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For months, BP had planned this year’s annual general meeting as a sleek presentation. The company’s brand-new CEO would be onstage at London’s ExCeL convention center, trumpeting his green revolution to hundreds of shareholders. But this being 2020, nothing went as planned. When the day of the meeting finally arrived in late May, there was no audience, and no applause.

Instead, Bernard Looney, head of one of the world’s biggest oil companies, sat in a bare room in BP’s deserted London headquarters, next to a board member and a company official, talking into a camera. By then, the pandemic had killed more than 38,000 people in Britain. And rather than hosting BP’s big event, the ExCeL center had been transformed into a triage hospital for coronavirus patients. Looney, on a brief outing from months of lockdown at home, looked less like the head of an iconic 111-year-old giant than the captain of a troubled spaceship beaming bad news down to Earth. “Today’s challenge is of a different scale than any experienced before,” he told the invisible investors logged on for the meeting. He called it a “brutal environment.”

Just three months earlier, Looney had begun his tenure as CEO with a bang by unveiling a drastic overhaul for BP. He committed to “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050—a strategy that promises to radically transform the company, and which several of his competitors then rushed to match.

Yet Looney barely had time to elaborate before COVID-19 hit the global economy with seismic force. Planes and cars sat grounded for months, with lockdown orders forcing billions of people indoors, including Looney and his team. From their homes, BP executives watched global oil demand collapse in the steepest drop since the Second World War. With no place left to store millions of barrels of unsold oil, futures prices of crude briefly dropped below $0 in April for the first time in history.

It was “brutal” indeed. BP’s first-quarter earnings showed debt of more than $6 billion and losses of $4.4 billion, compared with almost $3 billion in profits for the same period the year before. In June, the company announced 10,000 layoffs, equal to one in seven employees in its global workforce, and cast the bad news as being part of its net-zero restructuring. That same month it warned of a coming write-down in the value of its assets of up to $17.5 billion. (The actual figure turned out to be $17.4 billion.) And in early August, there was still more grim news: BP reported losses of $16.8 billion for the second quarter and slashed its dividend in half.

It didn’t take a pandemic to cause a crisis in the oil industry, however. Even before the virus began its rampage across the planet, oil companies’ stocks were lagging badly behind others on the major global indexes, as operating costs rose and crude prices remained low. And yet, oil super-majors like BP are hardly on the verge of collapse. Proof of that, if any is needed, is this year’s Global 500 list, in which five of the top 10 are oil and gas companies. BP sits at No. 8, with $283 billion in revenues and $4 billion in profits for 2019.

Yet for all their hundreds of billions of dollars in sales, a sense of unease has steadily grown inside these companies as they assess their prospects in a world increasingly committed to going green. And a combination of factors has ratcheted up the external pressure for change: a fast-worsening climate crisis; an angry and motivated younger generation; and, perhaps most critically, growing numbers of shareholders who are threatening to move their money out of oil and gas stocks unless they see serious change.

In last year’s climate marches, millions of youth railed against oil companies for causing global warming; scientists estimate that about one-third of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today can be connected to the oil and gas industry. Protesters threw beetroot juice on delegates to the Oil & Money conference in London last October. And on Looney’s first day as CEO in February, Greenpeace activists barricaded BP’s London offices, forcing a temporary shutdown. Wisely, Looney opted to spend the day visiting a BP refinery in Germany.

Ducking beetroot juice and barricades is relatively simple. However, the bigger problems are no longer possible for oil companies to sidestep. To avoid a precipitous collapse in their core business in decades to come, they will need to execute the most dramatic pivot in their long history. At least, that’s the conclusion from many outside the industry. In January, shortly before Looney began as CEO, Larry Fink, founder and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset management fund with more than $7 trillion under management, stunned investors by writing in his annual letter that “climate change has become the defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” That, he said, would become increasingly true as the new generation grow up to be investors and CEOs themselves. Simply put: Companies can either join the fight for climate, or slowly wither and die.

For the energy giants, that choice is painful indeed. Taken logically, it could well mean leaving in the ground, undrilled and unexplored, billions of barrels of oil and trillions of metric tons of gas. That seems to run contrary to their very DNA. “The oil industry has an existential challenge,” says Fred Krupp, president of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “Nothing will be easy about it.”

