Nov. 23, 2009, 7:53PM
BP has replaced the head of its Gulf of Mexico division in Houston with an executive who recently headed the British oil giant's business in Russia.
James Dupree has been named senior vice president over the offshore U.S. region, replacing Neil Shaw, who held the post for two years and has taken a more senior post with the company in Houston.
The move puts Dupree in control of a key strategic area for BP amid an ongoing turnaround of the company by CEO Tony Hayward.
He brings “extensive operating experience and deep knowledge of our Gulf of Mexico operations to his new position,” BP spokesman Ronnie Chappell said.
Dupree, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, did a tour in Houston from 2000 to 2002 as head of BP's Gulf of Mexico deep water production, drilling, exploration and facility fabrication.
Later, he led BP's deep water exploration and production business in Angola and then was group vice president for Russia, where he also oversaw BP activities in Kazakhstan.
He was in that post last year when a dispute developed between BP and its Russian partners in the joint-venture oil company TNK-BP. Lamar McKay, who replaced Dupree, received credit for resolving the dispute and in January was named chairman and president of BP America in Houston.
Dupree took over the Gulf of Mexico post this month, but BP did not announce the change.
Chappell called it a “routine personnel move.”
Shaw, who had run BP's Gulf of Mexico unit since 2007, will remain in Houston and lead the company's Centralized Developments Organization, a global exploration and production unit, Chappell said.
BP has made the Gulf of Mexico a focal point of its global oil and gas portfolio. It is the largest leaseholder there, and recently edged past Royal Dutch Shell to be the region's biggest oil and gas producer.
With the start-up this year of BP's massive and once problem-plagued Thunderhorse platform, BP's net production in the Gulf is now more than 400,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
In the Gulf of Mexico, BP operates eight deep water facilities, has a stake in 22 producing fields and is moving forward on nine additional projects.
In September, the company announced a major oil discovery in the deep water Gulf of Mexico in a field it calls Tiber and said Tiber might hold as much as 3 billion barrels of oil, putting it among the biggest finds ever in the region.
This month, the company scored again, saying it had found more crude oil than previously thought in a western extension of its giant Kaskida field, also in the deep water Gulf.
It could be years before the company extracts oil from the fields given the huge technical challenges and costs involved in developing the areas.
brett.clanton@chron.com
Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/6736089.html?
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