OREANDA-NEWS. Just as their bigger international counterparts have moved quickly and decisively to cut capital expenditure by around 25% in the wake of the recent rout in oil prices, Australia’s oil and gas players have also been tightening their belts and reassessing asset values.

Amid moves that have left some analysts mildly surprised at the speed of the global industry’s reaction to the current downturn, the major Australian players have hit the pause button on spending.

Santos, which dominates the Cooper Basin, Australia’s largest onshore oil and gas province, led the way in December after the stock market had slashed its share price in half due to concerns about its liquidity.

The company, ranked third among local oil and gas producers with output of 54.1 million barrels of equivalent in 2014, has cut its planned capital spending for this year by 25% to A\$2 billion (\$1.6 billion). Santos had originally planned to spend A\$2.7 billion in 2015.

Adelaide-based Santos has also flagged asset sales, at the right price, and is undertaking an impairment review, the results of which will be unveiled later this month.

Woodside Petroleum, the nation’s second-biggest and largest independently listed producer with 2014 output of 95.1 million boe, has already pushed back the timetable for its major growth project, the Browse floating LNG development in Western Australia. Woodside will also unveil revised investment plans and has alerted the market to asset write-downs in the range of \$250 million to \$400 million before tax, when it announces its 2014 results later this month.

In December, Woodside and its partners delayed the planned start of front-end engineering and design work for the Browse project by six months to mid-2015. A final investment decision on Browse, expected to produce 11 million mt/year from three FLNG facilities, has been pushed back from the second half of 2015 and is now targeted for mid-2016.

Diversified resources behemoth BHP Billiton, which is listed in both Sydney and London, is Australia’s largest oil and gas producer. The company pumped 243 million boe in the year to June 30, 2014, a number which is expected to rise 5% to 255 million in fiscal 2015.

BHP Billiton Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mackenzie said last month that the “Big Australian” had moved quickly in response to lower oil prices, and would reduce the number of rigs operating in its onshore US shale business by around 40% by the end of the fiscal year to 16, from 26 previously. Like Woodside, BHP Billiton will provide an updated drilling and development expenditure budget for 2015 when it releases its interim results later this month.

Australia-listed Oil Search signalled cuts to spending early on in the oil price crash, as cash flows from its Papua New Guinea-focused operations plummeted. The company has yet to reveal the quantum of its planned reductions, but has said it was “carrying out a comprehensive review of operating costs and investment priorities, in order to match expenditures with likely future revenue streams and return expectations.”

Oil Search is still also taking a look at asset write-downs, but has conceded it expected these to be in the order of \$150 million to \$200 million before tax. The company produced 19.27 million boe in 2014, but expects that to rise to between 26 million and 28 million boe in 2015 as a full year of output from the ExxonMobil-operated PNG LNG project, where it is a 29% partner, kicks in.

Among the other second-tier producers, Beach Energy has announced a 20% cut to capital expenditure in the second half of the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2015. The move will reduce the company’s full-year capital spending, most of which goes to its core operations in the Cooper Basin, by A\$55 million to between A\$430 million and A\$470 million.

Beach’s Cooper Basin neighbor Senex Energy has meanwhile trimmed its planned spending for the 2015 fiscal year to between A\$85 million and A\$90 million, from an original forecast of A\$100 million to A\$120 million.

Beach and Senex expect to produce around 9 million boe and 1.5 million boe respectively in fiscal 2015.

The news out of Australia echoes what has been heard in other corners of the globe, and it again raises the question whether any geographical area can be immune from the budgetary constraints brought on by the current lower oil prices.