The message has not been lost inside BP. By the time Fink published his BlackRock letter, Looney had reached the same conclusion. On Feb. 12, one week after taking over, he announced his dramatic shift in the company under the clunky title, “Reimagining Energy, Reinventing BP.” The core promise to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner mirrors what climate scientists believe is needed to avert environmental catastrophe.

Among both oil analysts and environmentalists, the reaction was a mix of hope and eye-rolling. In interviews, several pointed to BP’s last major rebrand in the late 1990s and the accompanying slogan “Beyond Petroleum,” which became symbolic of the industry’s unfulfilled promises to explore clean energy. Now BP is nominally leading the charge again, and Looney insists that this time his company is all in. “The direction is set,” Looney said in February. “We are moving to net zero. There is no turning back.”

If that is the case, Looney’s plan is a staggering shift for BP, whose driving purpose since 1909 has been to pump oil and gas out of the ground and oceans, and to refine and sell it at gas stations around the world. Now, within 30 years tops, it needs to account for all the 415 million metric tons of carbon it adds to the atmosphere every year by offsetting it with non-carbon renewables like wind turbines or solar plants; cutting methane emissions leaking out of oil facilities; capturing carbon and storing it deep underground; protecting forests, and—the hardest of all—simply not producing some of that carbon in the first place.

Looney told investors in early August that BP would cut its oil and gas production by 40% within a decade and stop exploring for fossil fuels in new countries. After more than a century in business, BP, he says, will now become an “integrated energy company.” Seeing that transformation through could prove to be an epic challenge. But BP’s new boss insists there will be no reversal. “I really think this direction is unstoppable,” Looney told Fortune in a long interview. “I really do.”

With hindsight, the rush to switch directions seems like an inevitable development, given the intense investor pressure. The impact of that has been “massive, massive. There is no question,” says Oswald Clint, senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London. He believes oil execs have become far more concerned about the climate themselves, rather than being dragged into taking action. “Perhaps the companies have been forced to buckle,” Clint says. “But they are not buckling today. It is full embracement, a cultural change.”

That BP could be in the vanguard of this historic shift will seem unlikely to many. Early on, the company was built by capitalizing on political upheaval in what is now Iran, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. And more recently, BP earned notoriety for unsafe operating conditions that went unattended—with disastrous results. Americans probably best remember BP for two major accidents, both found to have been the result of slipshod practices: the explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, in 2005, in which 15 workers died; and the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 off the coast of Louisiana, which killed 11 people and wreaked mammoth damage to the Gulf of Mexico. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history, for which BP is still paying out billions to local communities.

Looney’s ascent as CEO finally gives the company a chance for a very new role. In the weeks following his net-zero decision, BP’s competitors in Europe rushed to do the same, perhaps sensing that if they failed to do so they would be cast as climate villains. Within weeks of Looney’s speech, Royal Dutch Shell, the Italian oil major ENI, and France’s Total all announced goals for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Spanish oil company Repsol and Norway’s Equinor had made similar pronouncements earlier, promising to boost investments in renewables and increase energy efficiency in oil production.

The plan Looney unveiled in August would radically change BP by increasing its investment in low-carbon energy sources 10-fold by 2030, and eventually cutting oil and gas exploration by about 75% from its peak levels. “We know this will not be easy, but we are confident that this is the right thing for all our stakeholders,” he said. The plan would steadily determine all BP’s decisions. “You will see low carbon increasing, and fossil fuels in the long term decreasing,” says Giulia Chierchia, who joined BP in April, as its new executive vice president for strategy and sustainability, to help manage the net-zero transition. “We will make choices, and those choices will be low carbon.”

For Looney, 49, the decision came after much thought. In an hour-long video interview in late June, he said he came to realize that there was no way to square the growing alarm over climate change with his company’s business of pumping out 3.8 million barrels of oil and gas a day. Something had to give. “It became increasingly apparent over the last few years that we were in many ways swimming against the tide,” Looney says, sitting in a black T-shirt in his home office, back from a three-mile run around his London neighborhood. I ask him what would happen if BP and other big oil companies do not zero out their carbon footprint. “Without action,” he says, “it is a rather bleak future for the world.”

