Petroleum Economist Piece: Oil Companies Focusing on Being Oil Companies

[Note: This story is also published at The Petroleum Economist]

From its earliest days in the mid-19^th century, the oil and gas industry has always been an industry of trends. Most often, the trends in oil and gas develop due to new resource discoveries, development of advancing technologies or, as we have seen during the course of 2023, in response to evolving market pressures.

A Shift in Messaging

One of the most remarkable takeaways from this year’s CERAWeek conference, which I covered closely, was a shifting trend in the messaging by industry senior executives who spoke at the annual event in Houston in early March. Where the messages from big company execs in the several years prior had gone out of their way to focus on ESG scores, emissions reductions and allocating more capital to investments in green projects outside of their companies’ core competencies, the messages this year were starkly different, focusing in on a rededication to the core business of finding, producing, transporting, selling, processing and refining oil, natural gas and the products derived from them.

The shift in messaging was so stark, in fact, that one CEO I interviewed towards the end of the conference, Ken Gilmartin of Wood Plc., warned about the tone, saying, “We can’t go at it with a business-as-usual mindset.”