FORT WORTH, Texas—BPX Energy is taking an approach that’s “a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll” to develop, and then redevelop, its most prolific wells in the South Texas Eagle Ford Shale.

“I like to think about BPX as a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll,” said Shawn Holzhauser, vice president for development at BPX, during Hart Energy’s SUPER DUG 2025 Conference & Expo on May 15.

“We try to have the entrepreneurial spirit of all the folks in this room with the U.S. onshore trying to drive the industry, as well as bringing all the technical excellence and support from BP, whether it's engineering centers of excellence, supply or trading and shipping businesses.”

BPX, the onshore U.S. subsidiary of U.K.-based supermajor BP, operates in the Permian Basin, South Texas Eagle Ford and the Haynesville shales.

Parent company BP has been in the news most recently as the subject of a rumored merger with Shell, a potential deal that neither company has addressed publicly.

Hart Energy Editorial Director Darren Barbee asked Holzhauser during his presentation to address the speculation that Shell is courting BP. But there was no “tea to spill,” the executive said.

“I think what's important to BPX is, we've got great assets, and we need to focus on those assets, delivering cashflow back to the business. That's our job,” Holzhauser said. “It's Murray’s [Auchincloss], our CEO's job to figure out how to deal with all those big players like Shell and Exxon.”

BPX’s game plan is more straight-forward: developing its shale assets to capitalize on what’s recoverable at each location with a bespoke approach. The commercial strategy involves self-sourcing as much product as possible and then standardizing results across the business.

“We want to learn quickly and then quickly standardize this, eliminate uncertainty and financial risks,” he said.

BPX also embraces innovation and technology.

“We trial and then scale. Once we know it's going to work, we scale it for maximum value potential,” Holzhauser said, and that leads to how the firm employs technology.

“This goes into change management, how selective we’re with the right technologies to ensure success. What we've developed over the past three years is about a dozen proprietary workflows that are unique within BPX, and we continue to share and leverage those learnings with the other teams as we go forward,” he said. “This allows us to better understand our well planning, design processes and execution.”

The X factor

The ‘X’ in BPX stands for “exceptionality,” Holzhauser said.

“I think we've got exceptional people, exceptional vision and an exceptional opportunity to put it all together. I truly want to explore and see how good an onshore company can be.”

The commercial mindset comes from an entrepreneurial spirit, reflecting the “little bit country” attitude, he said. Leveraging and then scaling technology represents the side of the business that is “a little bit rock and roll.”

“It is deeply embedded in us to do both of these and hold them in unison; that's really what we want to drive into the business.”

In the Eagle Ford, BPX has roughly 450,000 acres spanning LaSalle and Cullen counties, Texas, with 1,400 wells that produce just shy of 200,000 boe/d.

“We’re super fortunate to have the Eagle Ford asset in our portfolio,” Holzhauser said.

The company can leverage its diverse commodity set to weather the volatility of oil and gas prices and remain commercial. BPX last year anticipated tariff and pricing issues on the horizon, so leadership sourced its steel to the U.S. and built up and inventory.

“We're really not subject to those constraints or tensions in the market right now. I think in the longer term, all that stuff will play itself out. We're super happy to keep investing and thanks to the great procurement team we have, we're able to get ahead of all that.”

BPX also intends to deploy EOR technology to redevelop its drilling strategies in mature assets.

“Here’s a place where we're thinking about the long term of the asset and how do we get EUR to work because we don't want to be here for five or 10 years. We want to be here for 20 years, 30 years, and I think there's plenty of resource to do that.”

BPX, Devon JV ends

BPX and Devon Energy dissolved their legacy JV in February, essentially splitting the assets along the lines of what each brought to the arrangement. BPX came away with a quarter billion-dollars; its modeling suggests up to 30% recovery rates using EOR. An EOR project in the Eagle Ford is in the works now and another one will begin during the first half of 2026.

In the Blackhawk part of the asset, BPX is seeing solid returns of almost 100% rate of return through recompletions. In the Eagle Ford, the company has more than 400 refrac candidates.

“We're really, really excited about that project and what that's going to bring in the future. Just to kind of round that out with the whole discussion on recovery factors, we think combining primary development, drilling and redevelopment drilling and then refrac-ing, we think we can get all the way up to 25% recoveries from the assets,” he said.

“It's really critical for us to continue to extract that value out of there. And then spend a little bit of time on redevelopment drilling, because I think this is a great example of where we are trying to be entrepreneurial—a little bit country—and really technically savvy—a little bit rock and roll.”

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