Unrest in the Middle East and North Africa helped push crude oil prices over $100 per barrel while huge supplies of natural gas have depressed prices.
The price disparity has prompted many smaller energy companies to shift spending to oil drilling, paving the way for deeper-pocketed Exxon to swoop in and strike good deals for natural gas assets.
"We think the market dynamics are set up to where you can potentially get good value, so we will continue to look," Jack Williams, president of Exxon's XTO unit, told the Reuters Global Energy and Climate Summit.
Exxon bought natural gas company XTO a year ago for $30 billion in a wager that demand for natural gas will rise in coming years as electricity consumption increases. The deal has been criticized by investors for creating earnings dilution, but Exxon is growing XTO through the purchase of hundreds of thousands of shale gas acres which were once too costly to drill.
Exxon, based in Irving Texas, earlier this month completed a $1.69 billion purchase of acreage in the Marcellus Shale in the eastern United States. It has also picked up other parcels ranging from 5,000 acres to 10,000 acres in basins including the Haynesville Shale in Louisiana and the Fayetteville Shale in Arkansas, Williams said.
Source: Reuters
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