BP Chairman Quits After Company Abandons Green Energy

The Chairman of BP is to quit in the wake of the oil giant abandoning its disastrous green energy plan and returning to focus on oil and gas. The Telegraph has more.

The oil giant said on Friday that Helge Lund would step down “in due course”. The announcement comes amid a campaign by activist US hedge fund Elliott for more change at the company, which has already watered down green energy plans previously adopted under Lund.

The Norwegian backed BP’s 2020 decision to cut fossil fuel production 40% by 2030 and become an “integrated energy company” focused on low carbon energy.

He was also in charge during BP’s 2020 appointment of Bernard Looney, the Chief Executive who committed the company to its low carbon path but who then left over his undeclared relationships with colleagues.

Mr Lund said on Friday: “Having fundamentally reset our strategy, BP’s focus now is on delivering the strategy at pace, improving performance and growing shareholder value. Now is the right time to start the process to find my successor and enable an orderly and seamless handover.”

It follows pressure from Elliott Advisors, which has taken a 5% stake in BP. The hedge fund told the company it was unhappy with the oil major’s strategy, which it believed lacked urgency and ambition. Elliott was thought to be organising a shareholders vote to force Mr Lund out.

BP announced plans to shift away from oil and gas in 2020, proposing a 10-fold increase in green energy investment and a 40% reduction in fossil fuel production by 2030.

Mr Lund said at the time: “We are confident that the decisions we have taken and the strategy we are setting out today are right for BP, for our shareholders, and for wider society.”

However, BP’s competitors instead bet on rising demand for oil and performed far better. Shares in BP underperformed as a result and the company has since jettisoned much of the 2020 strategy.

At a capital markets day in February, BP abandoned most of its green pledges and committed to indefinite annual increases in fossil fuel production.

Worth reading in full.

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kev
kev
1 year ago

What does BP stand for again?

Braindead Prats!

If my surname was Looney, I would be careful to not live up to the name.

robnicholson
robnicholson
1 year ago
Reply to  kev

>What does BP stand for again?

A once great British company that we sold to foreign investors for probably too little. I despair why we end up driving many highly successful and innovative companies into the ground and then sell them for a song. British Steel being the most recent casualty.

We really have lost our way 🙁

Heretic
Heretic
1 year ago
Reply to  robnicholson

“We” haven’t lost our way. Our Globalist Uniparty politicians have cynically, treasonously, deliberately asset-stripped the British Isles.

robnicholson
robnicholson
1 year ago
Reply to  Heretic

In this case, I’m mistaken and ChatGPT was almost rude:

BP (British Petroleum) was not sold to Norway. That might be a mix-up or a misunderstanding. Here’s a quick breakdown to clarify thing

It’s still a British company registered in UK with headquarters in London. But I wonder for how long…

Although the comments about asset stripping ring true. These are private companies but I’m guessing the economic environment drives a lot of what they do.

Heretic
Heretic
1 year ago
Reply to  robnicholson

Just like Gordon Brown sold off Britain’s Gold Reserves for tuppence ha’penny without the consent of the British People to whom those Gold Reserves belonged. It was nothing short of treason.

Tyrbiter
Tyrbiter
1 year ago
Reply to  Heretic

This, the lying, snivelling scum who all need to be deposed and abandoned to their fate.

Heretic
Heretic
1 year ago
Reply to  Tyrbiter

Yes, humanity does seem to be awakening now, all over the world. Even the repulsive Klaus Schwab is resigning, reportedly because of the huge US cutbacks to funding the World Economic Forum!

Grim Ace
Grim Ace
1 year ago
Reply to  Tyrbiter

We should put them all on trial for treason. Bliar, Browne, Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak, Starmer. All of them. Followed by life sentences.

JXB
JXB
1 year ago
Reply to  robnicholson

BP stands for “Beyond Patroleum”. Geddit? We been and got new green logo, cos we be goin’ green… beyond petroleum.

Of now we must use past tense, stood for, it seems.

Heretic
Heretic
1 year ago
Reply to  JXB

Nice one!

Heretic
Heretic
1 year ago

How interesting that the Norwegian Helge Lund was chosen to lead British Petroleum into Net Zero oblivion, while in his own ancestral homeland of Norway, this:

Norway plans to expand oil production, raising international criticism for ignoring its climate goals | WWF

“The international community is urging Norway to stop expanding its oil industry, as the government today issued 84 new areas for exploration and production of petroleum, and is expected to issue even more in the coming month. Neither the Norwegian minister of oil and energy, Norwegian unions, nor majority state-owned oil company Equinor are planning to slow down.”

