bp has successfully started oil production at its Argos offshore platform, delivering more energy at a critical time and strengthening bp’s position as a leading producer in the deepwater US Gulf of Mexico.
The semi-submersible platform aims to increase bp’s gross operated production capacity in the Gulf of Mexico by an estimated 20%. bp expects to safely and systematically ramp up production from Argos throughout 2023.
bp chief executive, Bernard Looney says: ‘The start-up of Argos is a fantastic achievement that helps deliver our integrated energy strategy – investing in today’s energy system and, at the same time, investing in the energy transition. As bp’s most digital facility worldwide, applying our latest technologies, Argos will strengthen our key position in the Gulf of Mexico for years to come.’
Argos is the centrepiece of bp’s Mad Dog Phase 2 project, which extends the life of the super-giant oil field discovered in 1998. It is one of nine high-margin major projects that bp plans to start, by the end of 2025.
Argos is bp’s most digitally advanced platform operating in the Gulf of Mexico, featuring bp’s proprietary LoSal Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) and Dynamic Digital Twin technologies. Argos has a waterflood injection capacity of more than 140,000 barrels of low-salinity water per day to help increase oil recovery from the Mad Dog field. The platform also has a Dynamic Digital Twin, a bp patent-pending software that links complex data from Argos to 3D digital models of those systems, allowing remote operators wearing Virtual Reality headsets to access data in real-time, to improve decision-making, efficiency and safety.
