Apr. 5, 2020 2:47 PM ET|About: Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM)|By: Liz Kiesche, SA News Editor

Some of the world’s largest oil companies  have raised more than $32B in recent weeks to ensure they have the cash to deal with the economic effects of the coronavirus while preserving dividends, the Financial Times reports.

ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDS.A) (NYSE:RDS.B), Equinor, Total, and BP (NYSE:BP) have sold debt to raise dollars or euros since mid-March.

They’re also paring capex, reducing costs, pausing stock buybacks, and delaying project approvals.

Besides the bond sales, Shell and BP have also obtained new multibillion-dollar credit facilities. read more

Shell, for example, said last month that it was diverting resources to the increased production of isopropyl alcohol, which is the primary ingredient in hand sanitizers. It also said it would make 2.5 million liters of the ingredient freely available to the healthcare sector in the Netherlands. The supermajor is also offering free food and drink to healthcare professionals at 15,000 retail outlets globally as well as to truck drivers and delivery personnel “who are vital to maintaining supplies.”

• Royal Dutch Shell is collaborating with Udacity to digitally train its workers in artificial intelligence.
• This began long before the coronavirus pandemic and the company continues to use this training method.
• The digital workforce skilling platform may become the training method of choice for a growing number of companies who need to keep employees up to speed in the weeks and months ahead.

Working at Royal Dutch Shell’s Deepwater division in New Orleans gives Barbara Waelde a front-row seat to how the right data can unlock crucial information for the oil giant. So when her supervisor asked her last year if she was interested in a program that could sharpen her digital and data science capabilities, Waelde, 55, jumped at the chance.

Since she began her online coursework, the seven-year Shell veteran has learned Python programming, supervised learning algorithms and data modeling, among other skills. read more

By Francois De Beaupuy: 2 April 2020, 09:24 BST

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SA and Equinor ASA are selling $12 billion of bonds as the combined effect of the slump in oil prices and the collapse in demand threaten to sap cash flows for months.

Big Oil, already under pressure from shareholders before the coronavirus crisis to improve returns, has moved swiftly to defer projects, cut spending and halt share buybacks. They are seeking to protect dividends as the economic slump and a price war led by Saudi Arabia undermines profits. read more

PUBLISHED WED, MAR 25 20205:14 AM EDT

• The world’s biggest oil and gas firms should break an industry taboo and consider cutting dividends as they weather the fallout from the pandemic, investors say.
• Investors prefer the dividend cut to companies taking on any more debt to maintain payouts.
• The top five so-called oil majors have avoided reducing dividends for years to keep investors sweet and added a combined $25 billion to debt levels in 2019 to maintain capital spending, while giving back billions to shareholders.

The world’s biggest oil and gas firms should break an industry taboo and consider cutting dividends, rather than taking on any more debt to maintain payouts as they weather the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, investors say.

The top five so-called oil majors have avoided reducing dividends for years to keep investors sweet and added a combined $25 billion to debt levels in 2019 to maintain capital spending, while giving back billions to shareholders. read more

Oil companies are survivors: Shell, BP and ExxonMobil each date back more than a century. After surviving wars, pandemics, depressions, gluts and nationalisations, they had begun to grapple with a new existential challenge: how to transform themselves in the era of climate change. Now the coronavirus crisis threatens to derail the big oil companies’ emerging plans.

Consolidation is inevitable, in the style of welding together two car wrecks to make a half-viable vehicle. Very cheaply, a supermajor could build a business to rule all shale – but it would be a huge gamble. read more

No Big Oil executive would ever accept that’s true — at least for now. Even as management teams confront both the catastrophic demand destruction wrought by the spread of coronavirus and an oil-price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, they’re determined to keep paying.

“Nobody wants to be the CEO who cuts the dividend,” said Noah Barrett, a Denver-based energy analyst at Janus Henderson Group Plc, which manages about $375 billion. “They understand that any company that cuts, its shareholders will flow into competitors and be very, very hesitant to ever come back.” read more

By Erwin Seba and Gary McWilliams

HOUSTON, March 15 (Reuters) – Major energy companies in the United States imposed work-from-home rules for office staff and began health checks for remote or critical workers as coronavirus spread across the United States and threatened an industry reeling by falling demand and profits.

BP, Exxon Mobil, Kinder Morgan, Motiva Enterprises and Royal Dutch Shell told non-essential staff to work from home starting Monday, workers and officials said. Shell and Chevron have begun routine health checks of workers and visitors at some key U.S. facilities, spokesmen said. read more

The collapse in crude prices has brought into relief the correlation between oil majors’ financial leverage and the valuation of their shares. It’s a relationship that looks like particularly bad news for the bigger European firms.

Investors’ knee-jerk reaction to the downward lurch in the oil price was, naturally, more severe toward the companies that were more indebted. So shares in BP Plc, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Equinor ASA and Eni SpA suffered more than Total SA and the two big U.S. majors, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp., when European markets closed on Monday. read more

By Ron Bousso and Shadia Nasralla: 09 March 2020

LONDON (Reuters) – An oil price plunge means the world’s top energy companies will have to review promises to return billions to investors, either by slowing down share buybacks or reintroducing non-cash dividends, analysts said on Monday.

Brent crude <LCOc1> was trading at around $36 a barrel, down around 20% by 1645 GMT on Monday, when analysts lowered share price forecasts for top oil and gas producers. [O/R]

The Brent benchmark has fallen by as much as a third since Thursday, just before Russia walked away from an agreement by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut output. read more

By Nick Cunningham – Mar 01, 2020, 4:00 PM CST

ExxonMobil saw its share price nosedive by roughly 15 percent in the past week, one in a series of oil companies that finds itself in a freefall.

Four other oil majors – Chevron, BP, Shell and Total – also declined sharply, dragged down by the worst weekly loss for oil prices in more than four years.

But the problems for the oil majors run much deeper than the coronavirus, and their share price declines have been underway for quite some time. read more

…it is more than halfway through the process of selling out of its holdings in oil majors BP, Shell and Total.

LONDON, Feb 26 (Reuters) – Catholic religious order Jesuits in Britain will ditch fossil fuel companies from its $500 million equity portfolio by the end of the year, it said on Wednesday, citing corporate failure to respond quickly to the threat of climate change.

Asset managers responsible for more than $14 trillion have divested from the sector in recent years, though many more prefer to remain invested and engage with companies to change their business strategies.

Some companies have sought to address investor concern, including BP’s pledge this month to reduce its carbon emissions, though critics have said that such measures have not gone far enough. read more

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is expanding an online program that teaches its employees artificial-intelligence skills, part of an effort to cut costs, improve business processes and generate revenue.

The Anglo-Dutch oil company, which has about 82,000 employees, said about 2,000 have expressed interest in or have been approached by management about taking AI courses through online-education company Udacity Inc. They include petroleum engineers, chemists and geophysicists, among others.

The courses are voluntary, not required, and employees can complete them at their own pace during work hours, Shell said. The oil company covers the cost of the training. read more

* Draft law circulating, split into two bills

* Expected to be presented next week

* “Operators in Nigeria are waiting” – Total

By Libby George

ABUJA, Nigeria Feb 14 (Reuters) – A Nigerian oil reform two decades in the making is urgently needed to get money into its energy sector, industry executives say, as tax increases and regulatory uncertainty scupper investments.

Africa’s largest oil exporting nation has not carried out a full revamp of the law underpinning its oil and gas sector since the 1960s. Piecemeal tax hikes, and a growing lack of certainty around terms, have made companies wary. read more