This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper OTC 26061, “Aligning Diverse Portfolio and Execution for Capital Efficiency,” by Martijn Dekker, Shell; Paul McNutt, ConocoPhillips; Greg Roder, Woodside Energy; Stuart Wheaton, Tullow Oil, and Sandeep Khurana, Granherne, prepared for the 2015 Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, 4–7 May. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Aligning a diverse portfolio with an organization’s execution capabilities and capacity is imperative in achieving capital efficiency and meeting shareholder expectations. Constructing a portfolio that provides both cash flow and long-term growth is a challenge. There should also be a direct connection of the organization’s strategy with its investment proposition. Should companies mitigate risk by diversification across countries, asset types, or play types? Or, alternatively, should they be a focused “pure-play” organization, leaving the investment diversification to the investors themselves? Industry Trends As complicated as the oil and gas business may seem at times, at its core it is quite simple. It begins by acquiring prospective acreage and exploring to find resources. To realize the value, produced oil and gas then has to be connected to the markets. But connecting the three links of this process (Resource/Develop/Market) alone is insufficient. There are external factors, such as interacting with host governments, communities, regulators, or public policy, that must be satisfied. It is only when these factors are combined appropriately, and their impacts understood, that value can be realized. All these aspects must be considered in constructing an oil and gas portfolio. From a historical perspective, the gaps that exist between finding the resource, developing it, and delivering it to the market for consumers have widened. Portfolio Composition Significantly different net-cash-flow profiles (Fig. 1) apply to different oil plays such as deep water and ultradeep water, unconventional, oil sands, and gas plays such as those requiring integrated liquefied natural gas (LNG), floating LNG, or the emerging coal-seam-gas (CSG) conversion to LNG. These differences make construction of a portfolio mix, and arriving at its risk weighting, a challenge.