If you really want your mind blown, you should find out where the name Exxon came from.
Also, I think the issue from reading your numerous threads about BP was that you were insisting on calling them British Petroleum instead of BP.
Hopefully that gets explained in The Prize. Two birds, yada yada…
yah well I gave that up. That’s the name I knew when the disaster happened.
These last quotes have me thinking about generalization math. Say BP is a stinker. Also, (still for example) BP is British. Does ‘stinker’ enjoy the transitive property the way proper variables would if we were reasoning along the lines of A=B, A=C, therefore B=C?
No it does not. BP being a British stinker has no bearing on whether any John Sterling strolling through the streets of London is. That’s the trouble with generalization reasoning. (You could also say reflexivity (A=A) does not apply, since ‘British’ =! ‘British’ if one is BP and the other is John Sterling)
Point being, I get it that this kind of reasoning doesn’t add up and I don’t intend to come across that way. I’m not out to confront the Brits with a guilty BP either. But speaking of guilt, the accepted commentators in this thread say it was a ‘systemic failure’. Well, what system, exactly, failed? BP? Well, everyone from Alabama.com to the Encyclopedia Britannica to ~51% of dopers says BP is British, so does that also somehow refer to this system?
One could wonder if the boundaries of the ‘failed system’ are limited by either ‘British’ or ‘BP’ since other parties are involved. Again, what system, exactly, are we talking about?
But all this gets pretty far from the basic question of the thread. Having got about 80 pages into ‘The Prize’, I can see that these organizations formed on a regional basis. They may have expanded like mad but they kept their identities. For example, on Standard Oil, from page 34:
It seems BP acquired some of Standard Oil’s property without incorporating this aspect of Standard Oil’s character.
Actually, you’re both wrong. al.com, the website linked to in the OP, is the web portal for the Alabama Media Group, which is composed of The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times, The Mobile Press-Register and The Mississippi Press. The author of that article, George Talbot, is a reporter for those papers.
No, I’m correct. I was responding to his mention of Alabama.com not Al.com.
Alabama.com doesn’t refer to them at all. The article is at al.com.
And from a while back, a post on the realities in which an oil rig is run.
I’ll save you the trouble. Exxon = Esso = S.O. = Standard Oil
I know I am skipping a lot of your post, but I feel it was really disjointed and the thought processes that must have been behind putting it together seem very foreign to me.
Let me just comment on this last part. Do you understand that Standard Oil was broken up in 1911? Rockefeller had already retired by then (1897). These former pieces of Standard Oil very in background tremendously.
Some were competitors that were bought by Standard Oil over time and some were just geographic business units of Standard Oil grown organically. For example, in Ohio you had the case of Standard Oil Company of Ohio (“Sohio”), which in this thread we earlier referenced as ultimately acquired by BP (partially in 1968 and the remainder in 1987).
You also had another Ohio based Standard Oil company that was part of the break-up, The Ohio Oil Company. This was a competitor to Standard Oil that was acquired in 1889. Again, it was split up into its own company in 1911 as part of the anti-trust break-up. This went on to become Marathon Oil Company. Over the more than 100 years since the anti-trust breakup, it changed focuses from refining to oil production and back, it was bought by U.S. Steel, ultimately it became the dominant part of U.S. Steel and the steel business was spun off into a separate company, Marathon then just split into two companies: Marathon Petroleum and Marathon Oil.
Do you seriously think Marathon Oil of today retains the same corporate culture instilled by John D. Rockefeller from 1889 to his retirement in 1897? We’re talking about an oil company that primarily operated prior to automobiles. The Ford Model T wasn’t built until 1914. The center of the oil universe was in the Appalachians. The Spindletop Field in Texas hadn’t been discovered yet. Saudi Arabia was four decades away from discovering oil. The primary refined product was kerosene as there was no use for gasoline.
I’m saying this to try to illustrate that criticizing BP for not retaining the Standard Oil culture after buying some of its former pieces decades after they had left is totally insane. Its like trying to compare you to the personality traits of your great great great great grandfather. Why in the world would you expect there to be any similarity.
To continue with the daft notion that country culture is at play you could also argue that BP didn’t do enough to expunge the Amoco and ARCO aspect/character from their business. Most BP installations and field I went to were generally well run, and it was tough to do anything without the right permit and risk assessment. ARCO rigs in the southern North Sea were the places most field engineers tried to get out of going to due to the unpleasant work environment (old school company men who though shouting was the best way to communicate) and terrible safety records. Multiple shut downs and visits from the UK equivalent of OSHA. The old Amoco fields (for example Chirag in Azerbaijan) were not much better - again poor safety records and an attitude to cooperation that belonged in the 1970s.
So with all the incidents that BP had were in the US, (Texas City ex Amoco, Leaking Pipelines EX ARCO) and Deep Water Horizon (US drilling engineers) maybe the common factor is US company culture?
Or maybe the British or American culture has squat all to do with it?
More fruitful areas to look at would be how the risks that were being taken were understood throughout the company ( I suspect poorly) and how the risk profile understanding translated into drivers (cost control being a driver when drilling bleeding edge wells is generally a bad bad idea) and why did solid well engineering practices get replaced with a “we got away with it last time so we should be good next time so we don’t need those (expensive) contingency operations” approach.
For what it is worth - have a look at this (which is from the plaintifs so obviously has a point to make one way or the other)
They address the risk assesment issues quite extensively, there is a mention of corporate culture as well.
Ok so this thread is a little dead but I couldn’t figure out where to put the following
link that goes to the chief counsels report into Macondo. It has some excellent explanations of deep water drilling , drilling rigs and completions in not too technical language. If you want to know a bit more about what happened and deepwater drilling it is worth browsing.
FYI it is 25 MB PDF and 350 pages