US oil giant Marathon is to increase its efforts to sell off its UK and Norwegian continental shelf assets as it switches focus onto American shale.
The company, which has its UK base in Aberdeen, is looking to get rid of its entire North Sea suite of assets to raise money for shale operations across North American.
Marathon has had a significant North Sea presence for two decades. It operates the South, Central, North and West Brae fields, along with holding significant stakes in the East Brae and Braemar fields. It also operates the Brae-Forties pipeline, and has stakes in the Foinaven field west of Shetland and the Sage pipeline to St Fergus gas terminal.
It also operates or has stakes in a number of Norwegian continental shelves, but as the company refocuses on US operations chief executive Lee Tillman confirmed it would look to increase the efforts to sell off its North Sea operations with a new marketing push.
“The marketing of our North Sea assets represents another example of our ongoing commitment to portfolio management,” he said.
“In the past three years, we have closed or agreed upon nearly $3.5 billion in non-core asset divestitures, surpassing the upper end of our stated $1.5 to $3 billion target.
“Our plan to market our assets in the UK and Norway provides an option to simplify and concentrate our portfolio while increasing our growth rate and accelerating cash flows. This, in turn, presents an opportunity to redeploy capital for long-term value creation for our shareholders.”
The majority of Marathon’s £3.6billion spending for 2014 will go towards the company’s liquids-rich North American assets, with the company looking to increase activity at the Eagle Ford and Bakken shale fields by 20% each, and at the Oklahoma Woodford field by 100% as it looks to unlock 2.4billion barrels of oil.
The US firm is also planning to increase its share repurchase scheme to $2.5billion.
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