HOUSTON — Exxon Mobil’s third quarter earnings fell 18 percent compared with the same period a year ago, but the company is poised to pull in more cash, particularly from shale plays, an executive said Thursday.
“We are just really getting started in the unconventional side,” said David Rosenthal, Exxon Mobil’s vice president of investor relations, speaking during a conference call with analysts. “We spent a lot of time in the last couple years evaluating what we had… now you’re really starting to see wells coming on, not for evaluation and delineation, but to sell so we can start ringing the cash register from these investments.”
As an example, the company has been growing its production in the Permian Basin, but not through drilling into shale, Rosenthal said. The vast majority of Exxon Mobil’s efforts in that region have been conventional drilling with carbon dioxide injection, meaning that the company has yet to fully target shale there, Rosenthal said.
Exxon Mobil also is ramping up its shale drilling efforts throughout its substantial North America holdings, some of which were acquired through its $25 billion purchase of XTO Energy in 2010 and others that Exxon Mobil has picked up over the last year.
“You’re really starting to see the benefit of the time we spent evaluating those areas, understanding what we had, quietly adding acreages to our position, which is now quite large in all of those key areas,” Rosenthal said.
