Jameson Berkow

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Three years into his tenure as CEO of Encana, Doug Suttles is still cleaning up the mess he was handed in 2013.

The Calgary-based energy producer sold some of its property in northeastern Alberta on Tuesday to Birchcliff Energy for $625 million, marking the ninth major asset sale spearheaded by Suttles since he took the top job in June 2013. In total, Encana has generated roughly $10 billion through divestitures over the past three years.

Suttles spent more than two decades with BP, where he’s best remembered as the British company’s public face at briefings on the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, before leaving to run Encana. When Suttles arrived in Calgary, his main focus was still on damage control.

Encana was bleeding cash trying to fund projects in different regions spread across North America. Randy Eresman, a 35-year veteran of the company who had served as chief operating officer since 2002 before taking on the CEO role in 2006, unexpectedly resigned barely two weeks into 2013, roughly four years after he led an effort to spin off the company’s oil sands assets into Cenovus Energy, leaving Encana with nothing but natural gas assets just before prices for that commodity crashed.

“The timing was just terrible,” Martin Pelletier, portfolio manager with TriVest Wealth Council, told BNN on Wednesday. “Focusing on natural gas right at a time when the supply chain basically just became overwhelmed, that is why you need both [oil and liquids as well as natural gas] to provide risk management and diversification.”

In hopes of minimizing the risk, Eresman took on more and more assets until Encana was funding as many as 27 different plays at a given time. His strategy garnered sharp criticism from investors.

“Randy Eresman has flip-flopped on their strategy so many times it’s pathetic,” Eric Nuttall, portfolio manager at Sprott Asset Management, told BNN in September of 2011, arguing even a rebound in natural gas prices would not reverse months of declining Encana share price values. “Encana [is] absolutely dead money.”

Eresman faced blame for Encana becoming embroiled in an anti-trust scandal in mid-2012 and six months later, the 54-year-old took an early retirement, succumbing to immense pressure for him step aside. His tenure stood in stark contrast to his own predecessor, Gwyn Morgan, who Pelletier described as having turned Encana into one of the “favoured companies here in Calgary, like how Canadian Natural Resources and Suncor is today.”

In November 2013, barely five months after becoming CEO, Suttles took bold steps he hoped would restore the company to its pre-Eresman era of prominence. He cut the number of plays Encana would fund by more than 80 per cent to just five that mostly produced liquid petroleum products instead of dry gas. He also laid off more than 1,000 employees in hopes of reducing costs.

Suttles has cut another 1,000 jobs since then, bringing the company’s total headcount to roughly half what it was at the start of 2013, and reduced the number of plays Encana funds again down to just four. After completing nine major asset sales – the smallest of which still managed to generate more than $400 million in proceeds for the company – Pelletier believes the cleanup job Suttles started three years ago may be nearly done.

“It is a much more efficient company today than it was before he came on board,” TriVest’s Pelletier said. “Now it is just a matter of did they sell the right assets and did they keep the right ones [but] it looks like the ship has been righted.”