Oil & Gas Price Deck Workbook. SEC, strip, bank, management, and buyer decks compared in one workbook.

Price deck guide

How lender and A&D teams read price decks

Why lender decks differ from market and SEC decks

A price deck is not a single truth about the future. It is an assumption set built for a specific decision. A public reserve filing, a borrowing-base redetermination, an operator budget, and a buyer bid can all use different decks without any one deck being fraudulent or careless. The differences usually come from the purpose of the analysis. SEC reserve disclosure needs a standardized historical price basis so investors can compare proved reserve economics across issuers. A futures strip reflects market pricing for deliverable contracts at a point in time. A bank deck is a credit-risk case used to decide how much collateral value a lender will advance against. A management deck is an internal planning case. A buyer deck is an acquisition underwriting case that includes the buyer's view of commodity risk, cost structure, and exit value.

The mistake in many A&D and lending workflows is treating the deck label as enough. It is not enough to say that an asset is worth $40 million under the bank deck or $55 million under management pricing. The useful question is how the same barrels move across SEC, strip, bank, management, and buyer decks after differentials, basis, hedge value, operating cost inflation, taxes, and capital timing are applied. This workbook is built around that bridge. It puts all five deck types in one table so the variance is visible before the model gets buried in a larger reserve report or bid workbook.

SEC 12-month average vs NYMEX strip vs bank deck

SEC Regulation S-X 4-10 uses a 12-month average price concept for reserve reporting, based on first-day-of-the-month prices unless prices are defined by contractual arrangements. That convention makes the reserve report less sensitive to a single day's spot price and gives public-company reserve disclosures a common framework. It is useful for disclosure comparability, but it is not a live market forecast. In a fast-moving commodity cycle, SEC pricing can lag the current market by a large amount.

The NYMEX strip is different. It is the market curve for futures contracts at a given observation date. The strip changes every day and embeds current supply-demand expectations, storage, interest rates, liquidity, weather, geopolitics, and risk transfer costs. It is useful because it is observable, but the strip is not the same as a lender's willingness to lend. A bank may look at strip pricing and still adopt a lower deck because the loan has downside risk, collateral liquidation risk, and borrowing-base deficiency mechanics. The bank deck is therefore a policy and risk-management input, not just a market quote.

How banks haircut WTI and HH for lender risk

Reserve-based lenders generally care about repayment capacity under stress. A lender deck may trail strip, cap long-term escalation, flatten optimistic out years, or haircut individual commodities. Some lenders also apply a separate borrowing-base haircut after category PV is computed. Those methods are not identical. A lower price deck changes revenue, taxes, economic limit, and PV timing. A post-PV haircut changes collateral value after the model has already generated cash flow. Good credit work separates those two effects. This page focuses on the deck itself, while the linked RBL calculator shows how the resulting PV flows into advance rates and borrowing-base availability.

The Haynes Boone Energy Bank Price Deck Survey is useful because it publishes a lender-market reference point. The default bank deck in this tool reuses the existing Petropt primitive with the Fall 2025 values: $55.44 per barrel WTI for 2026 and $3.20 per MMBtu Henry Hub for 2026. Those numbers are not a custom Petropt forecast. They are a public lender survey default used to make the sample comparison concrete. Users should replace them with their bank's actual deck when preparing a credit package.

Realized differential vs benchmark - basis explained

WTI and Henry Hub are benchmarks, not wellhead prices. A Permian oil barrel, an Eagle Ford condensate barrel, and a Bakken barrel can all price differently because of quality, transportation, gathering, location, and contract terms. The difference between the benchmark and realized price is usually modeled as a differential. If WTI is $60 per barrel and the property realizes WTI minus $3, the oil revenue model should use $57 before royalty and tax effects. The same logic applies to gas basis. Henry Hub may be $4 per MMBtu, but a field-level gas stream can realize a discount or premium after gathering, processing, fuel, shrink, heat content, and index location are considered.

Differentials deserve separate rows because they are often where hidden value leakage appears. A management deck might show a constructive WTI forecast while quietly assuming a narrow differential. A buyer might use the same WTI curve but widen the differential after reviewing contracts. A lender might use the bank deck plus conservative basis to protect against weak takeaway or poor marketing optionality. This workbook keeps benchmark prices and differentials visible so the deck comparison does not hide realized-price assumptions inside a single revenue line.

Hedge mark-to-market - how it interacts with the deck

Hedges do not make the physical deck irrelevant. A swap, collar, or put can change expected cash receipts, protect downside, or create an in-the-money mark-to-market asset. In a borrowing-base context, lenders often evaluate hedge schedules separately because hedge counterparties, maturities, collateral rules, and borrowing-base credit treatment are governed by the loan documents. A favorable hedge can support near-term cash flow even when the bank deck is lower than strip. An unfavorable hedge can cap upside under a buyer's constructive case. The key is to avoid double counting. If hedge value is included as a separate MTM uplift, the base deck should still represent unhedged commodity assumptions.

