Balanced Growth Strategy
We are a growth company and strive aggressively to increase our reserves and production from our existing asset base as well as through expansion into new operating areas. Our management team pursues a balanced growth strategy employing varying elements of exploration, development, and acquisition activities in complementary operating regions intended to achieve an overall moderate-risk growth profile at attractive rates of return under most industry conditions.
• Exploration: Our exploration program is designed to facilitate organic growth through exploration in a wide variety of exploratory drilling projects, including higher-risk, high-impact projects that have the potential to create substantial value for our stockholders. We view exploration as a core competency. We typically dedicate a significant portion of our capital program each year to prospecting for new oil and gas fields, including in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico where reserve accumulations are typically much larger than those found onshore or on the shelf. Our explorationists have a distinguished track record in the Gulf of Mexico and have made several significant discoveries in the deepwater and shelf. Our reputation for generating high-quality exploration prospects also can create potentially valuable partnering opportunities, which can enable us to participate in exploration projects developed by other operators.
• Development: Our development efforts are intended to complement our higher-risk exploration projects through a variety of moderate-risk activities targeted at maximizing recovery and production from known reservoirs as well as finding overlooked oil and gas accumulations in and around existing fields. Our geoscientists and engineers have a solid track record in effectively developing new fields, redeveloping legacy fields, rejuvenating production, controlling unit costs, and adding incremental reserves at attractive finding costs in both onshore and offshore fields. Our development and exploitation program strives to enhance the rate of returns of our projects, allowing us to establish critical operating mass from which to expand in our focus areas, and generate a rich portfolio of relatively lower-risk engineering/exploitation projects that counterbalance our higher-risk exploration activities.
• Acquisitions: In addition to our internal exploration and development activities on our existing properties, we also compete actively for new oil and gas properties through property acquisitions as well as corporate transactions. Our management team has substantial experience identifying and executing a wide variety of tactical and strategic transactions that augment our existing operations or present opportunities to expand into new operating regions. We primarily focus our acquisition efforts on stable, onshore basins such as West Texas, which can counterbalance our growing deepwater exploration operations, but we also respond in an opportunistic fashion to attractive acquisition opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico. Due to our existing prospect inventory, we are not compelled to make acquisitions in order to grow; however we expect to continue to pursue acquisitions aggressively on an opportunistic basis as an integral part of our growth strategy.