Sep. 2--Oil major BP today reported a "giant discovery" in the Gulf of Mexico sending its shares to a new high for the year.

The firm struck it rich at the Tiber Prospect about 250 miles south east of Houston in which it has a 62 percent stake.

Shares jumped nearly 4 percent or 19.8p to 539.3p -- their highest since the start of the year -- as investors cheered the find which will give BP access to much-needed oil reserves for years to come.

The Tiber well is being hailed as a winner by City analysts. It will help BP, already the biggest producer in the Gulf of Mexico, boost output in the region by 50 percent to 600,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day from 2020.

Drilled to a total depth of 35,055 feet -- greater than the height of Mount Everest -- BP said that the well is "one of the deepest ever drilled by the oil and gas industry". Jonathan Rigby, an analyst at UBS, said: "It will take a while to develop, the second half of next decade, but it's very important."

Tiber will go a long way to fulfilling BP's promise to shareholders of obtaining guaranteed reserves for the long-term future.

The absence of a guaranteed reserve pool has been a constant thorn in the side of both BP and rival Royal Dutch Shell managements in recent years.

Oil companies have been forced to look further afield and into less-hospitable areas to replenish reserves. As a result, costs have soared, squeezing profit margins.

This is also likely to have been the case with Tiber for which BP and its partners -- Petrobras of Brazil and ConocoPhillips of the US -- are said to have overcome challenging geological conditions.

No doubt those executives at BP who gave the go-ahead for the project will be breathing a deep sigh of relief that their gamble has paid off.

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