mais en anglais

par mareva , Barjac, mardi 19 septembre 2006, 18:25 (il y a 6632 jours) @ mareva

This year, the company denied reports of a €2.3 billion bid by Indian Oil Corp. and Oil India for a 40 percent stake.

Deal speculation continues, however, and in August, Maurel confirmed that it was in talks with ENI in Italy about a possible acquisition of assets.

"The rumor is that it will sell part or of the M'Boundi deposit," Limage said.

Meanwhile, the company continues about its business. "We will spend €100 million this year on pure exploration," Hénin said. "That is between 10 and 13 percent of Total's program, when the company is a fiftieth the size of Total."

"We have a risk profile, in the good sense of risk," he said.

Brian Childs contributed reporting.

PARIS Soaring oil prices have pumped up oil company profits and share prices, some more than others. Shares of integrated oil majors like Exxon Mobil of the United States or Total of France, invested along the whole industrial chain from well to gasoline pump, have risen 50 percent to 80 percent over the past three years - a modest clip compared with some smaller independent oil explorers whose market values climbed several hundredfold.

A case in point is Maurel & Prom, a sedate French trading company founded in the 19th century that turned its attention to exploring for oil in 1998 and found it in Congo three years later. Its share price has soared from less than €2 to a peak of €21.50 last year, although it has since slipped back to €17.37 at the close of trading Friday in Paris.

"The difference between small companies and big ones is that there is no hope for a big company to discover a new field that will dramatically change its reserve position," Jean-François Hénin, chief executive of Maurel & Prom, said in an interview.

Large oil companies need to find "elephant" fields, with reserves of 200 million barrels or more, to justify their exploration management costs, Hénin said. Small companies can make money on a field of 10 million barrels - and if they find one, it can turn their asset profile from ugly duckling to golden goose.

While downward reserve revisions can hit a major oil company's share price hard - as Royal Dutch Shell found in 2004 - the upside potential for the majors from additional reserves is limited. "Today the major players in the industry are the state oil companies of the producer countries, rather than the oil majors," Hénin said. "There's no possibility for Shell, or BP or Total to move their price by more than 5 to 10 percent."

In contrast, "in the case of Maurel & Prom and its peers, which have concentrated their activities in the upper part of the upstream, that is, more in exploration than production at this time, it is very possible to make a discovery that can double the share price of the company, or more."

Another example is Cairn Energy, a British exploration company that struck oil in Rajasthan state in India in 2004. "The discovery in Rajasthan tripled their reserves, and their share price," Hénin said.

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mareva