COLUMN | BP: beyond petroleum, beyond perdition or just bad performance? (part two of two) [Offshore Accounts]

Earlier in the week, we looked at the chronic management churn and a decade of underperformance and strategic flip-flop at BP.

In October 2025, the dynamic Irish businessman Albert Manifold was appointed chairman at the British oil company. Investors had high hopes that his proven track record of success at a building supply company (!!!) and his hands-on style would produce the turnaround that BP’s long-suffering shareholders had been sorely desiring.

Auchincloss heads for the exit

Unfortunately, to say that Mr Manifold’s tenure at BP was not a success would be an understatement. In December 2025, BP’s CEO Murray Auchincloss left the company abruptly one day after the press release was issued announcing his departure, less than two years into his role, and a week before Christmas. Happy Xmas, Murray!

Neither Mr Auchincloss nor BP were able to give a credible reason why.

"After more than three decades with BP, now is the right time to hand the reins to a new leader," Mr Auchincloss said in the press release. "When Albert became Chair, I expressed my openness to step down were an appropriate leader identified who could accelerate delivery of BP’s strategy. I am confident that BP is now well positioned for significant growth."

BP did not publicly announce a search process for a new CEO prior to his resignation, either. The company said that Carol Howle, who had worked at the company for 25 years, would serve as interim CEO until a permanent replacement could start.

Manifold failure as Meg comes in

Not to worry, though. Mr Manifold oversaw the appointment of former Woodside CEO Meg O'Neill (who began her career at ExxonMobil) as BP's fifth CEO since 2020. She started at BP in April 2026. Ms Howle stepped down to become deputy CEO.

Ms O’Neill had considerable firsthand experience of BP and its culture from her days at Woodside since 2018 and as CEO in the Perth-based giant since 2021, as BP and Woodside are partners in the North West Shelf and Browse projects in Australia, in Louisiana LNG, and in several Gulf of Mexico deepwater fields, including Atlantis. She promised to focus again on oil and gas and to simplify BP’s management structure (code for firing people and reorganising the company).

Surely the arrival of a seasoned pair of hands like Ms O’Neill would stabilise BP and allow it to deliver its potential?

Er, no.

BP board blows up; Manifold’s tenure exhausted

Unfortunately, Mr Manifold was then stabbed in the back ousted from his position as BP Chairman this June after less than a year. This was because of what the board described as serious concerns regarding his conduct, including allegations of bullying and inappropriate behaviour towards staff (the mind boggles as to what this involves given what has gone on in BP before).

The Financial Times seems to have had a hotline of disgruntled BP staff complaining about Mr Manifold, and his leadership style was described as “shouty” to the newspaper by anonymous colleagues (always the best sources, as I know), and overbearing and aggressive.

The BP board unanimously decided that the Irishman should no longer serve as chairman, citing governance standards and oversight issues. Following his departure, independent board member Ian Tyler (the former CEO of civil engineering company Balfour Beatty) was appointed as the interim chairman of BP, and a search for a permanent successor is underway, led by the same bunch of fools board members who appointed him in the first place, just nine months ago.

Leading the hunt is the manifestly unsuitable Dame Amanda Blanc, who has a full-time day job as CEO of insurer Aviva, and who gained notoriety in 2023 when she said that all and any white male senior hires needed both her personal sign off and that of the Aviva HR director, whereas women and minorities could be appointed by line managers at the insurer without her say so. It’s not sexism, apparently, even though 40 per cent of the British population are white and male, so one might expect that group to be widely represented in senior appointments at a British company.

But it is not just the CEO and Chairman who keep changing. Ms O’Neill’s drive to simplification at BP has led to massive senior management turnover. The first thing she did was to give Ms Howle the “heave-ho” and to fire a bunch of executive vice presidents.

Reuters produced this handy table that shows the extent of the turmoil at a company, which has now had five CEOs since the start of 2020.

So, this constant churn of senior management, many of whom carried valuable corporate experience and history with them, and the flip-flop of strategy do more to explain BP’s underperformance than simply blaming the devastating accident in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010 and the loss of all its production and reserves in Rosneft.

How can an organisation focus on implementing its goals if the senior management is endlessly being fired and restructured by a board that has proved completely unfit for purpose, and there is a revolving door of CEOs each with their own brand new strategy to implement?

But there is a second factor at play. BP is simply not very good at finding oil and gas and not very good at developing reserves into production in a timely manner.

Oil and gas companies should find and produce... oil and gas

Much of Exxon’s dramatic outperformance ahead of its peers has been the stunning successes it made in deepwater Guyana from 2015 onwards. First oil from the Stabroek block was swiftly delivered in late 2019 from the Liza Destiny floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO).

Around 2030, ExxonMobil and its partners Chevron (which bought Hess, the original partner in Stabroek) and Chinese state oil company CNOOC expect to be producing approximately two million barrels of oil a day from probably eight such FPSOs – almost as much as BP produced globally in 2025.

