US Large-Cap Upstream Oil Producers Compared (2026)

Five US large-cap upstream oil producers compared, as of 7 September 2026. A point-in-time snapshot, not an evergreen guide. Price deck: base US$70/bbl WTI — the fixed-grid price every underlying analysis takes from the trailing averages (3-month US$83.06, 6-month US$90.50, 12-month US$75.87, to end-August 2026), leaning to the lower grid price because the March–May 2026 Hormuz spike inflates the shorter windows — with every price on the fixed US$60–100 grid run as a scenario, Henry Hub held at US$3.00/MMBtu, and the EIA’s US$69 Brent forecast for 2027 as a 0%-weight cross-check; no spot deck is carried anywhere. Currency: US dollars throughout — all five report in USD, so no FX rate enters this post. Fiscal basis: each company’s fiscal-2025 Form 10-K (Devon’s pro-forma combined with Coterra) plus its Q2 2026 results. Discount rates: 9% for EOG, 10% for the other four, as each analysis runs them. Ratings (archetype-weighted composite, Section 4), in the post’s fixed order: EOG 4.7/5 · Occidental 3.7/5 · Diamondback 4.2/5 · Devon 4.1/5 · Ovintiv 3.6/5. Value reads at the shared deck: EOG Modestly overvalued (wide band) · Occidental Overvalued (wide band) · Diamondback Overvalued (wide band) · Devon Modestly overvalued (wide band) · Ovintiv Modestly overvalued (wide band). Timing spread: all five valuations are dated 7 September 2026 and all five are priced at the 4 September close — the last session before the 7 September Labor Day holiday, which EOG’s analysis labels 6 September, the day it was read — and Occidental’s was re-weighted on 9 September. Refreshed when the underlying analyses are refreshed. For information only, prepared with AI assistance — see the disclaimer at the end.

Five of the largest independent oil producers in the United States, five different answers to how a barrel gets paid for. EOG carries an A-tier balance sheet and sixteen years of premium inventory, and has just bought scale in the Utica. Occidental sold its chemicals arm to Berkshire Hathaway and still carries US$8.5 billion of Berkshire’s preferred ahead of its common. Diamondback runs the widest margin in the group from a single basin. Devon doubled overnight by merging its oil with Coterra’s Marcellus gas. Ovintiv traded its Anadarko position for more Montney. Put all five on one construction and the finding is about the group, not any one of them: at the shared US$70 deck not one of the five is priced at or below its value — every read sits on the overvalued side — and the share price that asks the least of oil, Ovintiv’s at about US$82, belongs to the company with the lowest quality score. The oil prices the five share prices embed run from there to about US$99 for Occidental, and that spread, not the scorecard, is where the peers separate. To screen these five and every other US upstream name on the same fields, go to Metal Pilot.

1. The peer group

The inclusion rule: US-listed, US-domiciled independent upstream producers that are oil-weighted by revenue, above roughly US$15 billion of market capitalisation, and already carry a published single-company analysis on this blog. That admits the five below. It deliberately excludes ConocoPhillips (no published analysis yet — the first candidate for the next edition), Matador, APA and Permian Resources (each a tier below the size threshold), ExxonMobil and Chevron (integrated majors, not independents), and Canadian Natural and Whitecap (Canadian-domiciled and reporting under NI 51-101 — they are compared in the Canadian series). Every column below is one published analysis; this post adds no primary research of its own, and the underlying analyses are listed in Section 6.1.

Every basis difference in the comparison — the drilling-inventory row inside one net asset value, the discount rates, the hedge treatments, the leverage definitions — is consolidated in the comparability ledger, Table 10 in Section 6.1. Read it before trusting any single row.

Table 1. Headline figures comparison, five US large-cap oil producers

Source: each company’s FY2025 Form 10-K and Q2 2026 results, as analysed in the five posts linked in Section 6.1 — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv ; market data per stockanalysis.com (EOG , OXY , FANG , DVN , OVV ) at the per-company close dated in the price row. Columns are ordered by market capitalisation, descending — and that one order is used everywhere in this post: every table, every grid, every bar figure, the quality-against-value plot and the ticker list beside the post. No figure re-sorts itself by its own metric; where a ranking is the finding it is named in the prose and marked on the leading bar in place. One construction governs the operating-cost block: each analysis’s own guidance-year build at the shared US$70 WTI and US$3.00 Henry Hub deck — realized price per boe, less lease operating cost, gathering, processing and transport, production taxes and cash G&A, giving EBITDA per boe; the cash-cost row is the realized price less that margin. Devon’s operating and reserve figures are pro-forma Devon + Coterra, from the joint proxy and its first combined quarter. Per-dollar rows are this post’s own arithmetic — FY2025 production and year-end proved reserves divided by the market capitalisation above, in the group’s canonical units of boe/d and mmboe — and are dated by the prices above. All five book SEC proved reserves at constant trailing prices, so the reserve rows are on one standard. The drilling-inventory row is not rankable: three of the five disclose it in different forms and two not at all. Gaps print n/d and are never imputed. Every basis difference is in the comparability ledger, Table 10, Section 6.1.

Three structural facts recur through the rest of the post. This is a tight large-cap group — 4.5 to 1 on market capitalisation and 2.4 to 1 on proved reserves — and the market-cap order is not the production order: Devon produces the most and ranks fourth by value. The per-dollar rows invert the size ranking: EOG, the largest company, buys the fewest barrels a day per dollar, while Ovintiv, the smallest, buys more than twice EOG’s production and nearly twice its reserves per dollar. And two of the five are growing by acquisition, not by the drill bit — EOG’s +13% is the Encino deal annualising and Devon’s scale is a merger completed in May — which is why Section 2.1 labels the growth it describes.

