Jim Ratcliffe’s INEOS to buy BP’s North Sea Forties Pipeline for £250m

Built, owned and operated by BP, the Forties pipeline was opened in 1975 to transport oil from the Forties field, the UK’s first major offshore oil field.

Today the 235 mile system links 85 North Sea oil and gas assets to the UK mainland and the INEOS site in Grangemouth in Scotland. The system has a capacity of 575,000 barrels of oil a day and delivers almost 40 per cent of the UK ‘s oil and gas. BP sold its interests in the Forties field to Apache in 2003 and sold the Grangemouth refinery and chemical plants to INEOS in 2005.

BP said that the firm’s North Sea activities will now focus on bringing new fields into production, redeveloping and renewing existing producing facilities and acquiring and exploring new interests. “While the Forties pipeline had great significance in BP’s history, our business here is now centred around our major offshore interests west of Shetland and in the Central North Sea,” said BP’s chief executive Bob Dudley.