Business View Magazine - August 2023

50 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 8 ENERPLUS shining example of this successful approach. Enerplus’s chief operating officer and senior vice-president, Wade Hutchings, and its vice- president of people and culture, Pam Ramotowski, recently informed that the company has two big offices: one in Calgary and the other in Denver. “We have operations concentrated in the United States, primarily in North Dakota,” Hutchings said. “We have a long future-development inventory in front of us; over a decade of inventory. We generate attractive free cash flow and provide a competitive return of capital to our shareholders, and we do all of that by maintaining strong financial discipline most often measured by low financial leverage. Our low leverage has provided us the flexibility to acquire assets counter cyclically as well as return capital to shareholders” Hutchings explained that in the 1980’s, the company started out as an oil-and- gas royalty trust, and it has evolved since then. It successfully pivoted into other kinds of oil-and-gas investments. “It ultimately pivoted into most of those investments being in the United States versus Canada,” he said, “and today we now look like most other U.S. or North American resource plate-focused companies. That transition has been quite successful.” He noted that the industry has had a dynamic history. “That’s in some ways kind of an understatement,” Hutchings observed. “The shale revolution kicked off 15 years ago in North America. A lot of companies in our space was rewarded for growing quickly.” Capital was readily available through both debt and equity markets, so many companies deployed all of the profits from their current business and sometimes even more capital to keep growing oil-and-gas production, as he explained. U.S. consumers and global consumers of energy were really among the bigger beneficiaries, and low-cost energy was one of the results. “That is really not a sustainable model for an industry or for an oil-and-gas company, so our company approximately 10 years ago began to operate more prudently than many of our peers, to where we weren’t growing as quickly,” he said, “and we were trying to ensure that we could not get over-leveraged and that