afrol News, 28 May - Africa has an exciting numerous opportunities and open deals to buyers and investors in the oil industries, a recently completed study by an independent oil and gas research and consulting firm, Derrick Petroleum Services ("Derrick"), has revealed.

The study of the Top 1000 global oil and gas companies has identified in excess of $20 billion of oil and gas assets currently for sale worldwide, consisting of 69 separately announced transactions. The study focuses on deals with an estimated value greater than $10 million.

According to the study, in Ghana, two partners have put interests on the market in the world class offshore Jubilee field, with an estimated 1.2 billion barrels equivalent of gross recoverable reserves.

The study said other deals are available in Uganda, Angola, Kenya, Egypt, Cote D'Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon, Cameroon and Namibia.

Looking at what the world offers, the study puts the North America as leading the inventory with over $9 billion, or 45 percent of value, followed by Africa at 22 percent, with the North Sea, rest of Europe, South America, Asia, Australia and Middle East rounding out the pack with deals valued at between $500 million to $1.5 billion.

It said that in North America, the most prized deal is the multi-billion dollar interest where Devon Energy is offering in its four discoveries (Kaskida, Cascade, Jack and St. Malo) in the emerging Lower tertiary trend in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico.

"Due primarily to the whipsaw in oil and gas prices over the past 12 months, our analysis highlights an unusually high quality and diverse set of world class opportunities, particularly for well-heeled buyers seeking long term assets in early stage development," according to Yashodeep Deodhar, CEO of Derrick Petroleum Services.

"These are not distressed assets put on the market by distressed companies. Quite the contrary, we have identified numerous opportunities by first class operators who are simply managing their forward risk profiles and laying off a portion of development capital. We foresee the recent trend of national oil companies (NOCs) and government backed oil companies dominating the buy side to continue," the "Derrick" CEO added.

In completing the study, Derrick also reviewed past M&A activity and trends. "In contrast to the first half of 2008 where seven of the top ten buyers were western companies; so far this year, only three of ten buyers are western. Buyers of significant deals have recently been mostly NOCs and government-backed companies such as IPIC (Abu Dhabi), CNPC (China), KNOC (Korea) and Ecopetrol (Colombia)," according to Mr Deodhar.

"In addition to tracking deal activity, value trends regionally and globally, and deals in play, we also continuously monitor companies with financial dry powder and a desire to do more deals. Currently, notables on this list include Norway's StatoilHydro, Colombia's Ecopetrol, China's

Sinopec, France's Total, United States' Apache Corporation and Canada's Talisman Energy. These companies alone have over $20 billion of capability," concluded Mr Deodhar.

By staff writer

© afrol News

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