BP officials announced a “fundamental reset” Wednesday for the London-based oil and gas major, outlining plans to slash the company’s spending on renewable energy.
The company’s new strategy is starkly different from five years ago, when BP proposed cutting oil and gas production by about 40 percent by 2030.
BP’s optimism about a fast energy transition was “misplaced and we went too far, too fast,” CEO Murray Auchincloss said Wednesday, appearing with other company executives at an investor day event. Auchincloss was previously BP’s chief financial officer.
The company said it now plans to spend $4 billion on low-carbon energy through 2030, a sharp decline from two years ago, when it expected to spend roughly $30 billion through the decade. BP said it will invest around $10 billion in oil and gas, or 20 percent more than prior guidance. The majority of that $10 billion, some 70 percent, is “expected to be allocated to oil” and the rest to gas, said Kate Thomson, BP’s chief financial officer.