One company is structurally different from the rest in a way no single row shows. Occidental is the only name with a senior security ahead of its common — Berkshire Hathaway’s 8% preferred, not voluntarily redeemable before August 2029 — and the only one with material production outside North America. Every per-share figure below treats that preferred as a claim ahead of the equity, and Section 2.6 gives it its own row rather than folding it into a leverage number.

2. Operating and financial position

Three metrics decide what a barrel is worth before a price deck enters: how much comes out each year, how much is still in the ground, and what it costs to lift. This section takes them one at a time, puts all three on one grid, and closes on the two things that decide what happens when the price moves — the balance sheet underneath the barrels, and how much of next year’s price each company has already sold.

2.1 Company by company

EOG Resources produced 449.0 mmboe in FY2025 against 5,514 mmboe of SEC proved reserves at 31 December 2025, a 12.3-year proved life — the longest here — on 254% reserve replacement. Its 2026 guidance of +13% total production is inorganic in large part: it is the Encino acquisition in the Utica annualising, not a drilling ramp. Only 42% of its volume is crude oil, and almost all of it is American — the Delaware Basin, the Eagle Ford, the Powder River Basin, the Utica and the Dorado gas play, plus a small Trinidad business. The structural fact: EOG carries about US$3.0 billion of net debt against a US$76.1 billion market capitalisation — the lightest load relative to its size in the group — and roughly sixteen years of premium drilling locations beyond what it has booked. Full detail in the EOG analysis .

Occidental produced 523.4 mmboe, the second-largest volume here, against 4,603 mmboe of proved reserves — an 8.8-year life on 107% organic replacement. Guidance is roughly flat because 2026 capital goes to the balance sheet first. It is the only name with material production outside the US (Oman, the UAE and Algeria), and it no longer owns OxyChem, sold to Berkshire Hathaway in January. The structural fact: Occidental’s net debt is not the whole claim ahead of its common — Berkshire’s 8% preferred sits on top, which is why every per-share figure it publishes compounds as those senior claims are retired. Full detail in the Occidental analysis .

Diamondback produced 336.2 mmboe against 3,618 mmboe of proved reserves, a 10.8-year life on 118% replacement, and guides 2026 about 9% higher. At 54% crude oil it is the most oil-weighted name in the group. Everything it owns is in the Permian — the Midland and Delaware basins of Texas and southeastern New Mexico — including its controlling stake in the minerals company Viper Energy. The structural fact: it is the only single-basin company here, and that concentration is what produces the widest cash margin in Section 2.4 and also what its own analysis names as the risk; it also carries the heaviest net debt in the group at US$12.3 billion. Full detail in the Diamondback analysis .

Devon Energy produced 592.8 mmboe on a pro-forma combined basis — the largest volume in the group — against 4,993 mmboe of proved reserves, an 8.4-year life, the shortest here. That scale is inorganic and new: the all-stock merger with Coterra closed in May 2026 and reported its first combined quarter on 4 August, so the figures come from the joint proxy and its only combined guidance is the Q3 2026 run-rate of 1,660–1,690 mboe/d. Crude is only 34% of volume because the merger deliberately added Coterra’s Marcellus gas. The structural fact: Devon is the only company here whose case rests on integration — landing the merger synergies its own model does not yet count. Full detail in the Devon analysis .

Ovintiv produced 222.7 mmboe against 2,325 mmboe of proved reserves, a 10.4-year life on 150% replacement, and guides 2026 to 226.3–235.4 mmboe. That growth is a portfolio swap rather than a ramp: it bought NuVista’s Montney acreage for cash and shares and sold its Anadarko position. About 34% of volume is crude oil, split between Midland Basin oil and Montney condensate-rich gas in Alberta. The structural fact: it is the only deliberately two-country, two-commodity portfolio here, carrying a Canadian gas-basis exposure no peer has — and a dollar of its market value buys more production and more reserves than a dollar of anyone else’s. Full detail in the Ovintiv analysis .

2.2 Production

Figure 1. Production, absolute and per dollar of market value

Source: Table 1. The two series carry different units, so each is scaled to its own maximum — bar lengths compare within a series, not across the two, and every bar prints its true value. Rows are in the post’s market-cap order. Devon’s absolute figure is pro-forma combined; the per-dollar series is struck at the per-company share price and date in Table 1 and moves with it.

The two series rank the group almost in reverse. Devon leads absolute output at 592.8 mmboe — 2.7 times Ovintiv’s, almost half of it Coterra’s — but on a per-dollar basis Ovintiv leads at 35,819 boe/d per US$1 billion — 2.2 times EOG’s 16,163, the lowest in the group — with Devon second at 29,386. EOG and Diamondback sit together at the bottom of the per-dollar series, barely 350 boe/d apart, so the market pays the most per flowing barrel for the two companies Section 4 rates highest on quality. Whether that premium is earned is Section 3’s question; the point here is that “largest” and “most per dollar” are two different answers. The flip is not an artifact of EOG’s Encino timing: on its Q2 2026 run-rate of 514.7 mmboe a year (ledger row 4), EOG would still sit fourth of five on production per dollar.

2.3 Proved reserves

Figure 2. Proved reserves, absolute and per dollar of market value

Source: Table 1. Each series is scaled to its own maximum because the two carry different units; every bar prints its true value. All five book reserves under SEC rules at constant trailing prices as of 31 December 2025 (Devon’s pro-forma combined), so both series are on one reserve standard and nothing is converted.

The stock read repeats the flow read’s flip, with one change at the top. EOG holds the most proved barrels at 5.51 billion boe, half a billion more than Devon, but per dollar it sits fourth at 72.4 mmboe per US$1 billion, just above Diamondback’s group-low 64.9. Ovintiv again leads per dollar at 136.5 — 1.9 times EOG’s — with Devon second at 90.3. The same two names lead both per-dollar series and the same two trail both — a pattern, not a coincidence, and the one to carry into the valuation: the market is paying for something other than barrels in the ground at EOG and Diamondback, and paying less than the barrels at Ovintiv and Devon. Devon’s second place rests on a pro-forma reserve book rather than one audited year-end figure (ledger row 2), so it is the per-dollar reading here to hold most loosely.

