BP Plc has abandoned its controversial £1billion plan to drill for 100m barrels of oil off the coast of Alaska.
The British oil company, which is still smarting from the Gulf of Mexico disaster two years ago, said it was pulling out of the Liberty field project because it would be too expensive to drill safely.
BP had planned to “make history” by drilling “the longest extended–reach wells ever attempted”, up to eight miles out and two miles down. The project would also have involved building a 12.6 hectare (31-acre) artificial island about three miles off the Alaskan coast.
The company launched a safety review of the project in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 men and led to the biggest ever offshore oil spill.
On Wednesday BP said: “We are not going to pursue Liberty in its present form. The project, as it’s designed right now, doesn’t meet BP’s standards.”
The review found that the Liberty project, which was expected to produce 40,000 barrels a day, would have cost a lot more than the $1.5bn (£1bn) BP had planned in order to make sufficient changes to meet BP’s new safety code.
BP has held tentative talks with America’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management about redesigning the project. A BP spokesman said the project had “to be discussed with regulators before we could move forward with a [new] plan”.
The Liberty field, discovered by BP in 1997, is estimated to hold about 100m barrels of oil.
