BP to put up for sale its 335 Dutch fuel and EV-charge stations

Oil giant British Petroleum (BP) is putting up for sale all its 310 fuel stations and 25 EV-charging stations in the Netherlands. The British are reluctant to spend millions to continue their expensive highway concessions, for instance, and expand their business in a market considered ‘too small, ‘ according to the Dutch newspaper AD.

The fuel stations and 25 EV-charging stations, including eleven currently to be finished, will be sold as one indivisible packet to the highest bidder. If the parties agree, the bidder can keep using the BP logo and trademark. BP’s Dutch workforce, 920 at service stations and 100 office clerks and fieldwork employees, will be included in the takeover deal.

Significant capital investments needed

The company says significant capital investments are needed to grow further in the Netherlands. “BP has decided to prioritize investment in other areas, and we believe that another company would be in a better position to invest in the future of this company,” the BP spokesperson said.

An example of ‘significant capital investments’ is the highway fuel station exploitation licenses the Dutch government auctions for fifteen years. AD points at Shell’s bidding of 41 million for a top location along the A2 highway between Amsterdam and Utrecht.

Shell already ran a fuel station at that location and wanted to keep the license for the next fifteen years at all costs when the government auctioned 27 locations in September 2023.

Eventually, Shell didn’t have to pay the total 41 million, as auction rules stipulate that only 30% of the difference between the highest and second-highest bid—12 million in this case—has to be paid.

Still, it is a lot of money that must be earned back in a country that is one of the forerunners in European electrification. Although previsions for the energy transition forsee fossil fuels continuing to play a distinctive role in the following decades, especially in emerging economies, BP publicly admits they have to be an ending story.

Conscious of the need for climate action?

In its own Energy Outlook 2024 report, BP warns, “Despite marked increases in government climate ambitions and actions and rapid growth in investment in low-carbon energy, carbon emissions continue to rise.”

“The longer it takes for the world to move to a rapid and sustained energy transition, the greater the risk of a costly and disorderly adjustment pathway in the future,” BP’s Chief Economist Spencer Dale writes.

From Energy addition to energy substitution

“The world is in an ‘energy addition’ phase of the energy transition in which it consumes increasing amounts of low-carbon energy and fossil fuels. The history of energy has seen several past phases of ‘energy additions,’ for example, the rapid increase in coal as the world shifted from the use of wood as its primary energy source to coal, and later, the sharp increases in oil as it displaced coal as the dominant energy form. But in each of these cases, the world continued to consume similar or more significant amounts of energy.”

“The challenge is to move—for the first time in history—from the current energy addition phase of the energy transition to an ‘energy substitution’ phase, in which low-carbon energy increases sufficiently quickly to more than match the increase in global energy demand, allowing the consumption of fossil fuels and, with that, carbon emissions to decline.”

Not the first oil giant to sell

BP isn’t the first oil giant to want to eliminate its fuel stations. In March 2023, French oil and gas concern TotalEnergies sold almost 1,600 of its gas stations in Germany and the Netherlands to Alimentation Couche-Tard, a Canadian multinational operator of convenience stores offering a wide variety of products for people on the go.