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BP’s Sustainability Struggle Essay

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Introduction
BP (British Petroleum) is a global corporation that discovers, extracts, transports and refines oil and gas in order to provide energy to the world. The crude oil is refined into much needed products such as high quality fuel, motor oils, bitumen and other chemicals found in every-day items such as adhesives and cosmetics.
A difficult challenge primarily from operating on a multinational scale in the petroleum industry is managing a diverse range as well as a large number of sustainability issues. BP’s global operations and footprint can have severe impacts on the environment, individuals, communities and society at large (Sustainability Review, 2012).
This short report will specifically focus on BP’s compliance to …show more content…

The Iranians were not happy about the British presence and the Iranian premier in 1951 nationalised BP’s (then known as AIOC) assets in 1951. British intelligence with the help of the CIA commenced “operation Ajax”. They overthrew the government in a coup during 1953 and thereafter handed the country back to a pro-western shah (Times Magazine, June 2010).
In 1954 the company rebranded itself British Petroleum however the company’s image was tarnished in the middle east. The Shah soon thereafter turned tyrannical to the people and the coup directly led to the Iranian revolution of 1979. The era of anti-Amercanism in the middle east began and BP efforts in the middle east where minimised by Arab-state nationalisations (Times Magazine, June 2010). This forced BP to investigate other avenues for their expansion and the US was primarily where they seeked out this growth through acquisitions. BP has since grown to become a global giant in the petroleum industry through this strategy.
However in the early 1990’s BP started facing huge pressure as incident after incident arose. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sued BP for illegal discharges from the Marcus Hook refinery into the Delaware River in 1990. That very same year BP was also sued by the State of California for an oil spill near Huntington Beach. The following year

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