MOSCOW (MRC) -- Japan's Mitsui & Co has put its 40 per cent stake in the BassGas project off southeastern Australia up for sale, reported Reuters with reference to the company's statement last Thursday.
Mitsui's stake in the BassGas project, which includes the undeveloped Trefoil gas project, could be worth about AD360 million (USD244 million), according to Credit Suisse. However, a person with knowledge of the asset estimated it at about AD140 million.
Mitsui Australia's spokesman said Rothschild has been engaged to advise on the sale of the stake, which Mitsui acquired with its takeover of oil and gas producer AWE last year. The planned sale was first reported by The Australian Financial Review newspaper.
BassGas, operated by Beach Energy, has been producing gas and liquids from the Yolla field in the Bass Basin off the state of Victoria since 2006. The gas is processed at a plant onshore and supplies the Australian east coast market.
Mitsui's share of output from the project in the year ended June 2019 was about 1.1 million barrels of oil equivalent, as calculated by Reuters based on Mitsui's 35 per cent stake in Yolla and Beach's 53.8 per cent share at 1.7 mmboe.
Beach declined to comment on whether the company might be interested in the stake or would have pre-emptive rights on it, as that is confidential.
The other partner in the BassGas project is Prize Petroleum, a unit of India's Hindustan Petroleum Corp, which bought an 11.25 per cent stake in BassGas and a 9.75 per cent stake in Trefoil for AD85 million in 2014.
Prize Petroleum declined to comment.
Mitsui's move comes at the same time that Exxon Mobil Corp has put its much bigger, but ageing Bass Strait oil and gas assets up for sale, which analysts and bankers have said would be of interest to Mitsui.
Mitsui declined to comment on whether it would be interested in the Exxon assets.
As MRC wrote before, Mitsui Chemicals, a part of the Mitsui conglomerate, restarted its naphtha cracker on 11-12 Mayl, 2019, following an unplanned outage. The cracker was shut in end-April, 2019 owing to power failure. Located at Chiba in Japan, the cracker has an ethylene capacity of 600,000 mt/year and propylene capacity of 331,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polyprolypele (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption was 1,081,100 tonnes in the first half of 2019, up by 8% year on year. Deliveries of all PE grades increased. Meanwhile, the estimated consumption of PP in the Russian market totalled 694,210 tonnes in January-June 2019, up by 14% year on year. The supply of propylene block copolymers (PP-block) and propylene homopolymers (PP-homo) increased.
Mitsui Chemicals is a leading manufacturer and supplier of value added specialty chemicals, plastics and materials for the automotive, healthcare, packaging, agricultural, building, and semiconductor and electronics markets. Mitsui Chemicals is a Japanese Chemicals company, a part of the Mitsui conglomerate. The company has a turnover of around 15 billion USD and has business interests in Japan, Europe, China, Southeast Asia and the USA. The company mainly deals in performance materials, petro and basic chemicals and functional polymeric materials.
MRC