LSU alum leading Houston firm into the big leagues with $6.1B deal

In the biggest deal in its short history, Houston-based Plains Exploration & Production Co. agreed Monday to spend $6.1 billion to buy deepwater assets in the Gulf of Mexico from BP and Shell Oil Co., catapulting the 10-year-old company into another level of competition. Leading the company is Jim Flores, an LSU graduate and former Baton Rouge resident, who sums up the deal to the The Houston Chronicle this way: “You have to go where the opportunities are.” Flores, who is the company’s chairman, president and CEO, says the acquisitions—a $560 million deal with Shell and a $5.6 billion deal with BP, which is selling as much as $38 billion in assets in part to offset the cost of its 2010 Gulf oil spill—don’t signal a change in strategy, although they will help set the company’s sights dramatically more on offshore work. The bigger move came a few years ago, Flores says, when the company started to shift away from natural gas to higher-priced oil. “The key for us, we’ll be 90% oil,” he says. “That’s our key strategic vision.” Analyst John White of Triple Double Advisors in Houston says the acquisitions could reshape the company. “It’s a transformational acquisition,” he says. “In terms of independents operating in the Gulf of Mexico, they’ll become one of the most important and largest, right behind Anadarko, Apache and Noble.” Read the full story here.