Harbour Energy Explores U.S. Deals

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Harbour Energy is exploring both offshore and onshore merger-and-acquisition opportunities in the U.S. as its production base shifts toward the western Atlantic in the coming years, its chief executive said.

The U.S. is the biggest market in the world where the U.K. oil-and-gas producer isn’t already present, and is a logical place for the company to establish a scalable position, Harbour Energy Chief Executive Linda Cook said in an interview.

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The company a year ago closed an $11 billion deal to buy oil-and-gas producer Wintershall Dea’s upstream assets, and the company is still integrating the portfolio. But Cook said she is now focused on acquiring new assets, with active discussions on deals.

“We continue to look for M&A opportunities; it’s part of our DNA,” Cook said. “I think the market dynamics are okay right now from an M&A standpoint.”

Harbour Energy had previously considered only U.S. offshore assets, but could now make a move for onshore assets, Cook said.

Some oil-and-gas companies are looking to expand production and reserves, reversing years of underinvestment as the clamor for greener assets peters out.

In the U.S., President Trump made “drill, baby, drill” a campaign pledge and is pushing ahead with a pro-fossil-fuel agenda. The Trump administration has moved to cut back environmental regulations, open land and federal waters to drilling and approved new terminals to export natural gas.

A move into U.S. assets would mark something of a full circle for Cook. The American CEO turned down offers to launch an oil-and-gas venture in her home nation, before helping to establish Harbour Energy in 2014.

At the time, money was flowing into non-producing onshore U.S. shale acreage.

“The more I heard that pitch, the more concerned I got about the ability to actually make money,” Cook said.

Instead, Cook and her team bought overlooked international assets that were already producing oil and gas, an approach that has led Harbour Energy to become one of the largest global independent oil-and-gas companies. It made its first acquisition in 2017, buying a package of U.K. North Sea assets from Shell for $3 billion in 2017, and snapped up ConocoPhillips U.K. North Sea for $2.7 billion two years later.

Cook has been the company’s CEO since it was founded by Washington, D.C.-based private-equity company EIG Global Energy Partners. She spent much of her earlier career at Shell, which she left after the group chose Peter Voser as CEO in 2009.

Harbour Energy has grown to producing 475,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day through acquisitions. The number of independent oil and gas companies is dwindling, but Harbour’s scale is similar to U.S. based Apache. As the company prepares to make final investment decisions on projects in Argentina and Mexico, its production focus is expected to shift toward the western shores of the Atlantic over the coming years.

Harbour’s production locations have continuously evolved. Initially, the company had a concentrated portfolio in the U.K., before acquisitions established Norway as its largest producing country, and gave it assets in Latin America, North Africa and Southeast Asia.

A deal with Premier Oil in 2021 and the acquisition of Wintershall Dea’s upstream portfolio in 2024 gave the company an interest in the Mexican side of the Gulf.

Cook said she has always considered that offshore assets in the U.S. side of the Gulf could make sense someday, since the majority of the company’s production base lies in conventional offshore assets.

“It’s an area that makes sense for us from a capability standpoint,” she said.

The Wintershall Dea deal gave the company a position in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale deposit as well as onshore assets in Egypt, Algeria, Mexico and Germany. As a result, Harbour now sees itself as an onshore player.

“We shouldn’t rule out onshore U.S.,” Cook said.

A weaker outlook for oil prices over the coming years doesn’t stand in the way, she said.

“I always say there’s one thing for sure I know about where oil and gas prices are going, and that’s that I don’t know.”

Write to Adam Whittaker at [email protected]

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