Energy Voice News

“Despite the problems, we’re a long term partner. We believe these issues will be resolved,” Spence said. DNO is moving ahead with its commitment well on the Baeshiqa licence. This is the last well in the programme, with a gross cost of $18mn.

In response to the crisis, a number of the companies are thinking about M&A. DNO aims to build scale in the North Sea through purchases.

ShaMaran, meanwhile, is doubling down on its Kurdistan operations. The company struck a deal this week involving the Ross Perot-founded HKN Energy and Abu Dhabi’s TAQA. The latter exited, leaving the two smaller companies to it.

Kurdistan was “non core” to TAQA, Soden explained. “It took them seven months to sell locally” from the Atrush licence once the pipeline was closed, he said. HKN, on the other hand, “was very quick to go to local sales” from Sarsang.

Atrush is only selling oil locally through the pipeline, Soden explained. HKN “can go immediately to trucking. The first opportunity for a quick win would be HKN putting in trucking and doubling oil flows to maximise local sales and local price. We are growing our production by 50% and our 2P reserves by 30%. At no cost, plus an earn out.”

Clements noted that M&A for Genel was becoming harder. “When we started trying to do M&A, we had a big pile of cash and the bond maturity was quite a long way out. That’s not the case now.”