BP

• 1. Introduction

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  BP p.l.c. began not as an oil giant but as a gamble on a remote patch of Persian ground. In May 1908, a group of British geologists struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in the Khuzestan Province of southwestern Persia. It was the first commercially significant oil discovery in the Middle East, and it set off a chain of events that would reshape empires, fuel wars, and leave hundreds of miles of ocean coastline blackened with crude. From that single find, a company grew that would one day rank 33rd on the Fortune Global 500, operate in dozens of countries, and become the subject of the largest criminal resolution in United States history. How does a subsidiary of a Scottish oil firm become one of the most powerful and controversial corporations on earth? And what does it mean when that company, after more than a century of extracting fossil fuels, announces it is going Beyond Petroleum, then quietly reverses course?

• 2. Persian Roots and British Power

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  William Knox D'Arcy, by contract with Ali-Qoli Khan Bakhtiari, first secured the right to explore for oil in the Middle East, an arrangement that altered the political geography of the entire region. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was incorporated on the 14th of April 1909 as a subsidiary of Burmah Oil Company, with Lord Strathcona serving as its first chairman and minority shareholder. Within three years, a refinery had been built on Abadan Island in Arabistan and was already operating.

  The British government's interest in the company was never purely commercial. In 1914, at the urging of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, the government acquired a controlling interest of just over 50% in the company. The Royal Navy rapidly converted the majority of its warships from coal to oil, and a 30-year supply contract with the Admiralty locked in a strategic relationship between the company and British military power.

  By 1923, Burmah had hired Churchill himself as a paid consultant to lobby the government to grant the company exclusive rights over Persian oil resources, and those rights were subsequently awarded. The same decade, the company and the Armenian businessman Calouste Gulbenkian were the driving forces behind the creation of the Turkish Petroleum Company in 1912, established to explore Mesopotamian oil. TPC finally struck oil in Iraq on the 14th of October 1927, opening another front in what was becoming a vast regional enterprise.

  When Reza Shah requested in 1935 that the international community refer to Persia as Iran, the company's name changed accordingly, becoming the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The name shift was cosmetic; the underlying tension between Iranian national interests and British control was not.

• 3. Nationalisation and the 1953 Coup

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  In March 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Ali Razmara was assassinated after resisting nationalist calls to revise the oil concession terms. Mohammed Mossadeq, a nationalist, was elected prime minister by the Majlis of Iran the same month, and by April 1951, the Iranian parliament had voted unanimously to nationalise the oil industry. The National Iranian Oil Company was formed, and the AIOC withdrew its management from the country.

  Britain organised an effective worldwide embargo of Iranian oil and contested the nationalisation at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The court dismissed the complaint. Prime Minister Churchill then asked President Eisenhower for help in removing Mossadeq from power. The resulting operation was conducted under the code name Operation Ajax by the CIA and Operation Boot by British intelligence service MI6. The coup of August 1953 established pro-Western general Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister and greatly strengthened the position of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The AIOC was able to return to Iran.

  In October 1954, a holding company called Iranian Oil Participants Ltd was founded in London, bringing Iranian oil back to the international market. British Petroleum was a founding member with a 40% stake. The new consortium agreed to share profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran, but, as the source notes, refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians onto its board of directors. That lopsided arrangement shaped the resentments that would later drive the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini's new government nationalised all of BP's Iranian assets without compensation, costing the company 40% of its global crude oil supply in a single stroke.

• 4. Growth, Risk, and a Reputation for Danger

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  By the 1960s, British Petroleum had built a reputation for pursuing the riskiest ventures in the industry. It was the first company to strike oil in the North Sea, in 1965. It entered Canada, Alaska, and later the United States, where a discovery at Prudhoe Bay in 1969 became one of the most significant finds in North American history. That appetite for risk earned massive profits. It also produced the worst safety record in the industry.

  In 1967, the giant tanker Torrey Canyon foundered off the English coast. More than 32 million US gallons of crude oil spilled into the Atlantic and onto the beaches of Cornwall and Brittany, causing the worst oil spill in British history to that point. The ship was being chartered by British Petroleum. RAF jet bombers were dispatched to bomb the wreck and burn off the oil, but the effort failed to destroy the slick.

  The pattern repeated in Texas in 2005, when 15 workers were killed and more than 170 were injured in an explosion at the Texas City refinery. The refinery had been built in 1934, and major upgrades had been postponed to save money. The explosion resulted in a record-setting fine from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Three months after the disaster, BP's giant Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico nearly sank during a hurricane because workers had installed a valve backwards, flooding the ballast tanks. Repairs cost hundreds of millions of dollars and kept the platform out of commission for three years.

