Speaker 2
So you touched on Exxon and Pioneer earlier. So why don't we talk about M&E now there's a lot going on. And as you mentioned, Exxon is buying Pioneer for 60 billion. Chevron is buying Hess for 53 billion. And there's been a number of smaller transactions. But what's happening here is because Exxon and Chevron can't find or can't replace the reserves. Is there no more oil to be found? And therefore they have to go out and acquire it by acquiring other companies?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think it's a complicated question. I'll just throw in that it's such a tight market for oil assets that Exxon wants Chevron's acquisition to. They're trying to exercise right of first refusal or something similar on Hess's Guiana asset, which is sort of the prize there. And the reason Chevron is trying to buy them. So we've done a lot of research and shared a lot of perspectives on transactions in the Permian Basin, West Texas and Southeast New Mexico, which is where Pioneer is focused. And what we've noticed is that transaction values are rising pretty significantly, even with oil prices having come down quite a bit from their peak in the last couple of years. And even with natural gas prices down by even higher percentage from their peak, especially in the last few months where you see natural gas prices go ultra low. And people think of these as oil fields, but they do produce a lot of natural gas. And if you think about it when these wells are drilled, if you segment the economics by commodity type, you can sort of see the oil in many of these wells getting companies to break even on the drilling cost and then natural gas liquids and natural gas being the sort of profit component. And so with lower natural gas prices and lower natural gas liquids prices like we've seen recently, because of this warm winter and because of a glutton dry gas and so on, you've actually seen those profits suppressed from those fields. And despite that, you're seeing these valuations go sky high. And well, I don't know about sky, but they've gone up a lot relative to where they were a few years ago. And I think they will get sky high. I think you're seeing just this this rush to buy the remaining assets with inventory in places like West Texas. And frankly, even in places that people had sort of thought were mature and had given up on to some extent, there's a high value acquisition happening, sort of, acquisition slash merger happening in North Dakota. There have been some pretty big deals in South Texas as well. And so, and you've seen some multi-billion dollar acquisitions happening in Canada. So, I think you're seeing an M&A boom, I think it gets bigger, not smaller over time. And I don't know how many more HESs and pioneers there are to buy, but there's many of these billion dollar to $10 billion type companies and numerous private companies that are getting bought, but a lot fewer than there were two years ago. So, there's a boom happening, there's different motivators for it. But I think one of the biggest ones is scarcity. And again, when you do the numbers, it sort of sounds a little weird because there's a lot of these private companies. But again, there's a lot fewer of them than there were and of the size that are getting bought. And there's even fewer when you look at the ones that are willing to sell. And so, scarcity really drives buying interest and it also can drive price.