London-based BP PLC (NYSE: BP), which has its U.S. headquarters in Houston, has named Starlee Sykes as the company’s future regional president for the Gulf of Mexico and Canada.
Sykes, currently vice president for BP’s global projects organization for offshore projects, will take over the role on Feb. 1 from Richard Morrison, who is retiring after 37 years with BP. She will remain based in Houston.
As part of her new role, Sykes will serve as chairman of BP Exploration & Production Inc. and will be a member of BP America Inc.’s board of directors, according to a Jan. 25 press release. She also will serve on the Center for Offshore Safety’s board of directors and on the industry advisory board for Texas A&M University’s department of petroleum engineering, per the release.
“Starlee is uniquely qualified to take on this important role, with more than 20 years of upstream experience across project management, offshore operations, subsea engineering and finance and a proven track record as a leader,” Bernard Looney, BP’s Upstream CEO, said in the release. “She is the right person to lead these two regions into the future.”
Sykes began her career as a subsea operations engineer after graduating from Texas A&M University in 1998. Her leadership roles have included vice president projects performance, vice president developments for the Gulf of Mexico, and founder and director of BP’s global subsea hardware organization.
Among the many project she’s overseen, Sykes was a key leader on two major Gulf of Mexico projects: the redesign of the Mad Dog 2 platform and the Thunder Horse South Expansion project. The latter came online 11 months ahead of schedule and $150 million under budget, per the release.
Around a year ago, BP made a final investment decision to build Mad Dog 2, a new oil and gas platform, after years of redesigning the original project, the Houston Business Journal previously reported. The project started as a roughly $20 billion investment. But by the time it made it to the investment decision, Mad Dog 2 had been redesigned into a $9 billion project, according to a press release from BP at the time.
That decision made BP one of the few companies to have sanctioned a new deepwater project in the Gulf of Mexico over the past year, but BP's strategy in the region still calls for a primary focus on tieback development, HBJ previously reported.
