BP was founded in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, established to exploit oil discoveries in what is now Iran. It became one of the world's largest integrated energy companies over the following century, operating across exploration, production, refining, and retail fuel.
The company's most significant modern inflection point was the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, which killed eleven workers, triggered the largest marine oil spill in US history, and ultimately cost BP more than $65 billion in cleanup costs, fines, and legal settlements. The event reshaped the company's risk culture, balance sheet, and public standing in ways that persisted for years.
In the early 2020s, BP announced ambitions to reduce oil and gas production and expand into renewables and low-carbon energy, positioning itself alongside peers such as Shell and TotalEnergies in what became a widely watched experiment in incumbent energy transition. The pace and credibility of that pivot drew sustained scrutiny from investors, regulators, and climate advocates alike.
For operators and scale-up leaders, BP is worth watching less as an energy company and more as a stress test for large-organisation transformation. The tension between legacy hydrocarbon cash flows and the capital demands of new energy businesses is a structural problem that mirrors, at enormous scale, the reinvention pressures facing incumbents across many sectors. How BP allocates capital, restructures its portfolio, and manages stakeholder expectations offers a live case study in the limits and possibilities of strategic change inside a very large, very complex organisation.
