Recognition of losses to impairment of assets: impairment in oil operation and production assets

Losses to impairment of assets are placed in the context that assets cannot be registered above their recoverable amount, through use or sale of by the company. In the oil sector, the representativeness of exploration and production assets is relevant and meaningful. Therefore, the practice in the industry is not new and dates of the 70’s. Moreover, oil companies are obligated to publish additional information about their typical activities. Thus, the purpose is to analyze how this additional information about oil exploration and production are related by oil companies to impairment losses of E&P assets. We conducted a regression with panel data, using 212 observations of 53 oil companies for the period from 2005 to 2008. Findings suggest that the variables: price per barrel, reserves proved undeveloped, reserves x production ratio, development expenditures incurred, valuation standard of reserves and earnings per barrel are relevant to the recognition of loss to the impairment of E&P assets. The scarcity of empirical research allows importance to this study, but it has limitations and its findings remain restricted to the sample, variables and econometric tool used.