By Georgina McCartney
HOUSTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Dealmaking in the U.S. upstream oil and gas sector shrank fourfold to $9 billion in the second quarter of this year as volatile oil prices tempered investor confidence, analytics firm Enverus said on Wednesday.
"Crude volatility tied to the Iran conflict and a softening gas outlook likely widened the bid-ask spread and complicated valuations, which pushed announced value to one of its lowest quarterly totals in years," said Andrew Dittmar, principal
analyst at Enverus Intelligence Research.
A record-setting lease sale by the Bureau of Land Management in May took the biggest share of dealmaking value, raking in around $4 billion by selling oil and gas drilling rights on federal lands in Texas and New Mexico, predominantly to Devon Energy and Matador Resources.
The sale covered 33,530 acres, primarily in New Mexico's Permian basin, part of the nation's most productive oilfield.
A shortage of drilling locations that produce more oil in the U.S. helped to drive fierce competition for the BLM assets, according to Enverus.
Meanwhile, Shell's June sale of its interest in the Na Kika platform and associated fields in the Gulf of Mexico to subsidiaries of Talos Energy and Ridgewood Energy took second place, totaling around $1.7 billion. The assets produced about 37,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2025.
Value-wise, second-quarter dealmaking was the third weakest since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic crushed oil demand and drove prices to multi-year lows.
From April to June, Brent crude futures closing prices have swung from a high of $118 a barrel to a low of $72, according to LSEG, as the war in Iran continues to disrupt energy flows across the globe.
(Reporting by Georgina McCartney in Houston; Editing by Liz Hampton and Barbara Lewis)
