Think the biggest and most obvious reason for one of these to...

Think the biggest and most obvious reason for one of these to take out LEL is not to add resources to their own portfolio (they already have plenty to keep them going), but to stop another larger entity snapping us up or partnering with us.
On our own it will probably take a long time to get up and going, but if a well funded major were to come along they could, set up shop in half the time and probably at twice the scale.
You have to remember it's all basically coming out of the same pond, like gas or oil. Consider if you were sitting on a large gas or oil field, would you really want someone popping up next door to start drilling and extracting from the same reservoir that you are.