Article by Clement Choo courtesy of S & P Global.
A subsidiary, Senex as the South Korean company moves to expand its LNG business.
The acquisition comes after the Federal Court of Australia March 18 approved a scheme of arrangement for POSCO to acquire 100% of the issued shares in Senex via subsidiary K-A Energy 1 Pty Ltd, which is owned 50.1% by POSCO and 49.9% by Australia-based Hancock Energy Corporation Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd.
The takeover is valued at around A$845.2 million ($623.4 million), based on POSCO’s offer of A$4.60/share and a share balance of 183.74 million ordinary shares posted for the Australian fiscal year ended June 30, 2021.
POSCO International has been a subsidiary of POSCO Holdings since the POSCO Group switched to a holding company system and established POSCO Holdings on March 2, with the steel business split off as POSCO.
Senex sells gas to a range of customers in Australia including Gladstone LNG, ENGIE, Santos, CleanCo, CSR, Orora and Origin Energy from its Atlas and Roma North main producing fields in Queensland’s Surat Basin. The company aims to boost its annual gas output to 60 petajoules by June 2025, enabling it to meet a 15-year supply agreement for Santos Ltd’s Gladstone LNG plant. Senex’s production was 17.3 PJ in FY 2020-21, about 2.4 times higher than the year before.
Another PSCO Holdings subsidiary, POSCO Energy, aims to build an additional three 200,000-kiloliter LNG tanks at its existing LNG storage complex at Gwangyang by 2025, taking the total to eight tanks. The current five tanks have a holding capacity of 730,000 kiloliters.
