In 1986 he became the CFO of BP's 55%-owned Sohio unit (which it later acquired outright).

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He later learned, as a rising executive at Sohio and BP, the many ways managers can massage numbers.

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Using research from the Ohio labs of the old Standard Oil of Ohio (Sohio), now a division of BP, Lee has a solid oxide cell that can be configured to run on natural gas, soy oil or farm wastes.

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There Browne began to take a harder look at the promise of deepwater drilling, largely out of necessity:He took charge of exploration and determined that Sohio's oil projects outside of Alaska were a mishmash of expensive properties that would never yield a proper profit.

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