VOLUME 35 | ISSUE 22
WEEK OF JUNE 1, 2023
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PROUD RAVENS
Deal creates state’s largest oil-gas producer • Page 9
• Vestas to lay off 200 employees
BUSINESS
Riverdale Ridge class of 2023 graduates show off their newly acquired diplomas at the end of the ceremony May 22 at the University of Colorado Event Center in Boulder. See PHOTO BY BELEN WARD more photos on page 6.
BY MARK JAFFE THE COLORADO SUN
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•27J Schools moves online-only Dec. 1
PDC Energy being bought for nearly $8B by Chevron
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Chevron Corp. is buying PDC Energy in a $7.6 billion deal that will make it by far and away the largest oil and gas producer in Colorado and continues a trend in the state of bigger companies gobbling up smaller ones. PDC Energy shareholders will get stock in San Ramon, Californiabased Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company by share value after ExxonMobil. Chevron will also assume more than $1 billion in PDC
Energy debt. For the money Chevron will get 275,000 acres adjacent to the company’s present holdings in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, in Weld County, with estimated reserves of 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent, a measure of oil and gas combined. Chevron will also get 25,000 acres Denver-based PDC Energy owns in Texas in the Permian Basin, the largest and most productive oil field in the country. “The deal makes Chevron an even more formidable operator in Colorado,” Andrew Dittmar, a director at Enverus Intelligence Research, said in an analyst’s note. “The Colorado assets do come with some increased regulatory risk,” Dittmar said, “but the worst case for
stopping permitting feared several years back has largely not come to pass. Companies have successfully been able to secure years of drilling permits.” For years Kerr-McGee Oil & Gas Onshore, a subsidiary of Houstonbased Occidental Petroleum Corp., was the No. 1 oil and gas producer in Colorado. It was followed by Noble Energy, a Chevron subsidiary. PDC Energy has been in third or fourth place among producers. In 2022, Kerr-McGee pumped 27 million barrels of oil. Noble and PDC Energy’s combined output was more than 52 million barrels, according to data from the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which starting July 1 will be known as the
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Energy and Carbon Management Commission. The PDC Energy purchase will boost Chevron’s cash flow by $1 billion and create $400 million in efficiencies, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told analysts on a call in May presenting the deal. “This seems like a testament to the idea that the DJ can be a core U.S. position even for a company as large as CVX,” Brad Handler, a researcher at the Colorado School of Mines’ Payne Institute for Public Policy, said in an email, referring to Chevron by its stock ticker symbol. The PDC Energy acquisition is part of a wave of Colorado oil and gas sector consolidations over the past SEE PRODUCER, P4
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