London — The usual suspects have planted their flags along the dusty byways of the Permian Basin, declaring where they’ve staked claims. There are names like Royal Dutch Shell, Anadarko Petroleum, Pioneer Natural Resources. And, on signs fronting a barbed-wire fence, BHP Billiton. For the world’s largest mining company, the heart of the US shale boom in West Texas might seem to be strange territory, a very long way from the iron-ore deposits of Australia or the copper mines of Chile’s Atacama desert. But BHP actually has been in the oil business for years, with operations stretching from Texas to the North Sea. Its US assets alone are so valuable that activist investor Paul Singer urged the company to spin them off — a suggestion BHP rejected on Monday, setting the stage for a tussle with the billionaire. For CEO Andrew Mackenzie, a Scottish-born geologist who spent two decades at BP and joined the miner in 2008, there is a lot at stake. For one thing, oil is one of the two commodit...
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