We have what they are all looking for.

BP hunts for Great White partner to drill in Great Australian Bight

• THE AUSTRALIAN
• MAY 19, 2015 4:01PM

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Matt Chambers

Resources Reporter
Melbourne

BP’s big bet on oil Source: TheAustralian
Oil major BP is looking for a partner in the Great Australian Bight as it pushes on with a $US1 billion ($1.25bn)-plus search for world-class oilfields, despite sliding prices.
BP’s head of Asia-Pacific Exploration, Bryan Ritchie, said the company was planning to drill the first of four planned offshore wells, called Stromlo, in October next year, after the worst of the Southern Ocean winter.
The company previously said it was chasing a province of similar geology and size to big oil producing “river delta” systems in Nigeria and the Gulf of Mexico.
“If this works, it will be large and will open up a new petroleum province that will be producing for a number of years to come,” Mr Ritchie told reporters at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association in Melbourne yesterday.
He warned that success was far from certain, and added that frontier region wells had an industry success rate of one in 10.
Previously two wells had been drilled in the region but BP thinks these did not go deep enough. So after long analysis of the wells and seismic data, BP is set to drill Stromlo, 300km southeast of Ceduna, in water 2.2km deep to test a target that is 2km beneath the ocean floor. To do so it commissioned a specially designed drill rig, known as Great White, to be built in South Korea at a cost of $US755 million.
BP has led a push into the region after the federal government opened it up in 2011. It was joined by the likes of Santos, Murphy Oil, Statoil (which is a 30 per cent partner in BP’s ground) and Chevron.
Mr Ritchie said BP was keen to sell down to a 40-50 per cent stake to balance the risk of the project, stressing this was nothing to do with lower oil prices and had always been planned.
“We’ve had a number of companies speaking to us and we’ll launch a formal process hopefully in the second half of this year,” he said.
“Hopefully some of the companies out there have seen some of the potential we’ve seen from the seismic (studies conducted by BP) and realise there’s a bigger opportunity there.”
One big company that won’t be interested is BHP Billiton, BP’s partner in the Gulf of Mexico and frontier exploration ground in Trinidad and Tobago.
BHP’s oil and gas chief Tim Cutt told reporters at the conference on Monday that the company had chosen not to explore in The Bight, instead focusing on offshore Western Australia for new oil finds and in Trinidad and Tobago.
Mr Ritchie said the recent oil price fall had led BP to pull back on some exploration but that it remained focused on three frontier areas globally: the Great Australian Bight, Nova Scotia and the Brazilian equatorial zone. Environmental activists have targeted the drilling, with 100 protesters reportedly gathering at Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach on the weekend.
Wilderness Society South Australia director Peter Owen referenced BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill, saying: “We don’t need a Gulf of Mexico disaster in the Great Australian Bight.”
Mr Ritchie said BP welcomed the scrutiny, adding that it was doing all the required studies and said the conditions were similar to those dealt with by the industry in many places around the world.