And this:
Inside Norway’s efforts to move on from oil and gas

Norway became the biggest supplier of EU gas, after boosting production by 8% year-on-year. While the rest of Europe scrambled to secure supplies, Norway’s oil and gas industry recorded its most lucrative year ever in 2022, despite years of warnings that the North Sea is a mature, declining basin.”

Less government
1 year ago
Reply to  Heretic

And let’s not forget Norway’s Wealth fund of c.£1.5Trillion.
Scotland in debt for £Billions.

JXB
JXB
1 year ago

He should be sued for breach of fiduciary duty to protect and enhance shareholder value.

I don’t understand why these lawsuits aren’t happening – it a civil case not criminal.

kev
kev
1 year ago
Reply to  JXB

Absolutely, spot on!

Grim Ace
Grim Ace
1 year ago
Reply to  JXB

Problem is there’d be an argument that he was protecting shareholder value, because these cretins believe we’re all going to due because of too much CO2. They’ve swallowed communist green propaganda about a gas that is generated by modern people’s daily activities. Communists are vile, anti human flourishing, people. Jail them all.

Gezza England
Gezza England
1 year ago
Reply to  JXB

The shareholders could have voted Lund out but of course the majority of the share are owned by funds and pension funds. As for whether it is British owned, there are more shareholders in the US than in the UK which made the dumbass O’bummer’s persecution on the company over the failure of an American company in respect of Deepwater Horizon more damaging to the people he claimed to represent.

Art Simtotic
1 year ago

Not for nothing, Mr Lund, was the industrial revolution kick-started three centuries ago by exploitation of reliable, high-density, high-gradient, 24/7/365 energy from nature’s bounty of coal, that superseded unreliable, low-density, low-gradient, intermittent energy from windmills, water-wheels and treadmills.

Humanity liberated from energy serfdom – as concluded in Ben Pile’s article earlier today:

Cheap energy is social justice. Abundant energy is fairness. Cheap and abundant energy makes the world a better place.”

Hardliner
1 year ago
Reply to  Art Simtotic

24/365 covers it… 🙂

Art Simtotic
1 year ago
Reply to  Hardliner

But 24/7/365 emphasises it even more.(and 24/7/12/365 really rams the message home – especially against competition that can’t relaibly manage 24 hour output).

Sparrowhawk
1 year ago
Reply to  Art Simtotic

Coal rules! in Asia at least. I shocked my (nice but oh so gullible) neighbour by telling her that those electric cars in China run on coal!

I thought I’d got across to her the 1100 plus coal-fired power stations that China runs, and I think she gets it, but she can’t connect the dots.

Something like 75% of China’s electricity comes from their coal power stations,so their electric cars run on coal!

Oh, yes! she says, and sort of “gets it”, for an hour or so at least. Then it’s back to safety and “conventional” (ie MSM) wisdom.

Less government
1 year ago
Reply to  Sparrowhawk

Marvellous 🤩
confronting the typical British apathy, ignorance and naivety.
How on earth did we manage the industrial revolution and the Empire?

Hester
Hester
1 year ago

That phrase “At pace” beloved of the woke and H.R and now Labour because they think it sounds dynamic. It doesn’t, What pace slow pace, steady pace? fast pace? setting the pace and if the latter against whom?
Wank words for the David Brent class, and incidentally if the CEO is leaving because an oil company has once again decided to focus on oil. he was in the wrong industry to start off with. It’s like having a Vegan in charge of a Halal slaughter house

EppingBlogger
1 year ago

Maybe time to buy shares?

lulu-b45
lulu-b45
1 year ago

Another useful idiot bites the dust. How do these people ever reach these exalted heights?

EppingBlogger
1 year ago

Whatever was the Board thinking of when they approved this daft green policy. BP is an energy company. Net Zero is about caves and shivering.

Marcus Aurelius knew
Reply to  EppingBlogger

Board is full of overeducated virtue-signalling numpties, too.

Heretic
Heretic
1 year ago
Reply to  EppingBlogger

What a great quote to remember:

“Net Zero is about caves and shivering.” Nice one.

Marcus Aurelius knew

See ya!

Grim Ace
Grim Ace
1 year ago

Marvellous. Common sense coming back to the idiots who are running our modern, free enterprise societies into the ground with their enviro-mental stupidity.