Four decades after Atlantic Resources dazzled investors, the oil dream looks over
AFTER four decades and hundreds of millions of euro, the O’Reilly family’s long, fruitless hunt for a game-changing Irish oil strike looks to be over.
In 1981, when what is now Providence got started, oil was power.
North Sea discoveries were fuelling Margaret Thatcher’s economic revolution in the UK. And oil was sexy – JR Ewing’s Texan swagger was a global phenomenon.
The dream of an Irish oil industry to match captivated Tony O’Reilly Snr, then Ireland’s best-known businessman, who founded Atlantic Resources to scour our vast offshore waters. He raised millions of pounds from investors captivated by the same dream: the romance of the hunt and the prospect of almost limitless wealth.
Despite the millions invested, the decades of searching and headlinegrabbing deals with oil majors like Exxon and Total – and even the discovery of commercial natural gas off Kinsale and in the Corrib basin – big oil has remained tantalisingly out of reach.
By the time Tony O’Reilly Jnr formally stepped down yesterday as CEO of Providence Resources – Atlantic’s successor company – he was one of just two employees left in the shrunken remains of the business.
The writing has been on the wall for the CEO since September, when a promised Chinese investment of $9m (€8.1m) failed, repeatedly, to materialise.
O’Reilly held out for the Chinese funds for months, shedding almost his entire staff and shutting down the company offices as the wait sapped the life out of the group. The cheque never came.
Eventually, the company fell back on its shareholders for €3.5m to keep the few remaining lights on and to pay redundancies. A search for a new CEO is under way. But Providence has no day-to-day business and almost no employees. It has assets, primarily its Barryroe prospect, off the Irish coast, where oil has been identified at a number of wells, but lacks the capital to exploit the finds.
A buyer may well emerge for the chance to take over Barryroe. That looks like the best bet for a recovery for shareholders now. But the dream is as good as dead.