Weatherford International Ltd. will pay BP PLC $75 million to settle claims the companies have filed against each other concerning last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Weatherford, an oil field equipment manufacturer, had produced a float collar that was used in the final cementing of BP's ill-fated Macondo well. The agreement, which does not signal any admissions of liability, means BP will no longer be expected to pay on behalf of Weatherford when other parties sue the manufacturer in connection with the spill.

The agreement comes about a month after Moex Offshore LLC -- part of the Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co. Ltd. that held a 10 percent nonoperating stake in the well -- settled with BP for $1 billion.

BP said the two agreements were acknowledgements of findings by the presidential commission investigating the spill "that the Deepwater Horizon incident was the product of complex causes involving multiple parties."

It took the crew aboard Deepwater Horizon -- BP's drilling rig that exploded following the Macondo blowout, killing 11 workers -- nine attempts to set the float collar's special valves to prevent backward flow. The presidential commission said that effort should have served as a warning.

Bill Herbert, an analyst with Simmons & Co. International, said in a note to investors that the agreement did not come as a surprise.

"At some point, we had always assumed that there would be some form of settlement between the service companies and BP -- this appears to be the first resolution on this front," Herbert said, adding that the settlement looks like "a favorable development" for Weatherford.

"Macondo, and the attendant legal distractions, are now in the rearview mirror," he said.

BP will use the $75 million from Weatherford toward the $20 billion trust the oil company created to pay economic claims from residents and business owners on the Gulf Coast (Tom Fowler, Houston Chronicle, June 20). -- PK