Bp Global Organization

BP Global Organization

Paul DeForge

ETH/316

10 June 2013

Jeanine Sanford

BP Global Organization

BP Corporation is a vast British ran and owned Oil Company dating back over 100 years to 1908.  The founder of BP William D’Arcy, “had gambled his considerable fortune on oil, and now he was on the verge of losing it all (both country houses, the mansion on Grosvenor Square)” (BP.com, 2013).  William D’Arcy was from England, searching for oil in Persia at the time.  So speaking from a cultural standpoint, BP had to start from the beginning with cultural diversity and understanding.

BP has risen from a dream and came to fruition when they struck oil in Persia, saving William D’Arcy’s fortune.  Culture shock came quickly for the team searching for the crude.  The issues the workers ran into were the landscape, heat, lack of medical attention, and language barriers. The workers of BP “lived through seven years of harsh heat, gastric illnesses and disappointments” (BP.com, 2013).  These were the first cultural issues that the team had to deal with.  According to BP’s website, once the team found the crude oil, they had to find a way to get it refined and sent across the terrain for shipment.  This brought on an entirely different set of culture issues.

As said earlier, BP is a British company, so the next set of culture issues BP had were having to hire different countries to work on the oil pipeline build.  Countries that joined the excursion were the United States, China, India, and neighboring Arab countries.  These countries all hold very different cultural ideas.  Though the cultures are different, ethical responsibilities for each culture are similar.  To fulfill an ethical responsibility to all these countries, BP sent out a doctor to aid in injuries and illnesses.  The priority of the BP doctors was to take care of the oil company’s employees, but news got out of to the nearby towns and tribes.  Soon enough, the locals learned of the doctor being there and started seeking help from this doctor.  Because of the doctor’s ethical code to help those in need, he started to take care of the locals as well and eventually opened a hospital in the region.  BP moved through different decades and eras, going through World War II which almost financially sank BP among many other Petroleum companies in Britain.  The parliament grouped all the companies together and called them Pool, but the war ended and BP made it through to the end.  

After the war and other economic issues passed by, BP decided to explore for other areas to search for oil.  Rigs were already drilling in the English Channel and were moved to the North Sea where it was thought that no oil would be found there, but instead 400,000 barrels a day was found.  Drilling in the Ocean brings on another set of ethical issues.  Issues of preserving ocean life and ensuring oil does not leak and kill animal life or coastline.  This kind of ethical issue is all too familiar with the spill in recent years in the Gulf of Mexico off the cost of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.  BP once known as Anglo-Persian in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century had an ethical and economical issue similar to what happened in the Gulf.  In Wales, the nearby refinery leaked oil into the river.

Over the years, BP has made strides to fix ethical dilemmas around the world by researching and creating ways to make cleaner fuel sources.  In 1997 BP’s CEO took a stand against global climate change.  They made strides at cutting down on pollution creation by cutting the amount of utilizing new insulation techniques in refinery chimneys.  Soon after BP had a an incident, “in 1967 Europe got an environmental wake-up call when a tanker ran aground off Land’s End, England, spilling 117,000 tons of crude into the English Channel. Everyone, including the oil industry, had been unprepared for a clean-up operation on such a large scale. Alarmed by the risks, BP opened an Oil Spill Research Centre, where researchers developed new technologies including BP 1100, a non-toxic dispersant that could be used to clean up beaches” (BP.com, 2013).  The majority of ethical issues that BP has ran into over its years are to do with economy.  BP started looking into cleaner burning fuels and looked into using solar panels to power their gas stations and also boasted powering over “300 Philippine villages” (BP.com, 2013).