It will pay an interim, fully franked dividend of US$1.09 per share, but has pulled the 1.5% discount as part of its dividend reinvestment policy. Managing director Meg O'Neill pointed out the eight-year high came even as the company now has double the number of shares on offer after the merger with BHP Petroleum June 1.
A year ago shareholders received only 30c for the six months.
It said 33c per share of the $1.1 billion BHP paid Woodside on completion of the merger will be returned to shareholders, or 80%, and 76cps from its profits, which is the top end of its payout range, it said. Gearing rises to 13%.
Underlying profit was $1.82 billion and revenue $5.81 billion, more than double the same time a year ago. Underlying net profit after tax was only $354 million in the six months to the end of June, 2021. Two years ago it reported a record loss of $4 billion.
Production was 55 million barrels of oil equivalent, a near 20% rise.
O'Neill said the record profit was driven by "strong demand for our products".
She said work was "really ramping up on Scarborough and Pluto Train 2" and 25% of pipeline manufacturing was complete.
"The LNG story is now more than just Asia," she said.
Its all-in tax rate in such a high priced environment has risen to 47%, according to CFO Graham Tiver. Its statutory tax rate is now 33%, it paid $824 in income tax for the six months ended June 30 and $424 in petroleum revenue resource tax, plus another $228 in royalties and excise.
"High prices do translate to higher taxes," he said.
Scarborough, fair price?
The company, which reported its first half-year results with one month of production from the BHP Petroleum portfolio added in, has a capital expenditure target of US$9 billion from July this year to the end of 2024 which takes in Scarborough, which it owns 100% of, its Senegal oil project and its 50% share of the Pluto Train 2 development.
Despite underlining the increased demand for LNG, O'Neill conceded sales and purchase agreement talks continue, with nothing more than two agreements made in January last year.
"We continue to talk to a number of players about Scarborough," she said today during an earnings call.
"We're talking to a variety of potential buyers and when we have something that's possible we will communicate to the market."
SPAs are being signed across the world right now.
The sell down of Scarborough was made official over a year ago but there have been suggestions of farm downs of Woodside's then 67.5% stake since 2019 when Saudi Aramco was briefly floated as potential dance partner.
Woodside took BHP's 23.5% stake as part of the merger announced last November.
BHP had an earlier option to acquire an additional 10% but passed.
"We continue to sell down process as we have communicated our goals with the processes to find the right partner at the right price," O'Neill said
"When we reflect on Scarborough, Scarborough is an extraordinarily important asset for Woodside it's going to be a significant contributor to our cash generation, starting in 2026, for 20 years."
"So it really is important that we get the right partner and we get the right price. So we're not going to be scheduled driven with this process.
"We do continue to have discussions with a number of high quality prospective partner and we'll continue those discussions and hopefully learn something but again, we're not going to learn critical assets.
"We had a pretty hard push ahead of FID and then after FID we took a bit of a pause because with that milestone we had significantly de-risked the project.
"So post FID, we've seen players come to us you know and we continue to have interest in the market, particularly as the LNG marketplace changes globally.
Exploration off the table
It has increased its planned spend on exploration from $50 million to between $300 million - $400 million as it inherited legacy commitments from BHP, largely in its heartland of the Gulf of Mexico where it will spud the deepwater Hoodoo-1 this year.
It also has seismic commitments.
The US-born chief executive reiterated her comments on exploration: Woodside under her management will be very strategic in its drilling, looking only to safe areas that can be commercialised quickly or tied back to existing infrastructure.
She said industry had an unfortunate habit of being good at technical successes while failing to mature projects within a reasonable time frame.
It recently handed a permit back to the titles regulator. Just over a year ago it was still trying to find a farminee.
She would not give a time frame for an FID on Trion, another GOM asset of BHP's that sits in Mexican waters.
"We're reviewing the contracting approach, we're looking to get greater confidence in the cost estimates," she said. It shares the project in a 60%-40% split with Pemex, the nation's oil company.
