By Seher Dareen
(Reuters) -ConocoPhillips beat Wall Street estimates for fourth-quarter profit on Thursday, as higher production helped offset lower crude prices, and expects 2025 to be a peak spending year for its long-term projects.
The company expects capital expenditure in 2025 to be $12.9 billion, aiming to spend 15% less on its Lower 48 assets while ramping up spending for its Willow LNG project in Alaska and LNG projects with Qatar, among others.
“We’re looking at how we can build out offtake for 10 million tonnes per annum to 15 million tonnes per annum,” executives said on the conference call.
The company is also looking to continue exploring west of the Willow project on President Trump’s call to reverse the Biden Administration’s limitation on oil and gas development in Alaska.
It said that the sale of its Surmont liquids, largely bitumen, would be impacted by Trump’s tariffs on imports into the U.S., as nearly half of them are shipped to the United States.
“It’s difficult to say who’s going to carry the burden where … here our diversified portfolio comes into play to provide some mitigation,” the executives added.
To lower debt after its $22.5-billion takeover of rival Marathon Oil, the company also announced it was signing agreements to divest its non-core Lower 48 assets with an output of 15,000 bpd for $600 million, which is expected to close in the first half of 2025.
Higher production helped ConocoPhillips post a profit for the reported quarter — it produced 2.18 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), up from 1.9 million boepd a year earlier.
Notably, it saw a near 54% rise in income from its Nuna drillsite in Alaska as it produced first oil in December.
The company forecast its output to be between 2.34 million and 2.38 million boepd in 2025.
The Houston, Texas-based company aims to increase its returns to shareholders to $10 billion this year from $9.1 billion in 2024.
On an adjusted basis, ConocoPhillips reported a profit of $1.98 per share for the three months ended December 31, compared with analysts’ average estimate of $1.84 according to data compiled by LSEG.
(Reporting by Seher Dareen in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Alan Barona)
