Earnings Labs

Occidental Petroleum Corporation (OXY)

Q4 2017 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 14, 2018

$58.69

+2.47%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-0.60%

1 Week

-2.76%

1 Month

-8.88%

vs S&P

-9.21%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Occidental Petroleum Corporation's Fourth Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note, today's event is being recorded. And at this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Mr. Richard Jackson, VP of Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.

Richard A. Jackson - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Okay. Thank you, Jamie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in Occidental Petroleum's Fourth Quarter 2017 Conference Call. On the call with us today are Vicki Hollub, President and Chief Executive Officer; Cedric Burgher, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Jody Elliott, President of Domestic Oil and Gas; Ken Dillon, President of International Oil and Gas Operations; and B.J. Hebert, President of OxyChem. In just a moment, I'll turn the call over to Vicki Hollub. As a reminder, today's conference call contains certain projections and other forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Additional information on factors that could cause results to differ is available on the company's most recent Form 10-K. Our fourth quarter 2017 earnings press release, the Investor Relations supplemental schedules and our non-GAAP to GAAP reconciliations and the conference call presentation slides can be downloaded off our website at www.oxy.com. I will now turn the call over to Vicki Hollub. Vicki, please go ahead.

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Thank you, Richard, and good morning, everyone. Before I talk about our business results, I'd like to first thank our employees for their efforts to ensure a safe workplace for our employees, contractors and the public. In 2017 we had the best employee and combined employee contractor injury and illness rate than we've ever had. In addition, OXY Oil & Gas had an industry-leading employee IIR – that's illness and injury rate – of 0.11. This is a result of a long trend of improving safety performance which indicates that safety is not an initiative for us. It's a part of who we are. It's embedded in our culture, which is a reflection of the quality and commitment of our employees. On behalf of the management team and our board, I want to thank our employees for owning safety. Today, I'll share some highlights from 2017 and then some key items we consider for disciplined reinvestment and what that means for allocating capital. I'll then conclude with details of our 2018 capital program. Cedric will update our progress on our breakeven plan. In 2017, we focused on improving our cash flow through value-based growth in Permian resources, enhancing our portfolio, increasing the value of our assets and using technology to drive operational performance. We enhanced our portfolio by increasing cash flow from OxyChem in 2017 with the completion of the Ingleside ethylene cracker, which reached full capacity in 2017. OxyChem will provide additional incremental cash flow in 2018 from the 4CPe plant that was commissioned and put on production in December of 2017. The plant, located in Geismar, Louisiana, uses an OxyChem patented process to produce 4CPe, which is a raw material used in making next generation climate-friendly refrigerants with low global warming and zero ozone depletion potential. The project…

Cedric W. Burgher - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Thank you, Vicki. I will begin with an update on our breakeven plan and then address financial results and 2018 guidance. On slide 9, we have updated our progress towards our breakeven plan at low oil prices. As the chart shows, we've made substantial progress towards this goal, and our business segments are exceeding targets. As noted in last night's press release, we have further accelerated our timeline and now expect to accomplish the plan by the third quarter of this year. As most of you know, once we achieve our remaining milestones, we will have the cash flow necessary for our $40 oil price business sustainability case or our $50 oil price business growth scenarios. Slide 10 illustrates our progress towards the breakeven plan. In the Chemical business, the 4CPe plant came online in December and will begin contributing towards the breakeven plan next quarter. In the Midstream business, the Midland-to-Gulf Coast spread remained wider than our breakeven plan assumption of $2.10 per barrel, as it averaged $4.61 per barrel during the fourth quarter. Ken Dillon will tell you about the Al Hosn Gas plant debottlenecking that's beginning in the first quarter, and we have provided additional details on the capacity upgrade to our crude export terminal in the appendix. In the Permian Resources business, we grew 20,000 BOEs per day sequentially, leaving 50,000 BOEs per day to achieve our goal. Jody will give you additional guidance on the timing of new wells online and production. The Chemical and EOR businesses are making operational gains and experiencing market improvements beyond our initial plan. Caustic soda realizations, a key profitability driver for the Chemicals business, improved further in the fourth quarter and solidified $150 million of market improvement shown in the other improvements category of our slide. In the EOR…

