Jordan Blum, editorial director, Hart Energy: We are here at the DUG Executive Oil Conference in Midland. I'm joined by Thaimar Ramirez, the president and general manager for the Midland Basin Business Unit for Occidental Petroleum. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Congrats on closing the CrownRock acquisition very recently. I just wanted to get your take first off just how the integration's going and how much work there is to do.
Thaimar Ramirez: Thank you Hart Energy for having me here today. It's going great. So the acquisition is, we started integration on August 1st. It's been a hundred plus days since we started, and the team is what we thought they were. The assets are what we thought they were. The team has been over delivering. So in some things I want to highlight some of the successes that we have had. So in the third quarter, the team exceeded 5,000 boe per day over the guidance that we have for that quarter. In the fourth quarter, we increased the guidance by 9,000 boe per day. And that is because again, is they exceeding the expectations. They're doing base management production. The wedge is over performing as well, and they're doing optimizations in their operations. So one of the things that they always say is that they're a relentless optimization organization, and they show it with the results.
JB: Great. So how are some of Oxy's best practices translating to the CrownRock position and vice versa? I guess some of the learnings from them?
TR: Yeah, we're doing both. We're calling the best, best practices workshops and what we're doing is learning from what CrownRock has done that has made them so successful. Cost leadership, some of the supply chain opportunities that we have found from them. Also from the Oxy legacy side, all of the robust surface workflows. So we continue to get the best of the two teams and to continue shaping the combined organization. So with that, we're creating a very robust plan for 2025. For the CrownRock side, it is going to be a very derisked plan. About 85% of that plan is going to be the Wolfberry, the Wolfcamp as well, and also the Dean. We're also trying that one at about 15% of the plan is going to be other benches.
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JB: Great. What can you say about lateral length completion designs now with a lot more contiguous Midland acreage?
TR: Certainly opportunities there to go 3-mile laterals, so in Midland Basin in the legacy side, so we're used to drilling 15,000 [ft] lateral wells. So for us, it is something that we do all the time in our operations and certainly we're going to find even more opportunities to lower the cost going that route.
JB: Great. And how would you describe just the role of the Midland Basin in Oxy's portfolio now that the Midland position is comparable to the Delaware side?
TR: Certainly brought a lot of scale to Midland Basin as [Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub] has mentioned. So Midland Basin is now one of the core areas that we have in the Permian portfolio at Oxy. For us, so it brought nine rig total now, so gross. That was an increase of 125% of our rig count. We have now over 200,000 boe per day production. That is over 350% of our production increase. And we also have 47,000 acres of surface that is about 25% increase for us compared to what we had before. And then also 1.3 million barrels of water per day capacity to handle that water management. So that would be for disposal, but also recycling water, and that was an increase of over 380%.
JB: Great. Well now that's a lot of new infrastructure added too. Thank you so much for joining us here today. We really appreciate it being here in Midland. To read and watch more, please visit online HartEnergy.com.
TR: Thank you so much.
