asset sales executed. Without going into a tremendous amount of detail of the discussions and negotiations, we think that that is something that is working very positively, and we're confident that we're going to get those done in the timeframe that we described. But that is the first priority is to make sure that we do that. After that, then there are a number of things we'll factor in to increasing our activities; commodity prices, capital costs, operating expenses, many more. But, directionally, you could look for us to start adding incremental activity when oil prices are $50 or higher. Now, that doesn't mean we go back from the two operated rigs to 20 operated rigs immediately at $50. That means we would start adding operated rigs at that point. I said during the comments that the most likely first place that we would add the rigs would be in the Delaware Basin and then the STACK play where, obviously, well results are just outstanding and amongst the best in the industry in both of those places. And so, we would incrementally add rigs as prices increase. But it would probably take $60 oil or more to really get back to a capital spend level of close to $2 billion versus the $1 billion we're at now, which would, really, with our maintenance capital sitting somewhere between $1.5 billion or $2 billion, that would allow us to flatten the production. Although, frankly, we're not – our number one priority is not just flattening the production on a 6:1 conversion rate. We're much more interested in, first, the financial strength of the balance sheet, and then, second, making sure that every dollar that we invest is generating strong economic returns. And we included a graph in the operations report that gives you a feel that, again, we have some of the – not only are we in some of the best plays in onshore North America, but we're in the heart of some of the best plays. We're in the core of the core of these plays. So, we certainly have, we think, as good of an economic opportunity as anybody out there. But, again, first, it's going to take the asset sales, second, starting adding rigs at $50, again, a small increment then, and then continuing to ramp up as prices increase into our strong plays.