Maxus owns the Guppy Wake prospect on the Mississippi Canyon 974 and Atwater Valley 6 blocks, and holds a 90 percent interest in the Green Canyon 470 block, which includes the Ra Deep and Ra Shallow prospects, documents on Tristone's Web site show.
The fields, which are located in water depths of 2,200 feet (670 meters) to 3,400 feet, are estimated to have a combined resource potential of 455 million barrels of oil equivalent, according to the documents, which were posted yesterday.
Maxus is selling because it may not be able to develop the assets before some of the leases expire, Tristone Vice President Tom Duncan said today in an interview from Houston. The Green Canyon lease expires in 2009 without development and Mississippi Canyon's and Atwater Valley's end in 2015, the documents show.
``They have quite a substantial leasehold in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico,'' he said. ``They just prioritized and said `we only have so much capital and so much time, we need to move some of these and try to monetize these for investments somewhere else.'''
`Quite Strategic'
The estimated value is ``unrisked,'' Duncan said. ``Most people will apply some risk factor'' to the value. Maxus prefers cash and an overriding royalty interest for the assets to benefit from a potential upside in the prospects and would consider selling the blocks separately, he said.
``This is a very sizeable set of deepwater assets that could be quite strategic to some offshore operators,'' said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates Inc. in Houston. The purchase price ``is not going to be anywhere near what it would have been if these were proved reserves.''
He said Gulf of Mexico assets have sold for an average of $18 to $24 a barrel of proved reserves in the past 12 months. Based on Tristone's valuation, the Maxus assets would be worth about $16.23 a barrel, if all the oil were produced.
Guppy Wake is in the vicinity of projects such as Mars, owned by Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc. The Ra prospects are within 4 miles of Chevron Corp.'s Knotty Head discovery, which includes the deepest well ever drilled in the Gulf of Mexico.
Shenzi
Madrid-based Repsol in July 2006 bought BP's 28 percent stake in the Shenzi deepwater Gulf project for $2.15 billion to help stem a three-year decline in reserves and almost quintuple its production in the region. Shenzi will add 28,000 barrels a day to output by 2009 to the daily 7,500 barrels Repsol expects to begin pumping elsewhere in the Gulf this year.
Companies which are expanding in the Gulf include Italy's Eni SpA, which in July paid about $4.7 billion for properties there from Dominion Resources Inc., and Norway's Statoil ASA, which in 2005 bought Gulf fields from EnCana Corp. for about $2 billion.
Ra Deep and Ra Shallow are 86 percent and 97 percent oil respectively, the documents show. Hess Corp. owns the remaining 10 percent of Ra. Guppy Wake is 86 percent oil.
A data room will open Sept. 4. Final offers are due by Sept. 27 and the transaction is expected to close in early November, the documents show. The effective date of the sale is Oct. 1.
Tristone is providing transaction and technical advisory services for the sale. A Repsol spokesman in Madrid, who declined to be identified, was unable to immediately provide more details nor to confirm the sale plan.
