* Eyes stakes in N America, Africa oil & gas assets
* Earmarks $1.3 bln for overseas acquisitions this yr
* Oil India Q4 drops 21 pct from year ago
NEW DELHI, May 28 (Reuters) – State-run Oil India
is looking to buy stakes in U.S. gas driller Chesapeake Energy
Corp.’s Mississippi Lime basin and ConocoPhillips’
oil sand assets in Canada, its head of finance said on
Monday.
The cash-rich Indian explorer, whose assets in India’s
north-east account for its entire crude oil production and the
bulk of gas production, has been aggressively scouting to
bolster its overseas assets portfolio.
Oil India has earmarked 60-70 billion rupees ($1.3 billion)
for overseas acquisition, T.K. Ananth Kumar told reporters after
announcing the company’s quarterly results.
He said the company had identified the U.S., Canada,
Australia and parts of Africa for acquisitions and hoped to seal
a deal in the current fiscal year that began on April 1.
When asked if the opportunities included Chesapeake’s
Mississippi stake, to which the company had earlier been linked,
he replied “yes”.
Chesapeake has put several assets up for sale, as the
second-largest U.S. natural gas producer scrambles to raise cash
to close a $9 billion to $10 billion funding
shortfall.
“Any decision (on buying a stake in Chesapeake’s
Mississippi asset) will be taken after technical, commercial and
political due diligence,” Oil India Chairman S. K. Srivastava
said.
Chesapeake came under intense pressure from investors to
improve its corporate governance after Reuters reported in April
that its chief executive Aubrey McClendon had taken out more
than $1 billion in loans using his personal stakes in thousands
of company wells as collateral.
ASSETS ABROAD
India, the world’s fourth-largest oil importer, imports
about 80 percent of its crude needs, and has been scouting for
oil and gas assets abroad to meet rising local demand and to
feed its expanding refining capacity.
India’s Reliance Industries and state-run GAIL
have so far acquired significant shale gas assets in
the U.S.
The government allowed Oil India to go global in late-2005
and since then it has acquired stakes in assets in Venezuela,
Libya, Gabon, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Nigeria and Sudan.
“For unconventional assets, we can spend $100 million-$200
million. We don’t want to be operators as we don’t have
experience in that. We will go as joint venture partners for
unconventional hydrocarbon assets,” Kumar told reporters.
“For conventional, like Maurel et Prom’s assets, we can
spend up to $1.5 billion,” he said.
The company is still in the race to buy a stake in the Gabon
assets of France’s Maurel et Prom, Kumar said. Oil
India had earlier said it could partner with the African country
for the assets, for which it had already done technical due
diligence.
Earlier on Monday, Oil India posted a 21 percent decline in
March quarter net profit to 4.45 billion rupees.
Separately, Kumar said the Indian government might sell some
of its 78.4 percent stake in the company in the current fiscal
year, part of the government’s plans to raise a total of 300
billion rupees ($5.4 billion) through stake sales to plug its
fiscal deficit.
