Occidental Petroleum Corp. reported a quarterly loss, compared with a profit a year earlier, largely due to $969 million in costs related to its Anadarko Petroleum purchase, Reuters reported.
Occidental Petroleum closed its acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum in the third quarter. However, despite the addition of that company's oil and gas operations as well as its stake in MLP Western Midstream, Occidental posted weaker sequential results, stated The Motley Fool.
Occidental's oil and gas business produced 1.155 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (BOE/D) during the third quarter, including 377,000 BOE/D from Anadarko as well as 41,000 BOE/D from that company's legacy African operations that Occidental plans to sell to Total. That pushed the company's total output up 70% year over year.
The company said daily production from legacy Occidental operations averaged 737,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd).
The company's chemicals business, The Motley Fool said, also posted lower sequential earnings. That's due to margin pressure as a result of higher ethylene costs because of some industrywide downtime at plants that produce that key petrochemical. The company partially offset those higher costs with improved volumes across most of its product lines.
Occidental's marketing and other midstream segments also posted weaker results. That's mainly due to a reduction in the difference in oil prices between the Permian Basin and the Gulf Coast as new oil pipelines came online.
