Understand This Aoi employed hedges, and swaps with counter parties. To ensure they get price protection for their share of crude entitlement. Also, most likely a demand by the lenders since all their production are collaterized under the RBL line. The hedges at $66 will all “roll off” by year end. Next year they are only hedged one-third at $60. They are exposed since they used $65 as the baseline for 2021 when Brent is trading currently at around $43.
Some oil producers such as Mexico’s Pemex bought massive puts and made over $1 billion when the oil price dropped in early 2020 by spending hundreds of millions for such protection.
That had nothing to do with Aoi preselling crude to get cash such as common in the mining industry preselling their production.