Looney says two groups of people had weighed heavily on his mind in thinking of BP’s future: his employees, and the investors. Both groups, it was clear, were deeply perturbed. “The sense that investors were really beginning to push, and question our purpose, started to weigh on the financial performance of our sector,” he says. “And our employees were becoming anxious about what I would describe as their personal purpose being misaligned with our corporate purpose.”

One of those anxious employees was Jo Alexander. A geoscientist with a long mane of red hair, she joined BP after graduating from Oxford University in 2003, then spent a decade working on major oil projects, including in Libya and Australia. It was a life of adventure and travel, she says. But her growing distress over the environment finally made the work feel untenable. She took a buyout from BP in 2015 and joined ShareAction, a nonprofit in London focusing on responsible investment.

At BP’s annual meeting last year, Alexander stood up to speak. She told the executives that many inside BP felt the same frustration that had driven her to leave the company. “I asked them, ‘When is BP going to give them jobs that are meaningful?’?” she says. The execs were taken aback. After the meeting, Looney came to find her and said, “Promise me you’ll come talk to me about this,” she says. She spent months quietly gauging the views of people she knew within BP. Then late last year, she met with Looney at BP headquarters. Looney, who headed BP’s upstream division, was already rumored to be the next CEO, succeeding Bob Dudley. Alexander shared a presentation she had prepared with data about the views of BP’s employees. Then Looney told her that he was about to unveil a drastically different strategy. Alexander knew in an instant she wanted to be involved. “I said, ‘You cannot do that without me,’?” she says. “It was the cheekiest thing I had ever said.”

Her boldness worked. Looney hired Alexander, 39, creating a job for her titled “purpose engagement manager,” with a brief to engage BP staff in the new purpose of “reimagining energy.” Looney now mentions her at every turn, including in his “net-zero” speech in February and in his interview with me. Alexander insists she is not there just to make Looney look good. “I am not naive. I do not think it is a slam dunk,” she says of BP’s net-zero plan. Still, she says, “everyone is on board with our purpose. A sense of pride has really returned.”

That optimism has not been shared equally by all BP alumni. Consider Mike Coffin, another engineer who, like Alexander, quit BP over environmental concerns. Coffin, 34, joined BP in 2008 as a geologist, right out of Cambridge University. Like Alexander, he spent a decade working on BP’s exploration projects and says the job offered him much of what he wanted: interesting work, and a solid career path that would enable him to buy a house and start a family. “Ten, 12 years ago, it was a very attractive proposition,” he says.

But Coffin grew increasingly uneasy about the environmental damage from oil production. He worried whether BP could even survive the energy transition, and that, even if it did, exploration engineers like him, hunting for big new finds, could become extinct. “I felt there was not necessarily a future in oil and gas,” he says.

Early last year, Coffin finally left BP and became an oil and gas analyst for Carbon Tracker Initiative, a nonprofit organization in London that researches oil companies’ climate impact on financial markets. With the stunning fossil-fuel cuts Looney announced over the summer, Coffin says, “BP is now the industry leader in responding to climate change.” Even so, he still harbors strong doubts about whether oil companies can truly reinvent themselves as dramatically as they claim. He also questions whether Big Oil will abandon its long practice of pegging bonuses to fossil-fuel production. (BP says from now on, it will increase the environmental weighting in bonus considerations.)

As activist investors have grown more organized, so has the movement to dump energy stocks from portfolios—both from environmental concern and for reasons of financial risk. “Investors maybe do not care about climate at all,” says Andrew Grant, head of oil, gas, and mining for Carbon Tracker Initiative. “But they are getting pressure from their clients,” he says. “At this point, the financial imperative has really lined up with the environmental imperative.”

In the U.S. and Europe, dozens of pension funds and governments have begun pulling billions of dollars’ worth of stocks from fossil-fuel companies. According to the activist organization Fossil Free, institutions with a total of more than $14 trillion in assets have now committed to divestment. “Investors have gotten more and more savvy about these companies,” says Kathy Mulvey, accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a research and advocacy organization in Cambridge, Mass. She adds that environmentalists fear that companies will use “corporate gymnastics,” rather than real carbon emission cuts, to reach net-zero targets. “There is quite a bit of work to be done to hold their feet to the fire,” she says.

Shareholders have also sought to drive change from within the companies. Since 2016, activists have pushed climate resolutions at the annual meetings of several big oil companies by grouping shareholders together, in order to meet the required threshold for a vote.

