There is a tremor of excitement about the arrival of Taqa on the Scottish oil scene. Until recently, few had heard of the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company but now most know there is no "u" after the "q".
There is a tremor of excitement about the arrival of Taqa on the Scottish oil scene.
Until recently, few had heard of the Abu Dhabi National Energy Company but now most know there is no "u" after the "q" and Taqa is rapidly becoming a household name.
When Taqa was floated in 2005 with the vision of creating a global energy company it only had interests in power assets in the United Arab Emirates.
Three years on it has assets of $23bn (£15.5bn) and 2800 employees of more than 40 nationalities in nine countries.
At the beginning of this year just seven of those were in Aberdeen, but the company has now moved into a new office at Westhill on the outskirts of the city where the payroll will have risen to 300 by the end of the year.
Leo Koot is managing director of Taqa Bratani, the company's UK arm, which has already acquired the Brae assets from Talisman and completed the Drum Farm-in, an exploration prospect near Brae, with Reach Exploration (UK) Limited.
In the next few weeks the i's will be dotted and the t's crossed to complete a deal with Shell/Exxon Mobil for their interests operating licences for six offshore fields and two non-operated subsea tie-backs in the northern North Sea.
When the acquisition is complete, the fledgling company will have production of somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 barrels a day, with a target of doubling that in two years.
Wood Group has won the contract to act as duty holder for these assets but Taqa, which means "energy" in Arabic, plans to be duty holder as well as operator of its own assets within 18 months.
"We will be transitioning to having all those skills in-house so it is fundamentally different to what new-start companies have been doing to date," said Koot.
"They have relied very much on the service community with just a small core team. We want to move away from that model because we want to add these skills in-house and then be able to export them around the globe where there are growth opportunities."
Taqa has a three-hub strategy, with Canada the centre for onshore oil and gas operations, the Netherlands focusing on offshore operated gas in the southern North Sea and onshore gas storage, and Aberdeen the global hub for operated oil.
Koot points out that the Taqa way is not typical.
"The current model is private equity backed with a small management team, optimised service sector, trying to make a quick buck in the oil industry, whereas we are going to be a full-blown exploration and production company.
"In the UK there are the large independents - Venture, Dana, Talisman, Apache - and then there is a gap and you have Shell, Total and BP, and we want to be operating in that gap.
"Why is it suitable for us? Because at the moment we are the only player capable of doing that because of our strong financial ratings. We are a double A minus-rated company and as a result we can take on the difficult abandonment liabilities."
Far from looking on the global credit crunch as a problem, Taqa sees it as an opportunity to make it possible to reach its 80,000 barrels-a-day target in two years.
"Now is buying time," he said. "There are several distressed companies and we are interested in corporate acquisitions. The majors are still under pressure from the government to do something with their assets so we would expect them to continue the divestment of their less- loved assets. Then there is the traditional route of licence applications, some exploration and some appraisal work.
"It would be arrogant of us to say we are better than the majors but we are differently structured, differently organised, more nimble and we can tune our investment to the economic environment and the opportunities we see throughout the year.
"Our programmes aren't cast in stone and as a result we feel we are in a better place to recover the oil in these mature assets."
These assets include three-quarters-of-a-billion barrels of untapped in oil below the Shell acquisitions in the northern North Sea fields and Taqa is keen to find ways to get at that oil.
The company believes that it will be possible by blending the experience gained in exploiting tight gas (gas which is hard to recover) in Canada with developments they hope to achieve with institutions such as Aberdeen and the Robert Gordon universities.
