The M&A market for 2023 was characterized by some familiar bedfellows: uncertainty and energy. Dealmakers had to run a gauntlet that included, at various moments, war, inflation, Federal Reserve intervention, price uncertainties and even scandal in tech-heavy business sectors like banking and blockchain. But despite all that, the year 2023 has ended in decent shape.
CDT Roundup: 23 Deals, 13 Firms, 219 Lawyers, $4.2B
Want to know what 2024 will look like? Just take a hard look at 2023, according to many of the respondents to the Dallas Fed’s quarterly energy survey. Buoyed by a belief that oil prices will remain more than $70 per barrel, even with depressed natural gas prices, energy producers in the Fed’s Region 11 expect consolidations to continue in East and West Texas including a few blockbuster deals. That’s what 2023 looked like. The CDT Roundup looks at the details of the Dallas Fed survey along with the usual list of lawyers and firms behind the 23 transactions reported during the next-to-last week of the year.
CDT Roundup: 23 Deals, 17 Firms, 230 Lawyers, $6.4B
Hydrogen ranks No. 1 in the Periodic Table of Elements, but its carbon-heavy production process has made it a target – not only of environmental concerns — but of potential solutions. Its elemental role in a variety of industrial production processes has made the pursuit of CCS technologies (carbon capture and sequestration) a rising star in a Texas-led pursuit of scalable environmental abatement. Alan Alexander, a partner at Vinson & Elkins, has made himself part of that pursuit. His views are part of this week’s CDT Roundup, along with the usual summaries of new transactions and the roster of lawyers who made them.