Jon McKenzie, Cenovus chief executive, in St. John's in November, 2025.Paul Daly/The Canadian Press
Cenovus Energy Inc. CVE-T reported multiple production records across its sites in 2025, despite lower commodity prices, averaging 834,000 barrels a day over the course of the year.
That’s 4-per-cent higher than in 2024, and excludes the roughly 100,000 barrels a day Cenovus will add to its books via MEG Energy, which it bought in October for $8.6-billion after a five-month bidding war with Strathcona Resources Ltd.
The heart of that deal was consolidating the Christina Lake oil-sands area in northeastern Alberta, Cenovus chief executive Jon McKenzie told analysts on a Thursday morning earnings call. The MEG and Cenovus operations are so near each other, Mr. McKenzie previously told The Globe and Mail, that “you can really throw a rock from our plant to their plant.”
Cenovus has said that merging the two assets would lead to operational savings, or synergies, of at least $400-million a year by 2028. It moved quickly to begin cutting corporate, human-resources and finance expenses after the deal closed on Nov. 15, Mr. McKenzie said Thursday and is on track to save $100-million-to-$150-million this year and next.
Cenovus beats profit estimates on higher production
It is estimated that the combined company will produce more than 850,000 barrels a day from Alberta’s oil sands by 2028, which would put Cenovus in a position to potentially unseat long-time industry leader Suncor Energy Inc. as the single largest producer in the region.
While the addition of MEG’s assets has greatly strengthened Cenovus’s heavy-oil portfolio, Mr. McKenzie said Thursday, there is more to do.
Cenovus will this year focus on improving operations at the site, including establishing reservoir reserves before it begins redeveloping the asset next month.
The initial step will be drilling 40 redevelopment wells to get to bitumen that sits below current production wells. First oil at the sites is expected from that change in the second quarter of this year, with a notable boost to production forecast for the remainder of 2026 into 2027, said Andrew Dahlin, Cenovus’s chief operating officer.
The second step will be developing longer wells that are spaced more widely apart, which is further expected to increase barrels from the site, then making improvements to the plant to push through more volume.
Cenovus completes MEG purchase, bringing end to takeover battle
Cenovus is also developing an expansion project for the facility to bring production to more than 150,000 barrels per day by 2027 or 2028. In the long term, it is also figuring out how to better tie operations between the MEG site and its existing assets in Christina Lake, Mr. Dahlin said.
Mr. McKenzie said that Cenovus hasn’t lost sight of the bigger picture “and the view of: How do we bring more synergy forward? How do we go beyond the $400-million that we articulated in the business case? We’re comfortable there’s a lot more there, and that’s what we’re working on now.”
Over on the other side of the country, Cenovus has completed the construction and installation of a massive fixed drilling platform for the expansion of the West White Rose oil field off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
The company is in the final phase of commissioning the project, living quarters are open and staff are being moved from a hotel vessel to fully staff the platform. That’s despite a particularly challenging storm season in the North Atlantic that saw waves as high as 17 metres and winds up to 170 kilometres an hour.
Cenovus had forecast first oil from the FPSO in the second quarter of this year. Mr. McKenzie said weather disruptions will make that timeline tight, but said “the final push is on, we’ve increased the number of people on the platform, and we look to be drilling very, very shortly.”
For the fourth quarter, Cenovus reported a profit of $934-million, up from $146-million a year ago. The energy company says the profit amounted to 50 cents per share for the quarter, up from seven cents per share a year earlier.
Cenovus sites produced 917,900 barrels a day of oil in the fourth quarter of 2025, an increase of 5 per cent from the same quarter in 2024.
With a report from The Canadian Press
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Cenovus has completed a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The company completed a fixed drilling platform there.