"Asian Buyers Are Scooping Up Dirt Cheap Oil Assets"

From OilPrice:

When a week ago, Rystad Energy reported that the oil and gas industry was divesting more than 12 billion barrels of oil equivalent in assets, it hardly came as a surprise. Asset sales, along with layoffs, are the default reaction of the industry to hard times.  But is anyone buying?

It has been said time and again, but it’s worth noting nonetheless: This oil crisis is not like the ones before it. It is, above all, a demand crisis rather than a simple imbalance between supply and demand. And, also unlike in previous price crashes, even the oil executives don’t know if demand will ever return to pre-crisis levels. In fact, some believe it might never recover fully. And this makes selling assets a tad harder than it would have been otherwise.

There are already signs of that. 

BP had to slash the price of the North Sea assets it was selling to Premier Oil by half, to $210 million, plus oil-price linked payments. It also had to revise the terms of its Alaska asset sale to Hilcorp Energy. Meanwhile, Total walked out of not one, but two asset acquisition deals with debt-laden Occidental, one for assets in Ghana and one for business in Algeria.

Total’s motivation for the decision could not be clearer: the company’s CEO, Patrick Pouyanne, said that Total was walking out because of “the extraordinary market environment and the lack of visibility that the group faces.” He added that refraining from the acquisition of Oxy’s African assets would make Total more financially flexible. It is also worth noting that while it shunned the oil and gas assets of Oxy, Total is happily expanding its solar and wind presence through asset acquisitions....

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