2.4 Operating costs

One construction runs through this subsection and Table 1’s cost block: each analysis’s own guidance-year build at the shared US$70 WTI and US$3.00 Henry Hub deck — realized price per boe, less lease operating cost, gathering, processing and transport, production taxes and cash G&A — giving the EBITDA margin per boe. Because all five underlying analyses now build that line on the same deck, the margin compares for all five; there is no disclosure gap in this block.

Figure 3. Cash margin at the shared base deck

Source: Table 1. Rows are in the post’s fixed market-cap order, not sorted by margin; higher is better, so the leader marker sits on Diamondback in third place. Each margin is the analysis’s own guidance-year EBITDA per boe at US$70 WTI and US$3.00 Henry Hub — a forward build, not the FY2025 reported netback, which each analysis also publishes on its own basis (ledger row 6).

Diamondback’s US$31.91 leads because of both halves of the line: the highest realized price in the group at US$43.20, from the most oil-weighted barrel, and the lowest cash cost at US$11.29. The spread across the group is US$14.80 a barrel, and realized price explains more of it than cost does. Devon and Ovintiv carry cash costs within US$3.60 of Diamondback’s, yet their margins sit about US$12–15 lower because a third of their volume is crude and much of the rest is gas held at the base deck. Occidental is the mirror image: the second-highest realized price at US$42.97, from a barrel that is half oil, but the highest cash cost in the group at US$18.63, on a cost base that spans offshore and international operations. EOG sits between the two shapes — a gassier barrel than Diamondback’s at a cost base only US$1.52 higher. Ovintiv’s US$17.11, the lowest here, is the arithmetic of a gas-weighted Montney barrel carrying the group’s second-highest cost, US$9.00 of it transport and processing to move Canadian gas to market.

The forward construction and the reported one agree at both ends. On each company’s FY2025 netback, on its own basis, Diamondback still leads at US$29.79 a barrel and Ovintiv still trails at about US$21; only the middle three reorder — EOG at about US$26 ahead of Devon standalone at US$24.94 and Occidental at US$23.03 (ledger row 6). The top and bottom of Figure 3 are therefore robust to the choice of construction, and the order of the middle three is the part of the ranking a reader should hold loosely. The margin is also struck before capital: Section 2.6 shows how much of it survives the drilling programme.

2.5 The three metrics side by side

Figure 4. Flow, stock and margin per company

Source: Table 1. Shading is ranked within each column, never across the grid — the three metrics carry different units, so a level 9 means the highest value in that column, not a fixed number. Rows are in the post’s market-cap order. Every cell carries a comparable figure; no company is excluded.

Three columns, two leaders, and one company leading two. Ovintiv leads both per-dollar columns; Diamondback leads the cash margin. Neither leads the other’s column — Ovintiv’s margin is the lowest in the group and Diamondback’s reserves per dollar are the lowest — so the grid splits cleanly into what the market underprices (Ovintiv’s barrels) and what it pays up for (Diamondback’s margin). EOG and Occidental lead none of the three, and EOG sits in the bottom two on both per-dollar reads. Devon is the most evenly placed, second on both per-dollar columns and fourth on margin.

The peers sort into three shapes. Two large, multi-basin companies the market prices for something other than barrels per dollar — EOG for its balance sheet and inventory, Occidental for its deleveraging. One single-basin Permian producer, Diamondback, that pays for its margin with the group’s lowest reserves per dollar. And two gas-heavier combinations the market buys more of per dollar — Devon, a merger still to prove itself, and Ovintiv, a two-country portfolio still carrying its history. What separates the shapes is how much of the barrel is oil and how much the market pays for the balance sheet around it, not geography.

The scale ratio is 4.5 to 1 on market capitalisation and 2.7 to 1 on production; duration runs from 8.4 years (Devon) to 12.3 (EOG) on one SEC standard. Leading a column in this grid is a statement about that column and nothing more; the verdict is Section 5’s.

2.6 Balance sheets and capital returns

Table 2. Balance sheet, credit standing and capital returns

Source: each company’s FY2025 Form 10-K, Q2 2026 results and guidance-year free-cash-flow bridge, as published in the five analyses linked in Section 6.1. Net debt and enterprise value are in Table 1 and are not repeated here. Leverage ratios in the first row are each company’s own and are not comparable — trailing, forward, EBITDA and EBITDAX denominators all appear (ledger row 7) — which is why Figure 5 puts all five on one construction instead. Free cash flow at the base deck and at US$60, and the price at which it turns negative, are each analysis’s own figures; the coverage row compares them with the dividend per share above. Capex ÷ OCF is shown only where an analysis publishes it (EOG, Ovintiv); the three n/d cells are left open rather than derived from other lines. Credit ratings print n/d where the analysis names no rating; no agency rating is carried in from elsewhere. For how these metrics behave through a commodity cycle, see The Commodity Investor, Part 10: Financial Metrics .

Figure 5. Leverage at the base deck and at the bottom of the grid

Source: net debt from Table 1 divided by each analysis’s own forward EBITDA at the US$70 and US$60 columns of its scenario table — this post’s arithmetic on published figures, so all five sit on one denominator. Rows are in the post’s fixed market-cap order; lower is better, so the leader marker sits on EOG. Both series share one unit and one scale. Occidental’s bars exclude its US$8.49 billion preferred: counting it, its ratio is 1.28× at US$70 and 1.65× at US$60, the heaviest in the group (ledger row 8).

EOG enters every stress test with the lowest leverage by a factor of nearly three — 0.22× at the base deck and 0.27× at US$60 — which is what an A-tier rating on a large shale producer looks like. Read at the bottom of the grid rather than at the base, the order of the rest holds but the gaps widen: Diamondback moves from 1.06× to 1.25× and Devon crosses 1.0×. Occidental’s bar is the chart’s most misleading number — 0.78× at US$60 on net debt alone, 1.65× once the preferred is counted — which is why Table 2 carries a row for claims ahead of the common. Diamondback’s Viper minority is the other such claim, and it does not show in net debt at all.