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Thank you, Cedric, and good morning, everyone. 2017 was an incredible year for our domestic business. Our teams leveraged our subsurface workflows and operating capability to drive improvements that derisked our cash flow breakeven plan and added significant long-term value to our assets. We monetized non-strategic assets with three key results. First, we acquired the CO2 EOR Seminole-San Andres unit to enhance our low decline Permian EOR business. Second, we invested additional capital into our Permian Resources strategic development plan and third, we cored up a Midland Basin multi-bench area we are now developing. We will continue to review our portfolio in 2018 and look for additional value-adding transactions. Our value-based development approach provided outstanding results across our business. Breakthroughs in geomechanics and petrophysical analysis of flow units drove an approximate 20% improvement in Permian Resources well productivity. Permian Resources lowered fourth quarter operating costs to $7.63 per BOE, a 9% improvement from the fourth quarter of 2016. In Permian EOR we've made significant progress at the recently acquired Seminole-San Andres unit. In just one quarter, we increased production by 3,600 gross BOE per day, reduced OpEx by over $5 per BOE and reduced flaring by 60%. We've also improved the economics of future development by reducing drilling costs by over 30% or $500,000 a well. I also want to highlight our progress in advancing new technology. As Vicki mentioned, we've implemented four different unconventional EOR pilots across the Midland and Delaware Basins. The initial results are encouraging and we believe that our position, scale and over 40-year history of operating EOR projects provide OXY with an advantage that will be extremely difficult to replicate. Progressing this technology will allow us to incorporate EOR into our future development plans and realize value with this upside option beyond just primary recovery.…

Kenneth Dillon - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Thanks, Jody, and good morning, everyone. We had a strong year in the international business with our achievements summarized on slide 24. The focus of the business during 2017 was twofold. First priority was cash generation which the upstream business delivered to the tune of over $1 billion in free cash flow. Second priority was continuing to develop a pipeline of potential projects in our core countries. This inventory is focused on strong returns for OXY and our partners. It builds upon our operational excellence in our core countries, including the use of the latest 3-D seismic technology and drilling successes in Oman and Colombia. Our major projects continue to be delivered on-time and on-budget as shown on slide 26. And we did all of this while achieving the best international HES performance in OXY's history. There are a number of topics that I'd like to mention today. First is the debottlenecking of the Al Hosn Gas plant which will begin during the first quarter and be completed in the second quarter 2018. Last year, during our annual turnaround, we were able to optimize the gas plant for no additional capital. This contributed to the increase in production from 64,000 BOE per day in 2016 to 71,000 BOE per day in 2017. This year during the turnaround, we will debottleneck the plant for an additional 11% in production from fourth quarter 2017 to third quarter 2018 for only $10 million of capital. This debottlenecking will bring the cumulative expansion versus the original plan to approximately 30%, as shown on slide 25. Production during the first quarter will be approximately 59,000 BOE per day, and we will achieve a peak rate of approximately 83,000 BOE per day in the third quarter. We're able to achieve this by utilizing a new patent-pending…

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Thank you, Ken. I'd like to close by commenting on executive compensation since we've been engaging with the investment community on this topic. We have expanded the use of returns-based metrics for executive incentive compensation. The changes will impact both our short and long-term incentives by incorporating cash return on capital employed as a key performance target, with a short-term target of 18% and a long-term target of 20%. At our 2018 target compensation level, cash return on capital employed-based compensation will comprise about 20% of the total. This policy is consistent with our historical practices at OXY and improves alignment with our shareholders. We'll now open it up for your questions.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we'll begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question today comes from Roger Read from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead with your question.

Roger D. Read - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Yeah. Thanks. Good morning. If we could go to slide 4, the talk about well productivity improvement. And I was curious, is there a way that you could break that out at all between just changes in physical things like lateral length and the number of stages versus – you've mentioned multiple times, the improvement in well productivity, how much of that is a design change or better rock, or you know, all the opportunities that are there?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yes, Roger. Good morning. This is Jody. It's really a combination of both. If you look at lateral length in 2017, it's about a 10% increase in overall lateral length. But our productivity improvement is on the order of 20%. And you have to remember this is based on a six-month cumulative, so a lot of the good wells that came online in the back half of the year aren't yet included in that improvement number. So it's a little bit lateral length, but a lot about, again, how we land these wells, the flow unit work that we do to optimize where we place them, and then continued completion design changes to increase stimulated rock volume. But it's a combination of both, but more performance-driven than lateral length-driven.