  In 2006, an oil spill at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope became the largest ever on the North Slope and resulted in a civil penalty of US$25 million, which was at the time the largest per-barrel penalty ever levied for an oil spill.

• 5. Deepwater Horizon

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  On the 20th of April 2010, an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico triggered the largest accidental release of oil into marine waters in recorded history. Approximately 4.9 million barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf, causing severe environmental, human health, and economic damage across the region.

  BP's response compounded the reputational damage. In the immediate aftermath, the company initially downplayed the severity of the incident, repeating public-relations errors similar to those made by Exxon after the Exxon Valdez disaster. CEO Tony Hayward drew widespread criticism for his public statements, including a remark that he wanted his life back. Hayward was replaced as chief executive by Bob Dudley in October 2010.

  The financial consequences were staggering. The spill cost BP more than $4.5 billion in fines and penalties. An additional $18.7 billion in Clean Water Act-related penalties and other claims followed, representing the largest criminal resolution in United States history. Altogether, the total cost to the company exceeded $65 billion.

  To raise funds and compensate for the liabilities, BP announced a divestment program to sell approximately $38 billion worth of non-core assets. Among the disposals were its natural gas activities in Canada, its Alaska upstream operations, refinery assets in California and Texas, and fields in the Gulf of Mexico. The sell-off fundamentally reshaped BP's global portfolio and took years to complete.

• 6. The Beyond Petroleum Brand

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  In the first quarter of 2001, BP replaced its old Green Shield logo with a green and yellow sunflower symbol called the Helios, named after the Greek sun god. The rebranding arrived alongside the slogan Beyond Petroleum and a marketing campaign valued at $200 million. By 2008, surveys showed consumers had come to regard BP as one of the greenest petroleum companies in the world, a remarkable result for a company whose primary business remained extracting fossil fuels.

  Critics were not convinced. Antonia Juhasz, an energy analyst and activist, noted that BP's investment in green technologies peaked at roughly 4% of its exploratory budget before cutbacks began. In a year when BP's budget included more than $20 billion for fossil fuel investment, the company spent less than $1.5 billion on all alternative energy forms combined. Greenpeace, Mother Jones, and others accused the company of greenwashing.

  BP did make concrete moves toward clean energy during this period. It acquired Chargemaster in 2018, which operated the United Kingdom's largest electric vehicle charging network. It purchased a 43% stake in solar developer Lightsource Renewable Energy in 2017. It invested in bioethanol ventures in Brazil and biobutanol technology through a joint venture with DuPont. In August 2020, BP promised to increase annual low-carbon investments to $5 billion by 2030 and set a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050.

  Then, in February 2025, BP declared it would cut renewable energy investments and increase oil and gas production by approximately 20% to $10 billion per year, while reducing planned funding for renewables by more than five billion pounds. Greenpeace UK stated that the decision was proof that fossil fuel companies cannot or will not be part of climate crisis solutions. BP's share price fell by 2% in the hours following the announcement.

• 7. Scale and Structure Today

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  BP has operations in 61 countries and produces around 2.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Its total proven reserves stand at 6.25 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The company runs approximately 21,200 service stations worldwide, trading under the BP name globally, the Amoco brand in the United States, and the Aral brand in Germany.

  The United States accounts for nearly one-third of BP's total operations. The company's largest subsidiary there is BP America, headquartered in Houston, Texas. In Azerbaijan, BP operates the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli offshore oil fields, which supply 80% of that country's oil production, and the Shah Deniz gas field. In Oman, BP holds a 60% interest in Block 61, described as the largest tight gas development in the Middle East, with a daily production capacity of 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas.

  Since 1951, BP has published its annual Statistical Review of World Energy, a document the energy industry uses as a benchmark. The company's 2024 revenues were US$194.6 billion, placing it 33rd in the Fortune Global 500. BP ranks as the fifth-largest investor-owned oil company in the world by 2024 revenues, after ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and TotalEnergies.

  In December 2025, BP announced that Meg O'Neill would become its new chief executive effective from April 2026, joining from Woodside Energy. She will be the first external hire and the first woman to serve as chief executive of a major global oil producer. That appointment followed the exit of Murray Auchincloss, who had steered the company through its latest pivot back toward fossil fuel production. In August 2025, BP announced its largest oil and gas discovery in 25 years, a find in the Bumerangue prospect located roughly 400 km offshore in Brazil's deepwater Santos Basin.