Free cash flow reorders the group. At the base deck Diamondback returns 10.2% of its market value as free cash flow and Devon 9.3%, against EOG’s 6.3% and Ovintiv’s 6.1%. The low deck separates them further: Diamondback’s free cash flow stays positive down to about US$31 WTI, Ovintiv’s turns negative below about US$54 — a US$23 gap, and the widest single difference in this subsection. Every dividend here is covered at both decks, but Ovintiv’s only just at US$60, where US$1.43 of free cash flow per share meets a US$1.20 dividend.

The payout policies run from all of free cash flow to debt first. EOG returned roughly US$4.7 billion in FY2025, all of its free cash flow, and its share count is down about 10% since buybacks began in 2023. Diamondback returned US$3.2 billion against a policy of at least half. Occidental sits at the other end: principal debt goes to US$10 billion before buybacks resume, and its share count rose 1.8% last year as warrants were exercised. Ovintiv’s count is up 8.8% since year-end on the NuVista shares — the honest denominator on any per-share growth claim it makes this year.

2.7 Hedging and price-risk exposure

Table 3. Price-risk position entering 2026

Source: each company’s FY2025 derivative disclosures as published in its own analysis’s NAV bridge — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon , Ovintiv . Rows are in the post’s fixed market-cap order. Coverage is stated as each filer defines it and is not converted or ranked. Only Devon’s analysis re-marks its book at every grid price; EOG’s, Diamondback’s and Ovintiv’s hold their marks flat and Occidental’s is an empty book (ledger row 14), which is why no hedge-mark grid is published (Section 6.1).

The group runs from no hedging to a systematic programme, and only one book changes the answer at the deck. Occidental is unhedged by policy and EOG and Diamondback nearly so — Diamondback’s puts sit US$5–10 below the lowest grid price. Devon’s is the one book that moves its valuation: its mark is worth +US$153 million at US$60 and costs US$1.68 billion at US$100, about US$1.46 a share, which is why Devon’s NAV gains less per step above the base than it loses below it (Section 3.2). Ovintiv’s book is the most structurally necessary — it defends against an oil move and a Canadian gas-basis move at once — but its analysis cannot re-mark it without the strikes.

Each posture has a price the other way. Occidental and EOG keep all of the upside above the base deck and carry all of the downside below it, which is why their free cash flow is the line their own analyses stress. Diamondback’s puts cost little because they sit below the grid and protect only against a collapse. Devon’s collars are the one book in the group that has already sold part of a rally: above about US$71 roughly 30% of its legacy oil is capped, and at US$100 the book costs roughly US$1.46 a share. That is the trade a hedge book makes, and here only Devon has made it at a strike near the base deck.

Four of the five risk registers name the same first risk: a sustained fall in the oil price. EOG’s, Occidental’s, Diamondback’s and Ovintiv’s analyses all lead with it, and Devon’s leads with commodity prices generally, so the first risk does not separate them — the second one does. For EOG it is whether the inventory beyond proved reserves is delivered at EOG’s well costs; for Occidental, the preferred stack Figure 5 quantifies; for Diamondback, single-basin concentration and a deleveraging schedule run through a leadership transition; for Devon, landing US$1 billion of synergies; for Ovintiv, Canadian gas basis and AECO egress. Geography barely separates them: three are wholly or almost wholly US, Occidental’s 16% outside the US is a contract risk, and Ovintiv’s Canadian exposure is a price-basis risk rather than a sovereign one.

3. Asset value

3.1 What the market pays

The primary yardstick is price to net asset value per share, because every company in the group now has one on a comparable construction: each underlying analysis starts from that company’s filed after-tax standardized measure — the SEC present value of its proved reserves after tax — splits it into developed and undeveloped tranches, moves it to the shared deck, and bridges it through net debt and every other claim to the common. Every ratio below is struck at the same US$70 base deck — the base column of Figure 7 — and every underlying analysis runs that same base, so no NAV has been restated. What each NAV adds on top of the reserves is not uniform, and the basis column is where that shows. None of these is a company-published valuation. For the methods behind them, see The Commodity Investor, Part 11: How to Value Commodity Stocks .

Table 4. Value against the yardstick

Source: each company’s valuation section — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv . Prices are per company and dated in the table. Every NAV per share is read at this post’s shared US$70 base deck and at each analysis’s own base discount rate. Price / NAV is the price divided by NAV per share on each analysis’s diluted count; for Occidental that gives 2.15× against the 2.12× its analysis’s NAV bridge prints on basic market capitalisation (ledger row 11). The NAVs differ in estimate content: only Diamondback’s credits a drilling-inventory row — without it its ratio would be 2.55×, the richest here (ledger row 9) — and EOG’s is struck at 9% rather than 10%; at 10% its ratio would be 2.02× (ledger row 10).

Figure 6. Price against net asset value

Source: Table 4, at the per-company price and date shown there. Bars are in the post’s fixed market-cap order, not sorted by ratio — cheap and expensive are read against the dashed parity marker, which sits at 1.0 ÷ 2.39 of the longest bar’s length, on the scale every bar uses. The leader marker sits on Diamondback, the lowest ratio. Diamondback’s ratio carries a drilling-inventory row no peer’s NAV carries (ledger row 9).

