BP said on Thursday that it had started up ahead of schedule its Thunder Horse Northwest Expansion project in deepwater Gulf of Mexico, adding 30,000 bpd to the Thunder Horse oil production at peak and taking the total field production to more than 200,000 bpd. The project comes online four months ahead of the original start-up date in early 2019, and is completed 15 percent below budget, BP said, without quantifying its investment in the project. The expansion project has added a new subsea manifold and two wells tied into existing flowlines two miles to the north of the Thunder Horse platform. “We are focused on growing value and these projects in the Gulf are competitive with any opportunities we have worldwide. This is what we mean by growing advantaged oil,” Bernard Looney, BP’s Upstream chief executive, said. “Over the past five years we’ve driven up production through safe […]