BP Sells U.S. Refinery for $2.5 Bn to Tesoro Corp.

British energy group BP said Monday that it had agreed to sell its Carson refinery in California to U.S. peer Tesoro Corporation for $2.5 billion (2.02 billion euros).

The sale is part of BP's previously-announced plans to sell $38 billion of assets by the end of 2013 to help pay the clean-up bill and compensation costs from the devastating 2010 U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The troubled energy major has agreed to sell $26.5 billion of assets since the start of 2010, including the latest deal.

"BP announced today it has reached agreement to sell its Carson, California refinery and related logistics and marketing assets in the region to Tesoro Corporation for $2.5 billion in cash," the group said in a statement.

BP said that the Carson sale would allow it to focus its investment and operations on the British group's three refineries in the northern United States.

The group had announced in February 2011 that it would sell off two major U.S. refineries -- including Carson -- as part of a restructuring to shift its focus away from the United States and to meet its compensation costs.

It also intends to offload the Texas City facility which suffered a deadly 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and sparked safety concerns across its U.S. operations.

"Today's announcement is a significant step in the strategic refocusing of our U.S. fuels business," chief executive of BP's global refining and marketing business, Iain Conn, said in Monday's statement.

"Together with the intended sale of Texas City, this will allow us to focus BP's operations and investments exclusively on our three northern U.S. refineries, which are crude feedstock advantaged, and their large and important marketing businesses."

Tesoro will acquire the Carson refinery near Los Angeles -- which produces 266,000 barrels of oil a day -- as well as the associated logistics network of pipelines and storage terminals.

It will also take ownership of BP's ARCO-branded retail marketing network in Southern California, Arizona and Nevada.

BP added that it would also sell the ARCO retail brand rights and exclusively license those rights from Tesoro for Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

The deal remains subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to complete before mid-2013.

In late afternoon trade on Monday, BP's share price fell 0.27 percent to 447.35 pence on London's FTSE 100 index of leading companies, which was 0.41 percent lower at 5,823.25 points.

The oil giant had last week announced the sale of its Sunray and Hemphill gas processing plants in Texas, together with their associated gas gathering system, to Eagle Rock Energy Partners for $227.5 million.

BP's fortunes were ravaged two years ago by an explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers, sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the sea and left it with huge compensation costs.

The blast on April 20, 2010, sparked what was been widely acknowledged to be the worst environmental catastrophe in U.S. history.

BP last month said it plunged into a second-quarter net loss, hit by lower output, falling oil prices and a near $5.0-billion write-down on the value of assets.

It made a loss after tax of $1.39 billion in the three months to June, compared with net profit of $5.72 billion in the year-earlier period.

BP is also facing major headaches in Russia after a Siberian court in July ordered the British group to pay $3.1 billion in damages for its attempted Arctic oil exploration tie-up with the state giant Rosneft.

The ruling came after BP entered direct talks with Rosneft over a buy-out by Russia's largest oil company of the British firm's stake in the troubled TNK-BP joint venture worth billions of dollars.