BP PLC, formerly known as British Petroleum, is a British energy multinational oil company with headquarters in London. The company is among the largest private sector energy corporations, and one of the six "supermajors" (vertically integrated private sector oil exploration, natural gas, and petroleum product marketing companies).

History:

In May 1901, William Knox D'Arcy was granted a concession by the Shah of Iran to search for oil which he found in May 1908. This was the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. On 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated to exploit this find. In 1917, APOC purchased the "British Petroleum Company Ltd (a German registered marketing company incorporated in 1906)" and began to use the letters BP in marketing. After the war ended, the company, in which the British Government now had a 51% interest, moved to secure outlets in Europe and elsewhere. However, its main concern was still Persia, following the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 the company continued to trade highly profitably in that country.

British Petroleum merged with Amoco in December 1998, becoming BP Amoco until 2000, when it was renamed BP and adopted the tagline "Beyond Petroleum," which remains in use today.

BP Oil Company Logo

BP activities are exploration and production business include oil and natural gas exploration and field development and production (the upstream activities) as well as the management of crude oil and natural gas pipelines, processing and export terminals and LNG processing facilities (the midstream activities).

Wikipedia

BP

Financial Times

Independent Online Edition

BP

BP Oil and Shell Merger:

Since 1932 the products of the Companies of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and of The British Petroleum Group have been marketed in the U.K. through the agency of Shell-Mex and B.P. Ltd. In the last years there has been speculations about a merger between both oil companies. On July 2007, Tony Hayward, BP's new chief executive denied those rumours, as well as he suggested a merger would be the wrong answer to BP's problems. BP needed to fix its operations, not its strategy, he said. Ed Crooks: Financial Times

BP Gas Stations

BP Oil and Venezuela:

In 1994, BP came to Venezuela as part of the government's strategy to explore and develop the country's oil reserves. Most of the work was focused on exploration and production, and also retail and lubricants business. BP has around 110 service stations located across Venezuela.

More recently, through an initiative of the Venezuelan government, all exploration and production projects that are operated by privately owned companies under service agreements must be migrated into incorporated joint ventures (IJV). Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., (PDVSA) the Venezuelan state oil company will hold the majority share in each IJV. Through this initiative, BP Venezuela will become a shareholder in two of these IJVs, Petroperijá and Petróleos de Boquerón. BP

BP blamed an aggressive attitude of Chavez government, which forced the renegotiation of contracts on three of BP's oil fields in Venezuela. It is believed that BP was forced to give up about two-thirds of the oil the fields were producing, handing it instead to the state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Independent

PDVSA and BP oil companies are also joint venture partners in Cerro Negro, an extra heavy oil project with gross reserves, located on the eastern end of Venezuela's Orinoco Belt.