Guyana is an incredible source of low cost, low tax oil, where ExxonMobil and Chevron produce billions of dollars of free cash flow. The speed and efficiency of ExxonMobil’s scale-up in Guyana should be the envy of the offshore energy industry, as good geology and benign local politics are turned into millions of barrels of daily production from fields with billions of barrels of proven reserves, starting from zero in 2015.

BP’s rivals have done a similarly good, albeit less spectacular, job of making big deepwater discoveries. We can think of TotalEnergies and its Gran Morgu project in Suriname and its deepwater discoveries off Namibia, Angola and Mozambique, of Eni’s success off Africa and in Libya and Indonesia, whilst Shell is developing new fields in Brazil, Australia (Crux to backfill the Prelude FLNG), Nigeria and the USA.

Pipeline? What pipeline of new projects?

Meanwhile, BP’s pipeline of new projects looks threadbare. There is step-out incremental production in shallow water Trinidad with the Ginger and Coconut projects, where the company has been present for decades; there is a new phase of development for the Shah Deniz gas field in Azerbaijan, where BP took a significant stake in 1994 in the “contract of the century”, which was since renewed; there are new projects in Indonesia and the Gulf of Mexico, where BP plans to have seven BP-operated oil and gas production hubs in American waters when Tiber-Guadalupe comes online in 2030.

Last year, BP did make the massive Bumerangue discovery in Brazil, but development is years away, not until after 2030. Appraisal drilling on the find has not yet begun (it is expected in 2027 subject to regulatory approval, BP said).

BP has also found success in Namibia via its independent Azule 50:50 joint venture with Eni (Azule also operates in Angola), but the successful exploration in Namibia is being performed by savvy minnow Rhino Resources.

One of the dangers for BP is that it has lost its exploration and production mojo, outsourcing drilling to Azule and Rhino in a key exploration frontier region, and losing the ability to perform large, complex production projects. The board has been dithering for years on the approval for the second phase of its successful GTA gas project in Senegal-Mauritania, which should be a no-brainer given Britain and Europe’s desire for diversified gas supplies. Adding step-out platforms in Trinidad or in-fill drilling in the Caspian Sea is not another Guyana.

With a backdrop of mediocre exploration success, only limited, successful large project experience and a board who would be better suited to running a posh English city gentleman’s club (or focusing on actually being CEO of Aviva and running that business, in the case of Dame Amanda Blanc), time is running out for BP. There is only so long a business can trade on its past glories. We wish Ms O’Neill every success in surviving the toxic politics of a business which has been badly managed for the last six years.

BP: simply bad performance

BP is now worth less than half as much its great rival Shell, with BP having a market capitalisation of around US$96 billion, whilst Shell is worth US$216 billion, and ExxonMobil is worth US$568 billion.

Much of the underperformance occurred in Bernard Looney’s time as CEO, and BP shareholders must have wished its stock had been as lively as his libido. Over the five years to April 2025, starting at the nadir of the Covid oil crisis, BP’s shares had risen by just nine per cent, while Shell's were up by 64 per cent, and ExxonMobil’s stock rose 168 per cent.

It is easy to see how the British giant went from top of the production table in 2009 to bottom in 2025. Let’s hope there is not further to fall.

Good luck to Ms O’Neill. Let’s hope the missteps and own goals of the past two decades can be prevented from recurring. Remember, it is never a good idea to promote someone you have slept with, it is never a good idea to invest heavily in a country run by a violent dictator, and adopting a shouty and aggressive management style is unlikely to win you friends, even if you believe you are simply being assertive and driven.

And finally… another letter at Seacor from another shareholder

Last week, we covered how Seacor Marine Holdings’ largest shareholder Jorey Chernett of the Pointillist Family Office had written to inform Seacor’s board that he wanted the company to sell its fleet of liftboats in the Arabian Gulf and then auction off its entire offshore support vessel fleet and shut up shop, or be taken over.

“Enough is enough,” he declared, arguing that the company’s value as a whole (US$200 million market capitalisation) lagged far behind the total individual value of its vessels.

Last week, a second shareholder joined the criticism with a wonderful letter to the Seacor board titled, “The time has come.” This missive came from Yoav Saffar, the founder and CIO of Smartlenses Capital, which holds 3.5 per cent of Seacor’s stock.

Mr Saffar made the same criticism as Mr Chernett, that Seacor continues to trade at a substantial discount to the intrinsic value of its fleet.

It is worth pointing out that Seacor shares have risen 65 per cent over the last five years to July 3. BP stock is up only 38 per cent in the same period.

I suspect that if Ms O’Neill cannot deliver in the next year, she will be hearing from her shareholders at BP as much as Seacor’s infinitely patient CEO John Gellert has done.

“Enough is enough,” and, “The time has come,” are both fair epitaphs for BP, more so than Seacor.