Joining forces in the Arctic: BP, Imperial and ExxonMobil form joint venture.
Trio team on Arctic acreage
Imperial Oil, ExxonMobil and BP have formed a joint venture to explore for oil and gas in acreage they hold in the Beaufort Sea in Canada's Arctic, Imperial said today.
Under the deal, signed this month, the companies will explore, and possibly team up to develop, offshore blocks the companies picked up for hundreds of millions of dollars in 2007 and 2008, Imperial's Gordon Wong said.
Imperial and its majority owner, ExxonMobil, will each own 25% of the venture and one of them will be operator. BP will own the remaining 50%.
Wong said talks to form the venture began last year, long before BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, causing the worst US offshore oil spill.
"This really predated that. These discussions have been ongoing for quite a long period of time and so we've recently reached an agreement," he said in a Reuters report.
Exploratory work on the acreage will not begin until after Canada's National Energy Board completes a sweeping review of offshore drilling regulations, Wong said.
Imperial and ExxonMobil acquired the Beaufort acreage license, called EL446, in 2007 for C$585 million ($568 million), a price that raised eyebrows in the energy industry at the time.
The following year, BP acquired EL449, its contribution to the venture, as part of a C$1.2 billion acquisition of Arctic exploration blocks.
This month, BP agreed to sell much of its Canadian operations to Apache to raise funds to pay for the US Gulf spill, but its Arctic holdings were not part of that deal.
