Oil and gas producers in emerging Asia are piling into North America’s booming unconventional energy sector, making investments in shale gas and oil sands projects worth at least $20bn in the past two years.
Yet the sector remains fraught with problems, including question marks over pricing, regulation and the environmental costs of extraction and transport.
The Asian companies involved are making vast bets on a sector in which they have little expertise. That implies greater risks, especially where their acquisitions are debt financed. Moody’s recently downgraded Thailand’s PTT Exploration and Production explicitly because of the risks involved in its $2.3bn acquisition of a 40 per cent stake in Canada’s Kai Kos Dehseh oil sands project.