Burlington Resources Inc., which will continue to focus its sights on North American natural gas, on Wednesday raised its cumulative production growth target to 20% through 2006. With $4/MMBtu natural gas prices, it also expects to see per-share growth of 10%.

CEO Bobby Shackouls and his management team laid out the company’s ambitious multi-year business plans during a day-long investor conference in Houston on Wednesday. North American gas is a “mature, slow-growth business,” he said, but he also emphasized that the U.S. and Canadian basins offered high returns.

“The key is to successfully navigate through the price cycles,” said Shackouls. “We do not view recent prices as required for our success. For the next few years…the three-to-five-year horizon, we expect to see gas ranging around $4-5/MMBtu. And we believe we’ve geared Burlington Resources to operate profitably at $4/MMBtu. Since prices have operated well above that for the past year or so, we’ll have above mid-cycle returns.” Shackouls said, “we’re not predicting $4 prices for the market, but for Burlington Resources. It helps us maintain our focus on controlling costs.”

Gas prices will be “considerably volatile as we go forward,” but the company will remain “focused on growth and returns.” With $4/MMBtu prices, Burlington has set a target of 10% per share/year. “If prices turn out higher, we expect cash flow and per share growth to be higher as well.”

Shackouls noted that the company realigned itself in 1999 and decided to get rid of the investments that weren’t working. “The culture of cost focus is essential to our success.” And those changes have led to an environment in which Burlington “clearly believes” it can succeed.

Addressing the company’s operational plans, Randy Limbacher, COO, said most of Burlington’s production growth is expected to come from several recently finished or soon-to-be-completed international development projects and from the North American properties. Worldwide, Burlington has 11.8 Tcfe of proved developed and proved undeveloped reserves. It also has identified a drilling inventory worldwide of 6.5 Tcfe, said Limbacher.

Using what Burlington calls the “Basin Excellence” model, Limbacher explained that the key to the company’s production success has been through high local market share, strong information and data, access to infrastructure, good relationships with relevant stakeholders and alignment of the core skills with competencies. “It makes a sustainable difference and gives us a tremendous advantage.”

North America, he said, “will continue to be the focus for our company. We have generated profitable growth — in spite of the fact that North America is very mature — because of our inventory.” He said the “key is, to do the deals that are doable.”

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