Murray Auchincloss: BP turns to the continuity candidate

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As a former chief of staff to ex-BP head Bob Dudley, Murray Auchincloss is familiar with the pressures of running a company that over the past 15 years has rarely been out of the spotlight.

The stint as a top lieutenant to Dudley is one of many Auchincloss has had in a more than two-decade career at BP, which the 53-year-old joined when the UK oil major merged with US-based Amoco in 1998.

The Canadian had been running BP on an interim basis since the sudden exit of Bernard Looney in September for failing to disclose past relationships with company colleagues.

The decision by BP chair Helge Lund and the board to hand Auchincloss the job on a permanent basis maintains the company’s tradition of never picking an outsider for the top job.

It also signals that BP will persist with a strategy, conceived and executed by Looney, of shifting into greener energy even as oil prices remain high.

In one of his few public appearances as interim chief, Auchincloss declared to shareholders at an investor day in Denver in October: “Strategy, financial frame and net zero ambition are unchanged.”

Paul Cheng, an analyst at Scotiabank, said the elevation of Auchincloss, who was BP’s chief financial officer from July 2020 to September 2023, was an “obvious move”.

“Any outside appointment would have taken six to nine months to get to know people in the company and get their feet wet,” he said.

The fourth generation of his family to work in the energy industry, Auchincloss began his career at Amoco in 1992 after graduating with a finance degree from the University of Calgary.

He qualified as a chartered financial analyst at West Virginia University and worked his way up the Amoco ranks as a tax analyst before relocating to London following the BP merger.

Stints in Texas and Scotland as finance chief for the company’s North America gas and North Sea operations, respectively, followed. He was promoted to chief financial officer of BP’s upstream operations in 2015 before becoming CFO of the whole group in 2020.

Auchincloss is generally well regarded by investors and analysts. Since September, his message has been one of stability and continuity. At the Adipec oil conference in Abu Dhabi in October, Auchincloss said he was “pretty optimistic” about the company’s direction.

“For the first time in the past four to five years, I can feel the alignment between shareholders, between countries in which we operate and our company,” he told delegates.

But with BP’s share price performance lagging that of rival Shell over the past 12 months and the speed of its push into green energy being questioned, the appointment of an insider may disappoint some.

“Murray is popular — he’s well regarded on Wall Street. But he’s obviously part of the overall BP construct, which has not been a success story,” said oil analyst Paul Sankey of Sankey Research. “It’s not necessarily the right decision because BP needs root-and-branch transformation in my view.

“Ideally you would get in some fresh blood the way Exxon did with Kathy Mikells as CFO,” he added, referring to the executive the US oil major plucked from drinks group Diageo in 2021.

While he lacks the operational experience of his predecessors, Auchincloss on Wednesday emphasised the need for BP to generate returns for investors.

“Now, more than ever, our focus must remain on delivery, operating safely and efficiently, executing with discipline and always focusing on returns,” he said.