From BNN
Three years into his tenure as CEO of Encana, Doug Suttles is still cleaning up the mess he was handed in 2013.
The Calgary-based energy producer sold some of its property in northeastern Alberta on Tuesday to Birchcliff Energy for $625 million, marking the ninth major asset sale spearheaded by Suttles since he took the top job in June 2013. In total, Encana has generated roughly $10 billion through divestitures over the past three years.
Suttles spent more than two decades with BP, where he’s best remembered as the British company’s public face at briefings on the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, before leaving to run Encana. When Suttles arrived in Calgary, his main focus was still on damage control.
Encana was bleeding cash trying to fund projects in different regions spread across North America. Randy Eresman, a 35-year veteran of the company who had served as chief operating officer since 2002 before taking on the CEO role in 2006, unexpectedly resignedbarely two weeks into 2013, roughly four years after he led an effort to spin off the company’s oil sands assets into Cenovus Energy, leaving Encana with nothing but natural gas assets just before prices for that commodity crashed.
“The timing was just terrible,” Martin Pelletier, portfolio manager with TriVest Wealth Council, told BNN on Wednesday. “Focusing on natural gas right at a time when the supply chain basically just became overwhelmed, that is why you need both [oil and liquids as well as natural gas] to provide risk management and diversification.”
