BP sells gas processing plants in Texas

BP's grand garage sale continues with the integrated oil giant announcing the sale of its Sunray and Hemphill gas processing plants in Texas.

Eagle Rock Energy Partners is paying $227.5m in cash for the plants, together with the plants' associated gas gathering system.

The Sunray plant, in Moore County, and the Hemphill plant, in Hemphill County, have combined processing capacity of some 220m cubic feet of gas a day and an associated gathering system of around 2,500 miles of pipelines.

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BP, which has been selling off chunks of the business ever since the Macondo oil well disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, said it believes the sold-off assets, which serve BP's natural gas production in the Texas Panhandle region, will be more strategically valuable to a company that specialises in midstream oil and gas operations. The agreement does not include BP's natural gas producing assets in the area.

Earlier this month BP sold its liquefied petroleum gas distribution business in the UK for $62m.

The company is raising money to set aside costs related to the Deepwater Horizon explosion 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.

JH