By Dan Healing, Calgary Herald, March 20, 2010
Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. will go public in one of the highest-priced initial public offering in oilsands history, according to pricing released after markets closed Tuesday.
 Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. will go public in one of the highest-priced initial public offering in oilsands history, according to pricing released after markets closed Tuesday. (Photograph by: Photo courtesy of Westerrn Oil Sands |
The offering could result in $1.5525 billion for the company, dwarfing the $1 billion raised when Suncor was formed in 1992.
The 75 million shares in the initial offering will be priced at $18 each for a total of $1.35 billion but the underwriters have been granted an over-allotment option for 11.25 million shares, taking the total to over $1.5 billion.
The underwriting syndicate is co-led by Morgan Stanley Canada and GMP Securities and includes nine other investment banks.
The company also announced it has received conditional approval for the listing of its common shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol ATH.
Athabasca this year closed a $1.9-billion partnership deal with the largest energy company in the world by market value, Petro China, to develop two projects.
In a preliminary prospectus filed with regulators, the private company lays out details of its plans to develop its northern Alberta oilsands leases — envisioning spending a total of $2.39 billion by 2014 to develop in situ projects on the two leases it shares with PetroChina and to explore its other lands.
Shareholders include two Luxembourg-based funds controlled by Morton Holdings, each with nine per cent of the company, and private Avenir Capital Corp., which has an eight per cent stake. Athabasca’s managers and directors control 21 per cent of the shares.
PetroChina. which is loaning $430 million to Athabasca to retire its senior secured debt, is expected to kick in $660 million in two additional loans over the next four years to fund Athabasca’s 40 per cent share of the first oilsands phases.
The company has filed for regulatory approval of two pilot projects, and applied in December for approval of the first 35,000-barrel-per-day commercial phase of its MacKay River project north of Fort McMurray, where first bitumen production is expected by 2014.
MacKay River is expected to have peak gross production of 150,000 bpd by 2021. It will use steam-assisted gravity drainage technology, where two parallel horizontal wells are drilled, one to inject steam to soften the bitumen and the other to collect it for pumping to the surface.
PetroChina owns 60 per cent of that project as well as Dover, a project expected to reach gross peak production of 200,000 to 270,000 bpd, with first phase production expected by 2015.
Athabasca’s plans also include gross peak production of 165,000 bpd from its 100 per cent owned Dover West oilsands play, forecast to have first bitumen by 2016.
The filing does not envision upgrading any of the bitumen.
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