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FROM DAIRY FARM
TO OIL RIGS
Ardilaun Energy founder John McKeon. Mining, diamonds, whiskey and oil tycoon John Teeling and his lieutenant David Horgan have also found him impressive. “This is a company that has given me everything I have in my life. I’ve been with them for 28 years, and it’s a company I love. It’s given me experiences and a life and career that I would not have otherwise had,” says Looney, adding that Dudley isn’t going anywhere just yet, and that Irishman the late Peter Sutherland, a former chairman of BP, was something of a role model. As we talk in Looney’s glass-fronted office in the BP HQ in London’s St James’s Square, the room is dominated by a huge panoramic photo of a BP oil rig, Thunder Horse that operates in the Gulf of Mexico dominates the room. The Irishman shows us a clear plastic cube in which is a small amount of black crude oil. “Thunder Horse is the size of three Croke Parks, sits in a mile of water, and the wells are three or four miles beneath that. It’s a floating rig, processing up to 250,000 barrels of oil and 200 million cubic feet of gas a day - a real feat of engineering,” he enthuses, as he shows us a video - in order to better illustrate the scale of the rig - that he took from a helicopter while visiting it last year. With an accent alternating between mid-Atlantic and Irish – perhaps due to the year he spent getting an MBA at
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oday, the 48 year-old UCD engineering graduate is based in London and spends about half his time travelling the globe for the world’s sixth largest energy company, BP. As CEO of its Upstream division, which finds and produces oil and gas, he’s in charge of 18,000 people – just under a fifth of the entire workforce. Operating in 29 countries, his division spends €7bn to €8bn a year to run it, investing €11bn to €12bn on top of that. Industry watchers have noted the Kerryman’s rise to the top ranks of the $240bn turnover firm, where he started out as a drilling engineer. The business pages of London’s Evening Standard has suggested he’s one of perhaps three contenders for the top job when the current CEO, Bob Dudley steps down. Oilmen in Ireland have also noted his progress. “He’s hugely knowledgeable and very engaging. I’ve met him several times,” said Providence Resources chief Tony O’Reilly junior. “He seems to be on the fast-track to the top,” notes
BP CEO, BERNARD Looney talks to us about his journey from Co Kerry to international oil prospecting
BP has the world’s largest non-military supercomputer, capable of carrying out 9,000 trillion calculations a second.
BP CEO Bernard Looney. 46
NETWORKS
Stanford University – he’s diplomatic and at times understated, at others matter-offactly holding forth to make his case. The week before our interview, Looney was at the UN General Assembly in New York, where he was meeting the President of Angola and its energy minister. He’s been spending a lot of time in Mauritania and Senegal over the last two years too – where Dublin woman Emma Delaney oversees its division. For most of September he was in the US, travelling between half a dozen cities. Places like Iraq, where BP pumps 1.4m barrels of oil a day in the huge Rumaila field, feature among his passport stamps too. Travel takes up about half his time. It’s quite a way from his Kerry roots, on a small dairy farm - “only about eight acres out of the 90 we had were actually arable. We had 14 cows and it was pretty much subsistence farming.” While his sister went into banking, his older brothers - a Guard, an electrician and a telecoms engineer - overhauled Ford tractors and sold them on to make a bit more money. Looney was “the gopher, bringing them whichever tool they needed,” when not helping out with farm duties. He was the only one in the family who went to university, having been encouraged to read everything he could by his mother. “She said if I could read, I could do anything.” Neither of his parents stayed in school beyond the age of 11. Does being Irish help in any way in his role? “Diplomacy does to some extent come with being Irish. There’s no bad baggage, which there can be if you come from other countries. Many of us perhaps have a certain humility, and if you want to develop a relationship, a little bit of humility can go a long way. But after that it’s about the individual.” He continues describing his role. “We’re drilling in Canada, starting projects in the North Sea, trying to get the Mauritania and Senegal project across the line. We’re bidding for new licences in Brazil. “We’ve got a project taking gas from the Caspian Sea, across Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey into Europe. It’s nine months early and about 20pc under
