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

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

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 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

* 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

BP, Shell, Chevron and Exxon have made almost $2tn in profits in the past three decades as their exploitation of oil, gas and coal reserves has driven the planet to the brink of climate breakdown, according to analysis for the Guardian.

The scale of their profits is revealed as experts say the fossil fuel boom is coming to an end, with big oil entering a “death knell” phase, according to one prominent Wall St commentator.

Analysis for the Guardian by Taxpayers for Common Sense in the US reveals that since 1990 – at which point the impact of fossil fuel extraction on the climate had been well known to industry leaders and politicians for years, experts say – the big four companies have accumulated $1.991tn in profits. read more

Oil sector is unloved, but holding up under pressure – HSBC

February 12, 20201:20 AM Reuters

** HSBC says the global integrated oil sector is holding up well despite combined pressure of price and margin weakness

** Brokerage upgrades Royal Dutch Shell to “buy” from “hold”, saying its financial framework is not at a significant risk

** However, says Shell’s current free cash flow breakeven is above average for the sector

** BP Plc and Total SA remain at low risk, and BP is HSBC’s preferred stock with best company-specific catalysts this year read more

As BP Plc’s new chief delivers his vision to transform the company on Wednesday, investors and activists want to know just how much appetite he has to take on the existential crisis facing the oil industry.

12 February 2020

Bernard Looney’s big challenge will be to navigate BP through an energy transition with the world falling out of love with oil, and louder demands from investors to pivot toward clean energy. When climate protesters forced the company to shut its London headquarters last week, the 49-year-old Irishman promised them he would address their concerns.

BP is already taking some modest steps to address climate change, including investment in renewables and selling some of its most carbon-intensive assets. But it remains an oil major through and through, still very much the company that tapped the first fields in Iran early in the last century and drilled wildcat wells on the Alaskan frontier more than 60 years ago. read more

The $1.3trn cost of leaving energy underground

Unless a solution is found for climate change in the coming decade, there is a risk of a sharp collapse in asset prices of oil companies. 

Alan Livsey: Feb 5, 2020

Donald Trump was thinking about the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg when he took aim at what he called the “prophets of doom” at Davos in January. But just as easily he could have been targeting global investors whose trenchant criticism of hydrocarbons has led to a shift in investment away from the traditional energy sector and into renewables.

This move represents a big problem for energy groups such as Exxon, BP and Saudi Aramco. Vast swaths of their oil, gas and coal reserves may never be extracted and burnt because doing so would intensify global warming, worsening weather events and threatening the loss of farmland and huge population displacement. read more

Agencies: Wed 5 Feb 2020 12.19 GMTLast modified on Wed 5 Feb 2020 13.16 GMT; THE GUARDIAN

Greenpeace members have blocked BP’s headquarters with solar panels and oil barrels to mark Bernard Looney’s first day as chief executive.

About 100 environmental activists took 500 solar panels to the central London building at 3am on Wednesday as Looney prepared to take up his new role. Some protesters sat underneath the solar panels after they were prevented from installing them on the pavements and roads near the office. read more

Anna Bateson and Hamish Nicklin: Wed 29 Jan 2020 12.07 GMT

For anyone who believes the world faces an urgent climate crisis, it has been quite a year. The world’s leading scientists tell us we have just twelve years to change human behaviour to avert catastrophe. Teenage climate strikers inspire millions of people, young and old, to protest against inaction, and devastating bushfires sweep across much of Australia. This is the most important challenge of our times.

Our Guardian editorial colleagues have led the world in covering the crisis with expertise and urgency. In May 2019 our editor-in-chief Katharine Viner announced that the Guardian would shift to using more urgent language to describe the climate emergency – and other news organisations have begun to follow suit. read more

Yannic Rack: 27 Jan 2020: S&P Global Market Intelligence

During the annual Oil & Money conference in London in October 2019, Ben van Beurden, who has been CEO of Royal Dutch Shell PLC since 2014, urged the oil and gas industry to step up and tackle climate change head-on. Shell and other oil and gas companies, van Beurden said, would need to help the transition to a lower-carbon world both to stay profitable and maintain their societal license to operate in the long run.

“We can, and must, evolve,” van Beurden said. At the same time, however, he emphasized another point dear to his heart — and one frequently echoed by executives at BP PLC, Total SA and other integrated majors. read more

Javier Blas: Bloomberg: January 27, 2020

(Bloomberg) — The world’s largest energy traders enjoyed one of their best ever years in 2019 as pipeline outages, dramatic changes in ship fuel regulations and Middle East conflicts shook up the global oil market.

The bonanza extended beyond the independent traders like Vitol Group and Trafigura Group Ltd. to the in-house units of oil giants Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SA and BP Plc, which made billions of dollars in profits.

“By all accounts, 2019 was among the best years ever for the energy trading industry,” said Marco Dunand, the chief executive of Mercuria Energy Group Ltd., one of the five largest independent oil traders. read more

By Tsvetana Paraskova – Jan 22, 2020, 2:00 PM CST

Several of the world’s largest oil companies talked behind closed doors on Wednesday about the potential adoption of more stringent emission reduction targets that could include emissions from the products they sell to end consumers, sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, where climate change and the urgency to act has taken center stage this year, the top executives of oil companies Chevron, BP, Shell, Total, and Saudi Aramco, among others,  met to discuss whether the industry should start accounting for and drafting emission reduction targets not only for their respective oil production, but also for emissions ‘at the pump’, or the emissions from the fuels they sell. read more