(Reuters) – BP Plc is expected to announce in the next 24 hours that Chief Executive Tony Hayward will step down and be replaced by Bob Dudley, a soft-spoken American unlikely to repeat the gaffes which have come to define Hayward in many Americans’ minds.
Dudley now heads BP’s oil spill response effort. Just over a week ago, BP installed a temporary cap on the Macondo well, which had been spewing up to 60,000 barrels per day of oil into the Gulf of Mexico since April.
Hayward has described Dudley — dispatched to Houston with just a small suitcase in the days after the rig explosion to help run efforts to cap the well — as “the management team’s Foreign Secretary — or perhaps Secretary of State in American terms.”
Before the spill, Dudley was managing director with responsibility for oversight of the Americas and Asia, a role which involved criss-crossing the globe, “making connections for BP,” he said in an interview with the company’s internal magazine late last year.
However Dudley was better known for his previous job as head of BP’s Russian joint venture, TNK-BP.
After BP and its partners fell out over control of the business in 2008, he was forced to flee Russia, blaming a campaign of harassment by BP-TNK’s billionaire oligarch co-owners.
Dudley had been boss from TNK-BP’s formation in 2003 and under him the venture increased oil output 33 percent to 1.6 million barrels per day.
Supporters see this as evidence he has the skill to manage a big oil company. Last year BP pumped more oil and gas than any other non-government-controlled oil producer.
The Russian dispute was also highly charged, with BP accusing the Russian side of calling in the security services to target staff seen as aligned to BP.
Yet Dudley talks about this time without any trace of bitterness or even emotion, suggesting he has the personality to withstand the attacks he will doubtless soon attract in his new role.
MISSISSIPPI BOY
BP sees rebuilding its reputation in the United States, on which it relies for future growth, as its most important goal after capping the Macondo well.
Dudley, born in New York, would be the company’s first non-British CEO.
Directors hope his nationality will help offset some of the anti-British sentiment that has stuck to the company many U.S. politicians now insist on calling “British Petroleum,” the name the company ditched over a decade ago.
The son of a naval officer, Dudley was raised in Mississippi, whose coast is now being spoiled with oil escaping from BP’s blown-out well.
Dudley started in the oil industry with Amoco as a field engineer in Texas. He later had roles in Scotland — which he cites as the place where he most enjoyed living — as well as in Russia and China.
He joined BP through its takeover of Amoco, after which he was made head of renewable and solar energy.
With his thinning, grey-blonde hair and calm manner, Dudley seems a little older than his 54 years.
He is married with two university-age children. His wife, whom he met at university, still travels to Russia regularly to help run a disabled children’s charity she founded there.
Like Hayward, Dudley enjoys recreational sailing. Unlike his boss, he has not been spotted enjoying his hobby during the spill.
(Editing by Andrew Callus, David Holmes and Michael Shields)
U.S. says must rely on BP to stop oil;Iran offers help
The U.S. government is forced to rely on BP and the private oil sector to try to plug the gushing Gulf of Mexico well because only they have the technical know-how to stop the spill at those depths, the U.S. Coast Guard chief said on Sunday.
Admiral Thad Allen, who heads the oil spill response operation, also said he trusted BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward at a time when U.S. government and public criticism of the company and its executives over the spill is mounting daily.
More than a month after a rig explosion triggered what President Barack Obama has described as an unprecedented environmental disaster, oil is still spewing unchecked from BP’s ruptured well a mile (1.6 km) down on the ocean floor.
Iran, a fierce critic of Washington, repeated an offer to assist with the Gulf spill, calling it no great challenge compared to what Iran itself had dealt with.
Sheets of heavy oil have washed ashore in Louisiana’s fragile marshlands and lesser “oil debris” has also reached the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama in what is seen as an ecological and economic catastrophe for the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Given the lack of a solution so far and the doubts over BP, Allen was asked on CNN’s “State of the Nation” show on Sunday why the U.S. federal government did not completely take over the spill containment operation from the London-based firm.
“What makes this an unprecedented anomalous event is access to the discharge site is controlled by the technology that was used for the drilling, which is owned by the private sector,” Allen said. “They have the eyes and ears that are down there. They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved,” he added.
Pressed about BP CEO Hayward, who has been widely criticized for public comments apparently downplaying the size of the spill and its likely environmental impact, Allen said: “I trust Tony Hayward. When I talk to him, I get an answer”
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“FIGHTING A MULTI-FRONT WAR”
In Tehran, Mehran Alinejad, head of special drilling operations at the National Iranian Drilling Co., said Iran had successfully dealt with past huge oil leaks, particularly when rigs were bombed during a war with Iraq in the 1980s.
“Iranian technical teams have had major achievements in oil well capping compared with which the Gulf of Mexico oil rig is no feat,” he told IRNA news agency.
After the failure so far of containment methods to stem the gushing oil flow, BP engineers are now preparing a “top kill” – pumping heavy fluids into the ruptured well to try to shut it off – in an operation that would begin late Tuesday or early Wednesday, BP Managing Director Bob Dudley told CNN.
Other possible short-term options include a “junk shot” of pieces of rubber and other materials into the failed blowout preventer on top of the leaking well. Allen added another option was the fitting of a new blowout preventer.
But Dudley cautioned: “There is no certainty (of success) at these kind of depths”.
Dudley said BP would nevertheless press ahead with all of these while also drilling a relief well — widely viewed as the plugging option with the best chance of success — expected to be finished in August. “We will keep trying, we will not wait until August,” Dudley told CNN.
Allen compared the battle to contain the spill and its spreading slick to “fighting a multi-front war”.
He added that when the leak was finally sealed, the total amount of oil spilled would “probably start to approach” the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, the worst U.S. oil spill. The tanker accident spilled 11 million gallons (41 million litres) of crude.
But many scientists believe the Gulf spill has already eclipsed this, and warn the spreading oil could increasingly be caught in a powerful ocean current that could take it to the Florida Keys, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson planned to return to the Gulf on Sunday to monitor the EPA’s response, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to travel to the BP Command Center in Houston.
RISING STAKES
Their missions underscored the rising stakes for the Obama administration in dealing with the disaster.
Obama at the weekend formally established a commission to investigate the disaster and also made his first reference to the possibility of a criminal probe. But he is facing increasing pressure to do more to solve the problem.
“The federal government should have stepped into this thing immediately, to help make sure that the appropriate steps are being taken by BP … here we are, almost a month and a half later, and it’s still spilling oil,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele told ABC’s “This Week”.
“Right now, the federal government is not moving forward on BP and cleaning up that mess,” Steele added.
The Democratic president, in his weekly radio and Internet address, said offshore drilling could go forward only if there were assurances that such accidents would not happen again.
The spill has raised major questions about Obama’s earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation. Analysts say ecological and economic damage from the spill could become a political liability before November congressional elections.
While also promising to hold Washington accountable for proper oversight of the industry, Obama ramped up pressure on companies linked to the spill: BP, Halliburton and Transocean Ltd. He believed a “breakdown of responsibility” between them led to the disaster.
BP stocks have taken a beating in the markets in the month since the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the spill. Its share price shed another 4 percent on Friday in London, extending recent sharp losses.
Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil — often defended by BP executives — as ridiculously low and say it could be 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million litres) per day or more.
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington, Hashem Kalantari in Tehran; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Jackie Frank)