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BP is one of the world's biggest oil and gas companies, pumping oil, refining it into fuels, and selling it at gas stations while also investing in lower-carbon energy.
BP is one of the giant oil companies that keeps the world's engines running. It finds and pumps oil and natural gas out of the ground, turns crude oil into gasoline at refineries, and sells fuel to drivers at thousands of gas stations that carry its name. It also runs a trading desk that buys and sells energy around the clock, and that trading operation can make or lose big money depending on how the markets move.
The company's history is a bit wild. It started more than a century ago as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, drilling in what is now Iran, and for decades it was partly owned by the British government. That gave it a reputation as a company that often seemed to blur the line between business and the state, and it has carried both the benefits and the baggage of that ever since. Today it is a plain old public company, owned by shareholders, and it competes with the other oil supermajors: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and TotalEnergies. The business has two big engines. One is oil and gas production, where BP spends huge sums drilling wells and building platforms that will pump for years. The other is refining and selling fuel, which is a thinner-margin business but steadier, because people still need to fill their tanks even when the oil price wobbles. BP makes the most money when oil prices are high, which makes its profits famously cyclical: great years, then painful ones. Its competitors are often national oil companies with cheap access to oil, like those in Saudi Arabia, so BP has to be smart about where it drills and how it cuts costs.
In the early 1900s, William Knox D'Arcy bet money on a wild idea: that there was oil under the hot, empty ground of Iran. For years he found nothing, and the money nearly ran out. Then came the strike at Masjed Soleyman, the first big oil find in the Middle East, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was born to turn it into a business. Pipelines carried the crude to a refinery at Abadan, and soon the first tankers of oil were sailing away.
This was the age when warships were switching from coal to oil, and Britain wanted a secure supply it controlled itself. So the government bought just over half of Anglo-Persian. It was a strange arrangement — a company part-owned by the state — and it lasted for decades before the government finally sold its last shares.
When Iran took its oil fields into state hands, the company lost its main source of crude and had to rebuild. It came back into Iran with a smaller share, as part of an international group, and took a new name: The British Petroleum Company. The old Persian connection was fading from the label.
With the government out, BP was finally a fully private company, free to make its own deals — and it soon went shopping. But the timing was awful. The great share sale collided with the 1987 market crash, and BP's shares dropped hard, leaving the banks that backed the sale staring at losses. Still, the sale got done, and BP was now free to grow by buying other companies.
The big move came when BP merged with Amoco, a giant American oil company. Everyone read it as BP buying Amoco, and the combined firm was briefly called BP Amoco. Then the Amoco name was dropped, and BP stopped standing for anything at all. The company started calling itself 'Beyond Petroleum' as it pushed deeper into America.
After those big mergers, the company tidied up its identity and renamed itself BP p.l.c. The name no longer spelled out British Petroleum — it was just BP, a global company with a short, simple label.
Then came the worst moment in BP's history. The Deepwater Horizon rig blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, and oil poured out for months — the largest marine spill ever. BP paid billions, admitted to criminal charges, and its share price was cut in half almost overnight. The company that had spent years building a green-ish image now had a reputation in tatters.
Under a new boss, Bernard Looney, BP promised to go net-zero by 2050 and to cut its oil and gas output by 40% within a decade, while pouring money into low-carbon projects. It even halved its dividend — a shock for investors who owned BP for the payouts. The shares sank to a 25-year low as people doubted the plan would work.
The green push did not pay off, and BP found itself struggling. Activist investor Elliott pushed for a return to the basics, oil and gas, and the outgoing boss had already reset the strategy that way. Then BP named Meg O'Neill as its new chief — the first woman to lead one of the big oil majors.
The reset bore fruit in a big way. Helped by the Iran war lifting energy prices and refining profits, BP reported its best quarterly profit in years and paid down debt faster than planned. It even said it would use the windfall to settle what was left of the Deepwater Horizon bills — closing a chapter that had haunted it since the spill.
A few things matter right now. The company made a big climate promise in 2020 to shift toward cleaner energy, but in early 2025 it pulled back and refocused on oil and gas, because investors wanted cash returns rather than green growth. It is also still paying for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the worst oil spills in history, and it sells off assets to help fund its dividend and buy back shares. The simple truth about BP is that it is a huge, cash-generating machine tied to the price of a barrel of oil, and its future depends on whether the world keeps needing fossil fuels long enough for its low-carbon bets to pay off.
Saved answer · last researched 25 Oct 2026