ConocoPhillips

ConocoPhillips is an American independent oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) company, headquartered in Houston, Texas, that explores for, produces, transports and markets crude oil, natural gas, natural gas liquids and bitumen, generating $58.7 billion of total revenues and $7.96 billion of net income in fiscal 2025. It is one of the world's largest independent E&P companies by both production and reserves, producing 2,375 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day (MBOED) in 2025 from a portfolio that spans Lower 48 shale, Alaska's North Slope, Canadian oil sands, North Sea and North African conventional fields, and a fast-growing global liquefied natural gas (LNG) franchise.

This is a story about a company that spent the past decade buying scale — Concho Resources and Shell's Permian assets in 2021, then Marathon Oil in 2024 — and is now turning from dealmaking to execution. Management has organized the entire enterprise around one idea: that a deep inventory of low-cost-of-supply barrels, harvested with discipline and paid out generously, beats chasing growth for its own sake. The same framework now has to fund a wave of long-dated megaprojects — the Willow oil development in Alaska and equity stakes in Qatari and U.S. Gulf Coast LNG — that will not produce meaningful cash until late this decade.

The file turns on a single question: whether ConocoPhillips can keep returning roughly 45 percent of its operating cash flow to shareholders and fund that long-cycle build-out and hold the balance sheet investment-grade, all while a commodity it does not control swings from a mid-$60s mid-cycle world into a supply shock that has taken roughly 10 million barrels a day offline, and, eventually, back out again. The answer the company is betting on is that its assets are cheap enough, and its costs low enough, that it does not have to choose.