Over the past 12 months, UK public companies returned £58.4bn to investors in the form of dividend payments. All but £6.3bn of that figure is attributable to FTSE100 companies. And of those, a single constituent, BP, accounted for £7.30bn - or 12.5 per cent of the total.
An obvious consequence of this 'clustering' of dividends is that disaster befalling one of the big payers would reduce the market yield - and create a headache for the managers of income funds. Those managers are probably trying right now to quantify whether the costs associated with the Deepwater Horizon explosion are significant enough to imperil that payout.
BP has confirmed that by 12 May the cost of the initial remedial actions undertaken in the wake of the disaster had already hit $450m. But the final figure could be much greater. Currently, oil company ancilliary liabilities are capped at $75m - a figure agreed after industry lobbying following the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska - but lawmakers want to raise that limit to $10bn.
Analysts at Citi have tried to calculate the financial impact of the disaster. The point out that BP's share of the equity in the well that's burst is 65 per cent, so a $10bn liability translates to $6.5bn, less after tax. However, that would be spread over many years, meaning it's unlikely to hit dividend payments in any one year.
More serious is the longer-term impact on reserves and production costs. No new drilling permits for the Gulf will be issued until at least the end of this month, and that will push 80,000 daily barrels of production into next year. Of all the major oil producers, BP is most exposed to the Gulf of Mexico - the region represents around 8 per cent of its reserve base.
However, others are still worse off. BHP Billiton, the diversified resources group, has a substantial oil division and almost a third of its reserves are in the Gulf. It looks likely, too, that up to 6bn barrels of new reserves in the eastern Gulf will remain off-limits to exploration. And all operators are likely to suffer from higher insurance and offshore operating costs in the wake of the blast. Wood Mackenzie, an oil industry consultancy, estimates that a 10 per cent hike in costs would push 2bn barrels of reserves towards the margins of profitability.
So higher costs, longer timescales, lower margins and weaker reserve growth are likely to be the long-term effects of Deepwater Horizon - and they'll be just as harmful to the industry as the immediate clean-up costs.
