Chevron (CVX +4.8%) shoots to the top of today's Dow gainers after Hungarian energy firm MOL said it is buying CVX's stake in the BP-operated Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli oilfield in Azerbaijan for $1.57B, Eurasia Diary reports citing a foreign news outlet.
The sale includes the 1,800-km Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which transports crude from the Caspian Sea through the Caucasus mountains to Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
CVX shares also enjoy support from a two-day surge in crude oil prices to multi-week highs amid further signs of progress in U.S.-China trade talks.
The ACG field, which contains ~3B barrels of reserves, produced 584K bbl/day of crude last year.
Credit Suisse analyst William Featherston says the Caspian sale takes CVX to the midpoint of its targeted $5B-$10B in 2018-20 asset sales.
Featherston cuts his 2020-21 CVX earnings forecast on news of the sale, citing the loss of production and pipeline income, but says the extra cash should help the company accelerate its share repurchases over the near-term.