Bernard Looney

Bernard Looney
Born	Bernard Looney 1970 Ashgrove, near Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Education	University College Dublin (B.E., electrical engineering) Stanford Graduate School of Business (M.Sc., management)
Alma mater	University College Dublin
Occupation	Business executive
Years active	1991-present
Employer	BP (1991-2023) Prometheus Hyperscale (2024-present)
Title	Group chief executive, BP plc
Term	2020-2023
Predecessor	Bob Dudley
Successor	Murray Auchincloss
Known for	Group chief executive of BP BP's 2020 net zero commitment Exit from Rosneft in 2022 Dismissal for serious misconduct in 2023
Spouse	Jacqueline Hurst (m. 2017; div. 2019)

Bernard Looney (born 1970) is an Irish business executive who served as group chief executive of BP from February 2020 until his resignation in September 2023. He spent his entire corporate career at the company, joining as a drilling engineer in 1991 and rising through its upstream operations over nearly three decades.

Looney's appointment was accompanied by the most far-reaching strategic commitment made by any large international oil company to that point. Within days of taking office he committed BP to becoming a net zero business by 2050, and in September 2020 he set out a plan to cut the company's oil and gas production by 40 percent by 2030 while increasing low-carbon investment tenfold. The strategy was praised by some investors and environmental commentators as the first serious attempt by a major to reduce production, and criticised by others as either inadequate or commercially reckless.

Two events reshaped his tenure. In February 2022 BP announced its exit from its 19.75 percent shareholding in the Russian state oil company Rosneft following the invasion of Ukraine, writing off more than $25 billion in what was the largest single financial consequence of the war for any Western company. Then, with energy prices at record levels through 2022, BP scaled back the production reduction target in February 2023, a decision widely characterised as a retreat from the 2020 strategy.

Looney resigned on 12 September 2023 after acknowledging that he had not been fully transparent with the BP board about past personal relationships with colleagues. In December 2023 the board concluded that he had knowingly misled it, dismissed him without notice for serious misconduct, and confirmed that he would forfeit remuneration valued at up to £32.4 million.

Early life and education

Bernard Looney was born in 1970 in County Kerry, Ireland, and was raised on a small dairy farm at Ashgrove, near Kenmare. The family holding was modest, and Looney has spoken about the financial pressure of Irish farming in the 1980s and its effect on his outlook.

He was the first member of his family to attend university. He studied electrical engineering at University College Dublin, graduating in 1991, and later took a master's degree in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of its Sloan programme for mid-career executives.

Looney is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Energy Institute.

Career at BP

Operational roles, 1991-2010

Looney joined BP in 1991 as a drilling engineer, immediately after graduating. He spent the first part of his career in field and operational positions rather than in corporate functions, working in production and drilling in the North Sea, Vietnam and Mexico.

The trajectory was that of a conventional upstream career, and it gave him direct operational experience of the parts of BP that generate the great majority of its profit. He held a succession of increasingly senior positions through the 2000s, a period that encompassed the Texas City refinery explosion of 2005, the Prudhoe Bay pipeline failures of 2006 and the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, events that reshaped the company's approach to operational risk.

Upstream leadership, 2016-2020

Looney was appointed chief executive of BP's upstream division in 2016, taking charge of the exploration and production business at a point when the oil price had collapsed to below $30 a barrel and the company was under pressure to reduce costs while still funding Deepwater Horizon settlements.

He established a reputation as an operator focused on cost discipline and on modernising BP's internal culture. He was notably active on social media, unusual for an oil executive of his seniority, and he encouraged a more open management style, which BP later presented as a break from the company's historically hierarchical approach.

In February and April 2019 Looney sold BP shares worth approximately £7.8 million.

In October 2019 BP announced that he would succeed Bob Dudley as group chief executive.

Group chief executive, 2020-2023

Looney took office on 5 February 2020.

The net zero commitment

On 12 February 2020, in his first week as chief executive, Looney announced that BP would become a net zero company by 2050 or sooner. The commitment covered emissions from BP's own operations and from the carbon in the oil and gas it produced, and it included a pledge to halve the carbon intensity of the products it sold. He described the objective as reinventing BP, and the company subsequently adopted the description "an integrated energy company" in place of "an international oil company."

In September 2020 he set out the operational detail. BP would reduce its oil and gas production by 40 percent by 2030 relative to 2019 levels, undertake no exploration in countries where it did not already operate, and increase annual low-carbon investment from around $500 million to about $5 billion, building 50 gigawatts of renewable generating capacity by 2030.

The plan was the most explicit production reduction announced by any of the international majors. It was welcomed by parts of the investment community as a recognition of transition risk and criticised from two directions: by environmental groups who noted that BP intended to continue producing oil and gas for decades and that the targets excluded significant categories of emissions, and by energy investors who argued that BP was abandoning profitable barrels to competitors and pursuing returns in renewables that would be materially lower than in oil and gas.

The strategy coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse in oil demand. BP recorded a loss of $20.3 billion for 2020, cut its dividend by half, the first reduction since Deepwater Horizon, and announced 10,000 job losses.

Exit from Rosneft

BP held a 19.75 percent shareholding in Rosneft, acquired under Dudley in 2013 as part of the disposal of TNK-BP. Looney sat on the Rosneft board alongside Igor Sechin, the company's chief executive.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Looney held discussions on 25 February 2022 with Kwasi Kwarteng, the United Kingdom Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in which the British government asked BP to give up the holding. On 27 February 2022 BP announced that it would exit the shareholding and that Looney and Dudley would both resign from the Rosneft board with immediate effect.