Every company trades above the value of its own net assets at the shared deck, and the range is wide: from 1.65× for Diamondback to 2.39× for Devon. Three sit between 1.65× and 1.90× — Diamondback, Ovintiv and EOG — and two above 2.1×, Occidental and Devon. The cheapest ratio needs a caveat to be read at all: Diamondback is the only company whose NAV counts drilling locations it has not booked, so its 1.65× is partly a construction difference rather than a price difference. Take that row out and Ovintiv’s 1.86× is the lowest, with EOG’s 1.90× beside it. The value reads are struck on each analysis’s blended fair value, not on this ratio alone — the blend also weighs cash-flow and per-barrel multiples — which is why Diamondback, cheapest here, still reads Overvalued while EOG, at 1.90×, reads a band better.

3.2 Price sensitivity

Every underlying analysis publishes its NAV per share at each of the five fixed WTI grid prices — US$60 / 70 / 80 / 90 / 100 a barrel, grid version 2026-09 — so the whole group sits on one axis. Each cell is an intrinsic figure that moves only when the model does; lay it against the share price in the source line to read premium or discount. The grid moves price and holds each company’s cost deck as its analysis modelled it: all five hold unit costs flat (ledger row 13).

Figure 7. NAV per share across the price deck

Source: each analysis’s own NAV-per-share grid, read at its base discount rate (EOG 9%, the other four 10%), across the fixed WTI grid of US$60–100, version 2026-09; every cell is a published figure in US dollars per share, none interpolated. Shading is ranked within each row, on that company’s own range across the five columns, so every row reads pale at US$60 and saturated at US$100 — the colour shows each company’s deck sensitivity, not its share-price magnitude. The US$70 base column is outlined, one cell per company. The bracketed figure under each value is that cell’s change against the company’s own US$70 NAV per share, rounded to the whole percent — the leverage read in the prose below, printed cell by cell. Share prices to lay each cell against: EOG US$145.11, Occidental US$60.04, Diamondback US$199.22, Devon US$48.06, Ovintiv US$61.83 (all 4 Sep 2026). Gas is held at US$3.00 Henry Hub in every column for all five; natural gas liquids move with WTI in four analyses and are held in Diamondback’s (ledger row 12). Devon’s cells carry its re-marked hedge book; the other four hold theirs flat (ledger row 14). Every analysis publishes its per-asset model table and a recomputed, not scaled, grid, so no NAV here is flagged as unauditable.

Only two companies’ NAV per share reaches their share price anywhere on the grid: Ovintiv’s at about US$93 and Diamondback’s at about US$95. EOG, Occidental and Devon stay below their prices even at US$100 — EOG’s US$131.32 against US$145.11, Occidental’s US$57.12 against US$60.04, Devon’s US$36.29 against US$48.06 — so on reserves alone their prices ask for oil above the top of the grid. At the low deck Diamondback is the name closest to its NAV (2.24× at US$60), and it holds that position until US$90, where Ovintiv overtakes it — 1.07× against 1.08×, widening to 0.88× against 0.92× at US$100. At the same US$90 column Occidental passes EOG, 1.27× against 1.28×. Devon is the richest against its NAV at every one of the five prices.

Ovintiv carries the most price leverage and EOG the least. One US$10 step from the base lifts Ovintiv’s NAV per share 37.0% and Occidental’s 34.8%, against 24.0% for EOG. Ovintiv’s is operating leverage: the thinnest margin in the group (US$17.11 a barrel at the base, Table 1) means each dollar of oil is a larger share of what it earns. Occidental’s is financial leverage: the preferred, net debt and legacy environmental claims do not move with price, so the equity beneath them swings harder. EOG, with almost nothing ahead of the common, sits at the other end — as a long-life, low-cost, lightly levered name should. Devon is the one company whose sensitivity is not symmetric: +27.5% up one step and −29.3% down, because its hedge book gains at US$60 and gives value back above US$70. All five hold unit costs flat as price rises, so every figure here overstates the leverage at the top of the grid, and it does so equally for all five.

3.3 The oil price each share price assumes

Figure 6 says what the market pays against asset value and Figure 7 how that value moves with the deck. Together they answer a third question: what oil price each share price already assumes.

Table 5. The oil price each share price assumes

Source: the market-implied deck and both flip prices are each underlying analysis’s own published figures, taken unchanged from EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv and never recomputed here — the implied deck is the flat WTI price at which that analysis’s blended value returns exactly the share price shown, and the flip prices are where its value read crosses into the next band. The crossover deck is this post’s own interpolation of Figure 7, between the two printed cells that straddle each share price, and is rounded to the dollar; “above US$100” means the NAV never reaches the price inside the grid. Distances are against this post’s US$70 base. For context, the WTI five-year average is US$79.08 (September 2021–August 2026, EIA), the highest monthly average of the 2026 Hormuz spike US$102.13, and the EIA’s 2027 Brent forecast US$69.

Every share price in this group embeds an oil price above the shared deck — and above WTI’s own five-year average. Ovintiv’s asks the least at US$81.69, 17% above the base and 3% above that average. Occidental’s asks the most at US$99.45, within three dollars of the peak monthly average of this spring’s spike. The US$17.76 spread between them is the widest single difference in the post, and it is the arithmetic version of a simple statement: the value dispersion in this peer group is a disagreement about the price of oil, not about the quality of the companies — the lowest-quality name has the leanest implied deck, and the two richest belong to Solid-rated Occidental and Diamondback.

The two decks diverge, and the divergence is informative. For EOG, Devon and Ovintiv the market-implied deck sits well below the NAV crossover, because the cash-flow and per-barrel legs of each blend value the business more generously than the proved reserves do. Diamondback runs the other way: its NAV reaches its price at about US$95 but its blend not until US$98.86, because its per-barrel leg values its 3.6 billion boe at well below the price. The flip prices say how far each name is from a different verdict. Diamondback needs only US$74.21 to leave the bottom band, the shortest one-band move in the group. The base deck sits 14 cents above Devon’s downward flip, so at US$70 it is effectively on the line between Modestly overvalued and Overvalued. Ovintiv needs US$75.28 to read Fairly valued, EOG US$83.48 and Devon US$87.28; Occidental’s analysis publishes only its first step up, to US$80.97.

