The British Petroleum Company (BP) has agreed to sell its petrochemical unit to Inious, owned by billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, for $ 5 billion.
According to Reuters, the company is withdrawing from the move, which is largely considered a major driver of oil demand growth in the coming decades.
This surprising move means that BP achieved its target of asset sales of $ 15 billion a year before the deadline, as CEO Bernard Looney is setting the company into a low-energy energy transformation company. Carbon.
The shares of the company listed on the London Stock Exchange rose after this news, as it rose by 2.3 percent by 1045 GMT.
Looney acknowledged that the sale of the activity, which employs 1,700 people and produced 9.7 million tons of petrochemicals last year, would come as a surprise.
Looney said in a statement from a strategic point of view, the interaction with the rest of the BP company is limited and we would need a large capital to develop these (petrochemical) activities. >
Today's agreement added a new, well-studied step on the path to making BP more competitive and successful during the energy transformation phase.
The activity includes stakes in production plants in the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Britain, Belgium, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. It does not include the petrochemical plant linked to BP oil refineries in Gelsenkirchen and Müllheim, Germany.
The International Energy Agency said in a report in 2018 that plastic materials and other petrochemical products will lead the global demand for oil until 2050, which compensates for the slowdown in the consumption of motor fuel. >