The decision produced a write-off of more than $25 billion, the largest recorded by any Western company as a result of the war, and it removed roughly a third of BP's oil and gas reserves and about half of its reported production at a stroke. BP's board stated that the association with a Russian state enterprise could not continue.

The company was the first Western major to announce a Russian exit, and the announcement was followed within days by comparable moves from Shell and ExxonMobil.

Record profits and the strategy revision

The disruption of energy markets caused by the war produced exceptional profits across the industry. BP reported underlying replacement cost profit of $27.7 billion for 2022, the highest in its 114-year history, and roughly double the previous year.

The scale of the profits, at a time when British households faced sharply higher energy bills, generated political pressure for windfall taxation, which the United Kingdom introduced as the Energy Profits Levy.

In February 2023, alongside the annual results, Looney revised the 2020 strategy. The production reduction target for 2030 was reduced from 40 percent to 25 percent, meaning BP would produce roughly two million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2030 rather than the lower figure previously indicated, while investment in both transition businesses and oil and gas was increased.

Looney presented the change as a response to the energy security concerns raised by the war and argued that oil and gas cash flow would fund the transition. Climate campaigners characterised it as a reversal, and some investors who had supported the original commitment publicly objected. The share price rose on the announcement.

Compensation

In March 2023 BP disclosed that Looney had received a pay package of approximately £10 million for 2022, more than double the previous year, comprising a salary of about £1.4 million, a bonus of about £2.4 million, a share award of about £6 million, and benefits.

The disclosure drew criticism from campaign groups and trade unions, who questioned the appropriateness of the increase at a time when energy costs were causing hardship for households, and it became a reference point in the debate over the windfall levy.

Resignation and dismissal

Resignation

On 12 September 2023 Looney notified BP that he was resigning with immediate effect as chief executive and as a director.

The company stated that in May 2022 it had received allegations from an anonymous source relating to Looney's personal relationships with colleagues, and that the board had sought assurances from him about disclosure of past relationships and about his future conduct. Looney had given assurances at that time. A further allegation was received in 2023, and in the course of the resulting review Looney informed the company that he had not been fully transparent in the assurances he had given.

BP did not allege at that stage that he had breached any company policy on relationships as such; the issue was the accuracy of what he had told the board. Murray Auchincloss, the chief financial officer, became interim chief executive and was confirmed in the role in January 2024.

Dismissal for cause

On 13 December 2023 BP announced the outcome of its investigation. The board had concluded that in providing inaccurate and incomplete assurances in July 2022 Looney had knowingly misled it, that his actions constituted serious misconduct, and that he was accordingly dismissed without notice with effect from that date rather than treated as having resigned.

The financial consequence was substantial. Looney forfeited remuneration with a total value of up to £32.4 million, equivalent to roughly $40 million. About 87 percent of the package had been automatically forfeited on his resignation, and the board's finding of serious misconduct accounted for a further 10 percent. He received no payment in lieu of notice and no severance, and his outstanding long-term incentive awards lapsed.

The case became a widely cited example of the enforcement of executive accountability under United Kingdom corporate governance practice, and of the use of forfeiture and clawback provisions that had rarely been applied to a chief executive of a company of BP's size.

Other controversies

COP27 accreditation

Looney was one of five BP employees who attended the COP27 climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh in November 2022 as part of the delegation of Mauritania, a country in which BP holds significant gas investments. BP said that the executives attended for a signing ceremony.

The arrangement was criticised by climate activists and transparency campaigners, who objected to fossil fuel executives obtaining access to the negotiations through national delegations rather than as registered industry observers, and who cited the case in a wider argument about industry influence over the conference process.

Later career

In November 2024 Looney was appointed chairman of Prometheus Hyperscale, an American company developing data centre capacity with an emphasis on energy-efficient and liquid-cooled facilities for artificial intelligence workloads. The appointment placed him in a sector whose rapidly growing electricity demand has become a central question for energy companies.

He has also taken advisory positions in energy and technology investment.

Assessment

Looney's tenure is assessed largely through two questions.

The first is whether the 2020 net zero strategy was a serious repositioning or a presentational exercise. Its supporters point to the scale of the announced production cut, which no other major matched, and to the tenfold increase in transition investment. Critics note that the 2023 revision reduced the central commitment before it had been tested, and BP under Auchincloss subsequently moved further in the same direction, cutting planned renewable investment and increasing oil and gas spending in a strategy reset announced in February 2025. On that reading the 2020 plan was abandoned within five years.

The second is governance. The circumstances of Looney's departure, and BP's decision to convert a resignation into a dismissal for cause with the forfeiture of a very large sum, were treated by governance specialists as a test of whether boards would enforce disclosure obligations against a chief executive whose commercial performance had been strong. BP's 2022 profits were the highest in its history, and the board nonetheless dismissed him.

Personal life

Looney lives in Mayfair, central London. He married the British life coach Jacqueline Hurst in October 2017. The couple separated the following year and finalised their divorce in 2019.

He has spoken publicly about his farming upbringing in County Kerry and about being the first in his family to attend university, and he maintained an unusually high public profile on social media for an executive in his industry, a practice he curtailed after his resignation.

External links

• BP plc official website