BP finds buyer for Californian refinery

published 13 August 2012

BP's selling spree has continued with the UK oil colossus announcing the sale of its refinery in Carson, California, to US refiner Tesoro.

BP is selling the 266,000 barrel per day refinery plus related logistics and marketing assets in the region to Tesoro Corporation for $2.5bn in cash (including the estimated value of hydrocarbon inventories and subject to post-closing adjustments).

The announcement, made on Monday afternoon, followed hot on the heels of Monday morning's announcement of the sale of its Sunray and Hemphill gas processing plants in Texas for $227.5m in cash.

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"Together with the intended sale of Texas City, this [sale of the Carson refinery] will allow us to focus BP's operations and investments exclusively on our three northern US refineries, which are crude feedstock advantaged, and their large and important marketing businesses," explained Iain Conn, chief executive of BP's global refining and marketing business.

The refineries in Carson and Texas City have been up for sale since February 2011.

As part of the California deal, BP will sell the ARCO retail brand rights and exclusively license those rights from Tesoro for Northern California, Oregon and Washington and continue to produce transportation fuels at its Cherry Point, Washington refinery. BP will also retain ownership of the "am-pm" convenience store brand and franchise it to Tesoro for use in the Southwest.

The afternoon announcement brings the total value of the divestments that BP has agreed since the beginning of 2010 to $26.5bn. This is part of the previously announced programme to divest $38 billion of assets by the end of 2013. The sell-off was sparked by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico. By the end of the second quarter of this year the company said it had paid a total of $8.8bn in individual and business claims and government payments arising from the incident. It intends to have completed $20bn of payments into the Macondo trust by the end of 2012.