4. Rating Scoreboard

The compared companies are the peer set. Every relative dimension — asset quality and scale, cost position, reserves and life, balance sheet, capital allocation — is scored against these five names. That is close to what the underlying analyses did: EOG, Occidental, Diamondback and Devon each benchmarked against peer sets that name at least two of the others (EOG against ConocoPhillips, Devon, Diamondback and Coterra; Occidental against ConocoPhillips, EOG, Diamondback and Devon; Diamondback against EOG, Devon, Coterra, Permian Resources and Matador; Devon against EOG, ConocoPhillips, Diamondback, EQT and Occidental). Ovintiv is the real limitation: its analysis benchmarked it against Devon, APA, Permian Resources, Matador and ARC Resources, a smaller and partly Canadian set. Re-read against these five, its two relative 3s — cost position and capital allocation — hold: Table 1 puts its cash margin last at US$17.11, and its capital-return record trails EOG’s and Diamondback’s (Table 2). No star moves (ledger row 15).

The weighting is the producer/operator archetype, the reference case: the five dominant dimensions carry 15% each and the four base-weight dimensions — growth, management, jurisdiction, ESG — 6.25% each. All nine apply to all five; none is not-applicable.

Table 6. The nine-dimension scorecard

Source: the Metal Pilot Company Scorecard as applied in the five analyses — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv — where every score is substantiated with a sourced figure. Rows are in weight-descending order and carry no dimension numbers — the reordering would put the scorecard’s own numbering out of sequence, and each name identifies its dimension. Every composite is Σ(weight × score). EOG, the highest: 0.15 × (5 + 4 + 5 + 5 + 5) + 0.0625 × (4 + 5 + 5 + 4) = 3.600 + 1.125 = 4.725. Ovintiv, the lowest: 0.15 × (4 + 3 + 4 + 4 + 3) + 0.0625 × (4 + 4 + 4 + 3) = 2.700 + 0.9375 = 3.6375. Diamondback 4.2125, Devon 4.0625, Occidental 3.700. The Delta row is empty in every column, and that is the result rather than an omission: all five source posts publish the weighted composite this table recomputes. Bands: 4.5 and above High quality, 3.5 to below 4.5 Solid.

Balance sheet and liquidity is the row that best explains the composite order, and it contradicts the size ranking. It runs from EOG’s 5 through Devon’s and Ovintiv’s 4 to a group-low 3 for Occidental and Diamondback — the second- and third-largest companies — while the smallest, Ovintiv, sits a point above both. Figure 5 corroborates it: at US$60 EOG runs 0.27×, Ovintiv 0.95×, and Diamondback 1.25× before its Viper minority and Occidental 1.65× with its preferred.

Cost position and capital allocation trade off at the bottom of the table. Diamondback’s cost 5 pairs with a balance-sheet 3; Ovintiv’s cost 3 with a balance-sheet 4. The margin that makes Diamondback the lowest-cost operator was bought with the acquisitions that left it the most indebted, and Ovintiv’s repaired balance sheet sits on the thinnest margin in the group (US$17.11). Capital allocation splits the same way: 5 for EOG, which returned all of its FY2025 free cash flow; 3 for Occidental and Ovintiv.

EOG is the outlier column. Six 5s, no score below 4 and the only High-quality band in the group — the card that puts its composite half a point clear of Diamondback’s. No other company scores 5 on more than three dimensions.

Jurisdiction and ESG are the two rows where the cross-border names give up a point. Jurisdiction reads 5 for EOG, Diamondback and Devon, all but wholly US-onshore, and 4 for Occidental and Ovintiv — the only two with material production outside the United States, in the Middle East and North Africa for one and in Alberta for the other. ESG and license to operate reads 4 across the group except Ovintiv’s 3, the only sub-4 base-weight score in the table. Together they cost Ovintiv an eighth of a point — small, but the rows a reader weighting sovereign and regulatory exposure should read first.

Reserves, life and replacement discriminates only at the top. EOG’s 5 rests on the longest proved life here (12.3 years) and 254% replacement; the other four all score 4 across lives from 8.4 to 10.8 years. Devon’s 4 on the shortest life in the group is carried by its 117% organic replacement, and it is the score in this row most exposed to the pro-forma basis of its reserve book (ledger row 2).

Growth and optionality is fully unanimous — 4, 4, 4, 4, 4 — and discriminates nothing. Each company earns its 4 for a different reason (EOG’s Utica, Occidental’s carbon option, Diamondback’s Viper, Devon’s synergies, Ovintiv’s Montney), but the numeral is identical and the row carries 6.25% of every composite without separating anyone. It stays because an absent dimension reads as an oversight. Management and governance is the next closest: four 4s and EOG’s 5.

The ranking survives a different weighting. Recomputed as a plain unweighted mean of the nine dimensions, every rank holds — EOG 4.67, Diamondback 4.22, Devon 4.11, Occidental 3.78, Ovintiv 3.67. The closest contest under the archetype weighting is Occidental against Ovintiv for fourth, 3.700 against 3.6375, a 0.0625 margin; equal weights widen it to 0.11. The order is a read on the companies, not on the weights.

5. Summary

Table 7. Quality × Value

Source: composites from Table 6, ratios from Table 4, flip prices from Table 5 and each analysis’s own conclusion, and the non-price triggers from each analysis’s verdict and catalysts — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv . The per-company price behind each ratio and its date are in Table 4. The NAVs vary in estimate content — Table 4’s basis column states each — so the ratio column compares construction, not certainty. Verdict language is the standard Quality × Value matrix of the Metal Pilot Company Scorecard, unchanged; both Modestly overvalued and Overvalued fall in its Overvalued column. The “(wide band)” qualifier travels with every read: each analysis’s bear-column blend sits 44% to 70% below its share price.

