BP’s New CEO Is an American Defender of Oil and Gas

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For years, Meg O’Neill clashed with environmentalists as chief executive of one of Australia’s biggest energy companies. Now she has been tapped to lead BP and steer the company back to its oil-and-gas roots.

BP named the American former Exxon Mobil executive as its new boss in an unexpected management shake-up Wednesday. She is set to take the helm of a storied yet often troubled energy producer that is aiming to reinvigorate its fossil-fuel business after an ill-timed turn toward renewable energy.

O’Neill, who is set to join the London-based company from Australia’s Woodside Energy in April, is a dealmaker who is willing to go to bat for the oil-and-gas business. She will be the first woman to lead an oil major.

As Woodside’s CEO, the engineer was forced to confront a rowdy environmental movement that regularly staged protests at the company’s headquarters in Perth—and targeted her home.

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When activist investors rallied a majority of shareholders to vote against Woodside’s climate strategy last year, she said that the company was “determined to play our role in addressing climate change, but we won’t make promises that we can’t deliver.”

At BP, O’Neill will join a company trying to steady itself after years of upheaval. Its shift to green energy—where it paid peak prices for assets—was unpopular among investors, and its debt ballooned. Now it is pivoting back to fossil fuels fast in a bid to boost profits and its languishing stock price.

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One of the most important decisions facing O’Neill will be the future structure of BP. Investors are closely watching to see if she will keep the company intact or pursue a major deal that would either merge BP with a competitor or split it up.

Analysts and investors praised the decision to bring in an outsider, unprecedented at BP where CEOs have always risen through the ranks, saying the move was needed to enable a thorough look at the business.

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Few oil companies are big enough to buy BP, analysts say. One is Exxon; Chief Executive Darren Woods said this summer that the U.S. company is looking for acquisitions to put the company’s cash pile to work. Exxon has a market value of nearly $500 billion, more than five times that of its British rival.

O’Neill knows Exxon well, having spent 23 years with the company in positions around the globe. At one point, the Colorado-born executive was an adviser to then-CEO Rex Tillerson.

In 2019, she left Exxon to join Woodside. O’Neill has said that she was spending too much time in the office at the American oil giant, and wanted to get closer to the front lines of the global energy business.

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