Review of the bp year

2025: A year of progress

From our oil and gas platforms out in the ocean to the fuel pumps on our retail sites, we’re focused on delivering what matters for our customers, partners and shareholders.

This year, we have made new discoveries, brought new projects online, and delivered energy to our customers around the world. We made it happen with engineering excellence, the adoption of new technologies, and by working together with trusted partners.

Here’s a look at some of the progress we’ve made this past year.

Growing the upstream

It’s been a year of strong performance and growth for our oil and gas business, including exceptional success for our exploration team who unlocked new opportunities for the future.

We achieved upstream plant reliability of around 97%, underpinning our commitment to safe and reliable operations.

Growth today

In a year of rising global demand for energy, we added around 150,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in combined peak net production from seven major projects we brought online, five of them ahead of schedule.

These projects are part of our efforts to grow the upstream and produce 2.3 to 2.5 million barrels of oil and gas equivalent a day by 2030.

In the US, our onshore oil and gas business, bpx, achieved its target of boosting output by 30-40% from 2022 levels, one year ahead of schedule.

Future growth

In an exceptional year for exploration success, we announced 12 discoveries. This includes Bumerangue in Brazil, our largest exploration discovery in 25 years, plus further finds in Brazil, Egypt, the Gulf of America, Libya and Trinidad, as well as discoveries in Namibia and Angola through Azule Energy, our 50-50 joint venture with Eni.

On top of this, we’ve made progress on several new major projects. These include reaching final investment decision on the Tiber-Guadalupe project in the Gulf of America. It will replicate 85% of the design of its sister project, Kaskida, helping to contribute to an expected $3 per barrel lower development cost in comparison.

We also progressed plans to rehabilitate several giant oilfields and related gas processing facilities at Kirkuk, in Iraq. In India, we began working with ONGC, the country’s largest government-owned oil and gas exploration and production company, as the technical services provider at Mumbai High offshore oilfield. And in Azerbaijan, we signed four major deals to boost exploration and production.

bp milestones

In February, we announced a fundamental reset of the strategy, reshaping the portfolio and reallocating capital to the highest-returning businesses. The updated strategy is to grow the upstream, focus the downstream and invest selectively and with discipline in transition.

The year also brought new expertise and experience to the board with the arrival of four new members, including our new chair Albert Manifold. Announcing the appointment, senior independent director Dame Amanda Blanc highlighted Albert's “relentless focus on performance which is well suited to bp's needs now and into the future.”

Focusing the downstream

We’ve been busy this year reshaping the portfolio across our customers & products business while reducing costs.

The momentum has been clear in our financial and operational performance with our customers business delivering its highest underlying earnings on record in the third quarter. Our refineries had three straight quarters of availability above 96%, and the third quarter was the best for availability in 20 years for the current portfolio.

We’ve added several new customer loyalty programmes this year, including two in Spain and one in Poland. We operate 12 loyalty schemes globally, and in the US, our loyalty offering was recently crowned “best in class” by a convenience trade magazine.

In the US, our retail network expanded with the bp/Amoco-branded businesses adding over 170 net new sites through the third quarter We also expanded our ampm brand into the southeast with two new stores in Atlanta.

Air bp, meanwhile, has marked four consecutive years of volume growth globally. This year, it has restarted marketing in Singapore Changi Airport, and its safe2go fuel & data platform reached a landmark 10 million global refuellings.

Our supply, trading and shipping business (ST&S) continued to connect our customers with energy. It trades more than 4 billion barrels of oil and 5 billion barrels of refined products a year and today, about 300 ships are on the water for bp at any one time, enabling us to move around 240 million tonnes of oil, gas and products.

ST&S is at the centre of our plans for growth in LNG, signing new supply agreements to Italian utility company A2A, to Indian power company, Torrent, and to the Turkish utility company BOTAS.

As the oldest continuously serving company within the bp group, bp shipping also marked its 110th birthday this year.

Castrol’s full-throttle growth

Castrol has delivered approximately 20% year-on-year earnings growth year-to-date, marking nine consecutive quarters of growth.

Highlights from a packed year include customer wins and strategic moves across electrification, data centre liquid cooling innovation and motorsport.

A joint venture with Gogoro is helping to strengthen Vietnam’s emerging electric two-wheeler market, while new data centre cooling labs in Shanghai and Pangbourne, plus the strategic investment in US-based Electronic Cooling Solutions, are expanding Castrol’s data centre cooling capabilities. On the track, Castrol joined the Honda HRC Factory MotoGP team as its official partner, providing lubricants and fuels technology, which has boosted the team’s performance across 2025.

Disciplined investment in transition

Our strategy for the energy transition is to invest selectively and with discipline. That means targeting opportunities that are competitive on returns, light on capital for bp, and offer the potential to build scale in the future.

In offshore wind, we completed the formation of JERA Nex bp – now, one of the five largest global developers, and we sold our US onshore wind business to LS Power.

Archaea, the largest producer of renewable natural gas in the US, enhanced its operations and increased uptime this year with shorter commissioning and ramp up of new plants. We added seven new plants this year, bringing the total to 60.

In hydrogen and CCS, we’re prioritizing five to seven projects this decade, with four of these now under construction.

bp pulse continued to provide customers with on-the-go EV charging, while increasing margins and reducing costs. In Germany, our Aral pulse network has charged more than 5 million vehicles since launch and was voted number one charge point operator for the third consecutive year.

And in the UK, we launched our first new-format EV charging and convenience hub, featuring ultra-fast chargers, a redesigned store and enhanced food options tailored for EV drivers and customers on the move.

Technology

From the rig floor to our retail sites, technology helped to unlock value, cut costs and drive improvement across bp.

In upstream oil and gas production, we achieved our best wells reliability in years – 98%. This was supported by smart monitoring – using downhole sensors to spot problems before they occur.

We are quadrupling our high-performance computing capacity, giving us the firepower to deploy next-generation seismic imaging techniques so we can map out complex reservoirs with unprecedented accuracy.

We continue to use AI to unlock value across our operations. Tools like our Wells Assistant generative AI tool have saved thousands of hours of engineering time across bp.

Throughout the year, we’ve worked closely with technical partners Palantir and Databricks on bp’s unified data platform. The goal is to take our most essential operational data, wherever it’s generated in the world, and make it available wherever it’s needed in bp. This will enable more data-driven decision-making, from the boardroom to control rooms.

In October, we launched our third Remote Operations Center in Pune, India, to enable round-the-clock monitoring and collaboration for our drilling operations worldwide. It processes 250 million sensor data points daily, helping our teams make smarter decisions and deliver safer, more efficient wells. This new centre joins our existing operations hubs in Houston and Sunbury, strengthening our global network and enhancing real-time support across regions.