Ithaca Energy Enters Canada With $860M Suncor Asset Deal

Ithaca Energy, the UK North Sea producer majority-owned by Israel’s Delek Group and Italy’s Eni, said Monday it has agreed to buy a package of offshore oil assets from Suncor Energy on Canada’s Grand Banks for $860 million, plus up to $250 million in contingent payments tied to future oil prices over 27 months. The deal, disclosed in a regulatory filing at 7:00 a.m. London time, is Ithaca’s first acquisition outside the North Sea and its first step into Canadian offshore production.

What Ithaca is actually buying

The package covers three interests roughly 350 kilometres southeast of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador: a 48% operated working interest in the Terra Nova field, a 40% non-operated interest in the existing White Rose lands, and a 38.6% non-operated interest in the White Rose Growth Lands, which include the West White Rose Extension. Ithaca is taking over as operator at Terra Nova, a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) development that Suncor and its partners restarted production at in late 2023 after a multi-year shutdown for asset life-extension work. The assets carry 2P reserves of about 103 million barrels of oil equivalent, works out to roughly $8 per barrel of reserves at the headline price, plus a further 200 million boe of additional resources that have not yet been booked as reserves.

A production bump that peaks in 2029

Ithaca expects the Canadian assets to add an average of roughly 30,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day between 2027 and 2031, with output peaking at 35,000-40,000 boe/d around 2029 as the West White Rose Extension ramps up. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to the usual regulatory and partner approvals, with an effective date of July 1, 2026 — meaning Ithaca will be compensated for cash flow generated by the assets between that date and closing.

Why a North Sea specialist is going to Canada

Ithaca’s identity has been built almost entirely in UK waters, and that profile deepened sharply after it absorbed the bulk of Eni’s UK North Sea portfolio in a 2024 share deal that left Eni holding roughly 38.7% of the combined company and gave Ithaca stakes in six of the ten largest oil fields in the UK Continental Shelf, including Rosebank, Cambo and Schiehallion. Chief executive Yaniv Friedman framed Monday’s deal as “the next era of growth” built on “disciplined international expansion” rather than a shift away from the North Sea. The Grand Banks assets give Ithaca a second core production area with its own operating history, its own regulatory regime, and none of the UK windfall-tax exposure that has repeatedly reshaped North Sea investment economics — a backdrop against which OPEC+’s own decision to hold November output steady has kept global crude benchmarks relatively predictable for dealmakers. The company said the purchase will be funded from cash on hand, its borrowing-base facility and secured in-country financing, and that it supports a medium-term production target of 140,000-150,000 boe/d company-wide.

What it means for Canada’s offshore sector

The Grand Banks have been a two-operator story for most of the past decade, dominated by Suncor-led and Cenovus-led joint ventures around Hibernia, Terra Nova and White Rose. Ithaca’s entry — the deal is expected to make it Canada’s fifth-largest offshore operator by the companies’ own count — introduces a new independent operator into a basin that has otherwise consolidated around a small number of established players. For Suncor, the sale continues a pattern of trimming non-core interests in mature offshore assets to concentrate capital on its Canadian oil sands business. It also lands at a moment when Canada’s oil sector is pushing to diversify where its barrels go, including the federal government’s move to fast-track the Pacific Link pipeline to open new Asian export markets for crude produced further inland.

Sources

• Ithaca Energy plc, regulatory news service announcement, “Strategic Acquisition of Offshore Canada Assets,” October 5, 2026, 7:00 a.m. — used for deal structure, asset interests, reserves/resources figures, financing and the CEO quote.
• Offshore Energy (offshore-energy.biz), “$860M play for offshore oil assets powers Ithaca’s entry into Canadian energy game,” October 5, 2026 — used for production profile, closing timeline and market-position context.

Illustrative image. Photo: GuavaTrain, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons — source