Analysis of all opportunities for sale (Assets, JV, Corporate M&A, etc) in North America with deal values above $100 million gives the following results seen in Chart 1. Opportunities related to the Marcellus Shale lead the pack at $7.5 billion worth of assets for sale in the US. Oil sands related projects in Canada come second with $4.5 billion worth of assets for sale.
Figure 1: Chart of total deal value vs play type/ sub-region. Only deals in the market with deal values above $100 million have been considered for this analysis. Source: Derrick Petroleum ‘Deals in Play’ database.
Clearly, there are a lot of shale related opportunities in North America. Shale related opportunities represent ~52% of all opportunities in North America with the rest split between the conventionals (34.8%) and oil sands (12.5%). Marcellus shale related opportunities dominate at ~23% of all opportunities.
Shales are the hottest play in North America at the moment, and deal activity involving them looks set to dominate the oil and gas industry in North America for some time to come.