Malaysia's state-owned Petronas has extended the deadline for its takeover of Canada's Progress Energy Resources to at least November 30, to give it time to work with the Canadian government and convince it that the $5.2 billion deal will prove a "net benefit" to the country.
Petronas' Canadian upstream arm said in a statement Monday that it had extended its "Outside Date" on the deal 30 days from October 31, and that it has the right to extend that twice more in 30-day increments.
Petronas and Progress have met with officials of federal agency Industry Canada to "understand the basis for the October 19, 2012 announcement by the Minister of Industry," the statement said.
The Malaysian state company also noted that according to the statement issued by Canadian Industry minister Christian Paradis blocking the deal, it has up to 30 days from October 19 to appeal the decision to block the deal.
"Petronas Canada intends to make further submissions to the Minister in order to obtain approval of the proposed transaction," it said.
Petronas made an offer in late June to take over Progress Energy, which owns three shale gas blocks at Altares, Lily and Kahta spread over 150,000 acres in North Montney in British Columbia. The companies had planned to build two gas liquefaction trains, each of capacity 3.7 million mt/year, an export terminal and pipeline access in British Columbia utilizing 1 Bcf/d of feedstock gas. First LNG production was targeted after 2016.
Petronas has exploration and production operations in more than 22 countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central Asia, Latin America and Africa, according to its website. And its international reserves of 6.56 billion barrels of oil equivalent make up nearly a quarter of its total reserves of 27.12 billion boe.
Petronas' total output is about 1.1 million boe/d.
