Dan Cozine has an issue with the project finance market. Namely, that the market to which people in the industry still refer on a consistent basis scarcely exists any more. “We’ve seen a blurring of the lines for project finance,” he says. “People still talk about it as a product, and there are still some pure project finance deals out there but they are more scarce these days, particularly in North America. There really has been a morphing of project finance and energy and commodities structured finance.”
He cites the example of a deal that BNP Paribas, a long-term player in the North American and global project finance markets, did last October for the Canadian public company Connacher Oil and Gas. The bank was sole lead arranger on a $180m term loan B, which funded both the company’s development in the Athabasca oil sands and also refinanced Connacher’s purchase of a refinery in Montana. Mr Cozine says that this was a good example of the sort of hybrid deal that the bank has been doing lately. “It was a combined deal involving our North American project finance team and our oil and gas team in Houston,” he says.
