I first knew BP as a tiny metal truck. It was a green-and-yellow Dodge tow truck with a solitary red light atop the cab and the BP shield logo on the side. My brother had one, too. As children we both played with Matchbox cars, the British-made die-cast replicas of real vehicles. The speedy, durable little cars inevitably had “accidents” that required frequent towing, and the red plastic hooks on the BP wreckers latched beautifully under the wheels of the other cars.
Our collection also included a BP tanker truck and, later, a plastic model of a BP service station. At the time, in the early 1970s, it was about all the contact that anyone in the American public had with British Petroleum.
Even then, BP was among the world’s biggest oil companies, but its presence in the United States was largely unseen. It was a partner in the Trans-Alaska pipeline, and it later bought Standard Oil of Ohio; but it remained largely hidden from the American consciousness.
Public distrust of oil companies in the America grew steadily during the final decades of the twentieth century. A blowout from an offshore platform near Santa Barbara, California, gave rise to the environmental movement, and oil companies became its most reliable villain. As prices soared under the foreign oil embargoes of the 1970s, the public began to believe that Big Oil was in cahoots with OPEC, the Middle Eastern cartel that suddenly demonstrated it could bring the world’s greatest industrialized nation to its knees with the turn of spigot. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of oil and cementing the oil industry’s demonic public image. BP was the biggest owner of the consortium that operated the pipeline feeding the Valdez terminal.
Still, BP remained little more than a logo on a Matchbox truck to most Americans.
Only in 1998, when it bought Amoco in the biggest industrial merger in history, did it begin to move into the spotlight of American business. Amoco, after all, was one of the fragments of John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, busted up by the U.S. government in 1911.
The Amoco acquisition gave BP a visible presence in America, with a string of branded gasoline stations and the country’s third-biggest refinery. Within a few years, BP would be the largest retailer of gasoline in America, and second only to Exxon Mobil in market value among publicly traded oil companies.
BP had moved to the big stage of global business. Under its chief executive, John Browne, it unveiled a bold strategy to push the company “beyond petroleum.” BP, whose logo had long sported the color green, would now become “green” in the environmental sense. The familiar shield was transformed into a leafy green-and-yellow sunburst.
Browne, essentially, tried to position BP as the anti-Exxon in the minds of the public. It was a brilliant and, initially, successful strategy. But something was terribly wrong inside BP. Beneath the green veneer lurked festering and fundamental problems that would, quite literally, explode before a horrified public. The warning signs predate the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon by more than a decade.
I began covering BP as a columnist for the Houston Chronicle in 2005, after an explosion at its Texas City refinery near Houston killed 15 people and injured hundreds. I have watched the company try to move past that disaster, and I have witnessed some of the triumphs shared by its employees as it met the incredible technological challenges of oil exploration and production. I have also seen the terrible cost of BP’s troubled culture to employees, contractors, and their families. I’ve listened to top executives promise change, and I’ve seen the disturbing patterns that emerge across its operations.
Somewhere, packed away in an upstairs closet, my Matchbox wreckers with their BP shield sit in their case. Like BP’s benign corporate anonymity, the childhood innocence with which I once viewed them is long gone.