ASX oil stocks have been badly on the nose with investors despite the global price run until October last year.

But producers haven’t been doing so badly, finance-wise.

The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is picking one, Australis Oil & Gas (ASX:ATS) to do very well when it reveals full year accounts in the next month or so.

In fact, it expects the company to post its first profit this year of $US3m, up from a $US1m loss last year, and a normalised EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) of $US622m, up from $US228m.

Australis paid RBC for “investment banking services” in the last 12 months and for the analysts to travel to its sites, but the bank says the report itself was not paid for.

The bank put ‘outperform’ tags for the coming 12 months on several other producers as well.

It believes gas plays Comet Ridge (ASX:COI), Karoon Gas (ASX:KAR) and Vintage Energy (ASX:VEN) are likely to do very well this year, and oil company Far (ASX:FAR) is set to outperform as well.

Only Vintage Energy is a current client of RBC.

RBC has given Elk Petroleum (ASX:ELK) a ‘maybe’ for how it expects the coming year to pan out, but it expects calendar 2018 results to be underdone compared to 2017 thanks to a a massive $US89m one-off cost.

Elk changed its reporting year from financial to calendar and is due to report full year numbers on March 29.

RBC reckons 2018 is going to deliver a massive net loss of $US109m, compared to an $US8m loss in 2017.

However, it also thinks normalised EBITDA is going to be in the black at $US12m, compared to a $US6m loss.

Elk began producing from its Greive field in the US in April last year — just before oil prices headed towards their October peak for 2018.

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