ConocoPhillips has announced one of the year’s most significant asset transactions, finalizing the sale of its Anadarko Basin assets for $1.3 billion to Flywheel Energy, backed by Stone Ridge Energy. The asset package encompasses approximately 300,000 net acres across the Anadarko Basin, generating current production of 54,000 boe/d from actively producing wells with ConocoPhillips as the reconciled TGS Operator.
The acreage benefits from large areas of existing 3D seismic coverage, providing valuable subsurface data for future development. This production is primarily natural gas, with average GOR hovering around 20 mcf/stb, which will complement Stone Ridge’s Digital Flare Mitigation (DFM) technology, which captures gas that would be flared or vented and uses it to power portable data centers to mine bitcoin. Expected to close in the fourth quarter, this transaction exceeds ConocoPhillips’ $2 billion divestiture goal, prompting them to set an even higher $5 billion asset sale goal.
ConocoPhillips Strategy
With ConocoPhillips assuming $5.4 billion in debt as part of their acquisition of Marathon Oil for $22.5 billion in November, they set a goal of $2 billion in asset sales within 2 years to optimize and focus their portfolio. After selling non-core Permian and Ursa assets, they have reached $2.5 billion in divestitures with this Anadarko sale, with ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance commenting
“We’re getting plenty of North American natural gas production from our assets in North America. It just wasn’t going to compete for capital as we integrated that asset into the company, and we were pretty pleased with the price that we got.”
Visualizing ConocoPhillips production portfolio in Figure 2 shows that the Anadarko Basin wasn’t performing as well as the rest of their assets. ConocoPhillips has announced a new target of $5 billion in divestitures by year end 2026, so an additional $2.5 billion of asset divestitures will be coming soon.
