Bp|Ry

Bp|Ry

BP p.l.c. (formerly The British Petroleum Company p.l.c and BP Amoco p.l.c) is a British multinational oil and gas company headquartered in London, England. It is one of the oil and gas "supermajors" and one of the world's largest companies measured by revenues and profits. It is a vertically integrated company operating in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and extraction, refining, distribution and marketing, power generation, and trading. BP's origins date back to the founding of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909, established as a subsidiary of Burmah Oil Company to exploit oil discoveries in Iran. In 1935, it became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and in 1954, adopted the name British Petroleum. In 1959, the company expanded beyond the Middle East to Alaska. British Petroleum acquired majority control of Standard Oil of Ohio in 1978. Formerly majority state-owned, the British government privatised the company in stages between 1979 and 1987. British Petroleum merged with Amoco in 1998, becoming BP Amoco plc, and acquired ARCO and Burmah Castrol in 2000 and Aral AG in 2002. The company's name was shortened to BP p.l.c. in 2001. From 2003 to 2013, BP was a partner in the TNK-BP joint venture in Russia, and as of December 2022 holds a nearly 20% stake in Rosneft - accounting for a third of BP's total production. BP had earlier promised to divest the Rosneft holdings but was unable to find a buyer; instead BP wrote the assets off their books in a $25 billion non-cash charge. As of 31 December 2018, BP had operations in nearly 80 countries, produced around 3.7 million barrels per day (590,000 m3/d) of oil equivalent, and had total proven reserves of 19.945 billion barrels (3.1710×109 m3) of oil equivalent. The company has around 18,700 service stations worldwide, which it operates under the BP brand (worldwide) and under the Amoco brand (in the United States) and the Aral brand (in Germany). Its largest division is BP America in the United States. BP is the fourth-largest investor-owned oil company in the world by 2021 revenues (after ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies). BP had a market capitalisation of US$98.36 billion as of 15 September 2022, placing it 122nd in the world, and its Fortune Global 500 rank was 35th in 2022 with revenues of US$164.2 billion. The company trades on the London Stock Exchange (where it is a member of the FTSE 100 Index), the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange. From 1988 to 2015, BP was responsible for 1.53% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions. BP has been directly involved in several major environmental and safety incidents. Among them were the 2005 Texas City Refinery explosion, which caused the death of 15 workers and which resulted in a record-setting OSHA fine; Britain's largest oil spill, the wreck of Torrey Canyon in 1967; and the 2006 Prudhoe Bay oil spill, the largest oil spill on Alaska's North Slope, which resulted in a US$25 million civil penalty, the largest per-barrel penalty at that time for an oil spill. BP's worst environmental catastrophe was the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest accidental release of oil into marine waters in history, which leaked about 4.9 million barrels (210 million US gal; 780,000 m3) of oil, causing severe environmental, human health, and economic consequences and serious legal and public relations repercussions for BP, eventually paying more than $4.5 billion in fines and penalties, and an additional $18.7 billion in Clean Water Act-related penalties and other claims, the largest criminal resolution in US history. Altogether, the oil spill cost the company more than $65 billion.

Update this biography »
Complete biography of Bp|Ry »