Which Will Be Most Resilient? The Permian Or The Bakken? Well, That Didn't Take Long -- March 10, 2020

MRO.  From SeekingAlpha:

• Marathon Oil pre-market after announcing an immediate capital spending reduction of at least $500M from its previously planned 2020 capital spending budget of $2.4B.
• The revised capex of $1.9B or less represents a ~30% reduction from 2019 levels.
• Marathon says it will suspend further resource play exploration drilling and leasing activity, suspend all operated drilling and completion activity in Oklahoma, and "meaningfully reduce" operated drilling and completion activity in the Northern Delaware.
• The company says it maintains a strong financial foundation, ending 2019 with ~$3.9B of liquidity and no near-term debt maturities.

OXY: cuts dividend from 79 cents to 11 cents. Major CAPEX cut. OXY left the Bakken years ago; if a pure Permian play (from my point of view). From Street Insider:

Occidental Petroleum Corporation announced today that its Board of Directors approved a reduction in the company’s quarterly dividend to $0.11 per share from $0.79 per share, effective July 2020.

The company also announced it will reduce 2020 capital spending to between $3.5 billion and $3.7 billion from $5.2 billion to $5.4 billion and will implement additional operating and corporate cost reductions. [A 30% cut in CAPEX.]

See this post. Updates are tracked there.

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Book Recommendation

Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid The Vicious Nationalism of World War I, Matthew Stanley, c. 2019. The author is probably a flaming liberal -- and I say that in a good way --  but the book looks good.

The author:

• degrees in history, astronomy, physics, and religion
• professor of history at NYU's Gallatin School Individualized Study
• has published two academic books
• has written for Physics Today, Physics World, and the Los Angeles Review of Books (I did not know people read books any more in Los Angeles)
• he has appeared in documentaries on the History Channel, BBC, and NPR

He looks like someone with whom I would enjoy spending a weekend in a cabin in Vermont, maybe near Bernie, discussing astronomy.