Royal Dutch/Shell Group announced another sharp cut in its energy reserve estimate yesterday even as high energy prices allowed the company to generate a fourth-quarter profit of $4.48 billion. Here is a series of posts over the past year on the reserve estimate mess and related problems that Shell has been confronting.
Shell’s announcement highlighted a problem that is facing most of the major exploration and production companies — i.e., the struggle to find new reserves to replace the oil and gas that the companies are currently producing.
Shell’s problems in that area are are worst than most. Yesterday, the company reduced reserves by an additional 1.4 billion barrels of oil equivalent, the fifth such cut over the past year.
This brings the cumulative reserves reduction to about one-third of total company reserves since Shell first disclosed early last year that it had drastically overstated its reserves numbers. Moreover, Shell has not filed its required 2004 year-end reserves numbers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, so even further reductions are possible. Shell expects the five-year earnings impact of these cuts to total about $700 million, which is about 1% of the company’s profit over that period.
Despite that relatively small impact on profits, it is Shell’s dismal performance over the past year in replacing energy reserves that is placing the company in a precarious position within the industry. Reserves are the estimated bank of energy reserves that an oil and gas company has in the ground and energy companies typically attempt to replace at least 100% of the reserves they pump annually in order to provide markets with the confidence of future growth potential.
Shell is not even close to that standard. The company announced that it expected its 2004 reserve replacement ratio to be somewhere between 45% to 55%. Moreover, if one includes the effect of divestments and technical adjustments related to year-end oil pricing, the replacement rate plunges to a horrifying 15% to 25%.
Although not as drastic a problem as Shell’s, the entire oil and gas industry is having a difficult time replacing its energy reserves. Last week, Houston-based ConocoPhillips announced that it replaced just 60% to 65% of its reserves in 2004 and ChevronTexaco Corp. announced that its replacement rate will also be disappointing.