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By Jo Nova
The iconic 120 year old company shares fall as rumors of a takeover spread
BP has lost a quarter of its share value in the last two weeks. The fall started when company profits turned out to be just $9 billion, down from $14b a year ago and $28b in 2022. As The Telegraph reports, “BP’s shareholders had realized that the green spending they supported in 2020 had halved their dividends.” But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon — the other oil giants — they were all doing much better.
Twenty years ago BP changed its name to “Beyond Petroleum”. By 2020 the company was hellbent on getting there. Suicidally, the oil company pledged to reduce their own oil production by 40% by 2030, (which did nothing except help all their competitors) and promised to pivot into renewable power. BP set itself a target to increase renewables generation by a factor of twenty this decade. The media gushed — “BP Shuns Fossil Fuels“, said Politico. BP supposedly shone a light on “stranded oil and gas”!
Thus and verily, in mid 2020, with exquisite timing, BP management leapt headlong in the magical energy pit. They were sure that after the pandemic the world would ‘build back better’ with renewables “so their economies would be more resilient”... CEO Bernard Looney actually said that (probably while reading from the WEF handbook of “What to Wear for Billionaires”).
So BP flagged a write-down of $18 billion dollars in fossil fuel assets and talked of “accelerating” it’s green investments. Then everything went wrong. Just after BP bet the house on renewables, the Ukraine war broke out and everyone needed oil and gas and no one needed another wind farm. There was a bonanza selling fossil fuels as prices lifted off (seen in the BP income in 2022) but suddenly no one could afford to buy real energy to make solar panels and turbines, and no one had much cash left to buy randomly-failing generators either. It’s been all downhill in renewables ever since.
Prior to this, BP operated Australia’s largest oil refinery for 66 years in Kwinana, Western Australia until it closed in 2021. Until a few weeks ago, BP was planning to launch a $600 million biofuel project on the same site, and the Australian government was thinking of tossing $1 billion dollars at a hydrogen project there too. They were supposed to turn cooking oil into av-gas and renewable diesel, and be a hub for hydrogen. It’s sadly pathetic and unravelling at warp speed.
The Telegraph has all the sordid details as British Petroleum fights for life.
BP faces ‘existential crisis’ after ruinous attempt to go green
The energy giant has vowed a ‘fundamental reset’ after its costly foray into net zero
Johnathon Leake and Ben Marlow, The Telegraph
Five years on from that speech in February 2020, the company is beleaguered by a ruthless activist investor, under pressure to boost its flatlining share price and considering a return to the oil and gas exploration that made it so successful to begin with.
The abrupt turn follows decades of crisis at one of Britain’s most venerable institutions. Today, its future is more uncertain than ever.
Five years on from that speech in February 2020, the company is beleaguered by a ruthless activist investor, under pressure to boost its flatlining share price and considering a return to the oil and gas exploration that made it so successful to begin with.
The abrupt turn follows decades of crisis at one of Britain’s most venerable institutions. Today, its future is more uncertain than ever.
To win round doubters, he is expected to announce a major break with the last five years – shifting away from net zero and back towards its oil and gas heritage.
Pushed by analysts, Auchincloss, Looney’s replacement, confirmed a halt to all investment in wind and solar. “We have completely decapitalised renewables,” he said.
We can blame management, who had been on the fruity green path since 1997, and screwed up majorly, but oddly, 88% of BP shareholders also voted in favor of cutting oil and growing renewables which doesn’t make much sense. Not unless the rank and file votes were unknowingly cast-by-proxy through their hedge funds and pension accounts. Were 88% of British Petroleum investors really fooled into thinking oil was “bad” — or was BP quietly undermined by the big banker blob cartel who may have bossed all the pension funds into voting for Hari Kari? Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, pumped up the whole renewables bubble in 2020, and the bankers were known to boss around whole countries with threats of high interest rates if they didn’t behave.
Hypothetically if the Big Bankers were heavily invested in renewable stocks (which they were), then during a bubble, it would work out well for them if one of the largest oil and gas companies performed a large public flip to renewables. And as a bonus, if BP shareholders were stiffed in the process, the wreckage of a great company could be picked up cheaply a few years later…
So management were crazy, but they probably had help from The Blob Bankers and the Blob Media to really screw things up.
Photo of BP logo by Alf van Beem,
BP Pin photo: Museum Rotterdam and BP Truck Photo.
You know what they say…
Get woke. Go broke.
Every. Single. Time.
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They need to bring back the Smurfs.
How many more sales did they get when there was a new Smurf each week?
Parents are pushed by their kids to buy Smurfs. Parents can only get them from BP. Hence sales go up.
Long live the Smurf.
Anyone still got a collection? Come on, stop hiding, the government already know who you are.
https://www.amazon.com.au/Smurfs-40TH-Anniversary-Classic-Figure/dp/B0949Q4VMB
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The man in the dress and lipstick just lost the entire company and Great Britain.
Like the NBN, it unravelling…….
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Hi David, did you see that Disney wants to shed a few more patrons by introducing “surge pricing”? GWGB for sure. Their latest epic movie is also fading fast!
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Never rely on a business model that is not based upon reason or science or that is dependent upon on taxpayer-funded subsidies.
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The problem with this is that post graduate degrees in Climate “Science” are on offer. With corrupted education systems, how does the average moose decide what it true?
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Back in the day, the purpose of the education system was to teach people how to think.
We no longer have an education system but an indoctrination system.
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I wonder if the truth about who caused this disaster will ever be exposed and who will take the blame. We know the Global Warming hoax was the result of a number of very poor scientists supported whole heartedly by an incurious , (or were they paid to stay dumb?), media. Will they be publicly shamed? As for the woke CEO of BP he should wear the cost of his dreadful decision.
