Bakken Operators Set To Outperform Big Oil This Year -- Bloomberg

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This story has been posted several times in different variations. But here is the Bloomberg story:

Oil explorers focused on high-margin shale drilling from Texas to North Dakota are set to outperform Big Oil this year.

EOG Resources Inc, Pioneer Natural Resources Co and Continental Resources Inc. are poised to reap bigger returns for investors than energy titans 15 times their market values as they devote almost all their drilling capital to higher-margin, domestic crude wells. Houston-based EOG is estimated to more than triple profit in 2013 to $1.92 billion.

Halcon Resources Corp., the oil and gas producer run by former Petrohawk Energy Chairman Floyd C. Wilson, posted record quarterly profit on Aug. 1 after a five-fold increase in output from wells, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

EOG and Unit are scheduled to announce second-quarter results on Aug. 6.

Continental follows the next day.

The world’s biggest energy producers, including Exxon and Shell, have had mixed results while playing catch-up to smaller U.S. explorers that helped pioneer shale exploration. Shell, Europe’s largest energy producer by market value, wrote down the value of its U.S. shale assets last week for the second time in less than a year, while saying its liquids-rich properties in Texas’ Permian Basin are “developing very well.” Natural Gas, the worst-performing commodity of the past half-decade in U.S. markets, accounts for more than 80 percent of the output from The Hague-based company’s shale wells.

Exxon spent $52 billion in the past three years to create a shale portfolio, though most of it has involved gas that tumbled to a 10-year low in 2012 and commands less than one-fifth the price of oil, on an energy-equivalent basis. During a conference call with analysts last week, Exxon touted its progress in ramping up output 74 percent from a year earlier to 60,000 barrels a day in the Bakken formation that sprawls beneath North Dakota and Montana.