U.S. Approves New BP Exploration Plan in Gulf of Mexico

U.S. regulators on Friday approved BP's new exploration plan, moving the company closer to drilling new wells in the lucrative deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half after the biggest offshore oil disaster in U.S. history.

BP will still need to get permits before it begins any drilling outlined in the plan, which is the company's first to be approved since an explosion killed 11 workers and ruptured its Macondo well, spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last year.

BP's plan includes drilling up to four wells off the coast of Louisiana at more than 6,000 feet (1,829 metres) under water, deeper than BP's doomed Macondo well, which was in 5,000 feet of water.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said BP's exploration plan meets the stringent standards issued by the government after the massive spill, as well as the additional self-imposed standards BP said it would comply with earlier this year.

Our review of BP's plan included verification of BP's compliance with the heightened standards that all deepwater activities must meet, said BOEM director Tommy Beaudreau said in a statement.

The exploration plan proposes further appraisal drilling in BP's Kaskida field in the Gulf of Mexico, a 2006 discovery that could hold up to 3 billion barrels of oil. An early appraisal well in 2009 confirmed oil was present in the field.

The field is in the highly touted Lower Tertiary trend in the Gulf of Mexico, a huge 300-mile (482-km) swath across the basin that is estimated to hold up to 15 billion barrels of oil, the largest oil trend in the U.S. since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay was discovered the late 1960s.

(Additional reporting by Kristen Hays in Houston; editing by Marguerita Choy and Jim Marshall)