For the week ended on August 13, U.S. oil and natural gas companies added 9 oil and natural gas drilling rigs to bring the total rig count to 500. That’s up 256 rigs, or 105%, from a record low of 244 in the summer of 2020, according to Baker Hughes.
The dispute over oil production quotas between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that blew up the OPEC+ meeting two weeks ago looks to be over. Under the compromise, the UAE will see its baseline production level rise to 3.65 million barrels per day when the current pact expires in April 2022, a source told Reuters. The current baseline for the UAE was around 3.17 million barrels per day. In exchange the UAE agreed to a Saudi proposal to extend the April 2022 production agreement until December 2022.
Yesterday, May 26, a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) to cut its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared with 2019 levels in a case brought by climate activist groups. The Hague District Court ruled that the Anglo-Dutch energy company has a duty to care about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and that its current reduction plans were not concrete enough. If that language sounds like the court is declaring a company has a fiduciary duty (to future generations? to current populations? to the earth?) to reduce emissions, you’re not mistaken.
On Wednesday, May 26, ExxonMobil shareholders voted to install at least two new independent directors to the company’s board. (The contest for another two seats remained, as they say, too close to call.) The results are a resounding defeat for CEO Darren Woods and a strong vote of shareholders’ unhappiness with the way the company had been addressing climate change. And, let’s not forget, the company’s lagging financial performance. ExxonMobil shares have lost roughly $125 billion in market capitalization during CEO’s Woods four-and-a-half years at the helm.
Oil prices have bounced back big time and with them the prices on oil stocks. I still think the long-term trend is against oil producers as efforts to combat global warming lead to lower consumption of fossil fuels. And I’d prefer not to own any oil and natural gas shares–even in as “progressive” a company as Equinor. I’m going to take advantage of the rally in oil prices to sell these shares out of my Jubak Picks Portfolio with a small 0.9% gain since I established that position in May 2012.
ExxonMobil’s (XOM) May 26 annual meeting has turned into a referendum on the global oil industry and climate change. At issue is a key question for the industry and the global climate: How much of the oil that’s been discovered to date but not pumped so far will stay in the ground?
Shares of ExxonMobil (XOM) closed down 4.81% today on a Wall Street Journal report that the Securities & Exchange Commission was investigating a whistleblower complaint alleging that the company overvalued assets in the Permian Basin oil shale geology. The whistleblower complaint alleges that during a 2019 internal assessment workers were forced to use unrealistic assumptions about how quickly wells could be drilled to reach a higher valuation.