Roger D. Read - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

All right. Thanks. Can I get you to hazard a guess on continued improvement on productivity at all or any sort of an internal target?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

I don't know if I can throw a number out. I mean, I get surprised every day with the improvements our teams continue to make. And I see some of the technology things we're working, whether it's in the execution side or on the completion side, and I still think there's more ahead. We've got some new frac designs coming out this quarter in Greater Sand Dunes, and I think those are going to lead to even better rates. And in addition to better rates, I think we're reducing our issues with offset frac hits and having to shut wells in because of doing frac work nearby. So not only are we trying to improve performance, we're trying to minimize the base production that's already online.

Roger D. Read - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Kind of getting rid of the parent/child issues we've seen elsewhere then.

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Exactly.

Roger D. Read - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. And then maybe just changing direction with my follow-up. I don't know for you, Vicki, or for Cedric. With the company now certainly line of sight to the breakeven at $50 or effectively there at current prices, how do you think about the dividend or share repurchases as the company moves out of 2018 and into 2019? What's the preferred method for shareholder returns here?

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Well, we prefer dividends, because the dividends are given directly to the shareholders, and it's often hard to predict the impact of the share repurchases. But we have done a lot of share repurchases over time, as we showed you in the graph, but the way we kind of look at it is we do it when we think it makes the most sense and adds the most value. And we sort of do that calculation by looking at the value of the Chemical and Midstream businesses and taking that from the total value of the company, but including debt and cash levels, then you divide that by your total proved reserves. Then when you compare that to your finding and development cost for the projects that you're in and, in that scenario, we would go today investing more in the projects that we're doing. But with that said, in those scenarios where we have incremental cash, and we don't want to accelerate our pace of development because that would potentially destroy value, in those scenarios, assuming our stock is a little bit lower than normal, those would be scenarios that we buy shares back into the company, and you've seen us do that. So that would be something that we certainly would consider doing. We never want to talk about it in advance, because we don't want to let others know that we're doing it. We want to make sure that we eliminate the potential of others buying our stock as we've talked about buying it back. So we think this approach, as we consider that limits our natural bias to think that the stock's always undervalued and it makes the calculation pretty straightforward.

Roger D. Read - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

All right. Appreciate that. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Brian Singer from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead with your question. Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Thank you. Good morning.

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Good morning. Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: As we think about the path to achieving that $50 breakeven, I wanted to just focus a bit more on your expectation to reduce well costs in the Delaware, in particular, which I think you have on slide 53. Based on your contracts, how exposed are you to market inflation risk relative to what you have in the slide? And can you also talk a little bit more about the drivers of the design and efficiency improvements and the risk there to the upside and the downside?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Hey, Brian. This is Jody. The slide 53 is one example of a well type in New Mexico. It's a 2nd Bone Spring 10,000-foot well. It's a three-string design, assumes 2,000 pounds per foot in the completion, includes everything, its hookup, flowback, first artificial lift, capitalized overhead, so it's an all-in capital cost. We see pressure on inflation, obviously. It's probably in the 5% range in the drilling area and more like 10% to 15% in the completion space. But with securing our resources in 2017, we're separating sand from pumping service and now with the startup of Aventine in 2018, we see our ability to offset and even drive down cost in an inflationary period. This is something we started a couple of years ago when we looked back at what really drove our improvements back then, and anticipating an inflationary cycle, what would we do different. So we focused on maintaining time to market, securing supply, securing resources, working the things that drive time to market because they're a much bigger part of the equation than just unit cost. And I could talk for a long time about Aventine, but there's a lot of things in place not just sand delivery but oil country tubular goods on rail instead of truck, the OxyChem hydrochloric acid facility, our work with Schlumberger there, a new sand delivery system for the last mile logistics that will drive down trucking and reduce the number of people required on location. So I'm just naming off a few. There's a long list of things that we believe continue to improve the cost structure, the capital intensity of our work in the unconventional business. Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Thanks. And I know this is just one example, but are well cost reductions of this type of magnitude baked into the $1.9 billion capital budget for Permian Resources or would achievement lead to lower capital needs relative to that?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yes, we've baked in kind of flat from where we are today. So I think there's upside opportunity as we work through this next generation of technology. So some of those are in there that's in our flat assumption, but we're just getting started with Aventine. Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Thanks. And then can you talk a little bit more about the six new benches you're planning to appraise in the Permian in 2018, and how the acreage you plan to evaluate compares to the new acreage that I think you said added 150 locations in 2017?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yeah, it's 1st Bone Spring, Avalon, 2nd Bone Spring Lower in New Mexico, 2nd Bone, 3rd Bone, Wolfcamp C and Greater Barilla Draw. Greater Barilla Draw is 50,000 net acres, so success in those other benches really gives you a lot of scale to work with. Brian Singer - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Phil Gresh from JPMorgan. Please go ahead with your question.

