BP has announced that Irishman Bernard Looney will be its new CEO next year, replacing the retiring Bob Dudley. Mr Looney joined BP in 1991 as a drilling engineer and has worked across the world with the company, most recently becoming its head of upstream operations. Mr Dudley has said of Mr Looney that he “knows BP and our industry as well as anyone but is creative and not bound by traditional ways of working. I have no doubt that he will thoughtfully lead BP through the transition to a low-carbon future.” While Mr Dudley faced the Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis when he became CEO in 2010, successfully pulling the company through it, Mr Looney’s challenge will be to guide BP into a low-carbon future. One of the biggest challenges of the transition will be finding ways of making similar returns on low-carbon projects as oil projects. As Ed Crooks, formerly energy reporter at the Financial Times and now a consultant at Wood Mackenzie put it, Mr Looney will have to answer the following question: “Does BP stay as Big Oil or does it become Big Energy — diversifying into power and renewables in a meaningful way? It feels like BP right now is on the fence.”