BP has started a formal process to sell its entire North Sea business, the company confirmed Friday, in what would be its most complete exit yet from a region it has operated in for 60 years.
Bloomberg previously reported that a full divestment could fetch around £2 billion ($2.7 billion). CEO Meg O’Neill said in a statement that the unit “will be better positioned as part of another company,” part of a wider review of BP’s portfolio.
The move is part of a debt-reduction push Reuters reports O’Neill has been accelerating since BP split its operations into separate upstream and downstream units earlier this month. Selling producing assets turns years of future output into cash upfront, letting BP pay down debt faster than it could by running the business itself.
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The North Sea unit runs five production hubs, two in the central North Sea and three west of Shetland, including Clair, the largest oilfield on the UK continental shelf. It produced 117,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day in 2025, and about 1,100 people work there, part of BP’s roughly 13,960-strong UK workforce.
Andy Burnham, who became the country’s prime minister just 11 days ago, succeeding Keir Starmer, had told reporters a day earlier that he’d informed US President Donald Trump the UK would “take a pragmatic approach when it comes to the North Sea,” a shift from his party’s prior position.
Read: Who Is Andy Burnham, Britain’s New Prime Minister
Trump had pushed publicly for exactly that. Writing on Truth Social, he called North Sea oil invaluable and said unrestricted drilling could turn Britain from a “Poverty Stricken Disaster, to one of the Richest Countries anywhere in the World.”
Burnham has moved quickly on energy costs. He cut VAT on household electricity from 5% to 0% in his first week and paid for it in part by scrapping the previous government’s Digital ID program.
Read: New UK PM Andy Burnham Scraps Electricity VAT, Cancels Digital ID To Pay For It
BP’s history in the North Sea has been one of gradual retreat rather than sudden exit. It sold central North Sea fields to Abu Dhabi’s Taqa for $1.1 billion in 2012, offloaded southern gas assets to Perenco the same year, and swapped Alaska holdings for a bigger stake in the Clair field with ConocoPhillips in 2018. A full sale of the regional business is a different order of move.
The company hasn’t named a buyer or set a timeline for completing it.
