Fun, Fun, Fun - Big-Dollar M&A Continues, But for Many E&Ps the Focus Is on Fine-Tuning Portfolios

The pace of multibillion-dollar acquisitions in the upstream sector may have eased a bit after a frenetic couple of years, but M&A among E&Ps is still happening. And, just as important, producers just coming off big deals are divesting assets that don’t fit their strategies, or reaching agreements to buy “bolt-on” acreage and production in key basins. There’s a lot of M&A “fun, fun, fun” going on, though many of the deals don’t make big headlines because there are only nine or 10 numbers after the dollar sign, not 11. In today’s RBN blog, we look at a variety of recent upstream M&A and divestment announcements and what they tell us about the production end of U.S. energy markets.