You know the old adage about life giving you lemons, and 2016 saw a lot of upstream producers puckered up with a straight shot of lemon juice. While the upstream oil and gas industry struggled through a second year of a prolonged downturn in 2016, some companies revealed staying power through the cycle and others exhibited the discipline to change and adapt. From the fray, we at Oil and Gas Investor have identified three success stories that we believe should be recognized.

This year’s winners for the 14th annual Oil and Gas Investor Excellence Awards are being honored for their achievements in 2016. They represent an unlikely and bold financing, a company-transforming M&A deal, and a portfolio and culture retooling by a determined and decisive leader.

You will find a detailed article on each of our winners in this issue, and each company will be honored and present their story at our upcoming Energy Capital Conference this month in Austin, Texas.

—The Editors

We are pleased to recognize as Executive of the Year the chairman and CEO of WPX Energy Inc., Richard (Rick) Muncrief. When he stepped into the CEO role in May 2014, WPX was experiencing high costs and low margins shortly after being spun out of its pipeline parent. Seeing danger lurking ahead, Muncrief instigated a five-year plan with a clear vision to increase margins by paring the portfolio of low-margin gas, adding oil, slashing costs and improving wellhead returns.

Two-and-a-half years and $6.5 billion in A&D later, Muncrief and his team completely retooled the portfolio and cost structure of the company to become one of the leading performers in its class, with ample room to grow. WPX cored up to three basins from seven, and effectively traded its legacy Piceance Basin position for the much-desired Delaware Basin.

The portfolio restructuring—all done in the headwinds of the unanticipated downturn—flipped its high-margin oil position from one-third to two-thirds, and doubled its margins even while at half the oil price from when the effort started. Investors took notice, as WPX’s share price was up nearly 170% in 2016.

The M&A Deal of the Year goes to RSP Permian Inc. for its transformative $2.4 billion acquisition of Silver Hill Energy Partners LLC, and to Silver Hill for the value it created in a short time in a difficult market. The deal gives RSP a new focus in the thickest part of Texas’ Delaware Basin, enabling significant production growth ahead. Silver Hill quadrupled the value of the acreage with a sale in mind after pulling it off the market a year prior. It will still enjoy the value creation as it took about half the deal value in RSP stock, which indicates confidence in the quality of the assets and the capabilities of the buyer to fully develop them.

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and J.P. Morgan are joint recipients of the Financing of the Year award for Anadarko’s acquisition of strategic deepwater Gulf of Mexico (GoM) assets funded through J.P. Morgan’s execution of a $2.16 billion overnight equity offering, the largest sole underwritten primary block trade by an E&P. The acquired assets generate substantial free cash flow, allowing Anadarko to accelerate activity in its onshore Delaware and Denver-Julesburg basins, while also adding to the company’s deep inventory of tieback opportunities in the GoM. Despite a downdraft in the Dow, J.P. Morgan priced the 40.54 million share offering tighter than average large block trades, leaving Anadarko’s stock little changed from pre-offering levels in subsequent days.

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