BP to boost its oil output 20% from North Slope fields

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City), Jun 18, 1998 by Reed V. Landberg Bloomberg News

LONDON -- British Petroleum said it will boost oil output from its fields on the Alaska's North Slope by 20 percent in the next few years following success in tapping new deposits and extending the life of the biggest-producing field in the Western hemisphere.

Europe's second-biggest oil company said it revised its estimates of its remaining reserves in Alaska to 7 billion barrels of oil, a third of its reserves worldwide. The figure reflects 1 billion barrels in "potential" from leases where it still hasn't drilled and four new fields scheduled to begin production in 2001.

The announcement gave new details on how BP planned to reach its goal of boosting production by 25 percent in the next five years and showed that Alaska's giant Prudhoe Bay field, discovered in 1968, still has plenty of oil left in it years after some said it should have run dry. "By all signs we have the barrels," Richard Campbell, president of BP's Alaska unit, said in a statement as he briefed industry analysts about the plans. BP had disclosed before its plans to boost output in the region, most recently at the annual meeting in April, though Wednesday's statement had details about the plan that makes the company's promises to boost output credible. BP is the biggest holder of oil production licenses in Alaska and controls the Prudhoe Bay field along with others such as Exxon Corp. and Atlantic Richfield Co. It pegged the size of the Prudhoe Bay field at 13.1 billion barrels of oil, about 3.5 billion barrels more than the amount originally estimated. For years, some analysts have said production from Alaska would peak soon, but BP and its partners have managed to use new drilling technologies and access to other fields in the region to extend output from the region. Wednesday, BP said it planned to boost output by 100,000 barrels a day from 460,000 barrels a day by 2002 and maintain production above 500,000 barrels a day "for the foreseeable future." More than half its output comes from the Prudhoe Bay field, found by Arco in December of 1968 and put into production in the mid- 1970s. BP and Arco are working to cut the annual 12 percent decline in production in that field.