British Petroleum Plc

More than 30 companies once called themselves Standard Oil, a name synonymous with the birth of Big Oil and the man who fathered it, John D. Rockefeller. But Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) proposed Wednesday to become Amoco Corp., and that would leave Standard Oil Co. (Ohio) as the last company to carry on the legacy of the Standard Oil Trust founded by Rockefeller and later broken up by the federal government.

Despite major obstacles, British Petroleum Co. PLC pressed ahead Thursday with its $4.13-billion cash offer for Britoil PLC, which quickly rejected it. The British government has said it would block any bidder from obtaining control of the board of directors of Britoil, an independent North Sea oil company based in Glasgow, Scotland. And Britoil already has reached a competing, friendly agreement for Atlantic Richfield Co. of Los Angeles to acquire a partial stake.

Like nomads at a desert oasis, investors here and abroad are gulping shares of Britain's newly privatized water industry, lifting prices to unexpected highs but raising fears of foreign control over a necessity of life. The government sold 10 water utilities in England and Wales for $8.4 billion earlier this month. It was the latest in a series of privatizations and surprisingly successful in an otherwise sluggish stock market. The government offered 2.183 million shares at the equivalent of $3.

The $12 billion in new shares of British Petroleum, whose flotation threatened to swamp a jittery stock market, traded briskly Friday as the government's plan to help stabilize the market with a floor price apparently paid off. The $5.64 price for the new shares was set before the October crash in the stock market pushed the market price of existing BP stock well below that level. This left the investment banks, which were committed to buying the shares from the government, with few buyers.

The British government said Thursday that it would go ahead with the $12-billion British Petroleum share offer, which had been threatened by the worldwide collapse of share prices over the past two weeks. The decision was announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, who said the Bank of England will help stabilize the stock price through share buybacks, if needed.

Although oil executives once swore that it wouldn't happen, corrosion is eating through critical sections of the 800-mile-long Trans Alaska Pipeline, threatening its structural integrity and forcing an expensive and unprecedented crash program of repairs. Pipeline officials were in Juneau, Alaska, last week to explain a rehabilitation plan that could cost the oil pipeline's operators $1.5 billion and perhaps more over the next five years.