Blackstone yesterday announced an agreement to invest $1.5B in a pair of drilling deals in West Texas, and committed another $500M to a group which has just purchased 16K acres in another area of the Permian Basin. The Blackstone (NYSE:BX) money for the deals came from an $8B pool raised early last year, but had mostly sat untapped. Other investors of late include Wilbur Ross, EIG Global Energy Partners and Apollo Global (NYSE:APO). Wall Street’s rush could be a sign of a bottom… or a bubble – in some cases properties are going for higher prices that exceed those paid when oil was above $100 per barrel two years ago. “There’s this one corner of the world, the Permian Basin, where investors will keep financing you to keep on acquiring,” says Parsley Energy (NYSE:PE) CEO Bryan Sheffield, whose company has sold stock to buy land five times since 2014 (including a sale last week). PDC Energy (NASDAQ:PDCE) shot higher earlier this week on an agreement to buy $1.5B of Permian fields for an NY investment firm. “It’s like musical chairs,” says a Dallas portfolio manager. “At some point in time, there’s not going to be a chair, and [oil producers] want to make sure they have a seat.”
