CIR Editorial

The acquisition and divestiture (A&D) market entered 2025 facing a question that every banker, private equity manager, and public company CFO was trying to answer: after the consolidation supercycle of 2023–2024, who's left to buy, and at what price? The 2023–2024 wave was transformational.

EOG Resources doesn't make headlines the way it probably should. The company has no transformational acquisitions to tout, no CEO with a media-friendly persona, and no single basin dominance narrative to push. What it has instead is arguably the best multi-basin operator track record in U.

Private equity's relationship with oil and gas upstream has never been more complicated. The wave of consolidation that swept the industry in 2023–2024 — culminating in ExxonMobil's $60 billion Pioneer acquisition and Diamondback's $26 billion Endeavor deal — was in large part a story about

Q2 2025 earnings season kicks off in mid-July, and the setup is more interesting than the headline WTI average suggests. Yes, WTI averaged roughly $68–70/bbl in Q2 — a reasonable environment. But the cost structure dynamics, natural gas price headwinds, and ongoing OPEC+ noise make this a more

Taking Stock at the Halfway Point With Q2 2025 drawing to a close, the upstream oil and gas sector looks materially different from where consensus expected it to be six months ago. WTI has averaged roughly $71/bbl year-to-date — below the $75–80 range that most operators used

The Capital Discipline Mandate It's now five years since institutional investors — burned by the shale growth-at-all-costs era — delivered a collective ultimatum to upstream oil and gas companies: generate returns, not just production growth. The industry heard the message. What's emerged from this recalibration