BP Chief Executive Robert Dudley inherited quite a bit of a mess from former CEO Tony Hayward, he of the loose lips, in the the form of last year’s terrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But Dudley wants everyone to know that he’s totally sorry.

“I am sorry for what happened last year,” he told the lunch crowd at CERAweek conference in Houston today, reports Forbes. “BP is sorry. BP gets it. BP is changing.”

“We are determined we will once again restore that trust and I realize this requires action, not words.”

He says they’ve done various things like paying out billions in claims and investing in the Gulf of Mexico Research intiative, as well as independent third party verification of “blowout preventers and better testing for cement jobs, well-integrity, rig safety. The company will no longer take rigs that don’t meet safety standards.”

You had us at “blowout preventers,” but yeah, making sure unsafe rigs are no longer floating around ready to gush tons of oil is also probably a good idea.

Dudley is going even further and creating a new group that dispatches safety specialists around the globe, which has already shut down a production platform in Azerbaijan, and another in the Gulf of Mexico for infractions that needed to be addressed before they continued to operate.

He hopes that the changes BP makes will spread to others in the industry, in order to make sure no one else causes such a calamity.

Speaking of companies saying “sorry,” Consumerist’s Chris Morran will be appearing on a panel called The Legal Ramifications of Saying “I’m Sorry” next Monday at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX. He’ll also be unveiling the newest Worst Company In America brackets at the event. Think BP made the cut?

BP’s Dudley Says He’s Sorry [Forbes]

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