BritEnergy Takes $50 Million Permian Stake as Third UK Driller Heads Overseas
The Lincolnshire firm's Lea County acquisition extends a pattern of British oil capital shifting to US shale over domestic policy concerns.
Lincolnshire-based BritEnergy Group said on Thursday (2026-08-27) it had acquired a majority stake in 13 Permian Basin wells across a 3,000-acre site in Lea County, New Mexico. The company invested $50 million in five producing wells, two of them new horizontal wells, and is targeting five million barrels of output by 2032, anticipating $200 million in profit from the acreage.5
The deal makes BritEnergy the third British oil and gas company in recent months to direct capital abroad over domestic policy concerns. Hunting's chief executive Jim Johnson publicly called the UK "uninvestable." BP has pledged to sell its North Sea assets. BritEnergy chair Garry Mahoney said on Thursday (2026-08-27) that Britain had become "hostile" to fossil fuel investment and was "heading to energy zero faster than net zero," noting that the country had historically held strong advantages in engineering and capital access.5
Shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho raised similar objections nine days earlier. On Wednesday (2026-08-19), at the launch of a report by the centre-right think tank Onward, she warned that the UK's legislated 2050 net zero target risked consigning the country to "fantasy land." Mahoney's phrasing tracks that argument closely.4,5
BP's concurrent retreat from its green portfolio provides the most prominent corporate precedent. The major expects a further $1 billion writedown from energy transition assets in the second quarter of 2026, Rigzone reported, following up to $5 billion of impairments earlier this year as it unwinds commitments made under the 2020 "performing while transforming" strategy. BP is also selling Archaea, a US biogas business it acquired four years ago for $4 billion, oilprice.com reported.1,2
Those asset disposals have not damaged BP's near-term earnings. The major reported a second-quarter profit of $5.73 billion, almost double the same period in 2025 and above analyst forecasts, oilprice.com reported, with crude prices elevated by disruption to flows through the Strait of Hormuz. Eight of the sector's largest companies combined for profits exceeding $90 billion in the three months to June, roughly double their combined approximately $50 billion in Q2 2025, the outlet reported. The group included Aramco, BP, Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, Chevron and ExxonMobil. Aramco alone reported net income exceeding $33 billion in the quarter, up 34% from a year earlier, oilprice.com reported.3
ICE Brent crude front-month was at $89.42 a barrel on Friday (2026-08-28). That price environment strengthens the Permian's appeal: the two states hosting the bulk of the basin's production together supply roughly a third of US natural gas and 14% of the country's electricity, according to energyvoice.com, without the regulatory friction facing UK offshore operators.5
BritEnergy's Lea County ambitions extend beyond oil. The company plans to build a 300 MW solar farm on the same site and said it is in talks over a gas production deal in Morocco. The solar element complicates any straightforward fossil-fuels-versus-clean-energy framing of the UK exit: BritEnergy is willing to commit to low-carbon generation where it judges the economics workable.5
Whether the Morocco gas talks produce an agreement remains unresolved, adding a layer of sovereign and counterparty risk to a company already committing across three geographies. BP's North Sea sale process, if it completes, will produce the most concrete pricing benchmark for UK offshore assets in years; what it achieves will matter to every remaining holder still deciding whether to follow.5,2