By Simon Hall
HONG KONG -- Thailand's PTT Exploration & Production PCL,
the country's flagship petroleum explorer, will buy the Thai assets
of Hess Corp. for around $1 billion, in the latest of a string of
sales by U.S. energy companies as they switch focus to
unconventional oil and gas projects in North America.
The Hess properties being bought by PTTET comprise minority
shares in one onshore and one offshore Thailand natural gas and
condensate field, whose stakes together produce around 17,000
barrels a day of oil equivalent, PTTET said Wednesday. One of the
deals has already closed, and the other will be completed in May,
said PTTEP's president and chief executive, Tevin Vongvanich.
Other U.S. companies shedding billions of dollars of noncore
assets in Asia and elsewhere, or restructuring their portfolios to
concentrate on exploiting shale gas and oil reserves in North
America, include Apache Corp., Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Devon
Energy Corp. In February, Anadarko said it had agreed to sell
offshore China assets to a Hong Kong-listed Chinese company for
$1.08 billion.
Hess said in late January its asset sales over the previous 12
months had risen to more than $7.8 billion, with some of the funds
used to help pay for a $4 billion share repurchase program. These
included $1.8 billion received from OAO Lukoil for part of a Russia
project last April, and $1.3 billion in December from Indonesian
oil company PT Pertamina and PTTEP for stakes in two Indonesia
projects.
Hess said in January that its fourth-quarter profit jumped to
$1.93 billion from $374 million although revenue fell 6.1% to $5.57
billion. Its average production fell to 307,000 barrels of oil
equivalent a day, down from 396,000 barrels a day a year
earlier.
Write to Simon Hall at simon.hall@wsj.com
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