From the Wall Street Journal:
The world's most famous oil and gas field -- and the backbone of
global crude pricing -- has dried up. Soon the Brent benchmark will have
no Brent oil.
Royal Dutch Shell PLC is expected next year to plug the last
remaining Brent oil wells, located in the North Sea's East Shetland
Basin, about 115 miles northeast of Scotland's Shetland Islands. The
closures mark the end of an era, as the industry shifts its focus to
smaller oil finds near existing infrastructure.
Many companies are shutting down platforms above massive fields
discovered in the 1970s, but Brent stands apart as one of the first and
most significant of these finds. The field has generated billions of
dollars for Shell, its partner in the field, Exxon Mobil Corp. and the
U.K. government.
In the late 1980s, Brent crude became the benchmark on which most
of the world's oil is priced and is still used to set the price of the
multi-trillion dollar Intercontinental Exchange Brent futures market.
"The role it has played is a cornerstone for this industry now for
40 plus years," said Steve Phimister, vice president of upstream and
director of U.K. operations at Shell.
The Brent benchmark will keep its name and increasingly represents a
blend of North Sea crudes, with the potential to include oil from other
locations in the future.
Shell discovered the field in 1971 and named it after the brent
goose, keeping with the seabird theme the company used for naming its
discoveries at the time. Developing it was a huge and expensive
undertaking. Standing as tall as the Eiffel tower, Brent Charlie, the
last active platform of Brent's original four, was built to withstand
some of the most hostile conditions on earth...MORE
