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Since Dudley was elevated to the chief executive position during the height of the crisis in July 2010, the firm has sold off more than $20 billion in assets to help meet spill clean-up costs in the Gulf and funding obligations for the $20 billion Gulf Spill Oil Fund, returned to profitability and resumed paying dividends last year — after posting nearly $4 billion in losses in 2010.
“BP for the past six months has definitely been playing more offense,” says Pavel Molchanov, energy analyst at Raymond James . “They raised the dividend, they increased the capital spending program, and most visibly, BP now has five rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico with a target of eight by the end of the year.”
Molchanov says two years after some had written the company’s obituary, BP has more than proven the skeptics wrong. While its oil and gas production levels remain 10 percent below pre-crisis levels, it is poised to make up a lot of ground. BP has not only resumed deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, in the last year it also secured more than 50 new drilling licenses in nine countries.
"What that tells us is this company is being treated like any normal multinational oil & gas producer the world over," he says.
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