BP Faces Further Soaking If Prudhoe Bay Per-Barrel Penalties Apply In Gulf Spill

British energy giant BP announced a return to profit on Tuesday but revealed new shock estimates for the cost of its Gulf of Mexico oil spill, putting the expected bill at close to 40 billion dollars.The new figure is far higher than expected.BP said it had taken an additional charge of 7.7 billion dollars during the third quarter, bringing the company's own total estimated clean-up and legal costs to 39.9 billion dollars (28.6 billion euros).

John Lounsbury submits:Last week I tried to bracket the cost exposure for BP as a result of the Deepwater Horizon well head blowout and explosion. That attempt proposed a very wide bracket, from $9 billion to $100+ billion. This week the numbers are being suggested to be between $15 billion and $40 billion.

ByBill Cunningham:BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust (BPT) annually updates its calculation of future cash flows likely to be generated by the Trust based upon certain assumptions. It reports this number in its annual report/ 10K, which will be issued in a few weeks.

BP is in talks to sell up to 12 billion dollars (9.5 billion euros) of assets, including a substantial stake in a giant Alaskan oil field, to Apache Corporation, the Sunday Times reported.Apache approached the beleaguered British oil company several weeks ago with the plan which would include a stake in Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in North America, the newspaper said.BP has been trying to offload assets as it seeks to build up a disaster fund of 20 billion dollars to cover the clean-up costs for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nearly three years after a deepwater well rupture killed 11 men, sank a rig and spewed 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP and the other companies involved are facing their day in court. The trial over the worst U.S. offshore oil spill is set to start Monday morning in New Orleans before a federal judge and without a jury. Few expect the case, seen lasting several months, will be decided by the judge.