Kerr-McGee Celebrates Gryphon Field FPSO 10th Anniversary

Kerr-McGee North Sea (U.K.) Limited today celebrates 10 years of production from the Gryphon field in the central North Sea. Discovered in 1987, the field came on stream 10 years ago, using the Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel Gryphon 'A'.

Gryphon A was the first permanently moored FPSO to be installed in the North Sea, a technology which has helped pave the way for more cost effective development of certain oil and gas fields.

"This milestone is a tremendous achievement for our workforce - offshore and onshore," said Chuck Meloy, Kerr-McGee's U.K. managing director. "The fact that this asset remains key to our future growth plans in the region is further testament to their efforts."

The Maclure and Tullich fields were tied back to Gryphon in 2002 and by early 2004 the facility will have handled 100 million barrels of oil.

The Gryphon field is located approximately 190 miles northeast of Aberdeen in Block 9/18b. The Gryphon A FPSO has a crude oil storage capacity of 525,000 bbls and oil is exported via shuttle tanker to refiners in NW Europe and the United States. There have been more than 200 offshore loading completed to date and 2002 average daily production is approximately 10,700 barrels per day.

Co-venturers in the Gryphon field are Kerr-McGee Oil (U.K.) PLC (operator with 61.5% interest), ConocoPhillips (U.K.) Theta Limited (25%), Cairn Energy Hydrocarbons Limited (10%) and Oranje-Nassau (U.K.) Limited (3.5%).