U.S. Oil Companies Set to Benefit From Saudi Supply Disruption

(Bloomberg) -- Some U.S. oil companies are positioned to gain from the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s facilities over the weekend and an attendant rise in crude prices.

The biggest moves could come from U.S. oil companies with a sizable short interest, including Apache Corp., Continental Resources Inc., Concho Resources Inc., Devon Energy Corp. and Noble Energy Inc., according to analysts at Houston-based Tudor Pickering Holt & Co.

“We are expecting strong performance across the entire energy complex tomorrow, and upstream should see some of the biggest gains as the increase in crude price will immediately flow through to improved cash flow,” the bank said in a note Sunday. “Given duration of outage, we suspect equity performance may be short-lived as investors continue to focus on imbalances in 2020 crude fundamentals.”

One other benefit is for those seeking to hedge across the forward curve for 2020 -- assuming the prices move that far into the future, according to the note.

Canadian oil producers, including Meg Energy Corp., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and Cenovus Energy Inc., can also stand to gain from the outage.

One potential loser? Refineries that have to buy oil at higher prices. However, that might not result in their shares getting hit on Monday, the bank said. “In recent years refiner equities have become more correlated with short-term moves in crude prices, which is likely a function of refiners becoming a bigger part of energy index funds.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Tina Davis in New York at tinadavis@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tina Davis at tinadavis@bloomberg.net, Linus Chua, Virginia Van Natta

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