Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Ovintiv drills for oil and natural gas and sells it to energy markets.
Ovintiv is an oil and gas company. It doesn't drill everywhere — it owns big patches of land in a handful of North American oil and gas fields, mainly the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, plus acreage in Utah and western Canada. It pulls crude oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids out of the ground and sells them into energy markets. Its customers are basically refineries, pipeline companies, and energy traders who buy raw oil and gas — not you at the pump, but the businesses that get it to you.
Think of it as a farm that grows oil instead of corn. The land is the key asset, and the "crop" is whatever comes out of the well — oil is the valuable part, and natural gas is often the cheaper byproduct. Roughly half the company's production is oil, with the rest split between natural gas and natural gas liquids. When oil prices are high, Ovintiv makes a lot of money fast; when they crash, profits shrink quickly too, because the cost of drilling doesn't disappear just because prices fall.
The company used to be called Encana, a big Canadian gas producer, and it renamed itself Ovintiv in 2020 and moved its headquarters to Denver, Colorado. It bought oil-rich land in the Permian when it was mostly a gas company, betting that oil would pay better than gas. Recently it's been focused on cutting debt, paying a dividend, and buying back its own stock — a sign management thinks the shares are cheap. One thing to watch: the company sold some of its natural gas assets in 2023 to focus more on oil, which is where the profits are. Big swings in energy prices remain the main risk for anyone owning this stock.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026