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Phil, could you hold just a second? We did have another comment from Ken, international.

Kenneth Dillon - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yes, just to follow on from Jody, on the international side, same drivers for us internationally, market forces and OXY in-house technology, we still see deflation continuing in drilling and completion arena at the moment, mainly because of the discipline of the NOCs and IOCs in this market, but also the entry of some new competition in the various product lines. We rolled out OXY Drilling Dynamics 3.0 at the start of 2018, we're making modifications to our drilling rig fleets and hardware, software and data analytics. If you look year-on-year in Oman North and in Colombia, we've reduced costs in Oman North by 12% and 26% in Colombia in these product lines. And if you look over the last three years for ourselves and our partners, we've saved over $420 million in the drilling and completion side and we're hoping that, that will continue this year.

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Okay. Phil, good morning.

Phil M. Gresh - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Good morning. First question coming back to capital spending, this year you're at $3.9 billion, which is towards the upper end of the range you had talked about previously of the $3.6 billion to $3.9 billion. Obviously, there's accelerating production growth that comes with that. But I guess I'm kind of wondering as we look ahead, Vicki, you've talked about a commitment to have a meaningful step down in CapEx in 2019 on the back of hitting the breakeven. So just want to get your latest thoughts on that. And you talked a bit about the various tradeoffs in your opening remarks, but is there a specific commitment you're thinking about or a roll-off of infrastructure spending or anything that will be driving CapEx materially lower next year?

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Well, once we get to the breakeven plan, we're still going to go back to our original 5% to 8% growth. We're forecasting 8% to 12% this year but next year in 2019, we'll target the 5% to 8% growth. And targeting that growth with our dividend means that we'll certainly be able to reduce our CapEx below where it is today and back more toward the $3.4 billion to $3.45 billion range.

Phil M. Gresh - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Okay. Got it.

Cedric W. Burgher - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Phil, this is Cedric. I would just add, as I said in my prepared remarks, once we complete the plan, we will be able to live within cash flow, including and cover the dividend, even as low as $40. And so part of the answer to your question depends on what the commodity price environment will be going into 2019. But we will have that ability even at low commodity prices to sustain our base and the dividend all within cash flow.

Phil M. Gresh - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

And if I could just ask maybe a clarification for my second question. There was a comment about higher international spend in 2019, and I heard some of the prepared remarks there, but what's the order of magnitude that would be baked into the $3.4 billion to $3.45 billion?

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

So it wouldn't be significant, because what we have in Oman and some of the international operations are these shorter cycle projects that actually could – we could vary that. We can almost vary like we do the Permian in terms of picking up rigs and activity levels. Ken, did you have an additional comment on that?

Kenneth Dillon - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yes. Part of our focus this year is picking up on the exploration wells and step-out wells that we did last year. We've added 50 million barrels of net resource. Our goal is to call these up this year, get them online. So some of the capital in Colombia will go towards that.

Phil M. Gresh - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Okay. Got it. And then my second question is around the OpEx for the U.S. The guidance of $12.50 a barrel. It's a little bit higher than my model, not hugely so, but given that the incremental – the resources barrels are coming on I think at $2 to $3 per barrel that you've talked about in the past. And I think 4Q ended sub-$8 a barrel. So I'm just trying to understand maybe some of the moving pieces there, and if you have any color about where the EOR cost is given the higher oil price et cetera?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yeah, Phil. It's Jody. So in Resources, we exited fourth quarter with OpEx of $7.63. We expect operating expense in 2018 to be below $7, more like $6.75. We'll exit 2018 below $6. So that additional production growth will continue to drive down Resources OpEx. On the EOR side there's two components. The fundamental – the things we control on rig work and those kind of things is pretty flat. The two things that move with oil price, one is there's some CO2 contracts that are indexed to oil price, or part of the contract is indexed to oil price. So as oil price goes up, the cost of CO2 goes up. The other is we're injecting about almost 3% more CO2 this year in 2018 than we will in 2017. As you know we've started a new flood and we've expanded several others, and so that's consuming the CO2 on the front end, and obviously the production comes as you go through the lifecycle of those projects.

