Golden oldies

In the oil and gas industry, one company’s trash is another’s treasure and the US independents are scavenging. Taking advantage of the majors’ need to make large finds, companies such as Kerr-McGee and Apache are picking up fields around the world considered non-core assets by big oil. The North Sea, west Africa and Brazil offer some of the best opportunities, writes Anne Feltus

HISTORICALLY, in the US, independent exploration and production companies have often followed in the footsteps of the majors, picking up the properties the larger, vertically integrated companies have shunned or cast aside. Now that same pattern is emerging in other parts of the world. This trend first became apparent on the Outer Continental Shelf of the US Gulf of Mexico (GoM), where the energy industry has been active since the mid-1940s. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the shelf's shallow waters had been heavily exploited. Faced with large overhead costs and the need to meet increasingly demanding production-growth targets, the major players began abandoning the region. Change of focu