The world’s largest listed oil firm, ExxonMobil, has been lagging behind other supermajors in reserve replacement ratio—a key metric in the industry that shows the amount of proved reserves a company adds to its reserve base during the year relative to the amount of oil and gas it produced. For Exxon, one of the quickest ways to add reserves is to buy a Permian-focused driller, which would be immediately accretive to reserves. However, in order for such a deal to be soundly justified financially, Exxon might need to find enough cost cuts to justify paying a premium for a potential target, says Reuters Breakingviews’ columnist Lauren Silva Laughlin . In January this year, Exxon bought companies owned by the Bass family in a deal that more than doubled the oil giant’s Permian Basin resources to 6 billion barrels of oil equivalent, after adding an estimated resource of 3.4 billion […]