Noble Energy acquires Suncor assets

Noble Energy Inc. has agreed to buy nearly all of the oil and natural gas reserves in eastern Colorado owned by CanadaÔÇÖs Suncor Energy Inc., for $494 million.  As a result of the deal, Houston, Texas-based Noble will add around 10,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, or 46 million cubic feet of natural gas and 2,500 barrels of liquids, to its daily output. In the third quarter of last year, the companyÔÇÖs output averaged 217,000 barrels of oil equivalent. The Suncor assets lie within the Denver-Julesburg, or DJ, Basin, which contains Noble's Wattenberg field, the company's biggest onshore US asset. Around 80 percent of the proven reserves of liquids being acquired, some of which Suncor obtained when it purchased Petro-Canada in August last year, are in the Wattenberg field. Noble has said it will add two rigs to the Wattenberg field later this year. The total purchased properties hold an estimated 53 million barrels of oil equivalent in proved reserves, 45 percent of which are liquids. Noble now controls over 530,000 net acres in the central DJ Basin, with net production approaching 52,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Last week, Noble signed a deal to sell natural gas from the Tamar field off the Israeli coast over a period of 15 years, an agreement which could generate $9.5 billion in revenue. The company is also in the process of marketing its North Sea assets. Noble has said it plans to spend around $1 billion a year on new projects in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Israel and West Africa. For Calgary, Alberta-based Suncor, the deal marks the first stage of a strategy to sell off a large portion of its natural gas interests in order to focus on oil sands development in western Canada. Suncor is said to only want to hold just enough gas production to serve as a hedge against declines in crude oil prices. It plans to sell additional natural gas assets in Alberta and north-east British Columbia shortly. Noble said that funding for the deal, which is expected to close by the end of March, will come from an existing credit line.  *┬á┬á┬á┬á┬á┬á┬á *┬á┬á┬á┬á┬á┬á┬á *