Exxon Mobil Near $60B Mega-Deal to Buy Shale-Driller Pioneer

ExxonMobil is in talks to acquire Pioneer Natural Resources, a Permian basin-focused shale oil producer, in a transaction that could be announced in the coming days and could be worth up to $60 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

This would be Exxon’s largest transaction since its merger with Mobil in the 1990s, and it would establish the company as the leading producer in the Permian.

According to the report, Pioneer has a market capitalization of almost $50 billion. Exxon, for its part, has a $436 billion market cap and enough capital to spend on industry consolidation following the record profits last year.

According to Reuters, the arrangement between two of the largest acreage holders in Texas and New Mexico’s Permian Basin will add approximately 700,000 barrels of oil equivalent production to its Permian output. Exxon’s own Permian output in the second quarter of the year was 620,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Consolidation has emerged as the favored technique of expansion for the major firms in the US shale region. The last two years have seen a slew of big transactions, including Occidental’s $38 billion purchase of Anadarko.

Pioneer also expanded through acquisitions, paying more than $7 billion for Parsley Energy in 2020 and more than $6 billion for DoublePoint Energy in 2021.