North Sea buyers wanted

The UKCS in particular has a pipeline of assets for sale. But who will the purchasers be?

“We got off to a really fast start at the beginning of this year. It has somewhat stagnated in the North Sea, but we still see plenty of opportunities in the pipeline.” So said Neivan Boroujerdi, principal analyst, North Sea upstream oil and gas at consultancy Wood Mackenzie, speaking at the Energy Voice Future North Sea conference in early September. Boroujerdi sees different types of actors that could be sellers of North Sea assets, including Asian players. “A good example of that is Japanese trading houses really changing their approach to upstream in light of net CO₂ targets,” he says. While ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP and Shell have all sold North Sea assets in recent years,