15-10-09 James Musselman, the Dallas executive who engineered the $ 3.2 bn sale of Triton Energy to Hess Corp. in 2001, is attempting another multibillion-dollar deal featuring oil finds in West Africa's Gulf of Guinea.
Musselman heads Kosmos Energy, the closely held US oil explorer that said Oct. 12 it has an agreement to sell its Ghana assets to ExxonMobil. A person familiar with the deal, which could be torpedoed by a competing bid involving Ghana's government, said the sale is worth at least $ 4 bn.

Musselman and four other former Triton executives co-founded Kosmos in 2003. Among them were ex-BP geologists Brian Maxted and Paul Dailly, who helped make the discoveries off Equatorial Guinea that attracted Hess. With Kosmos, they struck oil off Ghana, which will become Africa's newest crude exporter when the Jubilee field comes online next year.
"You got a saying in the oil and gas business: 'You gotta be good and you gotta be lucky,'" said Sheldon Erikson, chairman of oilfield-equipment maker Cameron International and a former board member with Musselman at Triton. "In this situation, he was both."

Kosmos, which is backed by private-equity firms Blackstone Group and Warburg Pincus, has a 23.49 stake in Jubilee. The field may hold 1.8 bn barrels of oil and will produce 120,000 barrels of crude a day, according to project operator Tullow Oil of London.
Dallas-based Kosmos landed $ 750 mm in loans this year to fund its share of development costs at Jubilee.

When Blackstone and Warburg Pincus gave the company about $ 300 mm in 2004, Musselman praised Kosmos's exploration record.
"Our team has already made a large number of discoveries in West Africa, and we have a good understanding of how to find oil and make money for our investors there," Musselman said at the time.

Musselman owns a house appraised at almost $ 6 mm in Dallas' Preston Hollow neighbourhood, home to George W. Bush, Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. A lawyer by training, he spearheaded the effort to bring Class 1 horseracing to the Dallas area and led development of the Lone Star Park race track in the Grand Prairie suburb.
He was an investor in Triton and was named CEO in October 1998, when Hicks, then chairman of private-equity firm Hicks Muse Tate & Furst bought an increased stake in the company. Erikson, the Cameron chairman, said Musselman did a "good job" managing the company in the three years before it was sold.

The company had already found reserves off the coast of Equatorial Guinea before Musselman came aboard, Erikson said. By June 2001, Musselman was telling analysts of Triton's interest in exploring more off the coast of West Africa.
"The economics in West Africa are the best in the world for explorers," he said June 20 at a conference in New York. Less than a month later, Hess, then known as Amerada Hess, said it was buying Triton. The price marked a 51 % premium for Triton shareholders over the company's stock price before the announcement.

Atwood rig
Kosmos joined last year with Houston-based Noble Energy to rent a rig from Atwood Oceanics. Before Houston-based Atwood agreed to the lease rather than competing offers, the driller studied Kosmos "pretty carefully," said Glen Kelley, senior vice president for administration and marketing. Kelley said his confidence in Kosmos increased when he started recognizing names from past work with Triton.
"It was the old Triton crowd," Kelley said. "I thought it was good. These guys had great success."

Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York, said he's happy to see a small oil explorer rewarded for major discoveries.
"They're not so little anymore," Gheit said. "That's what makes this industry. This industry was not made by the big guy, but rather the little guy."

China contact
Unlike the Triton deal, which was a takeover of the whole company, the sale to ExxonMobil, the biggest US oil producer, would include only Kosmos's Ghana assets. The company also has prospects in Cameroon and Morocco.
Ghana's state oil company, Ghana National Petroleum, said that it's still in talks to buy Kosmos's stake in Jubilee. Thomas Manu, GNPC's director of exploration and production, said the company will then consider partnership proposals from other companies.

Michael Sarpong, a spokesman for Ghana's Energy Ministry, said that the government has held talks with Chinese oil executives. There has been contact with CNOOC Ltd., the listed arm of state-controlled China National Offshore Oil Corp., he said.
A report on Oct. 12 said that CNOOC was in talks with GNPC on making a bid for Kosmos's stake in Jubilee. CNOOC Ltd. is the unit that handles China National Offshore Oil's overseas upstream acquisitions.