BP Pipelines history

Anglo-Persian Oil had a symbolic role as a bastion of British imperialism, and, following growing resentment of declining royalty payments from the company due to its falling profits during the Great Depression, the government of Persia canceled its concession in November of 1932.

The dispute eventually went to the League of Nations, and in 1933 Persia signed a new 60-year concession agreement with Anglo-Persian Oil that reduced the area of the concession to about a quarter of the original and introduced a new tonnage basis of assessment for royalty payments.

But the facility, built in 1934, was poorly maintained and long starved of capital investment.

Other Iranian fields and refineries were built, and by 1938 Ābādān had the largest single refinery in the world.

On May 1, 1951, the Iranian oil industry was formally nationalized.

Several years of complex negotiations followed, and eventually, a 1953 coup--in which the British government and the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were implicated--resulted in the overthrow of Mussadegh.

Under the accord, which was reached in August 1954, British Petroleum held a 40 percent interest in a newly created consortium of Western oil companies, formed to undertake oil exploration, production, and refining in Iran.

Effective January 1, 1955, British Petroleum became a holding company.

In 1965 BP found gas in British waters of the North Sea.

The Atlantic Richfield Company was created in 1966 by the merger of Richfield Oil Corporation and Atlantic Refining Company.

The solution was a 1969 agreement with the Standard Oil Company of Ohio (SOHIO), the market leader in Ohio and several neighboring states.

In October 1970 it discovered the Forties field, the first major commercial oil find in British waters.

BP and Shell clashed with the British government in 1973 over the allocation of scarce oil supplies.

In 1977, as part of an attempt to diversify out of a dependence on petroleum, Atlantic Richfield bought the Anaconda Company, a miner and processor of copper, aluminum, and uranium and a manufacturer of copper and aluminum products.

BP's chemical interests also expanded during this period, especially after 1978, when it acquired major European assets from Union Carbide and Monsanto.

CEO Sir Peter Walters, who took BP's helm in 1981, guided a five-year acquisitions binge costing approximately £10 billion.

The name British Petroleum Company PLC was adopted in 1982.

In 1987 BP acquired the remainder of the Standard Oil Company for almost $8 billion.

One result of the sale was that by March 1988 the Kuwait Investment Office had built up a 21.6 percent stake in the company; government regulatory authorities subsequently reported that this share was reduced to less than ten percent.

But the company’s attitude toward risk stands in contrast to that of its competitors, most notably Exxon Mobil, whose searing experience with the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 spurred a wholesale change in its approach to safety.

Project 1990 was the brainchild of BP's chairman, Robert Horton.

Horton's personal abrasiveness and tendency to dictate, rather than cultivate, change earned him an unflattering nickname: "The Hatchet." He was forced to resign on June 25, 1992, after BP sustained its first-ever quarterly losses.

International Ltd.'s London office called BP a "big green cash machine" in their fall 1995 report on the oil company.

In 1997, BP announced that it would build its first service stations in Japan.

In merging with United States oil giant Amoco in 1998, the newly created BP Amoco became the one of the largest petroleum concerns in the world.

In the late 20th century BP was a major investor in green energy, and in 2003 the company unveiled the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.” However, within a decade BP had scaled back its renewable energy efforts.

Browne’s fall from grace really began on March 23, 2005, when 15 people died and more than 170 were injured in America’s worst industrial accident in a generation: a huge fire and explosion at Texas City.

When Tony Hayward became BP’s chief executive in May 2007, he promised to get the company back to basics.

In 2010 the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon, owned by Transocean and leased by BP, exploded and collapsed, causing a rupture in the riser of a very deep oil well.

In 2012 BP agreed to pay more than $4.5 billion in fines and penalties to the United States government and to plead guilty to 14 criminal charges.