Close to $50 billion was added to the Australian Securities Exchange yesterday after shedding $30 billion on Wednesday, with energy, financials, materials, healthcare and technology sectors all rising as investors appeared to embrace US election winner Donald Trump's vision to re-energise his country's economy.

Origin Energy (up 4.23%), Santos (4.07%), AWE (3.85%), Woodside Petroleum (3.01%) and Oil Search (2.8%) all rose yesterday, but Beach was the clear leader in Australian energy stocks after its shareholders approved financial assistance for the acquisition of Drillsearch and officially voted in three new directors.

One of the key messages yesterday from Kay, who was poached from Oil Search, was the need to go back onto the front foot on exploration.

This could prove prescient given RBC Capital Markets recently downgraded its recommendation on Beach as "further oil exploration success or a value accretive acquisitions are the keys to further relative outperformance".

"Exploration success is an obvious necessity for a company like Beach," Kay said.

"The outcomes of drilling campaigns help replace the reserves we produce, and contribute to our growth trajectory.

He said a greater portion of discretionary capital expenditure will be directed toward exploration drilling on the Western Flank in 2016-17.

"Our 14 operated wells this year include exploration, appraisal and development wells, and a new focus on Birkhead, Patchawarra and Pooolowanna play types," Kay said.

Of the wells planned, nine are exploration wells, the underlying objective of which is to pursue what Beach considers the best prospects of material flow-on drilling.

Beach is also undertaking two major infrastructure projects to mitigate the naturally declining profile of its oil and gas fields and to increase its production capacity.

It is doing this by increasing fluids handling capacity by 60% at the Bauer facility to give headroom for an increasing water cut and new discoveries, while a gas compression project is also underway at the Middleton facility to mitigate gas reservoir depletion by enabling greater throughput from the fields around the hub.

Yet there was still plenty of ground to make up, as Beach chairman Glenn Davis reminded shareholders yesterday that Beach's average realised oil price was down a third in the 2016 financial year from 2014-15 and down 52% from the highs of 2013-14 before the oil rout started.

Beach enjoyed a record year of production, with 9.7 million barrels of oil equivalent produced thanks to commissioning of new facilities at the Pennington and Stunsail fields, various field development projects and additional production following the Drillsearch Energy takeover.

From that transaction, Davis said the new-look Beach was benefiting from annual pre-tax cost savings of about $40 million.

Kay said Beach's operated production accounted for 41% of its total production, which was up on last year, and this would increase again in 2016-17 due to its 100% ownership of PEL 91 and PEL 106 courtesy of the Drillsearch merger.

Though its well count was down it enjoyed a 75% exploration success from 16 wells including five new gas field discoveries from a five-well program in Queensland's Windorah Trough, with an overall success rate of 90% from 51 wells.

The company had also lowered its recordable incident rate by 76% with only one lost time injury recorded.