British Petroleum sells assets in US, Egypt

Besieged British oil giant BP agreed to sell some of its assets in the US, Canada and Egypt to the second-largest independent oil and gas company in the US Apache Corporation for $7 billion. BP earned $166 million from these assets last year and the aggregate value of the gross assets as at 30 June 2010 was $3.85 billion, BP disclosed in a statement. BP was in talks with Apache since the past two weeks over the sale of assets worth up to $12 billion including its stake in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America. But the sale did not include BP's prized 26-per cent stake in Prudhoe Bay, which produces 390,000 barrels a day or equal to almost 15 per cent of UK's output from its North Sea oil fields. BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said, ''Over the last two months the Board has considered BP's options for generating the cash necessary to meet the obligations likely to arise from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP has an extremely strong asset base which is diversified geographically as well as by asset class. The Board believes that there are opportunities to divest assets which are strategically more valuable to other parties than they are to BP.