BP’s CEO shake-up signals the end of its green energy era

BP +1.89% WDS +2.19%

British oil giant BP just announced a new CEO, marking its fourth chief executive shake-up in the last six years alone.

Most Read from Fast Company

• Chipotle launches 4-ounce bowl of meat for the Ozempic age

• A nasty ‘superflu’ virus is spreading in the U.S. right now: What to know about the subclade K flu variant

• Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire accused an innocent Palestinian of being the Brown shooter. Then he doubled down

The company named Meg O’Neill, who previously led Australia’s top oil and gas company Woodside Energy, to the role. O’Neill will become the first woman to hold the top executive spot at one of the world’s biggest oil companies. She said that she looks forward to working to “accelerate performance” at BP and plans to prioritize shareholder growth and reestablish BP—now a possible takeover target—as a market leader in the oil and gas industry.

O’Neill will take over from Murray Auchincloss, a longtime BP employee who was appointed as interim CEO in 2023 before being named to the role permanently in January 2024. While Auchincloss will leave the oil giant immediately, O’Neill won’t take the helm until April of next year.

“After more than three decades with BP, now is the right time to hand the reins to a new leader,” Auchincloss said in the announcement, adding that he told BP’s chairman that he would be open to stepping down if a different leader could hasten the company’s growth trajectory. “I am confident that BP is now well positioned for significant growth, and I look forward to watching the company’s future progress and success under Meg’s leadership,” he said.

BP named Albert Manifold as the new chairman of its board over the summer, tapping the oil and gas outsider who had spent the previous 10 years as CEO of the building materials company CRH. That shake-up to the board of directors was one of many recent moves designed to put the company back on track and make BP competitive again with its rivals in the oil and gas industry. Earlier this year, Elliott Investment Management, an activist investor known for dramatically remaking companies in its image, disclosed that it owns a 5% stake in the troubled British energy company.

BP’s checkered past

While oil and gas peers like Shell and ExxonMobil continue to notch market wins, BP’s share price has floundered. BP remains haunted by its past and still pays around a billion dollars a year in damages for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 people and triggered a long-term environmental and health catastrophe at the company’s semi-submersible offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP has changed directions a few times in recent years, but the company’s leadership and timing have yet to impress investors. The company took a significant near 20% stake of Russian oil company Rosneft in 2013, but paid a political price and eventually ate a $25 billion loss when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Under previous CEO Bernard Looney, who stepped into the role in 2020, BP pivoted toward an aggressive plan to reduce emissions and reorient the company toward renewable energy. Less than four years later, Looney was ousted from BP after failing to disclose intimate relationships with employees, and an internal investigation determined that he provided “inaccurate and incomplete assurances” about his conduct.

This year, BP slashed its green energy promises and announced a move back to fossil fuels like gasoline, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and petroleum to please its unhappy shareholders. Then-CEO Auchincloss said that the company went “too far, too fast” in its pivot toward clean energy—a claim that climate experts alarmed about the closing window for a planet-wide emissions intervention would certainly take issue with.

This post originally appeared at fastcompany.comSubscribe to get the Fast Company newsletter: http://fastcompany.com/newsletters