LONDON Reuters - BP is targeting the North Sea and U.S. shale basins to boost oil and gas supplies in the short term in response to the global energy crisis, head of oil and gas operations told Reuters.
BP aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, or 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, between 2019 and 2030, as part of its strategy to slash greenhouse gas emissions and build up a large renewables business.
In 2022, the company has boosted its spending on oil and gas by $500 million in response to soaring energy prices and a supply crunch after years of underinvestment in the sector and disruption to Russian supplies of gas to Europe.
BP is focusing its short-term output growth in the North Sea, where it produces around 130,000 barrels of oil, as well as shale fields in the United States, which produced 317,000 barrels of fuel in the first half of the year, BP head of production and operations Gordon Birrell told Reuters.
Birrell said we're moving forward some North Sea projects. Birrell said the Murlach field is one such project.
The plans BP submitted in April show that Mulach will be connected to the existing Eastern Trough Area Project ETAP platform some 7 kilometres away, according to development plans BP submitted in April.
After a $10.5 billion acquisition from BHP in 2018, BP became a major producer in the onshore U.S. shale basins and is one of our big fields with investment opportunities that we are doing as much as we can to move forward in time.
Birrell said that the company has invested heavily in technology to reduce carbon emissions from its shale operations, known as BPX, including electrifying drilling rigs in the oil-rich Permian basin.
He said that the development phase is ongoing and that we are putting more capital into that in response to the energy crisis. Some of it is going to be going into drilling and production, some of it going into reducing emissions. He said production will keep growing in BPX, and that we want to keep growing that business.