By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, July 16 (Reuters) - ConocoPhillips, Alaska's top-volume oil producer, will pay about $264million to BP Plc to help cover the cost of transportingcrude through the Trans Alaska Pipeline (TAPS), under asettlement approved on Tuesday by federal officials.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said it approvedthe deal between the three TAPS owners - BP, Conoco and ExxonMobil Corp - on how to share costs for shipping oil downthe 800-mile pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez.
Under the plan, first proposed in September, Conoco owes the$264 million to BP, which has the biggest share of TAPS, forpipeline costs dating back to Aug. 1, 2012, according to thesettlement. Conoco agreed to pay Exxon $8.89 million for costsover the same period, while BP will pay Exxon $1.8 million.
BP owns nearly half of TAPS, while Conoco has 29 percent andExxon the rest, according to operator Alyeska Pipeline ServiceCo. But Conoco, with a 36 percent share in the Greater PrudhoeBay unit and large stakes in other fields, produces over 35percent of the oil coming from Alaska's North Slope, accordingto state and company figures from 2012.
"This agreement seeks to better align how costs aredistributed among the TAPS owners," Dawn Patience, a spokeswomanfor BP in Alaska, said in an email.
The settlement covers a period that started when the threemajor North Slope producers became sole owners of TAPS. Twocompanies with minor shares, Koch Industries' Koch AlaskaPipeline Co and Chevron-owned Unocal Pipeline Company,relinquished their combined 4.4 percent ownership last summer,allowing their shares to be allocated between the other three.
There are lingering questions about how the shares of thewhat FERC calls the "Exiting Carriers" will be managed and howcosts prior to Aug. 1, 2012, are allocated, but they falloutside of the settlement approved on Tuesday.
Neither Koch, Chevron nor the state of Alaska objects to thenew deal between the remaining three, the approval order said.
Over the years, there have been many disputes about pipelinecosts and how they should be shared. In 1985, the FERC approveda settlement between the state of Alaska and the then-numerouspipeline owners that allowed specific transportation tariffs foreach company. That settlement deal expired at the end of 2008.
Since the mid-1980s, the number of TAPS owners has dwindled,largely because of company mergers. North Slope output averaged515,646 barrels per day for the first half of July, according tostate figures. It peaked in 1988 above 2 million barrels a day.