BHP Billiton Ltd.’s $40 billion hostile bid for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan puts this year on course to be the busiest for natural resources deals.

Commodities companies, including miners, oil producers and chemical makers, have announced $362 billion of takeovers so far this year. If they maintain that pace, they’ll eclipse the record $576 billion of deals announced in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Resources deals constitute 28 percent of this year’s $1.26 trillion merger market, double their average share during the previous 10 years.

BHP, Vedanta Resources Plc and Apache Corp. are taking advantage of low interest rates to finance all-cash deals that allow them to add reserves more cheaply than exploration. In addition, valuations haven’t rebounded as fast as commodity prices. The energy segment of the Morgan Stanley World Index has risen 39 percent from its 2009 low as the price of crude oil more than doubled.

“Commodity prices have recovered and natural resource producers are feeling confident again,” said Philip Keevil, a former Lazard Ltd. banker and now a senior partner at Compass Advisers LLP, in an interview from New York today. “In many cases it makes more sense to buy something someone else has already found. This hasn’t happened in the last two years when the financing dried up, but that appears to be changing.”

Melbourne-based BHP has lined up $43 billion in loans to finance its bid for Potash Corp. Miner Vedanta last week agreed to pay $8.4 billion in cash for a controlling stake in oil driller Cairn India Ltd., using a $5 billion loan arranged by Standard Chartered Plc.

‘Large Discoveries’

“The deals potentially signal the start of an upturn in natural resources,” said David Hart, an analyst at Westhouse Securities Ltd. in London. “Oil and gas companies are looking for access to potentially large discoveries. Access is one of the key challenges for oil majors.”

BP Plc, which said it will sell up to $30 billion of assets worldwide to help pay for the Gulf of Mexico spill, agreed to sell fields in the U.S., Canada at Egypt for $7 billion to Apache in July. The London-based company has agreed the disposal of $1.9 billion assets in Colombia and said operations in Pakistan and Vietnam are for sale.

Other than then BHP bid, the biggest mining deals this year are Polyus Gold Co.’s $11 billion acquisition of KazakhGold Group Ltd. and Lihir Gold Ltd.’s $9 billion purchase of Newcrest Mining Ltd., according to Bloomberg data.

To contact the reporters on this story: Brett Foley in London at bfoley8@bloomberg.net; Zachary R. Mider in New York at zmider1@bloomberg.net; Brian Swint in London at bswint@bloomberg.net.

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