Early this fall, the capital canyons of Wall Street were filled with myriad puddles, as eight straight days of rain pelted the Northeast corridor of the U.S. But the mood in the corporate-finance conference rooms and on the floors of the NYSE and Nymex was anything but gloomy. The only storm the denizens of these domains saw was a steady torrent of energy-related M&A transactions and initial public offerings (IPOs), a stream of new oil and gas stock symbols on exchange tickers, and a blizzard of buy and sell orders in the oil and gas futures-contract trading pits. The message of the Street to a capital-intensive energy industry: open for business. But the tempo and nature of this deal flow had been building all year. Amid global resource scarcity, national oil companies (NOCs) as early as this spring began vying with international oils for access to new assets, as witnessed by the Chevron/CNOOC bidding battle for Unocal. "We're in a whole new world today where a war for resources is under way," observes one global market-maker. Further evidence of the frenzy in crossborder M&A this year was Norsk Hydro's purchase of Spinnaker Exploration, Statoil's acquisition of EnCana's Gulf of Mexico assets and the sale of Kerr-McGee's North Sea assets to U.K. and Dutch buyers. Meanwhile, in purely domestic transactions, Occidental Petroleum was busy acquiring Vintage Petroleum, and Chesapeake Energy was busy buying every other domestic hydrocarbon asset not nailed down. For more on this, see the December issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-993-9320, ext. 126.

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