HOUSTON — In his first public address to oil industry executives since becoming chief of BP, Robert Dudley said

HOUSTON — In his first public address to oil industry executives since becoming chief of BP, Robert Dudley said
the entire industry needed to change to prevent another devastating deepwater oil spill like the one BP suffered last year.
“I think it would be a mistake to dismiss our experience of the last year simply as a ‘Black Swan,’ a one-in-a-million occurrence that carries no wider application for our industry as a whole,” Mr. Dudley told oil executives at a conference here. “I believe the industry also has a responsibility to change.”
He embraced the findings of the presidential investigative commission that came to a similar conclusion, and said BP was ready to share what it had learned.
Mr. Dudley’s comments were in sharp contrast to the statements of other senior oil executives who said their companies would have designed wells differently from the Macondo well involved almost a year ago in a blowout that killed 11 workers and leaked millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. They said the accident would not have happened had rig workers and their supervisors followed industry procedures, conducted adequate tests and been properly trained.
The chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Rex T. Tillerson, recently repeated his position at a conference in Austin, Tex., saying, “I do not agree that this is an industrywide problem.”
Since he took over as chief executive last fall, Mr. Dudley has tried to reposition BP and return a sense of calm and confidence. Company shares have recovered well over half of the value lost when they plunged after the spill. With oil prices rising, the company recently reinstituted a dividend that had been suspended after the accident.
Mr. Dudley has sold billions of dollars in assets to pay for damages from the Gulf accident. He has put up for sale half of BP’s refining assets in the United States, including the giant Texas City refinery where 15 workers were killed in a 2005 explosion, in an effort to raise $5 billion.
But he has also tried to guide the company on a renewed growth path. Mr. Dudley has lined up more than 30 projects around the world, including in Russia, India and Canada.
Only two weeks ago, BP announced that it would pay $7.2 billion to acquire a 30 percent stake in 23 oil and gas fields operated by Reliance Industries, India’s oil giant. BP will offer its expertise in deep-sea drilling and technology, a sign that last year’s accident had not affected its ability or desire to continue to drill in deep water.
The Reliance deal came only weeks after BP reached a $7.8 billion agreement with the Russian company Rosneft to drill in the Arctic. That deal turned heads around the industry, and was seen as a coup giving BP access to exploration licenses in one of the world’s last giant oil and gas frontiers.
A seal of approval from Moscow was viewed as particularly important since Russia is now the world’s largest oil producer. But the deal has also caused one more in a series of headaches in the country as BP tries to navigate Russia’s rough-and-tumble business environment.
Another BP Russian partner, TNK-BP, has tried to halt the deal in a London court, saying it violated previous agreements. Last week Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of Russia expressed frustration, saying that BP had offered false assurances that the Rosneft agreement would not violate BP’s contracts with its other Russian partners.
Wall Street analysts say that the company benefited from a report by the presidential commission investigating the fatal explosion because it held not only BP responsible but also the contractor Halliburton and the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig Transocean for a series of mistakes leading up to the accident.
“By spreading the blame around, you would think BP will not be found grossly negligent,” a legal finding that could multiply future fines, said Matti Teittinen, vice president and senior equity analyst at IHS Herold.
In his speech, Mr. Dudley said the company had introduced new safety standards that had already born fruit. He said the company had already intervened several times to stop operations when corrective action was needed, and turned away rigs from contractors when they did not meet company standards.
“We have shut in one production platform to repair the fire water pumps,” he said, referring to an incident in Azerbaijan. “And a producing field was shut down to enable pipeline integrity work to be carried out,” he added, referring to an incident last month in southern England. At a news conference, he said neither case threatened an imminent disaster.
“When we see a problem we want to be able to stop operations,” he told reporters. “We are rewarding people for doing that. This is part of the cultural change.”
William K. Reilly, co-chairman of the presidential commission that investigated the Gulf well accident, applauded the speech. “I thought it was a splendid acknowledgement,” he said. “A lot of C.E.O.’s are not happy with the characterization that the problem is systemic.”
But Wall Street analysts are still skeptical about the future of the company. “I’m not a believer yet,” Brian Youngberg, a senior energy analyst at Edward Jones, said. “There’s still uncertainty over spill liabilities and there is no real catalyst to see how this company can grow over the next three years.”
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