There has been no 11-figure upstream M&A since Devon Energy and Coterra Energy announced their $21.4 billion merger in early February, just a few weeks before the war on Iran started and the Strait of Hormuz was closed. But other, somewhat smaller — but still noteworthy — deals continue to happen.
No doubt about it, most of the headline-grabbing oil and gas M&A activity lately has involved large, publicly owned producers gobbling up other good-sized E&Ps, lock, stock and barrel. But there are other ways to increase scale and improve operational efficiency, as evidenced by privately held WildFire Energy’s bolt-on acquisition frenzy in the relatively sleepy northeastern Eagle Ford, aka the East Eagle Ford. In less than three years, with one bolt-on acquisition after another, WildFire — named in anticipation of the company’s aggressive expansion strategy — has morphed from a small player in the often-overlooked area into one of the largest producers there, with a laser focus on maximizing returns to its management and private-equity owners. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at the E&P and its rapid rise.
The wave of M&A activity in South Texas apparently hasn’t crested yet. Over the past couple months, Chesapeake Energy announced two deals totaling $2.825 billion that will almost complete its planned departure from the Eagle Ford — and signal UK-based INEOS’s arrival in the basin and a more than doubling of WildFire Energy’s production there. Just as important, Western Canada’s Baytex Energy a few days ago unveiled a $2.5 billion plan to acquire Ranger Oil, a pure-play Eagle Ford E&P, and thereby triple its South Texas production and gain its first operating capability in the U.S. And international interest in the basin doesn’t end there — Spanish energy giant Repsol, which had previously acquired the share of an Eagle Ford partnership held by Norway’s Equinor, recently bought basin assets held by Japan’s INPEX. (How’s that for multi-national M&A?) In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the latest round of E&P acquisitions and sales in South Texas, where production has been on the rebound.
