BP’s profits more than doubled in 2017 to $6.2 billion powered by higher prices and output of oil and gas, allowing the company to resume share buybacks as it recovers from a three-year downturn.
The London-listed company saw one of the strongest output increases in its history last year, lifting production to levels not seen since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill.
Production is set to continue growing into the end of the decade thanks to more field start-ups this year.
BP would generate profits in 2018 at an oil price of $50 a barrel, Chief Financial Officer Brian Gilvary told Reuters, as years of spending cuts kicked in and as it slowly shakes off a $65 billion bill for penalties and clean-up costs of the 2010 spill.
BP was the first among its European peers to resume share buybacks in the fourth quarter of 2017 after years dilutive austerity measures in the face of the industry slump.
With a 20 percent bounce in oil prices in the last quarter of 2017 to $61 a barrel, BP had a surplus of cash that allowed it to buy $343 million worth of shares in the fourth quarter, offsetting the scrip dilution.
BP shares were trading 0.7 percent lower at 1134 GMT, compared with a 2.3 percent decline for the sector.
“2017 was one of the strongest years in BP’s recent history,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Dudley said in a statement. “We enter the second year of our five-year plan with real momentum, increasingly confident that we can continue to deliver growth.”
The company’s full-year production rose 12 percent to 2.47 million barrels per day (bpd) after BP launched seven new oil and gas fields in 2017, a record year.
It is set to start up six additional projects this year including in Egypt, Azerbaijan and Britain’s North Sea, helping boost production by 900,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2021, most of it gas.
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