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Imperial has no Arctic drilling plans
Imperial Oil had no immediate plan to drill in Canada's Beaufort Sea even before BP's well ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering an environmental disaster and intense scrutiny on offshore drilling, company boss Bruce March said today.
"To put this in context, we were at least four or five years out from ever drilling a well (in the Beaufort)," said March, who was in Toronto to address an event hosted by the Toronto Board of Trade.
Canadian regulators have become more wary of offshore drilling operations following the Gulf spill, which BP has been struggling to plug for over five weeks, Reuters reported.
March said Imperial plans to learn from the incident and implement any measures that are adopted by regulators, following their investigations.
Imperial and ExxonMobil were awarded exploration rights for a parcel in the Arctic region in 2007. The two paid C$585 million (US$552 million) for the Beaufort Sea acreage, and have yet to drill a well there.
The block, 120 ilometres (75 miles) north of the mainland in water depths of 60 to 1200 metres (200 to 3900 feet), covers 205,321 hectares (507,300 acres).
The last time the company drilled in the Beaufort was in 1989 to 1990.
The only Beaufort well in the last 20 years was drilled by Devon Energy in 2005-06. It cost C$60 million.
Devon was looking for natural gas and found 240 million barrels of oil. It has not developed the field.
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