Santa Maria Energy Drops $40 Million Merger Deal

Santa Maria Energy axed its plan to merge with Hyde Park Acquisition Corp. II last week after the New York-based company didn’t round up enough votes for the $40 million deal, said Beth Marino, Santa Maria Energy’s vice president of legal and corporate affairs. Marino added that the Santa Maria oil drilling company — which had its 136 cyclic steam injection wells approved by the Board of Supervisors in November — will neither try to renegotiate with Hyde Park nor try to merge with another company. Instead, Marino said, the company will seek out a private equity investment to raise the $100 million to $125 million in capital to drill those 136 wells.

Under the plan proposed late last year, the two companies had planned to join and form Santa Maria Energy Corporation, which would have remained based in Santa Maria with the existing management staff. Hyde Park has more than $79 million in assets and would have contributed at least $40 million in a trust account to the new parent company. The shares of the new company would have been publicly traded. Santa Maria Energy will still be working with Kayne Anderson Capitol Advisors, L.P., which manages $24 billion in assets.

Santa Maria Energy — which reported $101.1 million in assets in 2012 to the Securities and Exchange Commission — has yet to begin drilling its 136 wells. Marino said they expect to be finished by the end of 2015. In a copy of a report the company made in relation to its Hyde Park plans, Santa Maria Energy was found to have the potential to drill 7,000 wells across its oil fields near Orcutt, Santa Maria, and Casmalia.