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Overview

In 2007, the North Sea region produced 19.7 million barrels of oil equivalent (MMboe), generating $1.4 billion of revenue. We continued to develop our North Sea core area around the Forties field, including investments in upgrades to improve the operating efficiency of our platforms.

In the Forties field, we commissioned a number of key facility projects, including new power generation and multi-platform gas and power distribution systems, export pumping, produced water handling and injection systems and drilling rig package upgrades. These efforts have already shown to be successful as operating efficiencies improved 11 percent relative to
2006. Despite an improvement in topsides efficiency, 2007 production was down eight percent from 2006. Workovers to restore production on the Echo platform progressed slower than planned, and new drilling was postponed on the Alpha platform to complete facility upgrades. Production from each of the other three platforms in the field (Bravo, Charlie, and Delta) increased in 2007 compared to 2006.

In 2007 we invested $538 million of capital in the North Sea region, including investments in drilling, recompletion and facility upgrades. The region drilled 16 wells in 2007, five of which were productive. Three exploration wells were drilled outside Forties but did not find commercial hydrocarbon accumulations. Also during 2007, a seismic survey acquired over Forties in 2005 was reprocessed to identify bypassed oil in the main reservoir units and enabled us to update the inventory of future drilling targets.