Last month’s explosion of Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s...

Last month’s explosion of Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s huge Piper Alpha oil platform is costing North Sea oil companies around $3 million a day, economists at the Royal Bank of Scotland said. The shutdown of the platform in the wake of the July 6 disaster, in which 167 workers died, has meant the loss of nearly 300,000 barrels of oil a day from six fields, they said. North Sea oil production is currently worth about $32.3 million a day, compared to $51 million a day at this time last year, the economists said.