A case study: How bp’s Atlantis platform is preparing for the future
bp’s Atlantis offshore platform is one of the longest-running platforms that bp operates in the Gulf of America, producing oil and gas for nearly 20 years. The facility is now being primed for the future.
Located 150 miles south of New Orleans, Atlantis can produce up to 200,000 barrels of oil and 180 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. As with all operating platforms, it requires maintenance and continuous improvement to continue to deliver American energy.
With that in mind, the bp team has set its sights on maximizing Atlantis’s production through two expansion projects – with the goal of “futureproofing” the platform for another 20 years of its expected operating life. It’s one of the ways bp is investing in America to safely grow our US oil and gas production.
Taking Atlantis to the next level
The Atlantis Drill Center 1 expansion started production in December 2025, two months ahead of schedule. The project connects two wells back to the platform and adds around 15,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of production at peak.
Additionally, the Atlantis Major Facility Expansion project will inject water into targeted reservoirs, in order to maximize its output with existing infrastructure, and is forecast to start up in 2027.
When an offshore platform like Atlantis extracts oil and gas, the reservoir pressures and fluid distribution change. To keep production efficient, the team needs to innovate – and manifold pumping is one of those innovations. It’s the first time bp has used this approach offshore anywhere in the world.
A manifold is a piece of subsea equipment that controls and directs flows from multiple wells. In this case, a cross-functional team evaluated subsea equipment options, technology opportunities and installation techniques to develop a system to safely perform five pumping jobs in a week and a half, rather than one at a time over four months. A pumping job sends fluid or gas underground to help resources flow to the surface.
Using technology to see where the resources are
Teams use seismic imaging to understand where oil and gas are located deep under the ocean floor. bp has long utilized advanced 3D – and more recently, 4D – seismic imaging technologies. The fourth dimension, time, allows bp to look at seismic images from 10-15 years ago and compare them to recently captured seismic images. The team can see how water, salt, oil and gas have moved under the surface.
That has helped the Atlantis team systematically plan how and where additional wells and pumps can be placed to support increased production, like the tiebacks in the expansion projects. Analyzing those seismic images previously took months, but now thanks to AI, can take as little as days.
Additionally, Optimization Genie is an AI tool developed by bp that helps to uncover opportunities to optimize oil and gas production. At Atlantis, it helped engineers identify ways to change the way specific parts of the production system work, leading to production increases of approximately 2,000 barrels per day.
Supporting our strategy
Oil and gas will be needed for decades to come. A key part of increasing our oil and gas output will be in the Gulf of America. And with five operated platforms in the basin, three decades of experience, and a promising road ahead for Atlantis, bp is poised for continued growth.
