Norway's second-largest listed oil company Aker BP said on Thursday it was maintaining its outlook, and its quarterly dividend at $0.55 per share, despite reporting an on-year fall in quarterly operating profit.
The company, partly owned by BP, posted $1.96 billion in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) for the first quarter, down from $1.71 billion in the same period a year earlier.
Aker BP has a 31.6% stake in Western Europe's largest oilfield, Johan Sverdrup, which produces medium-heavy crude similar to Russian Urals, which Western buyers have been seeking to replace since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
The field's operator, Equinor, has been trying to increase production capacity further after ramping it up to 720,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed) in December.
"The tests' results were positive. We are going to ramp up Sverdrup's capacity to 755,000 boed within a couple of months," Aker BP CEO Karl Johnny Hersvik told reporters. Aker BP has maintained its full-year 2023 production guidance at 430,000-460,000 boed, after reporting a record quarterly output of 453,000 boed for the first quarter. However, a sharp drop in realized crude oil and European gas prices from a year earlier led to a lower profit.
Aker BP plans to increase production to over 500,000 boed in 2028, mainly thanks to implementation of new projects. The company plans to invest about $18.5 billion in nine new projects approved in December, which are estimated to hold about 700 million barrels of oil equivalent net for Aker BP.
Most of the projects are expected to start production in 2027, including Aker BP's flagship Yggdrasil development, formerly known as NOAKA. The company maintained its capital spending guidance range for 2023 at $3 billion to $3.5 billion, up from $1.6 billion in 2022.
(Reuters - Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by Gwladys Fouche and Christopher Cushing)