BP PLC (BP) won't quit its businesses in the U.S. and must keep drilling for oil in deep water in the Gulf of Mexico despite the damage to its reputation wrought by the huge oil spill there this summer, the company's new Chief Executive Robert Dudley said Monday.
BP PLC (BP) won't quit its businesses in the
U.S.
and
must keep drilling for oil in deep water in the
Gulf
of Mexico
despite the damage to its reputation wrought by
the huge oil spill there this summer, the company's new Chief Executive Robert
Dudley said Monday.
In a robust defense of BP's response to the oil spill and its ability to drill
safely in the Gulf of Mexico in the future, Dudley also blamed the media for
fearmongering and igniting a "political firestorm" that,
"threatened the very existence of our company."
"I did not become chief executive of BP in order to walk away from the
U.S. BP will not be quitting America," Dudley said at the annual
conference of the Confederation of British Industry in London. "There is
too much at stake, both for BP and the U.S."
BP's relationship with the U.S. authorities has already started to improve, he
said. "The scale of our response, much of it going beyond the demands of
legal compliance, has not gone unnoticed," he said.
Dudley
acknowledged the risks of deep water drilling can
never be fully eliminated, but said operations can continue safely and BP
should remain a part of the industry.
"Deep waters are becoming an increasingly important source of energy to
fuel the global economy," he said. "We are one of only a handful of
companies with the financial and technological strengths to undertake
developments in these difficult geographies.
"Until this incident, over 5,000 wells had been drilled in over 1,000 feet
of water with no serious incident," Dudley said. "BP had drilled
safely in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico for 20 years...there are difficult
balances to strike, but we cannot afford to shy away from risk."
Dudley acknowledged mistakes and a lack of preparedness. "A subsea blowout
of the kind that happened was seen by us and the entire industry as a very
low-probability event. We thought we had the appropriate mitigations in
place," he said.
However, BP has learned a tremendous amount from the Gulf of Mexico disaster
that can enhance safety in the future, he said.
"The silver lining of the event is the significant and sustained advance
in industry preparedness," he said. BP aims to become the best in the oil
industry at managing risk has been consulting with experts from the nuclear and
chemical industries to improve BP's approach to safety, he said.
The oil industry and regulators should work together to restore public
confidence in the safety of deep water oil drilling, he said.
However, many of BP's peers still seek to distance themselves from the
tarnished company. Earlier this month, Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSB.LN) Chief
Executive Peter Voser echoed comments from several other senior oil executives
when he said his company would never have drilled a well in deep water using
the same design as BP's blown-out Macondo well.
Dudley also criticized the hysteria generated by intensive television coverage
that exacerbated public fear of the spill.
"[There was] a great rush to judgment by a fair number of observers before
the full facts could possibly be known," he said. "I watched graphic
projections of oil swirling around the Gulf, around Florida, across and around
Bermuda to England," he said, none of which came to pass.
"I hope for everyone's sake that over the next months and years we can
reach a balanced and informed judgment about what happened," Dudley said.
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