Hummingfrog - I take your point about the sale of 40's, however most of the onshore and offshore support staff are contractors emmployeed through service contracts and are not direct employees of BP. There is no way that a comany like BP would reveal it's strategy to them.
As far as unmanned and fully automated platforms - I agree, every operators dream. However as long as we have offshore platforms, there will be a requirement for personnel such as drilling, commissioning, maintenance and production. I can think of many 'new' platfroms with state of the art productions facilities etc that are now being retrofitted to increase their accomodation capacity. Why? Because the operators suddenly find they need more offshore support staff than the accountants / economists said they would (should).
There is no doubt that the north sea is continuing to decline (for the time being) however as we tend further towards becoming a net energy importer rather than exporter, who knows what incentives may appear via the Government, who will ultimately want to see this industry remain in force until every viable barrel has been squeezed out.
The point I actually want to make is that I do not believe the Bond brothers would have come back into this industry, signing such a deal with BP, without considering the older assets which BP may have been consider disposing of. They are successful businessmen and know how the NS oil industry works.