Bahrain may follow other Persian Gulf states and sell energy assets to bolster its economy after last year’s crash in oil prices. “We’ve got a lot of infrastructure assets that can easily be” structured to raise funding, Oil Minister Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Khalifa said in an interview on Wednesday. “We’ve been looking at this for some time. We haven’t made a decision yet.”

The government is in talks with international firms about them investing in a petrochemical plant that will cost as much as $2 billion to build, he said. A pipeline connecting the island-nation to Saudi Arabia would be “ideal” for a private-equity transaction, while a ship for importing liquefied natural gas and upstream assets could also be used to raise money, he said.

The region’s state energy producers are in a strong position because demand for infrastructure assets, which tend to have steady returns, is high, Al Khalifa said. “There seems to be a large pool of capital interested in this, despite all the challenges with the environmental drive,” he said.

Source Credit: Bloomberg