BP MOVING ONSHORE HQ OUT OF HOUSTON, WAY FURTHER ONSHORE 
BP announced today that it plans to move the main office for its onshore oil and gas branch to Denver at the start of 2018, starting with about 200 employees (compared to about 450 currently in the Houston office). The company announced late this summer that it was pulling its employees out of the WestLake 4 tower (about 7 years before that lease would’ve been up); that news was followed up a few days later with an announcement that BP would also sell off its LEED-platinum Helios Plaza building (pictured above), which it built in 2010 as a trading office. The plan at the time was to lease back space in Helios from the new owner; the rest of the company’s Energy Corridor employees will stay in the WestLake 1 office tower, which BP also owns. [BP Media Affairs via Houston Chronicle; previously on Swamplot] Photo of Helios Plaza at 201 Helios Way: BP
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Great choice. There really is no reason to concentrate all US oil jobs in Houston. They’ll probably have an easier time recruiting new hires to live in Denver.
My first instinct was to assume Denver giving them a nice tax break, but guess they’re leasing offices and only getting $140k from the city itself.
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Looks to be well reasoned geographical move to be close to their fields.
Times have certainly changed if big oil is finding it more financially sensible to undo the “move everyone to Houston” bandwagon that was so pervasive in the 80’s and 90’s, and move people back to such pleasant outdoorsy interesting places such as Denver. All you unhappy-trapped-in-Htown geologists, maybe there’s hope for you yet.
While not wishing ill will on those relocating employees, I can be glad that there may be 200 less cars around the local area. Maybe they have teenagers who drive their own cars so the actual number of cars leaving will be more.
There is no logical reason for BP to move it’s onshore upstream with everything connected by Internet so it must be an illogical one. I bet dollars to donuts it surely isn’t the stated excuse of drilling shale wells in the San Juan Basin! The only group that needs to be in close contact with the field operations are the drilling and completion ‘engineers’ and they are typically in local offices nearby the work anyway (i.e. they won’t be in Denver). Most likely the CEO likes to ski or something of the ilk, and that alone is a great reason to uproot a thousand people and spend millions of dollars in company assets.
The decision maker at BP Lower 48 is a Colorado native, so there’s that.