From Dairy Farm to Oil Rigs

CEO, BERNARD Looney talks to us about his journey from Co Kerry to international oil prospecting.

Today, 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 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 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 budget. It had 26,000 people working on it at its peak. We just finished a project in Oman, with 12,000 people working on it. It’s a 1bn cubic feet a day of gas, going to 1.5bn by 2020 or 2021.

“We have to be ultra-competitive, because the cost structure of oil and gas is changing and due to competition from other energy sources. We have to drive down the break-even cost of our business to between $35 and $40 a barrel by 2021. Our response to an uncertain world is to be resilient. We’ve gone through a phase of adjusting and we’re now in a very strong position and in a major growth phase.

“At the same time, we’re trying to figure out how to develop our people; how to have more women in the workplace and embrace investments in tech and renewables.

Looney demonstrates some of the technology BP is deploying. On a large touchscreen on one of his office walls, live data from all the Upstream division’s activities is streamed in real time, giving a picture of the performance of drilling and production around the globe as well as the related financial numbers.

A video then plays, describing how, in the same way as jet engine maker Rolls-Royce monitors the performance of its engines in real time, BP models “digital twins” of all its oil and gas wells, combining historical and real time data. It can monitor, simulate and optimise production, testing variables in order to both find optimal solutions and deal with and anticipate unforeseen occurrences. It makes production more efficient and also allows oil to be produced using less water and gas. Just as apps like Spotify or Shazam can distinguish between classical music and hard rock using an algorithm listening for specific sounds or acoustic signatures of specific songs or types of music, BP also lays miles of fibre-optic cable inside its wells, which act like a distributed array of microphones recording sounds deep underground.

The microphones listen for sounds such as sand entering a well, or building up, or gas bubbles in oil. It can work out where it’s happening, and can take necessary action early on such as adjusting pressure, clearing out a well, or shutting off part of a well.

At its disposal, the company also has the world’s largest non-military supercomputer, capable of carrying out 9,000 trillion calculations a second. Cognitive artificial intelligence and quantum computing are other key areas of interest.

Looney - who doesn’t own a car, preferring to take taxis or public transport - adds: “We believe that there is probably more oil in the world than the world will need.”

Copy John Reynolds