RE: Moving up26 Mar 2024 07:59
Operational and market performance mismatch
Canaccord Genuity view Star's recent updates highlight the progress made across the company's diverse UK onshore oil and gas production base and in the Croatian geothermal business.
Over the past year, the company has turned around a declining UK production profile for the first time in many years, through a combination of greater focus on incremental low-cost enhancements to well performance and significantly improved surface facilities efficiencies and uptime.
That has clearly borne fruit over the past 12+ months, and we think there is plenty of scope to maintain that elevated performance at least over the next few years. That is important because while the company sees longer-term growth through its geothermal businesses, it is the UK conventional hydrocarbons that provide the backbone of cashflow in the nearer-term. We think the progress made by Star in the UK and in Croatia is substantial, and certainly not reflected in the recent market performance.
We maintain our BUY rating, and though we trim our risked NPV10 target price to 65p (from 73p) to reflect the slow pace of progress (unrelated to Star) of the UK geothermal business, we think the company's valuation footing has improved significantly over the past year. Conventional production Productivity gains:
FY23 company expected c.2.09 kboed, better than early year c.2.0 kboed guidance. That rate implies higher production in H2 than H1 (2.07 kboed), itself a positive indicator. As a result, 2023 output is set to be the best since 2019. The signs are that a rolling programme of continued smaller scale investment - workovers and infrastructure optimisation - can be expected to deliver similar stable production levels for several years. New projects would provide further upside, but those probably require additional financing.
Costs: Star has also done a good job on operating cost control, which continue around $40/boe despite the inflationary environment. Geothermal projects Croatia: Star only entered the country in August through the acquisition of 51% of local company A14 Energy which holds the Ernestinovo geothermal exploration licence. Since then the company has been awarded two further licences, prepared a wellsite for testing of Ernestinovo-3, and mobilised a rig to test flow rates (results expected early 2024). A successful outcome can be expected to lead to application for a long-term exploitation licence.
UK: That progress contrasts starkly with activity levels in the UK, where a combination of factors - permitting, lack of government funding distribution, bureaucracy - have all conspired to hamper any real progress. Valuation underpinning The benefits of the renewed vigour applied to the UK oil and gas assets - both improved productivity and cost control - are critical to the underlying value of Star.
Given the unsurprisingly relatively high operating costs of small fields onshore UK and the significant ele
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