BP - Beyond Protests

The Trouble with BP is continuing as on the day that they announce that CEO Tony Haywood is standing down to be replaced by a more "US Acceptable" boss. Along with £11bn pounds loss for the second quarter, it is lucky for BP that RBS had such an atrocious year back in 2007 otherwise it will be the worst quarter by any UK PLC, (RBS lost £20Bn)

But on top of these there was a protest by Green Peace targeting BP filling stations inside London, BP claimed that they shut down 50 of the stations but BP claim there were only 16 effected, The protesters it seemed entered the filling stations and removed the safety switches therefore preventing the stations from opening - because nothing bad ever happened from messing about with the safety at a petrol station! - anyway it appears that all the garages are reopened now so now lasting damage has been done, although as the London Ambulance service have a contract with BP it could all have been a lot worse. The protesters message was that BP should not be spending as much money on trying to get new sources of Oil, a message that I personally think is a joke, whilst I would love to see a new power source (I am backing Hydrogen Power) the way to achieve the goal is not to attack an Oil company for selling Oil but rather to try and change the way consumers think, it is after all a case of supply and demand, as long as we are all consuming oil they will keep digging for it, and in harder and harder places meaning that a repeat of this years disaster is inevitable. Change needs to come but it needs to come from the car manufacturers and purchasers

Hopefully some good news for the environment (and BP)

BP, or British Petroleum as Mr. Obama likes to call them, today announced that they had succeeded in capping off the leak in the gulf of Mexico. This will hopefully be a great bit of news for what is a very important eco-system and for the UK's premier company. it will take a couple of days to know if it has worked but hopefully we are on the way to a solution. It appears that as the leak is around a mile deep (deeper than any human can operate.) they had to use small remote control robots to do the work, which leads to the question, was this inevitable? we have increased our demand to such a high extent and exhausted all easily retrievable supplies that we are forcing these countries to operate at the very limits of scientific possibility, maybe in fact it the consumers fault.

I have to admit however that I feel Barak Obama and other Americans have been very unfair to BP on this one, obviously this is an issue that needs prompt, swift and decisive action but I have not seen anything from Tony Haywood (CEO of BP) that suggests that they haven't provided exactly this. Mr. Haywood and his team have relocated to the US to ensure that they are on hand to deal with this disaster and BP have attempted a great deal of solutions for this problem, which seems to be at odds with the impressions the Americans want for this "greedy oil" company. I am sure this is in no way lead by America's own "caring, sharing" oil companies who donate so much each year to various politicians.

Anyway, there is a question to if this will destroy BP, personally my uninformed view is that they should be ok, It is predicted to have cost the firm £1bn so far, when you consider they had profits last year of £13bn and gave £10bn in dividends to share holders, they should be alright. A bigger risk could be from a take over bid, most likely run by the aforementioned American Oil Companies.