The Times26 Nov 2022 03:14
The view from the Times,…GL S
Goodman moves after Barryroe burns through €270m
Beef baron’s financial lifeline could yet see him own over 75% of the company and sets up battle of wills with Eamon Ryan
Can Larry Goodman, the 85-year-old beef billionaire, avoid becoming another footnote in the continuing saga of Barryroe?
In early 2012, then named Providence Resources, it sparked “black gold” headlines with the discovery of the first commercially viable oil find in Irish waters since offshore drilling began in the early 1970s.
The Barryroe field, in which the company has an 80 per cent stake, some 50km off the coast of Cork, was found at the time to contain high-quality light crude. Its then chief executive, Tony O’Reilly jnr, predicted it would lure international oil giants back to Irish waters.
“It’s just like winning the lottery: you’ve got to buy tickets,” he said that March.
Investors’ appetites suitably whetted, Providence would raise €79 million a month later in a share sale priced, unusually, at a premium to the going rate for its stock in the open market at the time.
All told, the company – which traces its roots back to 1981, when O’Reilly jnr’s father, Sir Anthony O’Reilly, and a group of investors set up Atlantic Resources – has raised more than €270 million in equity over the past dozen years.
That included an emergency $70 million fundraise in 2016 – backed by the likes of M&G, Capital Group, Henderson Group and Irish businessman Nick Furlong’s Pageant Holdings – where Providence dangled even brighter baubles before investors in the form of its Druid and Drombeg prospects.
These two fields out in the Atlantic were pitched at the time to potentially hold more than five billion barrels of oil – some 14 times the estimated 350 million barrels of recoverable oil at Barryroe. Subsequent drilling at Druid and Drombeg in 2017 revealed little more than water in the reservoirs.
Since then, all bets have been placed on one horse – underscored by the company’s name change in September to Barryroe Offshore Energy.
But a decade on from the oil find, not a drop has been pumped from Barryroe – the only commercial oil and gas prospect to come from 160 wells drilled in Irish waters over the past 52 years. (There have been four gas discoveries in that time – Kinsale, Ballycotton and Seven Heads off the coast of Cork, and the Corrib field off Mayo.)
The intervening 10 years have seen three planned partnership deals to develop the project fall through, the company succumb to a series of leadership changes after O’Reilly jnr quit three years ago, the Government move last year to ban new applications for exploration licences in response to climate change concerns and, more recently, a reluctance by Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications Eamon Ryan to grant a key permit to progress work on the existing Barryroe licence…..
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/11/25/goodman-makes-move-after-barryro
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