BP today announced further spending cuts and asset sales in the coming years to tackle an extended period of low oil prices after third-quarter profits slumped.
The British oil and gas company has already sold nearly $50 billion in assets since the deadly 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill and said today it was expecting an additional $3-5 billion of divestments in 2016.
Oil companies have been aggressively cutting spending and operating costs over the past year to deal with the sharp drop in cash flows due to the lower oil prices.
The cuts have resulted in thousands of job cuts and the scrapping of many new projects.
Benchmark Brent oil prices averaged $50 a barrel in the third quarter of 2015, down from $61.9 a barrel from the previous quarter and $101.9 a barrel a year earlier, according to BP.
The company also said restructuring charges are expected to increase by another $1 billion by the end of 2016 to $2.5 billion.
BP said that its investments for this year would now come in at close to $19 billion, down from a previous estimate of under $20 billion, and capex would fall to $17-19 billion a year through to 2017.
The oil producer reported better-than-expected third-quarter underlying replacement cost profit, the company's definition of net income, of $1.8 billion, compared with analysts' consensus of $1.2 billion.
"All of this underpins our strong priority of sustaining our dividend and then growing free cash flow and shareholder distributions over the long term," chief executive Bob Dudley said in a statement.
