BP to sell Canadian natural gas liquids business to Plains All American for $1.67 bn

BP Plc has announced that it is selling its Canadian natural gas liquids business (NGL) to Plains All American (PAA), for $1.67 billion in cash, as part of the British oil giant's plan to raise $45 billion in order to fund the liabilities of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

BP's Canadian NGL business owns and operates its oil fields and has contractual rights to those assets across Canada and in the US Midwest.

Assets in the sale include NGL extraction plants; pipeline gathering systems; fractionation plants; and storage and specification product distribution facilities.

The business owns or has rights to approximately 4,000km of pipeline systems; 21 million barrels of storage capacity, 232,000 barrels per day of fractionation capacity, and NGLs produced from 8.3 billion cubic feet per day of gas processing capacity.

''I want to thank our NGL employees for their dedication,'' said Anne Drinkwater, president of BP Canada. ''They have continued to remain vigilant about maintaining safe and reliable operations.''

"BP's Canadian NGL business is an asset-rich platform that significantly expands our LPG asset footprint, providing a supply-based complement to our existing demand-focused business and making PAA one of the largest LPG service providers in North America," said Greg Armstrong, chairman and CEO of PAA.