Middle East and North Africa also on the Block
Multiple divestitures appear to be coming for Occidental Petroleum (ticker: OXY), the $75 billion (market cap) diversified oil company.
In June the company filed a Registration Statement with the SEC to spin off its California oil and gas assets into a separate company called California Resources Corporation. At the same time the company is reported to have its 335,000 acres in the Bakken, three Forks and Pronghorn up for sale for a reported $3 billion.
“In the context of Occidental, this is definitely not core acreage. The company has not historically played in the Bakken,” Raymond James analyst Pavel Molchanov told Bloomberg.
OXY’s developed and undeveloped oil and gas assets in the U.S. total nearly 6.7 million net acres, the largest region being in the Permian Basin of West Texas and southeast New Mexico, where Occidental is both the largest operator and producer of oil. Occidental is heavily involved in EORs and operates more active carbon dioxide (CO2) floods than any other CO2 flood operator, according to the company’s Web site.
In California, Occidental is the state’s largest hydrocarbon producer and its footprint of more than 2.3 million net acres exceeds all of its peers. Its entire California operations are to be included in the spinoff company, California Resources Corporation, whose first conference call is scheduled for Oct. 22.
Occidental’s production in the Mid-Continent region of the U.S. includes the Piceance Basin in western Colorado, the Williston Basin in North Dakota and fields in South Texas.
OXY is trying to sell 40% of its operations in the Middle East and North Africa, a stake that could be worth as much as $8 billion, according to Bloomberg.
More than a third of Occidental’s worldwide oil and gas production comes from the Middle East—Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Net developed and undeveloped oil and gas assets in the region total more than 5 million acres. It is the second-largest oil producer offshore Qatar, and it participates in the Dolphin Gas Project, the trans-border natural gas project that supplies natural gas from wells offshore Qatar, processes and transports the gas through a 230-mile subsea pipeline to the UAE and Oman, where it is the largest independent oil producer. In the UAE, Occidental is working with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) on to develop what it believes to be one of the largest natural gas fields in the Middle East, the Al Hosn Gas Project.
Besides its upstream business segment, Oxy also has midstream and pipelines businesses, chemical manufacturing, power generation and commodities trading businesses. OXY’s Q3 conference call is scheduled for Oct. 23.
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