|About: BP p.l.c. (BP)|By: Carl Surran, SA News Editor
- BP CEO Bob Dudley has spent 38 years in the oil business, and he says has never seen anything like what happened with the company’s mature oil fields last year – their production increased.
- Results across the industry were not as spectacular as BP’s but still impressive, executives and officials at the CERAWeek conference said this week; the International Energy Agency reported production from mature fields fell 5.7% last year, the smallest decline in at least a decade.
- The findings are a surprise because the oil industry cut spending dramatically during the three-year downturn, but the need to stretch each dollar spent is exactly why major oil firms are getting more from those fields, says Wael Sawan, executive VP for deepwater at Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A, RDS.B), which also reported improved results at its legacy wells.
- “Companies are focusing on the basics, so there was a massive re-focus on existing wells,” Sawan tells Bloomberg. “It’s the cheapest and most profitable barrel that companies can access.”