OREANDA-NEWS. The Wall Street Journal reports that after 2020, the Brent benchmark will not include the oil that gave it the name.

According to the publication, next year Royal Dutch Shell will completely stop production at the Brent field, located between the Shetland Islands and Norway in the North Sea.

The oil and gas field located at a depth of 140 meters, 186 kilometers off the coast of Scotland, was discovered in 1971 and was considered one of the largest fields in the world at that time. The field was named after brent geese living in the North Sea. In 1975, oil and gas production began there. Production volumes were constantly growing. In 1982, over 500 thousand barrels of oil per day were pumped out of the field, on which four platforms (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta) were installed one after the other. In the early 1990s, Brent field provided 13 % of the Great Britain’s demand for oil and 10 % of the country’s demand for gas.

At the peak of production, Brent crude oil became the benchmark; prices for other grades of oil were calculated from its price.

In the late 1990s, the production of Brent fell sharply and turned the standard into a mixture, adding oil from other fields of the North Sea to it: Forties and Oseberg in 2002, Ekofisk in 2007, Troll in 2018 . Brent’s share of the resulting BFOET blend continued to decline, and Royal Dutch Shell gradually decommissioned the platforms installed at the field. Delta stopped production in December 2011, Alpha and Bravo in November 2014.

Now, according to Royal Dutch Shell, the share of Brent in the BFOET is only about 1 %, and after the decommissioning of the Charlie platform in 2020, its production will stop.

Totally, over 2 billion barrels of oil and about 161 billion cubic meters of gas have been produced in the Brent field.