LONDON - BP is in advanced talks to sell stakes in a group of Gulf of Mexico oil fields to the Houston-based company Plains Exploration and Production, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
The sale price might be $5 billion to $6 billion, and an announcement could come as early as Monday, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Robert W. Dudley, chief executive of BP, is raising money to pay cleanup costs and potential fines resulting from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.
He also is trying to use the divestitures to slim the company down and focus more on what he thinks it does best: high-risk, high-return frontier exploration and production, including so-called deepwater fields. The British company has said it is in talks to sell its 50 percent stake in its Russian affiliate TNK-BP.
A sale of older, smaller Gulf of Mexico assets would be in keeping with t his effort to sell mature fields.
In May, BP said it was marketing its interests in a group of Gulf of Mexico fields including Horn Mountain, Holstein, Diana Hoover, Ram Powell and Marlin. These fields have production of about 62,500 barrels per day, according to estimates by Stuart Joyner, an analyst at Investec in London. The figure is a little over one-quarter of BP's gulf production of 240,000 barrels per day in the three months ended June 30.
The sale of the fields does not mean that BP is pulling out of the Gulf of Mexico, as the company expects output there to return to growth by 2014.
Mr. Dudley wants to focus on a group of key fields, including Thunder Horse, Atlantis, Mad Dog and Na Kika. BP is now appraising two new fields called Kaskida and Tiber that it thinks could also become major producers.
Gulf of Mexico oil is among the most profitable in BP's portfolio because of relatively low taxes and exploration and development costs, BP exe cutives and analysts say.
BP had production of just over 400,000 barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico before the April 2010 explosion at its Macondo well, which killed 11 people on the Deepwater Horizon rig, halted drilling, causing output to fall rapidly.
If the sale of the new assets goes through, BP would be closer to its goal of selling $38 billion in assets by the end of this year, not including the TNK-BP stake.
The company has already sold about $26.5 billion in oil and gas assets since the beginning of 2010, Mr. Joyner of Investec said. Last month, BP announced an agreement to sell its Carson oil refinery in California and 800 gasoline stations to Tesoro for $2.5 billion.
