ANOTHER big player is on the prowl in the depressed oil and gas sector, with Caltex Australia saying it could make large acquisitions outside its core refining and marketing business, including in gas exploration and production.
Caltex managing director Julian Segal said that now the company’s two-year-long closure of the Kurnell refinery in Sydney was nearly complete, he was looking at how to grow the company using more serious measures than the bolt-on acquisitions of less than $100 million pursued in recent years.
“We do have the financial capabilities to look at bigger opportunities,” Mr Segal told The Australian yesterday.
“Those bigger opportunities could be both in the core business if some opportunity for consolidation occurs but also some related step-outs in the energy industry, and those opportunities could be significantly bigger.”
“We are not just being opportunistic saying we are interested in gas today because of the current special conditions in the market; we have been scanning the environment for these type of opportunities for quite a while,” Mr Segal said.
“But one should be looking at these kind of opportunities, and market conditions are very favourable to companies with a strong balance sheet.”
Caltex, which has a $10 billion market value and is half-owned by US major Chevron, joins Woodside Petroleum, ExxonMobil and Kerry Stokes’s Seven Group as companies with strong balance sheets that have declared they are on the hunt for investment opportunities that emerge in a depressed market.
Mr Segal stressed that Caltex had no “concrete” targets in mind and was looking at a broad spectrum of opportunities. Any step out into energy would be in line with Caltex’s competencies, he said. “Clearly, one opportunity we could look at is energy for transport, but if there is the opportunity to move into the upstream part of gas, we don’t have to limit ourselves,” he said.
