The question has appeared before. I was in the habit of referring to BP as a British company, but some posters objected. Eventually I stopped doing it after some smart doper claimed continuing to refer to the company as ‘British’ in the face of the evidence for the case against amounted to provocation.
All right. But Alabama.com is referring to them as a ‘British oil company’. Maybe some will think this is not a reliable source, so I’ll point out this isn’t some random guy in Alabama but AL.com itself.
Forget about whether the identification is good or bad news for BP, or for the British, or anyone else. Forget if you like or dislike one answer or the other, and just settle it:
Yes or no?
BP is a multi-national corporation. Their worldwide headquarters are in London. They have a USA headquarters in Houston. They have offices and installations all over the world.
As a multi-national, it is technically incorrect to attribute them to any specific country. Their roots are in the United Kingdom and their company culture is heavily British.
Their name is just BP, not British Petroleum. They stopped using British Petroleum near the end of the 20th century. If asked, a corporate suit would probably tell you the BP stands for “Beyond Petroleum”, not “British Petroleum”.
The Encyclopedia Britannica also calls it a British company, which sounds reasonably authoritative to me.
The company is based in London, and has historically been British. However, it is a multinational and a substantially part of its holdings come from its merger with the American company Amoco.
Is General Motors an American company? It’s also a multinational, like many major companies.
BP p.l.c.
(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)
England and Wales
(Jurisdiction of incorporation or organization)
1 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4PD
United Kingdom
(Address of principal executive offices)
Dr Brian Gilvary
BP p.l.c.
1 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4PD
United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0) 20 7496 5311
Fax +44 (0) 20 7496 4573
(Name, Telephone, E-mail and/or Facsimile number and Address of Company Contact Person)
Now I’m confused, because until that merger, Standard Oil and British Petroleum had separate histories. But if you really want to know more about this stuff, read “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power” by Daniel Yergin. It’s really good, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.
BP actually acquired two of Standard Oil’s post-antitrust progeny: Standard Oil of Ohio (dba Sohio) in 1968, and Standard Oil of Indiana (dba Amoco) in 1998.
Is there some stigma attached to being a British company? Coca-Cola is a multinational corporation but most people wouldn’t balk at it being called American.
While we’re on the topic of BP and oil company genealogies, where does ARCO come in?
Arco, as I always understood it, was a new name (or successor company) for Atlantic Richfield Company. But Arco is now a part of BP. What was the sequence of buy-outs / mergers / name changes / etc., that led up to that?
The *British *company this, and the *British *company that, and did we mention it’s the *British *company…
Yeah, heard ya the first time. It’s a Brit company. So what? American Big Oil never rapes nature? A big evil oil company called BP screwed the gulf, not “the British,” like there’s 60 million Brits over there wringing their hands together in evil glee.
The OP keeps starting threads over the actions of the US arm of BP in the US under US laws and with US-issued permits that caused the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and blaming Britain because BP used to stand for British Petroleum.
BP is a very large multinational, and was only called British Petroleum for a bit more than half its life. However considering that the UK government were at one stage a major shareholder, and when they sold their shareholding acted to prevent control of the company falling into Kuwaiti hands, the Britishness of the company is hard to deny.
The relationship between the UK management and the US operation (aka the Amoco component) has been remarked upon a bit, and I had some contact with it in the past. In many places UK senior managers were put in place above Amoco employees. Something that did not go down well. At the time there was a joke that did the rounds of the Amoco side - “How do you pronounce BP-Amoco?” Answer “BP - the Amoco is silent.”
Given the OP’s question is clearly directed at the Mancodo disaster, and culpability therein, I would suggest that there is so much blame to go around that no-one can claim clean hands. The rig owner - Transocean (which is Swiss) is not blame free, nor is Haliburton (although as it turns out the actual failure would have occurred without them) and even Cameron (the builder of the blow out protector) is not fully blame free. The US regulator carries a good fraction of the blame, being essentially oblivious to safety concerns, despite such being a clear part of their responsibility. The disaster needed a ridiculous number of things to all go wrong at the same time, and at many points a single person doing their job right would have saved the situation. Most of those single people were not BP employees. Many of them are now dead. It isn’t as if they thought they were being careless. However there is also no doubt that BP had one of the worst attitudes to safety, and as the lessee of the rig and the final manager of the operation, they bear ultimate responsibility. The disaster is a very complex story both from an engineering failure and a management failure point of view. There have been books written already, but I don’t think the definitive one has been written yet. The story makes disasters like Challenger, Columbia, Chernobyl, Fukushima, look trivial.