It is good to see that the game is changing. On the news this morning are the decisions by major car makers, Mercedes Benz and Porche to invest in making better gasoline engines, to make hybrid cars and to stop making EVs.
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It’s the schools. These companies recuit management from the universities. The schools teach green, woke, nonsense. They also do not teach real world economics. Kids who question get weeded out early on.
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Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions” (der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen), started in 1967.
The commies took over the schools throughout the West and have been teaching wokeness, socialism/communism and anti-science ever since.
Hopefully TRUMP will change that in your country. The rest of us have little hope and no leadership. Australia doesn’t even have a mainstream conservative party, just a fake one.
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How long before these parasites spend 5 minutes online and look up the available data and save the OECD countries endless TRILLIONs of $ by 2050 and beyond?
Why is beyond any reasonable understanding and yet the bonus is we boost our security against Russia, China , Nth Korea and Iran etc and spend our wasted trillions for the benefit of our countries for a change.
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There is a VAST amount of “spillage” involved in ALL of these capers.
Without a constant drumbeat of “shock and horror”, the churnalsists have nothing to say to an audience seemingly programmed to dote on scare campaigns.
Without said scare campaigns, Wankerdemia cannot keep justifying increasesd “public” funding.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”.
H. L. Mencken
It is ALL , essentially’ a classic “protection racket”, like a colossal plot of a Film Noir gangster movie.
And, it plays on the basic human frailty of not wanting to “miss out on a good thing”, in the face of the ancient surety that there are indeed, NO FREE LUNCHES.
Backed with the other well-cultivated “human frailty” wherein, when an action or “thought” is exposed as fundamentally flawed, the instant reaction is to NOT “take a step back in review, but to “double down”
Well may we live in “interesting times”, but NEVER forget that “Murphy was an Optimist”.
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We will need gasoline and other oil products for a very long time.
EV’s make good shopping cars for housewives just like they were in the 1900’s last time they were popular.
But EVs are unnecessary as gasoline cars no longer have the inconvenience of early 1900’s gasoline cars.
So, note to BP, as TRUMP would say, “drill baby, drill”. But don’t bother coming to Australia as drilling and fracking are banned over much of the country, especially at the most promising locations.
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Perhaps more countries are starting to wake up before it’s too late?
It looks like the Paris treaty is really in the bin and Sterling Burnett also looks at the latest encouraging data about global fires and Aussies can also share that very good news.
Again why don’t they just look up the historical data and wake up?
It cost us nothing but a few minutes online and yet it always seems a bridge too far.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/22/climate-change-weekly-535-paris-climate-treaty-is-going-down/
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Not in Australia.
The alternative PM, fake conservative Dutton, has already expressed his continued commitment to Paris, even after TRUMP abandoned it.
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Here’s the death rates from fires and burns around the world and there has been a big drop in deaths since 1980 and Aussies have lower rates than other high income + colder countries today.
And note at the top line that low income countries are dropping at a faster rate. Wonderful news, but ignored by the MSM.
I wonder why?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fire-death-rates?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~Low-income+countries~High-income+countries~Upper-middle-income+countries~Lower-middle-income+countries~AUS
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Someone the other day commented “ … I thought this was a science blog?”. I think it was in a more general article about some of the actions of the new US administration. Here we have a “ business “ story. One you should be reading in the Australian Financial Review or watching on one of those slick TV business shows. Nope, note a word have I heard. This story is huge and with Australia’s long term history with BP you would think a front page story in the MSM. Thanks again Jo, you run rings around the so called journalists.
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Ross, you are quite correct. When I first discovered Jo’s blog (Gawd, how many yeas ago was that!) it was nearly all on climate issues, which at the time provided me with much of the information I really needed on that subject. But over the years Jo has expanded her interest and forensic investigation into a range of issues of critical importance that I would seldom have found on my own.
In addition her command of the English language and her quirky sense of humour with which she garnishes her articles makes reading a pleasure as well as educational. She now had tremendous readership around the world and is often quoted elsewhere.
Keep at it, Jo, you are a marvel.
Which reminds me, it’s pre Easter chocolate time. Time to send her some if you have not done so lately.
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Looney says it all really.
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A bit more on this link regarding the EPA and endangerment:
https://www.wastedive.com/news/zeldin-climate-endangemerent-rule-tax-credits-workforce/740651/
The subsidy harvesters are not happy.
Dutton could provide energy bill relief simply by bringing forward the end of the RET. I think it would get support because no one wants tio enrich big energy at the expense of their own well-being. No doubt that would get legal pushback similar to what is happening in the USA.
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Jo,
Some editorial points:
You doubled up the Telegraph quote “Five years on from that speech…”
BP never changed its name to Beyond Petroleum. That was just a slogan.
OTOH, it has changed its name a couple of times since being called British Petroleum:
IOW it’s just BP now.
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That tells us that they are not viable in free market and should be scrapped.
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The phrase “an own goal” comes to mind.
Might I suggest the new managers read the daily posts at joannenova dot com.
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Might be a good time to buy BP shares.
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Bernard Looney. Nominative determinism at work.
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20 years ago they changed their name to Beyond Petroleum…in another 20 it may change to Beyond Profit.
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Through adaptation and the use of fossil fuels we’ve made the Earth a much safer planet.
Today deaths from extreme weather events have dropped by 98% from 100 years ago and 60 years ago.
Dr Koonin wins his debates and always states that extreme weather deaths today are just one fiftieth the deaths in the earlier years of the 20th century.
Yet we’ve had the Biden loony etc telling the kiddies that we’re facing an EXISTENTIAL threat to the Human race.
Here’s the proof from OWI Data that the kids have been lied to for decades.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/decadal-average-death-rates-from-natural-disasters
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