What’s Really Going On at BP?

Albert Manifold. Eight months into the job. Gone — with immediate effect.

The board cited “serious concerns about governance standards, oversight and conduct.” Manifold says he was given no warning and no explanation. He’s going to fight it.

Whatever the truth, the pattern is hard to ignore.

Bernard Looney — fired in 2023. Murray Auchincloss — gone abruptly in December 2025. Albert Manifold — out this week.

BP has had five CEOs since 2020.

Five.

The new one is Meg O’Neill, former Woodside CEO, brought in to accelerate the shift back to oil and gas and away from renewables.

Different leaders. Different slogans. The direction? Finally consistent.

I arrived in Aberdeen in 1976 — shortly after first oil transformed the city.

Since then I’ve watched every boom, every crash, every round of redundancies.

After the 2014 oil price collapse alone, more than 120,000 UK oil and gas jobs were estimated to have disappeared.

I built crewdog.ai for the people who lived through that. For the contractors and engineers whose skills are still in demand — somewhere.

Here’s what I’ve learned watching BP over the decades.

While the headlines obsess over management drama and green slogans, the capital tells a different story.

Take Azerbaijan.

Reuters reports BP is preparing to take operatorship of the Babek gas field — adding to major long-life projects already supplying gas to Europe.