BP called it self-help, a magical number that emerged from its quarterly financial reports to banish the blues of plunging oil prices. At the turn of the millennium BP had just completed the takeover of two American giants, Amoco and Arco. With oil cheaper than mineral water, BP had timed its takeover well, but it would need brutal efficiency to deliver the cashflow that would keep its own share price from being dragged into the mire.

Self-help rescued a business with refining margins barely wide enough to slide in a credit card, except that BP was giving no credit to its stinking, smoking refineries. There were two kinds of self-help — increased numbers of barrels and cost-savings. In 2001 BP boasted that it had generated $2 billion in cost-savings, and then, in 2001, Lord Browne of Madingley announced a further $2 billion in “performance improvements”.

By the end of 2002 a further billion dollars was pulled out of the hat and the BP chief executive announced a programme of $2 billion stock repurchases. The cashflows were being delivered in places such as Texas City. It was an Amoco plant and, under its former ownership, the management had been kept on a tight financial leash as the American company tried to buff up its financial performance. When BP took over, it began to stretch the leash like a rubber band, to ensure that billions of dollars of self-help continued to bolster BP’s annual results, with nary a penny diverted to anything other than essential investment.

The dispute that is certain to erupt over the accusation by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) — that cost-cutting left Texas City vulnerable — will be narrow and legalistic. BP does not want its executives pursued in “closest to the valve”. The CSB states that in 2004 BP ordered a 25 per cent budget reduction “challenge” for 2005. The Texas City management asked for more funds, but initially the group management denied the request.

The plant manager negotiated a restoration of half the cut, but the news affected work-force morale. The CSB report reveals that a BP health, safety, security and environment the American courts for killing workers with cashflow spreadsheets.

There is a political agenda at work here. The CSB is hot on the heels of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, its sister regulator, for its lax performance at Texas City. The recommendation of a mandatory review by companies of the safety impact of mergers and corporate restructurings will cause eyeballs to bulge on Wall Street.

That dispute threatens to neglect the wider issue that the CSB attempts to address. This is not about who cut the training budget or why the gizmo was never connected to a widget: the real question is how a vast industrial complex was allowed to go lame, staggering from one crisis to another until it lurched into an industrial graveyard.

Look at the numbers, BP says, pointing to the desperately slim margins and shrinking oil price. True, but oil is an industry that prides itself on its ability to manage cycles and has survived many. Absurd though it sounds, the management of BP had lost confidence in a core activity — the business of fuel manufacturing. Refining with its pots, pipes and pans was seen as chronically unprofitable and dull in a world that had been turned on by Enron to the electronic profits of energy trading. In 2000 BP took the opportunity to rebrand itself and Lord Browne delivered a message that was a kick in the teeth to every worker at Texas City. BP was to go “beyond petroleum”.

The slogan is the butt of many jokes, but at its heart was a desperate bid to make BP lovable to consumers that mostly hated oil companies. BP spent $100 million in a year promoting the idea that the company had somehow left behind the dirty, smelly business of turning crude into kerosene. Environmentalists had told the world that companies such as BP were destroying the planet. Unwilling, unable or just tired of arguing its corner, BP chose instead to leave the room. Left behind was a clutter of ageing fuel factories that were rusting (HSSE) business plan, published on March 15, 2005 — eight days before the disaster — gave warning that the refinery would “kill someone in the next 12-18 months”.

Concern about the risk of fatality was expressed by an HSSE manager in an e-mail sent in February 2005, referring to a catastrophic incident. It read: “I truly believe that we are on the verge of something bigger happening.” and starved of cash. Still, the management and workers at Texas City struggled on, using 50-year-old kit to make the fuel that keeps America rolling, while BP erected solar panels on petrol stations.

Like old-fashioned conglomerate bosses from the Hanson and BTR era, the BP board issued edicts about costs and cash. The company’s own documents reveal the terror of the local managers, convinced that a catastrophe was imminent. Yet, until recently, senior BP officials in London were pointing to failings among staff at Texas City. “They were blind to safety” seems to be the view among the parachute managers at St James’s Square.

Why did Britain’s biggest industrial enterprise treat a core business unit with such indifference, dare one say contempt? Did they open the door too wide to antiindustrial green zealots or was it the constant harping of City and media scribblers that cash invested is cash wasted?

The CSB report is a sad end to the Browne era. It will have done some good if it reasserts the importance of massive and dangerous industrial processes in keeping us lit, warm and comfortable.

Some people seem to think that the world can be powered by windmills and controlled by clicking a mouse.

It’s not true.

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