In A&D work, hedge treatment is negotiated. The buyer may not receive the seller's hedge book. If hedges transfer, the purchase price may reflect hedge value separately from PDP value. If hedges do not transfer, the buyer deck should value physical production without assuming seller hedge protection. That is why a deck workbook should include a hedge note or MTM bridge even when the first version of the model is focused on prices.

Spring vs fall redetermination cycle and deck timing

Many RBL facilities run borrowing-base redeterminations twice per year, commonly in spring and fall. The price deck used in that process matters because production decline, debt balance, hedge roll-off, and commodity prices can shift between cycles. A deck that looked conservative in a spring case may become aggressive by fall if strip moves down or basis widens. Conversely, a bank may keep a conservative long-term deck even when near-term strip rallies because the loan needs collateral protection across more than one season.

Deck timing also matters for acquisitions. A seller may market an asset using a management deck prepared months earlier. A buyer may underwrite with a current strip snapshot. A lender financing the acquisition may use a bank deck that is lower than both. Those timing mismatches explain why the same reserve report can produce multiple value indications. A clean deck workbook lets teams update only the price assumptions and immediately see which deltas are timing-driven rather than engineering-driven.

What management decks look like inside an operator

A management deck is usually built for planning. It may support the annual budget, development schedule, hedge plan, impairment testing, investor communication, or board materials. It can be more constructive than a bank deck because management is planning investment, not setting collateral advance limits. It can also be more conservative than strip if the operator has a lower-risk budget culture or if service cost inflation makes high activity unattractive. The management deck is useful in this workbook because it shows how the operator is actually steering the asset.

When reviewing a management deck, the important questions are practical. Does the deck match the capital plan? Does the gas deck support drilling gassy locations? Does NGL pricing track the product mix? Are differentials based on actual contracts or a generic basin assumption? Does LOE inflation match recent field costs? A management deck with a reasonable headline WTI number can still be weak if basis, NGL uplift, or cost inflation is not grounded in operating history.

What A&D buyer decks look like in M&A

A buyer deck is an underwriting view. It is shaped by the buyer's cost of capital, hedge strategy, operational plan, corporate portfolio, tax position, and exit assumptions. A strategic buyer with nearby infrastructure may use better differentials or lower LOE than a financial buyer. A buyer with a strong hedge program may accept more commodity risk. A buyer pursuing PDP cash yield may use a lower long-term deck and still bid aggressively if near-term cash flow is protected. A buyer pursuing undeveloped inventory may focus more on out-year oil and gas assumptions.

For the seller, the buyer deck is invisible unless the buyer shares it. For a lender or advisor, reconstructing buyer economics requires comparing the buyer's bid against SEC, strip, bank, and management cases. If a buyer's value only clears under an aggressive deck, the diligence questions change. If the buyer value clears even under the bank deck, the asset may have stronger downside support. The workbook gives teams a simple way to isolate that conclusion before building a full transaction model.

Worked example: same asset, five PV10 outputs

Consider a representative PDP asset producing oil, gas, and a modest NGL stream over five years. Under a SEC-style sample deck at $65 WTI and $3.50 Henry Hub, the first-year revenue line is materially different from the bank deck at $55.44 WTI and $3.20 Henry Hub. If the strip deck uses lower oil but higher gas, the asset response depends on its commodity mix. A liquids-rich gas asset may look better under strip than under SEC even if the oil curve is lower. A black-oil asset may lose value quickly under the bank deck because WTI drives most revenue.

The front-end PV10 callout uses the same simple production stream across all decks, applies each deck's realized oil differential and gas basis, adds NGL revenue as a percent of WTI, inflates LOE, and discounts annual net cash flow at 10%. The result is not a reserve report. It is a deck sensitivity preview. If the PV10 difference between SEC and bank is small, the asset is less price-sensitive or has strong gas/NGL offset. If the spread is large, the next step is to run the deck through a full well economics model and then through the RBL borrowing-base calculator.

Public references for this workbook include the EIA Open Data API for public spot price series including WTI, Brent, and Henry Hub, SEC Regulation S-X 4-10, Crowell & Moring discussion of reserve-based energy loans and redetermination mechanics, and Haynes Boone Energy Bank Price Deck Survey materials. The public demo uses static fallbacks for SEC and strip placeholders and the existing Haynes Boone default for the lender deck. It does not copy a private bank model or scrape a restricted data product.