As President Trump promises to “unleash” oil and gas drilling, Atlas Energy has announced plans to acquire Moser Energy for $220 million. Structured as a stock purchase, Atlas will pay $180 million in cash and $40 million in equity and is expected to close before the end of the first quarter of 2025.
“The combination of Atlas’s completion platform and Mosers distributed power platform creates an innovative, diversified energy solutions provider,” according to the deal’s press release. Moser’s “Dynamic fleet of natural gas-powered assets (~212MWs) expands Atlas’s current operations into production and distributed power end markets supported by strong macro tailwinds expected to reduce through-cycle volatility associated with completions operations.”
Source: CleanTechnica
Moser was the first company to successfully run natural gas generators on wellhead gas, significantly reducing power costs and oilfield flaring. Atlass seeks to partner with Moser to power oil and gas operations as production of both reaches record highs worldwide.
The United States leads production of crude oil and petroleum liquids worldwide. While OPEC nations’ production fell in 2024 due to voluntary volume cuts aimed at increasing prices, growth in output from the United States, Guyana, Canada, and other non-OPEC producers more than offset the drop. This has kept oil prices from rising – and continuing to hover around $75 per barrel.
Closing price of Brent crude oil
Source: Statista
“Between 2010 to 2015, the U.S. saw a surge in domestic production, fueled by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, helped make the United States the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas,” according to PBS. “But the price crash that followed in 2015 led to mass layoffs and company bankruptcies. The pandemic’s arrival in 2020 led to another collapse, with U.S. crude prices briefly plunging into negative territory. The industry has since rebounded, but it has done so with fewer workers and greater automation.”
As the U.S. faces persistent inflation, President Trump has pledged to open new oil and gas fields to drilling. The goal is to further increase supply in order to place downward pressure not only on gas prices but on prices throughout the economy as products’ manufacturing and shipping costs also decline.
According to DealPulse’s M&A database, which harnesses both AI and attorneys to digest the granular deal points of publicly-announced transactions, Atlas is advised by law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP and Moser is advised by Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP.
