By Nerijus Adomaitis
OSLO, April 27 (Reuters) – Aker BP, Norway’s second-biggest listed oil company, said on Thursday it was maintaining its outlook and its quarterly dividend of $0.55 per share, despite posting a year-on-year drop in quarterly operating profit. .
The company, partly owned by BP, posted earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of $1.96 billion in the first quarter, compared with $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 a medium-heavy crude similar to Russia’s Urals, which Western buyers want to substitute since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.
The field’s operator, Equinor, has been trying to further increase production capacity after ramping it up to 720,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed) in December.
“The test results have been positive. We are going to increase Sverdrup’s capacity to 755,000 boed in a couple of months,” Karl Johnny Hersvik, CEO of Aker BP, told reporters.
Aker BP has maintained its full-year 2023 production forecast at 430,000-460,000 boed, after posting record quarterly production of 453,000 boed in the first quarter.
However, the sharp drop in oil and gas prices in Europe compared to the previous year has caused a decline in profits.
Aker BP plans to increase production to more than 500,000 boed by 2028, mainly thanks to the execution of new projects.
The company plans to invest about $18.5 billion in nine new projects approved in December, estimated to host about 700 million barrels of net oil equivalent for Aker BP.
Most projects are scheduled to start production in 2027, including Aker BP’s flagship project Yggdrasil, formerly known as NOAKA.
The company maintained its investment forecast for 2023 between 3,000 and 3,500 million dollars, compared to 1,600 million in 2022.
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by Gwladys Fouche and Christopher Cushing; Editing in Spanish by Flora Gómez)