In 2016, Mark van Baal, a Dutch mechanical engineer turned activist, founded the shareholder group Follow This, specifically to put pressure on oil companies to commit to environmental policies via shareholder resolutions. “People said, ‘Oh, you want to change Shell? Dream on,’?” he says. His first resolution, at Shell’s 2016 annual shareholder meeting, was blunt: “We told the company they should not explore oil and gas.” That was a tough sell, considering that the oil giant’s sole purpose was to do just that. “It’s a miracle the resolution got 2.6% support,” he says.

The group’s strategy has since grown more sophisticated and now includes directly negotiating with oil executives. Last November, van Baal hopped the Eurostar train from Amsterdam to meet Looney at BP’s London headquarters. Looney had by then been named as the next CEO. The two holed up in a closed room, where Looney revealed to van Baal that big changes were coming. “He was quite convinced he would need to make a big announcement when he took the helm, and that he would need shareholder support,” van Baal says. Van Baal agreed not to push an activist resolution at Looney’s first shareholder meeting in late May and to rather work with Looney on a joint resolution for next year’s meeting, committing BP to net-zero strategies. “If implemented properly, it would be a radical shift,” he says.

Van Baal has succeeded in getting resolutions to a vote in Shell, Total, Equinor, and BP; in the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission has blocked similar activist resolutions, including at the annual shareholder meetings of Exxon Mobil and Chevron, claiming that investors were trying to interfere with the companies’ management decisions. Van Baal is sanguine, confident that the oil industry must bow to reality. “I used to dream about a big oil CEO having an epiphany, a sleepless night about his children’s future,” he says. “That is not going to happen. Looney was woken up by his shareholders. He’s an oil and gas guy.”

Yet van Baal believes BP’s “oil and gas guy” is finally a CEO he can work with. And he believes that the plan Looney outlined in August could be a landmark moment for the industry. “This is the first oil major to walk the walk instead of just talking about 2050. Cutting oil production by 40%, that’s really immense,” says van Baal. “If one oil major breaks ranks and shareholders reward them for it, others will follow.”

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When Looney describes his early life, it seems extraordinary that he could emerge as a game changer of any kind. He feels hugely grateful to BP. “It has given me an opportunity I never could have dreamed of, coming from where I came from,” he says. “I didn’t come from the right school or the right background.”

That is an understatement. Looney’s parents left school at age 11 and raised their five children on a dairy farm with 14 cows in rural County Kerry, Ireland. Money was tight. He says he and his brothers learned at a young age how to work for extra cash. When I ask Looney about the green toy tractor sitting on his bookshelf at home in London, he says it is a nod to his childhood. “We never had good machinery, and we always wanted good stuff,” he says. “We made money buying old tractors and selling them. Anything to make a few pounds.”

His strongest memory was of being different from his peers. “Boys were good at hurling [a traditional Irish sport somewhat similar to lacrosse] and rugby, and to be honest with you, I was pretty useless,” he says. “I was not good with my hands, on a farm where everything is about your hands.”

Looney was the first in his family to go to college. He joined BP as a drilling engineer immediately after graduating from University College, Dublin, and spent years working on projects in Britain’s North Sea, Alaska, Norway, and the U.S. He was eventually handpicked by former CEO Lord John Browne as a “turtle”—an executive assistant (named for the Ninja Turtles) on a likely track to the top. In preparation, Browne sent him for a year to Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Even now, Looney says his childhood has indelibly marked him. He believes it left him with a heightened need to include people who feel different or disrespected. One of the few interviews since his appointment to CEO was with transsexual activist and filmmaker Jake Graf, telling him that if any BP employees do not support LGBTQ+ rights, “they don’t belong in our company.” Amid the explosive Black Lives Matter protests, he wrote to BP’s worldwide staff on June 1, urging them to “call out” racism in their lives as well as inside BP. Wrenching video meetings with staff followed, with “people in tears, people crying,” he says.

As CEO, Looney has made mental health BP’s main charitable cause, with the company donating heavily to Mind, a British mental-health organization. He sees it as a critical issue within corporations and thinks it has been “turbocharged” by the pandemic. But it is clear that the issue is also personal. “I have had my own relationship challenges. I have had counseling and all of those things,” he says, without offering details. “I believe it affects each and every one of us.” Under lockdown, Looney offered BP employees access to Headspace, a meditation app, which he says he now uses every night. “It’s next to my bed,” he says. “I put on waves rolling in. It is calming.”

