Foreign investors are emerging as the biggest beneficiaries of the unfolding U.S. energy revolution—underscoring how the landscape is being dominated by small, nimble players profiting where oil majors seemingly cannot.
According to a quarterly analysis by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, private equity firms, and especially foreign buyers, are large investors in the U.S. oil and gas story, having executed nine deals worth $2.8 billion during the third quarter. This year, international buyers have done 33 percent more deals even as overall deal value has dropped—suggesting buyers are getting bargain prices.
The urge may be there to snap up smaller and more nimble oil producers, but analysts say the domestic Big Three are encumbered by sprawling size and underperforming assets that make acquisitions less likely.
Buyers now are more diverse than the usual suspects from the Middle East, according to Doug Meier, PWC's mergers and acquisitions energy deals leader.
"Out of these transactions that involve a foreign component, it's interesting that Canada and Asia-Pacific are kind of leading the way," Meier said in an interview, adding that much of the activity is concentrated in the exploration and production, or "upstream" sector.
"We continue to see foreign acquirers playing a significant role in the number of value deals announced," he added.
A separate study from Deloitte put the U.S. at the center of global energy deals worldwide this year, also noting the preponderance of private equity and international buyers. Of the 10 largest deals in the first half of 2013, at least 60 percent involved international players, according to the firm's data.
"In oil and gas, U.S. companies and independent oil companies have typically driven activity, so to have that many other large international buyers in the top 10 is an interesting trend," said Trevear Thomas, a principal at Deloitte.
The dynamic underscores how the fortunes of small and mid-sized oil companies, which dominate U.S. shale hot spots like Eagle Ford, Bakken and Utica, are diverging from those of Big Oil, whose bottom lines are being bypassed by the shale boom.
Last week, ExxonMobil and Chevron reported disappointing third-quarter earnings, showing little benefit from the U.S. energy boom.
The lone bright spot was ConocoPhillips, the no. 3 U.S. oil producer, which has aggressively spun off assets in the last few years in an effort to separate upstream operations while concentrating on increasing production volumes and margins. This week, a Deutsche Bank analyst lauded Conoco's "disciplined" strategy as an example of "how Big Oil should manage itself."
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Even as the U.S. produces increasing amounts of energy that have even the Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quaking in their figurative boots, the largest oil companies aren't expected to derive much benefit.
Energy market watchers say Big Oil missed the opportunity to get in on the U.S. boom in its early stages. Companies like Exxon pulled off big mergers during the late 1990s to early 2000s that ultimately left them too unwieldy to adapt to the shale boom. Now, they have little choice but to sit on the sidelines, and hope for the right shot at a reasonable price.
"All these [smaller players] that are growing oil production are very tiny when you compare them to Exxon, Chevron and BP," noted Fadel Gheit, managing director of oil and gas research at Oppenheimer & Co. "A company like Exxon would have to buy a company every year in order to keep the oil flowing."
—By CNBC's Javier E. David.