Phil M. Gresh - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Got it. So EOR is closer to $20 then per barrel?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yeah, I don't have the number right here in front of me. We'll get it to you.

Phil M. Gresh - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Okay. Thanks a lot.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from John Herrlin from Société Générale. Please go ahead with your question. John P. Herrlin - Société Générale: Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Most everything's been covered. I was just curious about the EOR activity in Permian Resources, what you're expecting to get out of the wells by pursuing that. And then the other one is on the Aventine venture. Will this be your only joint venture? Like Schlumberger mentioned the joint venture on their call with you, or working with you, I was wondering are you going to do more of these corporate things to help manage costs in the future? That's it.

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Sure. Be glad to talk about both. So the EOR work in the unconventional space, when you look at primary production, you're recovering 8%, 10% of the production. So there's a tremendous resource there. So the objective or the challenge is how can we increase that materially and do it economically. And so with either CO2 injection or miscible gas injection, both in the lab and in the trials in the field, we've demonstrated we can recover incremental oil. And it doesn't behave like the traditional conventional CO2 flood where you inject then you push oil to the producers and it's a long cycle project. The oil recovery is actually quite quick, so it has a short cycle nature to it. So the objective is to continue to do pilots and understand how we take it from pilot to full scale, and then how that affects development plans in the unconventional space going forward. John P. Herrlin - Société Générale: So is this fracture or matrix porosity you're dealing with (54:04)?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Your matrix permeability is micro. It's not matrix. It's a function of the unconventional geology and whether you're in a sandstone or whether you're in a shale, so the behavior's different. That's all part of the learning that we'll talk about more as we're ready to disclose more of the details. John P. Herrlin - Société Générale: Great.

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

With regard to Aventine, Aventine is multiple companies at that site. So Aventine is set up to support Greater New Mexico, all the way from Turkey Track and then our Greater Sand Dunes area. And so it's pumping service, it's oil country tubular goods, it's sand transload, sand delivery. It's a new sand last mile logistics system called SANDSTORM. It's the OxyChem ACL facility, and that's just where we're starting. With Schlumberger, it's frac, it's drilling tools, it's cementing, and it's providing logistics improvements by the location. In the Texas Delaware – so you treat each area based on what the current infrastructure is. In the Texas Delaware, it's really more about securing transload. And so we don't have the full scale buildout of an Aventine-like facility, but we have transload secured. It's closer to the regional sands in Texas. Our sand provider has a regional sand mine that will be opening shortly, and so we'll take advantage of that in the Texas Delaware. And in the Midland Basin, really, the infrastructure is pretty good; it's just really securing supply of sand. To give you just a couple of stats on the New Mexico impact, you think about the proximity of that to the well sites. It's a 60% reduction in the number of miles driven. You go from almost 20 million miles to 8 million miles. And then, when you put in the new SANDSTORM system that we're starting up this year, we can haul 27 tons of sand per load versus 22 tons. You do that math, that drives another 1.3 million miles out of the equation. So it's 33,000 fewer truckloads over a five-year period. It also reduces 9,000 metric tons of CO2. You think about accident statistics. It will improve our safety. And then, the new SANDSTORM system, that's really the last mile part of this, reduces the number of people required on-site, because of the automated nature of the way it works. So that SANDSTORM technology would apply both in New Mexico, Texas Delaware and Midland. And then, the logistics hub design and complexity varies as you move across those three areas as well. John P. Herrlin - Société Générale: Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James. Please go ahead with your question. Pavel S. Molchanov - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Thanks for taking the question. I know you don't generally give guidance by oil versus gas, but as we think about Permian Resources up 40-plus percent this year, is it going to be a broadly parallel increase between liquids and gas? So, in other words, the gas/oil ratio, is it going to remain broadly stable throughout the year?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yeah. Pavel, this is Jody. In 2017, our oil cuts were kind of on the 60% – right around 60% and it actually increases a little bit to 61% for total of 2018. So your mix stays about the same. Pavel S. Molchanov - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. Helpful. And then, a quick one on Colombia. We've seen a lot of headlines, January in particular, about pipeline attacks affecting a number of the major fields in Colombia. To what extent is your Q1 international guidance affected by that?

