BRITISH PETROLEUM COMPANY PLC, THE

(BP) British petrochemical corporation registered on April 14, 1909, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Ltd. It was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Ltd., in 1935 and changed its name to the British Petroleum Company Limited in 1954. The current name was adopted in 1982. The company's headquarters are in London. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed in 1909 to take over and finance an oil-field concession granted in 1901 by the Iranian government to an English investor, William Knox D'Arcy. The first successful oil wells were drilled at Masjed Soleyman, and crude oil was piped to a refinery built at Abadan, from which the first cargo of oil was exported in March 1912. Other Iranian fields and refineries were built, and by 1938 Abadan had the largest single refinery in the world. The concession was revised in 1933, briefly suspended in 195153, and renewed in 1953 in a consortium with other oil companies. In 1914 the British government became the company's principal stockholder and over the years was usually the largest single stockholder. Effective Jan. 1, 1955, British Petroleum became a holding company. Beginning in 1977 the British government reduced its ownership of BP by selling shares to the public, and in the late 1980s the government turned over BP entirely to private ownership by selling its remaining shares of the company. This cleared the way for BP to fully acquire Britoil PLC, an independent oil company that produced oil from the North Sea fields. Over the years BP developed oil fields and built refineries in several more countries. It now has major interests in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and in the United Kingdom sector of the North Sea, where, in 1965, BP made the first commercial discovery of natural gas and, in 1970, the first discovery of a major oil field. Beginning in 1970, BP merged its assets in the United States with those of the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), in which BP acquired a controlling interest. In 1987 BP acquired the remainder of the Standard Oil Company for almost $8,000,000,000, thereby reinforcing its position as one of the largest oil companies in the world. British Petroleum and its subsidiaries and associated companies (some 650 in all) engage in the exploration, production, refining, transportation, and distribution of oil and natural gas and in the manufacture of chemicals, plastics, synthetic fibres, and animal-feed products.