Maersk Oil (Danish: Mærsk Olie og Gas A/S) is a Danish oil and gas company owned by the A. P. Moller-Maersk Group. The company was established in 1962 when Maersk Group was awarded a concession for oil and gas exploration and production in the Danish sector of the North Sea. In 1986, Maersk Oil took over the operation of the Dansk Undergrunds Consortium’s fields in the Danish section of the North Sea.
Maersk Oil is an international oil and gas company with operated production of 550,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Production comes from Denmark, the UK, Qatar, Kazakhstan, the US Gulf of Mexico, Algeria and Brazil. Exploration activities are on-going in Angola, Norway, Greenland, Kurdistan Region of Iraq and in the producing countries.
The cornerstone of Maersk Oil’s business has been turning challenging oil fields into commercial successes. Maersk Oil focuses on new technologies to create value for partners and host governments. Maersk Oil is a fully owned subsidiary of the global conglomerate, the Maersk Group.
On 31 August, 2015, the UK Oil And Gas Authority approved a consurtium headed by Maersk Oil going ahead with production at the Culzean oil and gas field about 150 miles southeast of Aberdeen, Scotland in the North Sea. The high pressure, high temperature field held the equivalent of about 300 million barrels of oil and, when it reached peak production in 2020 or 2021, was expected to produce enough gas to meet 5% of the UK’s needs. Maersk Oil said that it and its other consortium partners, JX Nippon and BP (Britoil) would invest about £3 billion (about $4.5 billion) in the field’s development