BP drills at 'giant' Gulf field after setback due to spill
BP has begun appraisal drilling in its highly touted Tiber oil prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said on Thursday, more than three years after its massive Macondo blowout and crude spill set back drilling in the basin.
BP has begun appraisal drilling in its highly touted Tiber oil prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said on Thursday, more than three years after its massive Macondo blowout and crude spill set back drilling in the basin.
BP confirmed that drilling began on August 3. ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Ryan Lance disclosed it to analysts during a webcast presentation at the Barclays Energy-Power Conference in New York. ConocoPhillips is a minority partner in Tiber.
“We are appraising the Tiber discovery which was made pre-incident in the Gulf of Mexico,” Lance said, referring to BP’s 2010 Macondo oil spill that spewed millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf and prompted a six-month drilling shutdown by the US government.
In 2009, BP touted what it called a “giant” oil discovery in the Tiber field next to its Kaskida field that could hold up to 3 billion barrels of oil.
Both fields are in the Lower Tertiary trend, the Gulf’s deepest, most challenging and most promising deposit that is estimated to hold up to 15 billion barrels of oil.
BP had planned in 2010 to drill appraisal wells in the Tiber field to help gauge how much oil was there. The company’s Macondo rupture and spill prompted the shutdown that delayed those plans as well as drilling by other Gulf oil producers.
