Word: bp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...reason is that BP has huge interests in the world's two most exciting sources of new crude, Alaska and the North Sea. The BP-Sohio partnership has leased the largest chunk (its proven reserves: 5.1 billion bbl.) of Prudhoe Bay fields on Alaska's North Slope. According to an agreement between the two companies, as the flow of Alaskan oil increases so will BP's share in Sohio, rising from 26% now to 51%, probably some time next year. In the North Sea, BP's wells are expected to produce more than 650,000 bbl. a day by 1980?...
...BP's strength has always been its ability to find oil. The company was started in 1909 by William Knox D'Arcy, an adventurer who somehow had wangled a concession to explore in Iran. The British government bought a 51% stake in BP in 1914 because Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted a secure source of oil for the navy. Known originally as Anglo-Persian, the company was renamed British Petroleum several years after the government of Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized its Iranian concessions...
Early Warning. By then, BP had bought up concessions all over the Middle East. But the Iranian nationalization served as an early warning that the region's political instability made dependence on Middle Eastern crude risky. Realizing that its other concessions in the Middle East and North Africa might be nationalized too?in fact several of them have been?BP's management foresightedly stepped up the search for oil in politically friendly (though environmentally frigid) climates, from the North Sea to the Labrador shores and Alaska's North Slope. The company began buying leases in Alaska as early...
Under a tacit agreement, the British government has left BP's managers free to go their own way, even when they have strained politicians' patience. During the 1973 Arab oil embargo, BP diverted shipments of Middle Eastern crude away from Britain, where prices were under government control, to Germany, where the market was free. The same year, BP pulled out of the unprofitable Italian market, with never a word from Whitehall about what that would do to Common Market solidarity...
Thus sale of part of the government's interest probably will make little or no difference in the way BP operates. Why, then, is the left wing so angry? Because the sale violates socialist ideology, which calls for the nationalization of more, not less, of British industry. The relative success of BP also dramatizes the value of letting proficient managers alone. Any attention focused on BP inevitably brings to mind the contrasting inefficiency of businesses controlled by the government in fact as well as name, such as the National Coal Board and the British Steel Corp...