Science Museum Group Ends Decades-Long BP Partnership
The Science Museum Group announced on 28 August 2026 that it is ending its decades-long partnership with BP, a relationship that had drawn sustained criticism from climate campaigners and educators over the oil company's influence on UK science education.
Sir Ian Blatchford, director and chief executive of the Science Museum Group, said the partnership had "drawn to a close at the end of the current contract term" The Guardian. The announcement came through the Science Museum Group academy, a body established in 2018 to provide training and resources to teachers, museum practitioners and the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) industry both nationally and internationally.
BP's involvement with the institution was extensive. Blatchford said the company's contributions helped inspire more than 11,000 education, museum and science professionals through research-informed science engagement training, and that the BP-supported work helped bring science to life for more than 1 million young people across the country. The partnership underpinned several initiatives, including the Enterprising Science project, a collaboration between the Science Museum Group, University College London and King's College London Science Museum Group. A five-year research and development partnership focused on the "science capital" teaching approach — a framework for understanding how a young person's exposure to science shapes their engagement with it — was also funded by BP Science Museum Group. BP's own educational service, bpES, provided free resources aimed at increasing young people's understanding and enjoyment of STEM, and was referenced in Science Museum Group learning materials as recently as 2020 Science Museum Group Blog.
Campaigners have long accused BP of exerting an "insidious influence" over the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths in the UK through its relationship with the Science Museum. Chris Garrard of the campaign group Culture Unstained said the end of the partnership followed years of campaigning and growing pressure from educators and schools, some of which had pledged to boycott trips to the museum over the BP link.
Garrard tempered the announcement, calling it only a "partial victory." He pointed out that the museum still accepts money from Adani Green Energy Ltd, a subsidiary of the Adani Group. That ongoing relationship signals that the question of fossil fuel industry sponsorship of cultural and educational institutions is far from settled, even as individual partnerships fall away.
The BP split is not the Science Museum Group's first such decision. In 2024, the museum cut ties with the Norwegian oil company Equinor over its failure to lower carbon emissions sufficiently to align with the Paris climate agreement goal of limiting global heating to 1.5°C. That earlier move set a precedent for evaluating sponsor relationships against climate benchmarks, and the BP announcement extends that logic to the institution's most prominent and longest-running corporate partner.
The wider cultural sector has been moving in the same direction. The British Museum ended its sponsorship deal with BP in 2023 after 27 years Arts Professional. Together, these departures mark a near-complete unwinding of BP's presence among major UK cultural institutions. For the Science Museum Group specifically, the departure of BP removes a sponsor whose educational programs touched over a million young people, raising questions about how that funding gap will be filled. The institution's most recent Annual Report and Accounts, covering the period from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, was published on 3 August 2026 UK Government.
The broader context here is a sector-wide reckoning with the legitimacy of fossil fuel sponsorship, one that has accelerated as climate targets tighten and public tolerance for greenwashing — the practice of presenting a company as more environmentally friendly than it is — diminishes. The Science Museum Group's own science director, Roger Highfield, authored a blog post describing a study finding that global warming could wipe out 24% of staple-crop calories by the end of this century Science Museum Group — an internal acknowledgment of the stakes that sits uneasily alongside decades of oil industry patronage.
What remains unresolved is the Adani question. Culture Unstained's framing of the BP decision as a "partial victory" is an explicit signal that campaign pressure will now pivot toward the museum's remaining energy-sector sponsors. The Adani Green Energy relationship, which involves a subsidiary of a coal-adjacent conglomerate, offers a more ambiguous target than BP or Equinor: it is nominally a renewables entity, but campaigners draw a direct line to the parent group's broader fossil fuel portfolio.
For institutions weighing similar decisions, the Science Museum Group's trajectory offers a template. Equinor was judged against Paris-aligned emissions reductions. BP's departure appears to have been driven more by reputational pressure than by a specific climate benchmark, which may make it harder for other institutions to draw clean lines. The distinction matters: a sponsorship policy grounded in measurable climate criteria is replicable and defensible, while one shaped by campaign intensity is more vulnerable to charges of inconsistency.
The Science Museum Group has not announced a replacement sponsor for the academy's training programs, nor has it detailed how the education initiatives previously supported by BP will be funded going forward. What the institution has done is close a chapter that campaigners and a growing number of educators considered untenable — while leaving at least one more conspicuously open.
