In the coming two or three years what may decide BP's survival is the extent to which Mr Hayward's words are shown to reflect rhetoric or reality. If the emphasis leans towards the rhetorical - if, after Texas City in 2005 and Prudhoe Bay the following year, BP has only learned better what to say than what to do then it will be found out and, most likely, it won't survive in its present form. If, however, safety was indeed the top priority, or right up there with the commercial imperatives, then BP may come through an uncomfortably intimate inspection.
No one can yet begin to make a judgement on this crucial issue. But it is interesting to offer up one statistic. Companies operating in the US must quantify their "recordable injury frequency rate", which shows the number of injuries sustained by their employees - excluding very minor ones - per unit of hours worked. For BP, in 1999 the rate was 1.42 injuries for every 200,000 hours worked. By 2009, the rate was barely a quarter of that - 0.34 injuries - having fallen consistently throughout the 10-year period.
Such a heartening statistic may incline investors to assess the value in BP shares on the basis of business as usual. That would be foolhardy, but this does remind us that every investor in the world - including the oil giants Rosneft of Russia and CNPC of China - is running their spreadsheets over BP.
With its share price at 360p, 50 per cent off its five-year high and not far above the book value of net assets at the end of 2009 - 335p per share - that's predictable. And it's not hard to find reasons why BP's shares might be cheap. Maybe most persuasive is to put a value on the 18bn barrels of oil and oil equivalent that BP has in the ground. After deducting all of BP's $134bn (£90bn) liabilities (debts, provisions, the lot), then implicitly those reserves currently get a value of about $13 a barrel. Granted, many of them will stay in the ground for decades to come and the cost of extracting them - especially the reserves buried deep in the Gulf of Mexico - won't necessarily be cheap. BP's production costs were just $6.40 per barrel group-wide in 2009, but more than twice that in its most expensive regions. Clearly, however, juxtapose current market prices for oil (say, $80) against BP's future production costs (say, $12) plus the implied value of its oil and gas in the ground ($13) and there is quite a gap.
Also persuasive is any one of several ways of putting a value on BP's likely profits or cash flow. So, for example, its so-called net operating profits after tax - a figure that works out the theoretical allocation of post-tax profits between shareholders and debt holders - have averaged $21.7bn a year in the past five years. Capitalise that figure at BP's cost of capital - 6.8 per cent in my workings - then deduct debt holders' fixed claims on the business and we are left with $293bn "belonging" to shareholders.
That's an enormous sum - over £10 per share - in relation to the current share price. So enormous, we have to remind ourselves that BP's near future won't be nearly as good as its recent past. A combination of the costs relating to Deepwater Horizon, the slowdown in the business that will reflect BP's intended cut in capital spending and - maybe most important - the impact on trading of erosion of its goodwill will see to that. Yet even if the costs of Deepwater Horizon are huge, the slowdown marked and the erosion of goodwill significant, BP could easily make enough profit to justify a higher share price.
I get to the same sort of conclusion with a similar calculation that focuses on BP's free cash flow - the cash left over for shareholders. It's only when valuing BP's shares using a multi-phase dividend discount model that problems arise. Clearly, the big questions are: when will dividend payments resume and at what level? Assume a resumption in 2011 at 25p per share (the 2009 payout was 36p) and it requires heroic assumptions about dividend growth rates to conclude the shares are cheap. For example, that BP will produce an eight-year phase of dividends growing by 7 per cent, followed by 10 years at 6 per cent then a constant growth rate of 3 per cent - and that just isn't going to happen.
So where does this leave us? Concluding that there should be a mad dash for the shares should their price somehow sink to the book value of tangible net assets per share (268p) and something not be far behind if they only sunk to the value of all net assets (335p). At current levels they are tempting, but no more than that. Sure, on the basis of business as usual, they would be wonderfully cheap. But business at BP is no longer usual and - depending on how seriously its people have really taken safety these past few years - may never be again.
