Middle East buying up

The sharks are circling and going in for the kill!

Middle Eastern Oil Companies To Capitalize On Oil Bust

By Dave Forest
Posted on Fri, 12 February 2016 15:59 | 1


The oil and gas business is moving into a new age for financing. With groups like private equity becoming more prominent (just this week, PE-backed Terra Energy put down $910 million to acquire 200,000 acres in the Piceance Basin of the western U.S.).

But two new deals in the last few days suggest that another unconventional source of petro-finance may be on the rise globally.

The Middle East.


On Tuesday, state-owned Qatar Petroleum made a big step-out from its home base. By acquiring a 30% interest in three deepwater licenses in offshore Morocco from operator Chevron.

The same day, another Middle Eastern player — Oman’s Petrogas E&P — struck a big buy in the offshore. This coming even further afield: in the North Sea.

Petrogas signed an agreement to acquire all of the North Sea assets of Sweden’s PA Resources. Which includes oil and gas discoveries in the offshore of Denmark — as well as exploration acreage in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands.


The move comes as PA Resources has been under pressure to sell assets to pay down outstanding debt. A theme that’s becoming very common across the oil and gas industry — and which Middle Eastern firms may be using to their advantage in buying fields on the cheap.

Interestingly, players from this region weren’t very active in global M&A during the boom times of the last several years. In fact, Qatar Petroleum’s Morocco purchase will represent the second-largest interest in a foreign project ever taken by the firm (behind the 40 percent it owns in Canadian onshore asset)

It’s thus possible that Middle Eastern companies are sensing an opportunity in today’s depressed markets. And starting to make a move to capitalize — which could open up a new financing source for projects globally.

Watch to see if the trend toward rising petro-investment from this part of the world continues.

Here’s to going abroad,

By Dave Forest