Marianella Foschi
Editor’s note: This profile is part of Hart Energy’s Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
Civitas Resources’ CFO Marianella Foschi helped the Denver E&P more than double in size, scope and production within just a few years.
Foschi is young and savvy, a woman of color with dual degrees in finance and economics, and a coming-of-age story that started in Colombia.
In many ways, she is the future of the U.S. industry. By the time she graduated from high school at 18, Foschi knew she wanted to pursue an education in the U.S., where she found “fascinating” opportunities for someone willing to work hard.
Within 10 years of graduating from The University of Texas at Austin, Foschi had held key finance roles at two public companies, managed debt and equity investing at The Blackstone Group—the world’s largest alternative investment firm with more than $880 billion in assets under management (AUM)—and worked on oil and gas deals at Credit Suisse, where AUM value is upward of $1.5 trillion.
She was finance director, then CFO at Extraction Oil & Gas when the Denver-Julesberg Basin-focused E&P went bankrupt in 2020, along with dozens of other independent producers around the country. Civitas was born of a triple merger of Extraction, Bonanza Creek Energy and Crestone Peak; then two private companies came into the business. Inside of two years, Civitas began trading on the public markets with a $5 billion to $6 billion enterprise value, and Foschi was its finance chief.
But none of this was easy. Nor was it for the faint of heart.
“It takes courage, more than I realized at the time (probably for the better!), to leave behind everything you have ever known and start a new life in another country,” she told Oil and Gas Investor. “As an immigrant, I always had to work harder, and I knew that. Looking for my first job immediately following the 2008 financial crisis didn’t help, as work visa sponsorship budgets were slashed. I was trying to thrive as a non-citizen immigrant, in a highly complex male-dominated industry, immediately following the financial crisis. It doesn’t get much harder than that to start off your career.”
But Foschi had learned the lessons her parents had sought to instill in their family. Her father worked in manufacturing and her mother in the telecom business. She grew up in an environment in which academics were prioritized, and her academic performance helped as she began a career in the U.S.
“My parents both worked very hard and had successful careers, which allowed us to have a better lifestyle than they had for themselves,” she said.
Energy had piqued her interest while she still lived in Colombia, because it was a key source of revenue for the country’s coffers.
“I was attracted by how powerful it is,” she said of the industry. “We take it for granted, but the modern world and the lifestyle we know and enjoy daily is powered by the energy we produce. Access to affordable and reliable energy is a key factor differentiating developed countries from undeveloped ones.”
Challenges = opportunities
As CFO, Foschi has helped usher in a period of tremendous growth at Civitas. Soon after the firm became Colorado’s first carbon-neutral producer, Civitas ventured outside of the state to grow its portfolio in the Permian Basin. Last year,
Civitas spent close to $7 billion to purchase three Permian Basin producers, which doubled its cash flow, more than doubled production and made it a $12 billion enterprise value company.
The company is evolving in other ways, too.
“A few short years ago, we believed 2-mile horizontal wells to be pushing the limits of drilling technology. We just recently drilled and completed 13 4-mile wells [in the D-J Basin],” she said. “In a quest to continue lowering the cost it takes to get hydrocarbons out of the ground, the industry is constantly beating its own records, and that continuous evolution is fascinating.”
That evolution is part of functioning in a cyclical industry, Foschi said.
“The highs are very high, and the lows are very low, and every high and low feels very different from prior iterations. It is a very complex, global industry with lots of macro implications.”
Moreover, the industry’s cyclicality also has implications for the micro side of the business for those who work in it.
“There is no such thing as ‘status quo’ in such a cyclical industry. The industry is always changing and evolving, whether due to technological advancements, global supply/demand dynamics, availability of capital, etcetera, and as industry execs we always have to be ‘on our toes,’” Foschi said. “We have a long-term mindset but have to be responsive to market dynamics that play out along the way.”
For E&Ps and the executives who work for them, new challenges routinely emerge. But Foschi said that both she and Civitas are up to prevailing over any obstacles.
“Challenges always present opportunities to those that know how to capitalize on them.”
Periods of low commodity prices may be a recurring challenge depending on a variety of factors, but Civitas found those cycles “present an opportunity to lower our cost structure, which we have always successfully navigated,” Foschi said. “Separately, the steep rate of change Civitas has had in 2021 and then again in 2023 presented all sorts of challenges, but we were able to remain focused as a management team and prove all the skeptics wrong by putting our head down and executing on our business plan.”
On the personal side, Foschi’s challenge is being a female in a male-dominated industry.
However, she said, “I’ve been fortunate to work at companies that truly value diversity, without lowering the standards to meet a certain quota, which in my view is doing a bigger disservice to females.”
—Deon Daugherty, editor-in-chief