Is BP really Beyond Petroleum?

by Stuart Hampton, September 2nd, 2008, 7:00 am

Led by former CEO Lord Browne, BP launched a $200 million public relations campaign (conducted by Ogilvy & Mather) in 2000 to rebrand the oil and gas behemoth as an environmentally sensitive and responsive energy company. The Big Oil giant’s corporate brand became an earth-friendly green and yellow logo in the shape of a sunflower, and the message about the company became BP: Beyond Petroleum.

A 2008 Adweek article points out that BP’s advertising strategy has worked. It reported that in a Landor “ImagePower Green Brands” Survey conducted in early 2007 BP was seen as more green (21%) than its Big Oil peer brands Shell (15%), Chevron (13%), ExxonMobil (11%), and Texaco (part of Chevron, 9%). BP also led the survey of companies that had “become more green” in the last five years, with some 49% of consumers familiar with the brands concluding that BP had done so (compared to Shell’s 36% and Exxon Mobil’s 31%).

But is BP really walking the clean energy walk or just trying to assuage a growing unease among Western consumers about Big Oil’s traditional products and practices and their deleterious effects on global warming and pollution, with a thin veneer of clean energy initiatives, aka greenwashing?

Here are some pros:

• In 1997 the company was the first to acknowledge the potential link between carbon emission and global warming, and later that year resigned from the anti-global warming business lobby, the Global Climate Coalition.
• In 1999 it acquired solar power pioneer Solarex (now BP Solar International) for $45 million.
• In 2005 it formed BP Alternative Energy and committed to spend $1.8 billion over three years in developing alternative and renewable energies.

And some cons:

• In 2005 an explosion at BP’s refinery in Texas City killed 15 workers. The US Chemical Safety Board’s report in 2007 blamed BP for the “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels” that led to the disaster.
• In 2006 corroded pipelines broke at its Prudhoe Bay Field in Alaska, leaving a record 201,000-gallon oil spill and forcing the company to partially shut down the field. (A similar, smaller problem occurred in 2008).
• In late 2007 the company moved into the development of Canadian Oil Sands (perhaps the dirtiest of all oil sources) with Husky Energy.

In its defense, BP does not claim to be Beyond Petroleum yet. One of its ads reads:

“We’ve invested $28 billion in the last five years in US energy supplies … and $500 million over the next 10 years to develop advanced biofuels. It’s a start.”

Current CEO Tony Hayward took over from Browne in 2007. Early this year he hinted that he might spin off the renewables unit (valued at up to $7 billion). In July, however, he committed to keeping and growing the clean technologies businesses as part of BP.

Authentic champion of green energy or a traditional Big Oil company with a green wash?

You decide.

What’s your carbon footprint?