How Sir John Browne turned BP Amoco into the hottest prospect in the oil patch.
The London-based BP Amoco once confined its efforts to buying small stakes in the deepwater forays led by bigger rivals.
For BP Amoco's soft-spoken CEO, Sir John Browne, deep water offers the prospect of the largest untapped reserves and the lowest-cost means of extraction.
The name BP Amoco Arco Burmah Castrol shows the extent of one oil giant's merger activity, before it wisely chose to rename itself BP.
But for BP Amoco, such deepwater oilfields are the only chance of finding enough crude to replace declining reserves in less remote parts of the world.
In exchange, the Chinese oil firm signed a letter of intent with BP Amoco calling for the establishment of a gas-marketing joint venture in eastern China.
Oil giants BP Amoco and Shell also fell sharply, carving 19 points from the FTSE 100 as a dip in crude prices sparked a bout of profit-taking.
The ship, named the Schiehallion after a mountain on the Scottish coast, is the only visible sign of what lies 365 meters below:a 500-million-barrel oilfield that BP Amoco has discovered and developed.
The company was forced to sell off 90% of the production, ceding control to BP Amoco, in order to finance a multibillion-dollar project that included pipelines to carry the oil 500 miles from the Andes to Colombia's coast.
It was forced to sell off 90% of the production, ceding control to BP Amoco, in order to finance a multibillion-dollar project that included pipelines to carry the oil 800 kilometers from the Andes to the coast of Colombia.
Winning the operating rights for what may prove to be one of the greatest oil discoveries ever is a major victory for ENI, which was competing against the likes of Royal Dutch Shell (nyse: RD - news - people), BP Amoco (nyse: BP - news - people), TotalFinaElf (nyse: TOT - news - people), Exxon Mobil (nyse: XOM - news - people) and Phillips Petroleum (nyse: P - news - people).
BP-Amoco, Texaco and Chevron, are scrambling for a share of the equity.
"The principal motivation and the primary competitive justification for BP-Amoco and Exxon-Mobil is to gain the necessary scale to undertake larger and riskier global exploration and development projects that become available, " says Philip K. Verleger Jr.
One thing Dudley has going for him is that he was not brought up within BP culture, coming instead to the company via its acquisition of Amoco a decade ago.
No matter that Dudley has been with BP for a decade, having come over in the 1998 acquisition of Amoco.
Mr. Dudley, who came to the British company via its 1998 Amoco acquisition, previously was newsworthy for his role in managing BP's fabulously lucrative yet surreal joint venture with four Russian oligarchs.
WSJ: The Weekend Interview with Bob Dudley: Three Years After the Spill, BP Gets Bullish
应用推荐