Figure 8. Quality against value

Source: Table 7. The y-axis runs the fixed 1-to-5 composite range so peer groups stay comparable across this series; the x-axis is price to NAV at the US$70 base deck, ascending, so cheap is on the left. The x-axis starts at 1.0× parity, the left edge: every company trades above its own net asset value. The shaded bands are the quality bands — High quality at 4.5 and above, Average and below under 3.5. Value bands are not drawn, because each value read is struck on its analysis’s blended value rather than on this ratio. The price behind each ratio and its date are in Table 4. Every point is on the same footing; the dominance screen below reads these two coordinates.

The value axis sits entirely on the overvalued side, and that is the headline of this edition. Three names read Modestly overvalued and two Overvalued, all with the wide-band qualifier, so the matrix puts EOG in “great company, rich price” and the other four in “full”. The undervalued and fairly-valued columns are empty, and so is the low-quality row. In the August edition all five read Fairly valued; since then every underlying analysis has been rebuilt on its filed standardized measure rather than a corporate cash-flow model, and struck on the September grid. The finding is not that the market mispriced quality inside this group — it is that it pays an oil price above the one the reserve reports are struck at, for all five at once. The discrimination the matrix loses is in Section 3.3, where the same five spread across US$17.76 of implied oil.

The dominance screen. Comparing the composite out of 5 against price to NAV as published — no normalisation, no blended score — three of the five are beaten by a peer on both measures at once:

• Occidental (3.7/5, 2.15×) is beaten by EOG (4.7/5, 1.90×) and Diamondback (4.2/5, 1.65×). It still has the group’s second-highest realized price, the only international cash engine and a first-mover carbon-capture option no peer can match.
• Devon (4.1/5, 2.39×) is beaten by EOG and Diamondback. It is still the largest producer here, has the second-highest free-cash-flow yield at the base deck at 9.3%, and has US$1 billion of synergies its NAV does not yet count.
• Ovintiv (3.6/5, 1.86×) is beaten by Diamondback. It still buys the most production and reserves per dollar of any name here, and its share price asks the least of oil.

What survives is EOG and Diamondback — a set, not a ranking: EOG is the quality end at 4.7/5 and Diamondback the value end at 1.65×. Diamondback’s place on the frontier rests on the one NAV row no peer carries: without its drilling-inventory row its ratio would be 2.55× and EOG would beat it on both axes, leaving Ovintiv as the value end. The shortlist comes out the same way if the screen uses each analysis’s implied return on its blend instead of price to NAV (Section 6.1, choice 4). Both are real results — they say the value end of this frontier is decided by how unbooked locations are counted. The screen cannot order the two names it leaves standing, and none of the three it removes is a bad company.

The value-trap quadrant is empty, and the nearest thing to one is Ovintiv. No company here is cheap on its own read — nothing reads undervalued — but Ovintiv pairs the group’s lowest composite with its leanest implied deck and the second-lowest ratio. What is priced in is US$81.69 oil, three dollars above the five-year average. What would have to go right is specific: Montney oil growth landing at 5% or more a year, and the Canadian gas basis holding. What goes wrong is equally specific: its free cash flow turns negative below about US$54, the dividend is only just covered at US$60, and its NAV falls 37% per US$10 step down — the most of any name here. A lean implied deck on the thinnest margin in the group is not a bargain waiting to be recognised; it is the smallest cushion.

Which name answers which question. The screen cannot say which of the five suits a given reader; this table does — one row per question, the name leading one published figure, and what leading it costs. Nothing is weighted, scored or ranked.

Table 8. Which name answers which question

Source: every figure in this table is printed in the table or figure named beside it, and traces to the five analyses — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv ; nothing here is computed, weighted or ranked. The full fixed question set is answered. The one addition a hedging group can earn — most protected at the low deck — is dropped, because only Devon’s analysis re-marks its hedge book across the deck, so the question has no comparable answer in this group (Section 6.1). This is a map of preferences, not a pick — a name in a row leads that row’s metric and nothing more.

The consensus cross-check.

Table 9. Analyst consensus against this analysis

Source: stockanalysis.com analyst consensus (EOG , OXY , FANG , DVN , OVV ) as read by each underlying analysis on 7 September 2026, against the per-company close shown. Rows are in the post’s fixed market-cap order. Implied upside is against the price and date in the same row; no target carries a date of its own in the underlying analyses. The market-implied deck each price embeds is in Table 5 and is not repeated here.

Every target sits above the current price, and the equal-weight average of the five implied upsides is 14% — and the disagreement with this analysis is about the deck. Table 5 already puts a number on that disagreement: every share price here embeds US$81.69 to US$99.45 oil against a US$70 base, so a target above the price underwrites a deck higher still. Devon is where the gap is widest — the only Strong Buy and the largest implied upside at +23.9%, against a read that sits 14 cents from Overvalued at the base deck — because a target that credits the US$1 billion of synergies is pricing something its analysis deliberately leaves out. Ovintiv is where the two views meet: the smallest Street upside at about 8% and the leanest implied deck. Coverage is broad for all five, at 24 to 30 analysts, so no discount here persists for lack of attention.

What this post is not. The shortlist is a set of two names no peer beats on both axes — it is not a shopping list, it is not ordered, and it says nothing about which suits a particular reader. The decision map is a map of preferences, not a set of recommendations: a name leading a row leads that metric and nothing else. The three dominated names are not names to avoid; each was out-argued on two coordinates and each carries a real strength named above. And a value read on the overvalued side is not an instruction to sell — it is a statement that at a US$70 deck the arithmetic does not support the price, together with the oil price at which it would. To run the same nine dimensions, cost lines, reserve metrics and valuation ratios across the whole US upstream universe rather than these five, explore Metal Pilot.

