BP began with a 1908 oil strike in Persia and a navy switching from coal
In May 1908 British geologists struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in south-west Persia, the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. A company formed the next year to exploit it. Within five years the British government had bought control, because Winston Churchill wanted oil for the Royal Navy. That company became BP.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was incorporated on 14 April 1909 as an offshoot of Burmah Oil, building on exploration rights William Knox D'Arcy had secured. A refinery on Abadan Island began operating in 1912. In 1914, urged on by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, the government took a controlling stake of just over half, the navy moved most of its warships from coal to oil, and the company signed a 30-year fixed-price supply contract with the Admiralty. It soon added a tanker fleet and, in 1916, bought the British arm of a German petroleum group that carried the name British Petroleum.
The company was renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil in 1935 and British Petroleum in 1954. It took majority control of Standard Oil of Ohio in 1978, and the government sold off its shares in stages between 1979 and 1987. A 1998 merger with Amoco, followed by purchases of ARCO, Burmah Castrol and the German fuel brand Aral, created a giant that shortened its name to BP in 2001.
Today BP works across the whole industry, from drilling to refining, trading and around 21,200 filling stations. In 2024 it operated in 61 countries, pumped about 2.4 million barrels of oil equivalent a day, and ranked 33rd on the Fortune Global 500 with revenues of 194.6 billion dollars, fifth among investor-owned oil companies.
Its record also includes serious disasters: the Torrey Canyon tanker wreck of 1967, still Britain's biggest oil spill; a 2005 refinery explosion in Texas City that killed 15 workers; and a 2006 spill at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska. The worst was Deepwater Horizon in 2010, when about 4.9 million barrels poured into the Gulf of Mexico, the largest accidental marine oil release on record. Fines, penalties and claims eventually cost BP more than 65 billion dollars.
Source: BP
