Murray Auchincloss was at the helm of BP for almost two years, until yesterday it suddenly became known that he had been dismissed. In April 2026, Meg O’Neill will start as the new boss of the British oil company.
O’Neill is the first ‘external’ chief executive officer of BP, and the first woman to lead one of the major oil companies. She has to come and shake things up. O’Neill’s appointment late according to analysts see that BP wants rapid growth, and in the direction of ‘fossil interests’.
BP has been struggling with itself in recent years. Auchincloss’ predecessor, Bernard Looney, ambitiously embarked on the path of renewable energy with BP in 2020. He wanted to “reinvent” BP, he said when he took office. It was “the right way for the world, and for BP.”
That’s what shareholders thought very different about.
Auchincloss was put in place to completely change course again, back to the familiar fossil energy. Apparently that did not happen at a fast enough pace. Exit Auchincloss, enter O’Neill.
Definitely not a newcomer
O’Neill may be an external to BP, but she is certainly no newcomer to the world of oil and gas. The American studied chemical engineering and ocean engineering at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Immediately afterwards she went to work for ExxonMobil, where in her first years she modeled the impact of waves on oil platforms.
O’Neill subsequently held various management positions at Exxon: in Indonesia she was responsible for the gas fields for the production of liquefied gas (LNG), in Houston she led the reservoir engineersin Canada she was responsible for the offshore activities and in Norway she became country manager.
In 2016, she became the right-hand man of ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson. From him she learned to ask herself when making difficult decisions whether she would still be able to look at herself in the mirror after the decision, she said in an interview of Forbes Australia. In 2017, Tillerson became Secretary of State in Donald Trump’s first administration.
Warship
Her move in 2018 to Australia’s Woodside Energy, then called Woodside Petroleum, came from a desire for “practice,” she told Forbes. She described ExxonMobil as a large warship; where the captain can influence the course, but where the ship also has its own momentum. She first visited her new base in Perth for a holiday, before deciding to move with her wife and teenage daughter.
In 2021, when O’Neill had just become CEO, the Australian mining and oil company BHP became part of Woodside. The merger involved an amount of 63 billion Australian dollars (35 billion euros). Woodside became one of the ten largest independent oil and gas companies in the world.
After O’Neill scaled back Woodside’s investments in renewable energy, she became a target of climate activists. “You have to be convinced that what you’re doing is the right thing,” she told Forbes when asked what it feels like to be seen as a bad guy. “I spend a lot of time with customers, with governments in South Korea and Japan for example, and I am convinced that what we do contributes to improving people’s lives.”
According to analysts, she is known among Woodside shareholders as a CEO who favors capital-intensive fossil fuel projects. For example, last year it invested 17 billion US dollars (14.5 billion euros) in an American LNG project, which made Woodside’s focus even more clearly on gas; In her eyes, Woodside had to become a “gas champion”.
According to her, oil and gas will remain of great importance to the world in the future. At the Woodside shareholder meeting last month, according to the Reuters news agency, she referred to the rapid growth of AI and data centers: “I think it is recognized worldwide that they need to be supplied with energy.”
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