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Not dead yet: Home of Brent crude gets new lease of life

Reuters, London
Oil giant BP's Eastern Trough Area Project off the coast of Scotland wasn't supposed to be viable beyond 2018. But government and industry working together have given ETAP a new lease of life that is being closely watched by countries and companies eyeing other ageing projects around the world.
When ETAP was launched 20 years ago today, some experts predicted the UK sector of the North Sea would cease most production by 2030.
Government efforts to keep producers in the basin, home to the Brent crude that underpins the price benchmark, gained urgency with the 2014 oil price crash. Cheaper oil also forced the industry to upgrade technology and find more efficiencies. From original plans to stop production at ETAP, BP decided to invest $ 1 billion in 2015.
"One has to take stock of the potential going forward and make an intervention that allows for the right investment to extend life," Ariel Flores, BP's North Sea Chief, told Reuters. "We've done that on ETAP."
ETAP's example shows how efforts to extend the production in the North Sea are succeeding, providing lessons for producers in other fields near exhaustion such as those in the Gulf of Mexico and southeast Asia.
ETAP produces around 37,000 barrels per day of oil now against as much as 217,000 bpd in 2000. But BP production in the entirety of the North Sea is set to double in 2020 to 200,000 bpd from 2014 as fields such as Clair Ridge west of Shetland islands come on line, Flores said. "There are a number of fields in the central North Sea area waiting for final investment decisions (FIDs). And for some of those, the potential host is ETAP," Flores said.
Long-established oil giants such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total as well as smaller, nimbler North Sea-focused producers such as Enquest and Premier Oil are all finding business opportunities in the area.
The region has also seen something of a changing of the guard in recent years. Shell, BP, OMV, and Engie have sold fields and infrastructure to smaller players, many of which are backed by private equity or specialize in squeezing more life out of mature assets, such as Chrysaor, Siccar Point and Neptune.
Chrysaor acquired around half of Shell's North Sea portfolio last year and is now one of the largest operators in the basin, boosting reserves by drilling wells around ageing fields, such as the Armada field.
"Six years ago you went to the US raising money and everyone was talking about fiscal instability,
decommissioning, a basin in decline, and that has completely changed," Chrysaor CEO Phil Kirk told Reuters. "Now people talk about opportunity, about a change in the ownership of the basin.”
Oil and gas companies invested billions in the North Sea in the late 2000s to meet surging demand from Asia but the subsequent oil price rally masked huge inefficiencies and waste.
When the bottom fell out in 2014 as shale producers in the United States competed with OPEC for market share, output had already dwindled to around 1 million barrels per day from a peak of 2.6 million in 1999. Investments were drying up and many operators were focused on plugging wells and dismantling fields. That's where the UK governmentstepped in.
Scottish oil and gas magnate Ian Wood was commissioned in 2013 to look at how government could stem the outflow from an industry that provides 300,000 jobs in the region.
The 2014 Wood report led to the creation of the independent Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) and a regulatory overhaul, including scrapping a 50 percent petroleum revenue tax and, starting in November, allowing the transfer of the tax history of an asset to the buyer who can then offset tax on decommissioning.