BP to sell Texas refinery to Marathon Petroleum in a $2.5 billion deal

BP Plc yesterday agreed to sell its Texas City refinery and related infrastructure  to Marathon Petroleum Corp for $2.5 billion, as part of  its plan to sell assets in order to pay for its 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Under the terms of the deal, Marathon will pay $598 million and about $1.2 billion for inventories. BP could also get an additional $700 million over six years if the facility meets certain performance targets.

The Texas City refinery, the fifth-largest in the US, became a component of BP's assets as part of its 1998 acquisition of Amoco. The 78 year-old refinery, which primarily focuses on natural gas liquids,  has a capacity of 475,000 barrels a day.

Apart from the refinery, the sale also includes three intrastate natural gas liquids pipelines, four marketing terminals and other assets.

BP said that it will also assign certain branded jobber contracts supplying approximately 1,200 retail sites in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, which could be supplied by the refinery.

''Today's announcement is the second major milestone in the strategic refocusing of our US fuels business,'' Iain Conn, the head of BP's global refining and marketing business, said in a statement.