Looney does not sound much like the typical head of a giant corporation, and he seems to recoil from being depicted as one. “Bernard,” as he is called on BP’s official website, has a new Instagram account whose few dozen posts include Pride rainbows and rain forests amid the regular corporate photos, where he is typically dressed in blue jeans, and rarely in a tie, not even at the shareholder meeting in May.

The new CEO has urged workers to reach out, and some have taken him up on the offer, using the coronavirus lockdown as a chance to catch time with him online. On one video call, gas-station attendants in Britain spoke to Looney about their difficulties in working low-paying jobs through the pandemic as essential frontline workers; Looney afterward raised their wages. In Toledo, Jose Rodriguez, operations coordinator for the BP-Husky oil refinery, pinged Looney on a whim, using the company’s internal social network Yammer, and invited him to join one of their staff meetings. Rodriguez was stunned to hear back. Looney quickly set a date and chatted by video to the refinery workers for 20 minutes. “It made us feel like he actually cared about us,” Rodriguez says with amazement, adding that Looney was unlike the four former BP CEOs during his 29 years at the company. “One plant manager’s mom had just died,” Rodriguez says. “Bernard said, ‘Don’t forget about your dad. He might be hiding his feelings.’?” Rodriguez and Looney have since kept in touch.

It is tempting to dismiss this all as part of BP’s image-making, at a moment when the company is promising a drastic shift in direction. But by all accounts it appears to reflect Looney’s actual management style and personality.

Even so, the CEO will have trouble winning over doubters on the outside with long memories. The company’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebrand, launched in 1997, was a $200 million PR campaign designed by Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. The company, the world was told, would “think outside the barrel.” For emphasis, then-CEO Browne changed the company’s name from British Petroleum to BP.

To some, Looney’s “Reimagining Energy” does not sound all that different. “We’ve heard this before from BP with ‘Beyond Petroleum,’?” says Mulvey, from the Union of Concerned Scientists. “People were pretty hopeful at that time. It felt like it was a breakthrough.” Environmentalists fear being let down again, she says.

Browne says his efforts represented serious progress at the time, signaling the company’s real worries about carbon emissions, in a break from other oil majors. “The industry felt very threatened by it, telling us we were leaving the church,” he says. “We had no intention of greenwashing.”

The campaign coincided with BP’s $8 billion investment in solar panels in the U.S., an expenditure that cost it dearly when China began mass-producing panels at a fraction of the price; BP later took a 50% share in Lightsource, a solar company in Britain, with which it builds and operates solar plants, without manufacturing the panels. Browne says oil companies were well aware, as far back as the 1990s, that their carbon emissions were wreaking severe damage on the world’s climate. Yet there was still little sense of urgency. “We were nowhere near the position we are in today,” Browne says. “We had plenty of time.”

Looney has no such luxury. To reach net-zero in 30 years, he must race to change BP, starting now. What is more, far more than in the 1990s, investors will reject any hint of hypocrisy, Browne says. “You cannot just say you are offsetting,” he says, referring to the practice of balancing carbon emissions with, for example, planting trees or protecting existing forests. “You have to do something real.”

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Investors and activists are finally hearing Looney’s plan for “something real.” (And, he says, it doesn’t depend on carbon offsets.) Chierchia, BP’s new head of strategy, says that the pandemic has made the need for change feel more immediate. “If anything, it’s showed us the exposure we have to an environment that is very volatile,” she says. “It reinforced our need to diversify.” She says she quit her previous position at McKinsey & Co. earlier this year, after Looney convinced her BP was fully committed to cutting emissions and would not make compromises. “I thought, ‘Wow these guys are actually serious about it,’?” she says. “I thought if we could be successful, others would follow.”

Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, has met several times with Looney to discuss BP’s net-zero plans, including by video during the pandemic. He says BP will need to deploy myriad solutions, starting this year, in order to meet its 2050 target. Krupp has advised Looney to rapidly shift from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy production; reduce pollutants like methane around oil facilities; and neutralize whatever carbon emissions remain, including by protecting existing tropical forests. All of those, he says, should be done on a massive scale. “They have to shift away from investing in more oil and gas,” he says. “We have challenged Bernard to find the milestones in that shift.”