6. Sources, methodology & disclaimer

6.1 Sources, methodology & data vintage

This post contains no primary research of its own. It is a synthesis of five single-company analyses published on this blog, each built from that company’s fiscal-2025 Form 10-K and Q2 2026 results; its contribution is putting all five on one construction. The underlying analyses, with every figure sourced and every scorecard score substantiated:

• EOG Resources (EOG) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.7] — valuation as of 7 September 2026
• Occidental Petroleum (OXY) — Stock Analysis 2026 [3.7] — valuation as of 7 September 2026, re-weighted 9 September
• Diamondback Energy (FANG) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.2] — valuation as of 7 September 2026
• Devon Energy (DVN) — Stock Analysis 2026 [4.1] — valuation as of 7 September 2026
• Ovintiv (OVV) — Stock Analysis 2026 [3.6] — valuation as of 7 September 2026

For the market backdrop these companies operate in, see Oil — A Complete Market Guide . The sibling comparisons in this series are Canadian-Listed Oil Producers Compared (2026) and, for the gas side that shapes Devon’s and Ovintiv’s volumes, US Upstream Natural Gas Producers Compared (2026) . No ranking page for US oil producers exists on this blog yet, so there is none to link here.

Market data and analyst consensus are from stockanalysis.com , sourced from S&P Global Market Intelligence, at the per-company closes in Table 1 as read by each underlying analysis on 7 September 2026. The WTI trailing averages behind the price deck — 3-month US$83.06, 6-month US$90.50, 12-month US$75.87, and the five-year average of US$79.08 — are from the U.S. EIA Cushing spot series to end-August 2026; the forecast carried as a 0%-weight cross-check is from the U.S. EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook (August 2026).

The comparability ledger. Every place the one-construction rule bends, with the direction of the bias:

Table 10. Comparability ledger

Source: this analysis, from the disclosures cited in Tables 1–5 and the assumptions box of each underlying analysis — EOG , Occidental , Diamondback , Devon and Ovintiv . Each row is cited by number from the table or figure it qualifies.

Methodology — the choices, and what each costs.

1. One construction for unit economics — each analysis’s guidance-year EBITDA per boe at the shared deck. Buys: five margins that mean the same thing, with no disclosure gaps. Costs: it is a forward build, not a reported result, and it discards the FY2025 netbacks each company headlines (ledger row 6).
2. Every figure is read from a published analysis. This post’s own arithmetic is limited to the per-dollar rows, the cash-cost row (price less margin), Ovintiv’s share-count change, Figure 5’s leverage ratios and the Figure 7 crossovers, each labelled where it appears. Buys: every number traces to a source post. Costs: where an analysis publishes no line — three capex ratios, three credit ratings, two inventory lives — the cell prints n/d.
3. Price to NAV as the primary yardstick, struck at the shared US$70 base column. Buys: one number per company, already bridged through its own debt and claims. Costs: the NAVs differ in estimate content — Diamondback’s inventory row above all — which Table 4’s basis column states and no single ratio can express.
4. The dominance screen uses price to NAV as the value axis. Buys: the same axis as Section 3.1 and Figure 8. Costs: the value reads are struck on each analysis’s blend, and on implied return to the blend the screen keeps Ovintiv rather than Diamondback beside EOG (Ovintiv −18.2%, EOG −25.3%, Diamondback −35.1%). Section 5 states both.
5. The base deck is the fixed-grid price the underlying analyses chose from the trailing averages, never a spot quote. Buys: a price axis that lines up column-for-column with each analysis’s own grid. Costs: at US$70 the base sits 11.5% below the five-year average, which is a large part of why all five reads land on the overvalued side.
6. Canonical units for the per-dollar rows — boe/d for flow and mmboe for stock, per US$1 bn of market capitalisation. Buys: the flip between absolute and per-dollar scale. Costs: every such row is dated by the price behind its denominator.
7. The producer/operator archetype weighting. Buys: composites every source post reproduces. Costs: an editorial choice; Section 4 shows the order survives equal weights.
8. The decision map is a map, not a score. Buys: a question leads to a name, with its cost beside it. Costs: a row can be misread as a pick, which is why every row carries a cost clause.
9. A comparison-specific figure set, with one optional figure not built. Every figure is drawn in the page itself, with its values printed on it. The hedge-mark grid is not published: only Devon’s analysis re-marks its hedge book across the deck, so a grid would print four constant rows and one real one. The same read is in Table 3 and ledger row 14. No cost-stack figure is built either, because the margin, not its components, is what separates these five.

This is a dated artifact. Like the analyses it draws on, it carries market capitalisations, enterprise values and valuation multiples that go stale quickly — the deliberate deviation from this blog’s normal practice of keeping company posts free of point-in-time valuations. Every such figure is dated, and the whole post is refreshed when the underlying analyses are. Data as of 7 September 2026.

Timing spread. All five valuations are dated 7 September 2026 on the same base and grid; all five are priced at the 4 September close (EOG’s analysis labels it 6 September, the Sunday it was read), and Occidental’s re-weighting on 9 September moved its blend and implied deck but not its value read. No company has reported since its analysis was struck.

Provenance: EOG Resources, Inc. — 10-K Filing — 2025; Occidental Petroleum Corporation — 10-K Filing — 2025; Diamondback Energy, Inc. — 10-K Filing — 2025; Devon Energy Corporation / Coterra Energy Inc. — Joint Proxy Statement/Prospectus & 10-K Filings — 2025–2026; Ovintiv Inc. — 10-K Filing — 2025.

6.2 Disclaimer & disclosure

This comparison is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice; do your own research or consult a licensed advisor. It is a point-in-time snapshot as of 7 September 2026 — prices, multiples, targets and value reads all move. Reserve and net-asset-value figures are estimates under SEC conventions, not market values. The ratings and verdicts are analytical reads, not buy or sell instructions: a ranking is not a recommendation to buy the top of it, a name removed by the dominance screen is not a name to avoid, and an overvalued read is not an instruction to sell. Prepared with AI assistance from company filings, the U.S. EIA and market data, and reviewed; verify before acting. The author holds no position in any of the five companies.