BP to pay $3 bln for Deepwater disaster settlements

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BP said onTuesday that it expects to pay some three billion US dollars in cash payments this year for claims related to a court-supervised settlement program.

The British oil company said in the third quarter last year that it had expected those payments for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster to come in at two billion US dollars for 2018.

The company said in a statement on Tuesday that it will take a charge of 1.7 billion US dollars in its fourth-quarter earnings to pay out the remaining loss claims stemming from the disaster.

"With the claim facility's work very nearly done, we now have better visibility into the remaining liability," BP CFO Brian Gilvary said on Tuesday in a statement.

He said BP can manage the post-tax non-operating charge, "especially now that we have the company back into balance at 50 dollars per barrel."

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which cost 11 lives and the spill of millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, is the largest environmental disaster in the US history of the oil industry.

It has cost BP a total of 62 billion US dollars as of 2016 calculations. The after-tax figures came in at around 44 billion US dollars.

Despite the huge bill, BP has recovered quite well, supported by higher oil prices last year.

The company has continued to invest in large-scale projects and to improve efficiency to lower its break-even point, and it has boasted a 40-percent decline in its production costs since 2014.

Its production last year averaged 3.6 million barrels per day.

Source(s): Xinhua News Agency