One crucial question towers over all: Just how much oil and gas will the energy giants be willing not to drill? BP says it will use its oil and gas production to fund investment in low-carbon energy. Right now it has 19.3 billion barrels in reserves on its books.

But in a net-zero strategy, millions of barrels will likely need to remain in the ground forever, becoming so-called stranded assets, in finance-speak. Environmentalists fear that BP might be tempted to increase drilling as world prices rise—just as oil companies and OPEC’s oil-rich countries have done for decades. BP invested less than 3% on renewables last year out of its $15.2 billion capital expenditure, according to the company. The industry overall is currently projected to devote about 9% of its spending on clean energy over the next five years, says Matthew Fitzsimmons, vice president of energy service research at the market intelligence firm Rystad Energy. Those figures are hardly reassuring to environmentalists. “The industry has been kicking the can down the road for the past 20 years,” says Sophie Marjanac, a lawyer for ClientEarth, a London NGO. “Hopefully, the game is up now.”

Changing that dynamic while still finding a way to deliver the profits that shareholders demand is the ultimate challenge for Looney and his Big Oil peers. One thing seems almost certain: BP and others are likely to continue their oil and gas production for many years. “It is simply not possible to transform a company of 110 years old by shutting off the taps,” Looney said when unveiling his plans in August. And even if they invest heavily in solar power, electric vehicles, and wind turbines, oil demand is projected to continue rising for at least a decade, as wealth rises in emerging countries, according to the International Energy Agency in Paris.

When I ask Looney if BP might inevitably become less profitable as the company moves away from fossil-fuel production, he says that on the contrary, he believes BP will gain hugely from the energy transition. Governments are rolling out gargantuan investments to facilitate the energy shift, including the European Union’s trillion-dollar pandemic recovery plan. With thousands of engineers and a global supply chain, the oil majors could position themselves to be part of that rollout. “Trillions of dollars will be spent rewiring and replumbing the world’s energy system,” Looney says. “That presents an enormous opportunity for a company of our skills.”

Besides just identifying a financial opportunity, Looney is also increasingly sounding like a true climate believer. “There’s a tendency to take position. I am not into positions,” he says. “I want us to do what I think is right for the world.” The trick will be making what’s right for BP, and right for all of us, one and the same.

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10 years after: How the Deepwater Horizon debacle changed BP

A decade ago, the explosion at a BP well caused the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. The company is still paying the price.

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling into an ultra-deep oil prospect off the coast of Louisiana named Macondo, after the setting for Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. And then it turned into an epic disaster.

Gas ripped through the well and blew up 1.5 miles undersea in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 platform workers. It sent up a plume of fire visible from space and wreaked mammoth damage on the Gulf’s fishing stocks and wetlands. About 3.2 million barrels of oil poured into the Gulf over 87 days, and another 810,000 barrels were soaked up by BP, in the biggest oil spill in U.S. history.

Ten years on, the Trump administration has rolled back several key oversight regulations that were introduced after Deepwater Horizon, including independent inspections and safety requirements such as backup systems to prevent blowouts.

The incident cast a shadow for years over BP’s trustworthiness, which it is only now beginning to shake off. “It was a desperately difficult experience,” says current CEO Looney, back then a senior BP executive who helped oversee the cleanup effort. In court, BP was found to have cut corners on safety, and President Barack Obama accused the company of “recklessness.”

BP is still paying the remainder of the $69 billion or so in settlements and grants to local communities and states along the Gulf, including about $2.4 billion paid last year. The company predicts it will pay about $1 billion a year for the next 13 years.

Despite the disaster, BP still invests heavily in deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and aims to pump about 400,000 barrels a day from its waters by the mid-2020s—about the same amount it produced in 2009, before the explosion. But Looney says Deepwater Horizon forever changed the company. He says safety conditions are now the primary consideration in BP’s operations, and that the company has learned not to get too attached to one particular project—a charge that critics leveled against BP after the 2010 accident.

“We will never forget, and we must never forget,” he says. “We walked away with a lot of humility, which I personally believe is good for all seasons.” For BP and for the Gulf Coast, it was a very costly lesson.

A version of this article appears in the August/September 2020 issue of Fortune with the headline “Is BP finally ready to ‘think outside the barrel’?”