Kenneth Dillon - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

I think the best way to answer is to look at our production last year. In Q1 2017 – since Q1 2017, our production's remained steady quarter-by-quarter. That's thanks to a lot of work in the field and excellent collaboration with our partner Ecopetrol and the full support of the Colombian government, and we're planning to continue with the same approaches in 2018. Pavel S. Molchanov - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. But I guess how many BOE a day have you lost year-to-date, for example, in Colombia, if you can share that?

Kenneth Dillon - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

I think it's basically a variation on the answer I gave a moment ago. Our production from our areas is basically steady at the moment. And it's mainly as a result of the work that we've done with the government and with Ecopetrol. We're not seeing major impacts on our fields at the moment. Pavel S. Molchanov - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. Fair enough. Appreciate it.

Operator

Operator

Our next question comes from Leo Mariani from NatAlliance Securities. Please go ahead with your question.

Leo P. Mariani - NatAlliance Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Hey, guys. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the way you're sort of splitting up capital in the Permian Resources division this year, really between just Midland and Delaware. I don't know if I had this right, but I think I was seeing maybe roughly one rig in the Midland and 10 in the Delaware. Is that something you're going to sustain this year, or is that going to move around? Can you just kind of talk about that broadly in terms of how you're thinking about Permian Resources capital over the next couple years with those two sub basins?

Joseph C. Elliott - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yeah, you can kind of look at it two different ways, you can look at wells online, you can look at rig count. If you look at wells online, it's about 55% in New Mexico, 30% in the Texas Delaware, and about 15% of the wells in Midland. And that probably stays fairly consistent throughout the next couple of years. From a rig – we're running 11 rigs operated, again, that's about 6 in New Mexico, 4 in Texas Delaware and a rig or 2 in Midland, so I don't see that changing drastically. But again, we're continuing to develop inventory, learn new things. Turkey Track's a great example. We thought we had a single bench 2nd Bone Spring development there. Turns out we've got two. So as we learn more and we change how we think about our inventory, obviously, that could adjust. And I want to go back to Phil's question, he asked about OpEx and EOR. It's about $19 a barrel.

Leo P. Mariani - NatAlliance Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

All right. And then maybe could you talk a little bit about plans for Oman Block 30? I think you guys recently signed that late last year. Are you starting to see incremental capital there in the budget in 2018? When can we start to see some incremental production? Is it going to be largely oil targets? I think you guys had mentioned gas potential as well in Oman. So kind of what can you say about that as it develops over time?

Kenneth Dillon - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Yeah, I think as you can see from the map on slide 24, Block 30 fits perfectly into the Oman North jigsaw. There's currently three discovery wells on the block and two reservoirs that we're completely familiar with due to the work in the other blocks. We have the same approach internationally as we have domestically. The goal is value, not just driving up production. So the short-term plans are basically to reprocess the existing seismic on the block, come up with a development plan and start drilling probably towards the end of this year, and have some production next year. So relatively small amounts of capital invested this year, mainly study work and coming up with a value-based development plan.

Leo P. Mariani - NatAlliance Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

All right. That's really helpful. And last thing you mentioned, portfolio management, $0.5 billion to $2 billion. I guess it's kind of an ongoing thing for you guys. Do you see anything on the horizon here in 2018 where you might look to sell down any of your assets or is that just something that's out there and might take several years?

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

Well, certainly for our core assets, we're satisfied with where we are. The only thing that we're continuing to do is look for things, assets that are way out in the inventory and the Permian. So things that we can't get to any time soon, and when I say soon that's like 10 to 15 years, or that's non-strategic for us, we would certainly consider to sell or monetize, anything that's non-core for us and, of course, we still have the Plains units that we can monetize.

Leo P. Mariani - NatAlliance Securities LLC

Analyst · your question.

Thank you very much.

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

All right. Thank you.

Vicki A. Hollub - Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Management

So I want to thank you all for your questions, and I'd like to leave you with three takeaways from our call. First, we're ahead of schedule with our breakeven plan, but we're still focused on optimizing delivery across all of our businesses. And second, we're disciplined in our reinvestment and we'll provide additional security to our dividend through net debt reduction. Lastly, our expanded use of returns-based incentive metrics align our executive comp with shareholder priorities. So we're looking forward to the rest of 2018. Thank you for joining our call, and have a good day.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's conference call. We do thank you for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.