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Article: North Sea production changes shape as big players offload their ageing assets
- Article from:
- Scotland on Sunday
- Article date:
- January 19, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2003 Scotland on Sunday. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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LAST week BP sold its Forties oilfield to a US company, Apache, in
a 1.3bn dollars deal and consigned another chapter of the history of
the North Sea oil industry to the dustbin.
Discovered in 1970, it was the first major find in the North Sea
and within three years it was pumping 500,000 barrels per day.
Several years later, Shell discovered the even larger Brent oilfield,
which lends its name to the benchmark for crude prices in the UK.
In the aftermath of the first oil crisis sparked by the Opec
cartel in 1973, oil majors invested billions in building up
production in the North Sea.
Now Forties, whose oil rivals Brent as the most suitable benchmark
for North Sea crude prices, is ...