The pace of U.S. corporate transactions among publicly held companies would pick up for the right price, according to speakers at the fourth annual A&D Strategies and Opportunities conference in Dallas recently. "If (potential corporate sellers) would just cooperate with us, we could make a deal," quipped Mike Taylor, vice president, corporate development, for Comstock Resources Inc. The conference, hosted by Oil and Gas Investor magazine and A&D Watch newsletter, was attended by more than 300 professionals involved in mergers and acquisitions. With E&P stock prices up, however, "everyone seems expensive," Taylor noted. The pace of U.S. corporate transactions in the upstream space slowed since 2002 to involve only a handful of such deals, including the Devon Energy Corp. and Ocean Energy Inc. merger in early 2003, the Plains E&P Co. and Nuevo Energy merger in early 2004, and a series of Rockies-focused mergers. Otherwise, most deals have been asset-only in structure or they involved public-company purchases of private companies. Glen Mizenko, vice president, business development, for Forest Oil Corp. said Forest looks at potential corporate transactions but "they're hard to do." In the past two years, Forest has restructured its portfolio to be North America-focused: some 43% of its portfolio is new. (For more on this, see "Out of the Woods," Oil and Gas Investor, September 2005.) "We've changed a lot in a very short period of time. We've developed growth engines and hope to develop more growth engines through acquisitions," Mizenko said. For more on this, see the October issue of Oil and Gas Investor. For a subscription, call 713-993-9320, ext. 126.