BP shares were down 2% as investors reacted to the company's failure to win a US Supreme Court battle over oil spill compensation claims. The price of Brent crude fell to $66 a barrel due to oversupply fears.
A challenge by BP over a settlement agreement following the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been rejected by the US Supreme Court. The oil major had claimed the deal allowed certain businesses to get payouts, despite being unable to trace their losses to the disaster. The court’s refusal to hear the appeal by BP means that it will have to continue making payments as it deals with the aftermath of the explosion four years ago.
The rate of job losses across BP in the UK and abroad will increase after dropping oil prices intensified the company’s simplification plans, the oil giant said. Some 15,000 of BP’s employees are based in the UK, while the company employs about 84,000 people worldwide. BP’s finance director Brian Gilvary is reported to have said: “What you’ll see with this simplification plan is that headcounts are starting to come down across all of our activities in upstream, downstream and in the corporate centres - essentially the layers above operations.”
Energy firms and airlines were big movers today after the decision by Opec ministers not to cut output triggered a further fall in oil prices. With Brent crude at a fresh four-year low of 72 US dollars a barrel overnight, the FTSE 100 Index tumbled 40.1 points to 6683.3 on the back of sizeable declines for some of the City’s biggest stocks. BP was down 3%, or 14.15p to 412.25p, and rival Royal Dutch Shell slid by 65p to 2200.5p. Oil and gas exploration firm BG was the biggest faller in the top flight with a decline of more than 7% or 73.8p to 912.9p, while energy services firm Weir declined 152p to 1808p.
BP Plc, having pledged billions of dollars for damages caused by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, won’t have to make payouts any time soon to more than 95 percent of the workers hurt while cleaning up the mess. If the workers want money for their physical injuries, they’ll need to sue the company, a federal judge in New Orleans ruled yesterday, saying they no longer qualify for automatic compensation under the company’s medical-benefits settlement.
BP Plc lost a bid for a new trial on findings that it was grossly negligent in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a decision that exposes the company to $18 billion in pollution fines. The loss follows multiple BP legal setbacks, including failed efforts to cut the cost of its settlement with spill victims. After being told by trial and appeals courts that it must live with the deal it negotiated, BP is awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether it will hear the company’s complaint that the deal is being misinterpreted to compensate claimants BP says it didn’t intended to pay.
Oil giant BP has launched a cost reduction exercise in the North Sea in line with rivals such as Shell and Chevron which have cut hundreds of jobs. The firm, which recently announced a significant new discovery in the central North Sea along with partner GDF Suez, said that rising costs and toughening market conditions were to blame for the restructuring move. The company declined to reveal the expected effects on its 4,000 North Sea workforce, saying that the company was in the “early stages” of the process.
Oil at $80 a barrel won’t stop BP Plc or Total SA from exploring and developing crude deposits. Oil has dropped into a bear market this year, with prices falling almost 30 percent since June amid a global glut. OPEC won’t cut its collective output when it meets this month and global oil prices will stabilize once the surplus is absorbed, Kuwait Oil Minister Ali Al-Omair said at an oil conference in Abu Dhabi, the capital of United Arab Emirates, yesterday. All projects under way now will go ahead with oil at $80 a barrel, London-based BP Chief Executive Officer Robert Dudley said at the conference. Total, based in Paris, can proceeed with its projects at $80, Arnaud Breuillac, president of exploration and production, also said in Abu Dhabi. Brent crude, benchmark for more than half of the world’s oil, fell 0.5 percent today to $81.97 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe in London, extending this year’s retreat to 26 percent. “We have only sanctioned or approved projects based on an $80 oil price,” Dudley said. “We’ve been doing that three or four years so there isn’t any project that we’re working on today, particularly those big capital projects, that we have any different view of.”
BP Egypt and its partners plan to invest $240million in a pair of blocks just awarded as a result of the 2013 EGAS (Egyptian Natural Gas Holding) round. The oil major said the programme will include 3D seismic and three exploration wells in each of the onshore and offshore blocks in phases lasting between six to eight years. The first block, the North El Mataria, is BP’s first entry into the Onshore Nile Delta.
BP confirmed it is now operating the world’s first robotic coreflooding system in a bid to boost its enhanced oil recovery abilities. The firm also confirmed the new technology will now be fully deployed on the Clair Ridge project in the North Sea.
Oil giant BP is planning at least one more development phase for the huge west of Shetland Clair field at a likely cost in the range £6.3billion-£9.4billion. No clear time-scale for development has been set - it is is at the concept stage just now - but the current expectation is that phase three of Clair will up and running before the original first stage peters out by around 2028. The cost estimate is two to three times higher than the current phase two - Clair Ridge - development, where production is expected to start in 2016.
Oil giant BP has halted production at its Skarv field in the Norwegian Sea due to a technical issue. The company has invested more than £4billion in the development since production began in January last year. A spokesman for BP said a problem with a short-circuit resulted in the outage of a train 1 gas compressor.
BP Plc, Europe’s third-largest oil company, reported a 19% decline in quarterly profit. The company increased its dividend to 10 cents a share.
BP's bid for a new trial over causes of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill should be rejected because the judge didn’t rely on excluded testimony, Halliburton Co. said in court papers.
Oil major Chevron has made a new oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico. The company said a significant oil pay had been made at the Keathley Canyon Block 10 in the Guadalupe prospect.
GDF Suez and BP have made a new oil discovery in the UK Central North Sea.
Oil giant BP has awarded engineering contracts for its $12billion expansion of its Tangguh Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) development in Indonesia. The contracts are for the onshore Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) to a number of partners including PT Tripatra Engineers and Contractors.
Oil giant BP has signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi’s offshore company ADMA-OPCO to develop a new technology for enhance oil recovery (EOR). Senior officials from the company recently visited BP’s EOR laboratory in Sunbury and research centre in Pangbourne.
BP will restart the Rhum gas field in the UK North Sea, half-owned by Iran's National Oil Company, four years after the field was shut down due to Western sanctions.
BP chose to “cut corners” when an oil pipeline was built across land belonging to Colombian farmers, then put up “a smokescreen of obfuscation" when things went wrong, a QC has said in the High Court.
Kevin Lacy is still haunted by the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- by the lives lost, the families devastated and the environment despoiled. He describes the images of the giant, burning rig as looking like “something from Pearl Harbor.”
Colombian farmers are coming to court seeking compensation from BP for serious damage they allege was caused by negligence in the building of a pipeline across their land.
The North Sea will soon produce an extra 45,000 barrels of oil a day after start-up on the £700million Kinnoull field, BP chief executive Bob Dudley has announced.
Fifty years since acquiring its first North Sea license, BP is preparing to start a £700million ($1.1billion) project in the region that’s expected to produce oil and gas into the next decade.
Engineering and construction company Technip has been using buoy in its largest North Sea project to plan operations more effectively around harsh weather. The Fugro SEAWATCH Wavescan buoy has led to improved safety at BP’s Quad 204 project, which is just West of Shetland.