Ponca City, We love you: What are ConocoPhillips Plans for Ponca City?

There has been a lot of talk around Ponca City that ConocoPhillips is interested in selling its Ponca refinery to another oil company and getting out of Ponca City especially after ConocoPhillips Chairman and CEO Jim Mulva met with corporate analysts in October 2009 for the ConocoPhillips Q3 2009 Earnings Call and announced that the company's capital budget would decrease by about 12 percent in 2010 and that ConocoPhillips planned to divest $10 billion in refining, exploration, and production assets in a bid to improve its financial position.

At the earnings call on October 29, Mulva was asked specifically about the possibility that ConocoPhillips might divest itself of some of its refineries and Mulva said that the company was "going through a more strategic assessment [of its refineries] because there are some that are less sophisticated. We will think long-term when the market gets a little bit better about selling some refineries. We think that is going to be subsequent to the next two years for 2012, 2013 and we have in mind a number of facilities that we think might have some value to someone else."

The Tulsa World and the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise report that Mulva appeared before a packed house at the Bartlesville Community Center on May 21, 2010 to present the annual company update, talk about ConocoPhillips' plans for the future, and clarify the company's plans for Bartlesville and for the Ponca City refinery.

Mulva told his audience that employees in Bartlesville and Ponca City have little to fear. Although ConocoPhillips announced last year that it was tranferring or eliminating all 700 non-refinery jobs in Ponca City, ConocoPhillips plans to keep the Ponca City refinery with it's 750 employees. "We will retain only the largest and most sophisticated refineries," Mulva said. "Ponca City is a large and sophisticated refinery that is important to our refinery portfolio."

Mulva added that he didn't forsee any change in the 3,100 ConocoPhillips employees in Bartlesville, and that there was actually room to accommodate an additional 800 to 1,000 more employees in Bartlesville. "There's no change in our long-term plans for Bartlesville," Mulva said. "It's a very important global support center for ConocoPhillips."

The recent announcement reinforces a statement made in February 2009 at the time that the announcement was made that ConocoPhillips non-refinery employees in Ponca City would be relocated over the next three years. "The refinery in Ponca City continues to be a competitive refinery," said John A Carrig, President and Chief Operating Officer of ConocoPhillips, when he talked to students as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series at the Michael F. Price College of Business. "Like all of our facilities, we are continuing to make investments to enable it to thrive. I don't see any particular change in the outlook for it."

Top Photo: ConocoPhillips Refinery in Ponca City, Oklahoma by Warren Brown Photography. Flickr Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

Bottom Photo: Jim Mulva, Chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips by EnergyTomorrow Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

Click the above photos to enlarge.

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