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Whiting pays off 42% of debt; position is ‘strong’ despite oil prices
By Devika Patel
Knoxville, Tenn., June 27 – Whiting Petroleum Corp. has reduced its debt by 42% since 2014, resulting in a “strong” balance sheet and “stable or rising” borrowing base, despite falling oil prices.
“We’ve been successful at reducing Whiting’s debt by 42%,” president and chief executive officer James J. Volker said at the J.P. Morgan 2017 Energy Equity Conference in New York on Tuesday.
“We’ve done this since the time of late 2014, when we acquired Kodiak and added their debt, so we’ve paid off $2.4 billion worth of debt during that period of time and it’s very important to us to maintain that strong balance sheet and capital discipline.
“We’re well within all of our covenants with respect to both our bonds and our banks,” he said.
Volker said that the company has no near-term maturities and could even pay off its next maturity in 2019 with half of its available borrowing base.
“We have no near-term maturities.
“The next one is 2019 and our bank borrowing base has been strong, which is $2.5 billion, and we’re currently only using about $500 million of that.
“We could actually retire our next bond that comes due in 2019 with only about half of our existing available borrowing base,” he stated.
Volker said that the company is now in a “very strong position” and that the company’s borrowing base reflects that position.
“Whiting’s in a very strong position.
“The banks are very happy with us. They’re very happy with the way we’ve been adding reserves at the very low cost per BOE, so even though oil prices have come down, our borrowing base has actually been very stable or rising.
“The banks are very happy with us and we don’t see any problems in dealing with them at the time of the next bank redetermination,” he said.
Whiting is an independent oil and gas company based in Denver.
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