BP Weighs North Sea Exit Under New CEO

Authored by Michael Kern via OilPrice.com,

BP has started to simplify its portfolio and cut costs, and will make fewer but better choices in which projects to invest, chief executive Meg O’Neill said on Thursday.

“We are taking concrete action to grow long-term value for shareholders: simplifying our portfolio, reducing costs, maintaining tight discipline on capex and strengthening the balance sheet,” O’Neill, the first female CEO of a Big Oil company, wrote in a LinkedIn post to reflect on the first 100 days as top executive of BP.

“We need to be deliberate about where we invest and where we don’t. We need to make fewer, better choices and hold ourselves to account,” O’Neill wrote.

“Investors should be able to rely on us in the same way our customers do,” the executive added.

BP has already simplified its structure by bundling operations into two businesses, Upstream and Downstream, with trading connecting both to create value.

Despite the unprecedented disruption in the energy industry in recent months, BP has continued to simplify the company and reduce costs to make the supermajor more attractive to investors, she said.

As part of the portfolio simplification, BP is reportedly considering an exit from the UK North Sea, due to unfavorable taxation policies in Britain.

BP is the last supermajor to haven’t either sold or combined its UK North Sea business in recent years. Shell and Equinor combined their oil and gas assets in a standalone company, Adura.

TotalEnergies merged its assets with NEO NEXT to create NEO NEXT+, in which the French supermajor holds a 47.5% interest.

This week, BP announced a divestiture offshore Canada, as it agreed to sell its non-operated interest in the Bay du Nord offshore oil development to Equinor.

The sale marks another step in BP’s strategy to streamline its upstream portfolio and tighten capital allocation.