Joseph R. DeDominic, president and general manager of Occidental Petroleum’s Williston business unit, left the company in November to take a position with Eagle Ford player Sanchez Energy as its senior vice president and chief operating officer.
“With Joe’s departure, our Williston business unit has been absorbed into our Mid-Continent business unit,” Nancy Turner, Oxy’s director of communications and public affairs, told Petroleum News Bakken Nov. 28.
The Mid-Continent business unit’s president and general manager, Ron Brokmeyer, is based in Houston, she said.
DeDominic “led the acquisition and growth of Oxy’s Bakken and Three Forks assets in North Dakota,” Sanchez said Nov. 28.
Oxy is currently running five rigs in Dunn County, N.D., up from four rigs in October. The Los Angeles-based major once had as many as 14 rigs working the Bakken play after it first entered the Williston Basin in 2010. But once its leases were secured by drilling, high well costs and unsatisfactory oil price differentials led to a reduction in capital spending in the basin by the company.
In an October third-quarter earnings conference call Stephen Chazen, Oxy’s chief executive officer and president, said the issue of “product price” was “at least partially on its way to resolution,” leaving the need for “large-scale reductions” in the cost of wells before the company would consider boosting investment in the play.
Per State of North Dakota records, in September Oxy was the 16th largest producer of oil from the Bakken petroleum system, which includes the Three Forks formation, outputting 11,629 barrels of oil per day from the wells it operates.
—Kay Cashman
