El Paso Corp.

The El Paso Corporation agreed on Friday to sell its exploration and production businesses to a consortium led by Apollo Global Management for about $7.15 billion, striking one of the biggest leveraged buyouts since the end of the financial crisis.

In buying the units, Apollo and its partners — a group that includes Riverstone Holdings, the Russian-born industrialist Len Blavatnik and several unidentified investors — are the latest to find attractive takeover targets in North America’s oil and natural gas patch.

“Apollo is acquiring a company with an impressive portfolio of valuable natural resource assets,” Josh Harris, senior managing director at Apollo, said in a statement.

The deal also provides a respite from a sharp slowdown in mergers activity for the year to date. Announced worldwide deal volume has plunged 35 percent from the previous year, according to Thomson Reuters.

At the heart of the latest round of deals is a boom in drilling for natural gas and related compounds through techniques like hydraulic fracturing. Late last year, a group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts struck a $7.2 billion takeover of the Samson Investment Company, one of the country’s biggest privately held energy companies.

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Many of these transactions have led to a rafter of new oil and gas billionaires, whose companies were snatched up after infusions of capital from private equity backers.

Friday’s deal was made possible through Kinder Morgan‘s $21.1 billion takeover of El Paso itself, which will create the biggest network of oil and gas pipelines on the continent. To help pay for that transaction, Kinder Morgan said it would sell off El Paso’s exploration and production units.

Despite the attractiveness of those divisions, which include parts of shale formations in Texas and Colorado, analysts and investors had regarded the units as nonessential for some time. El Paso announced last spring that it was exploring spinning them off to shareholders to focus on its pipeline operations.

Those holdings had been the subject of controversy in 2003, after El Paso admitted to having overstated its proven natural gas reserves.

Last spring’s announcement spurred interest from potential buyers, according to a person briefed on the matter. But it took the Kinder Morgan deal and a formal auction of the businesses to prompt formal interest from Apollo and other suitors.

Apollo and its partners were regarded as formidable candidates relatively early on in the process, in part because they sought to buy the El Paso businesses in one transaction, making for a cleaner sale, according to people briefed on the matter.

Within the corps of advisers to the Apollo consortium, the deal was known internally as “Project Everest,” according to a person briefed on the matter.

Apollo has struck a number of energy deals in recent years, including selling Parallel Petroleum to a unit of Samsung in December for nearly $800 million after buying the company in 2009 for about $483 million. And Riverstone is a well-known investor in energy companies, having participated in at least 24 deals last year, according to data from Capital IQ.

The Apollo-led group is expected to put up about $3 billion in capital to back the deal, a relatively high amount of equity for a leveraged buyout but fairly standard for an energy deal. The consortium will also draw upon about $5.5 billion in financing arranged by seven banks, led by Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.

One possible hitch for Friday’s deal is a lawsuit filed in Delaware by El Paso shareholders arguing that the company’s sale to Kinder Morgan is flawed and should be reopened to other potential buyers. The Apollo-led leveraged buyout is contingent on the closing of the earlier deal, according to one of the people briefed on the matter.

El Paso was advised by Evercore Partners and Barclays Capital.