Some Notes About Friday's White House Meeting Between Trump and Oil CEOs

Some notes about Friday’s White House meeting between Trump and some of his senior officials and oil company CEOs.

First, here’s a list of the companies in attendance as far as I was able to tell from the televised part of the meeting:

• ExxonMobil

• Chevron

• ConocoPhillips

• Shell

• Marathon Petroleum (Refiner)

• Halliburton

• Trafigura (Infrastructure Company)

• Armstrong Oil & Gas (Independent International Wildcatter)

• Continental Oil & Gas (Harold Hamm)

• HilCorp (Huge US independent, operator of more US wells than any other company)

• Ross Perot, Jr (Chairman at Perot Companies)

• Aspect Energy (Independent International Wildcatter)

• Tallgrass Energy (Independent International Wildcatter)

• Repsol - Spanish major headquartered in Madrid with extensive production/infrastructure holdings across South America

• Vitol - Big Dutch infrastructure and logistics company with extensive international holdings

• Eni - Italian Major with operations around the world

• Brian Sheffield (Managing Partner at Formentera Partners (private equity company) and longtime oil man in the Permian Basin.)
  

Some are making a big deal that BP wasn’t there. This did not surprise me at all given that BP has a brand new CEO and I don’t believe BP will exist as a company by the end of 2026. It will either be broken into parts and sold piecemeal to the highest bigger or finally, at long last, merged with Shell. I believe the latter is the most likely final outcome for the struggling major which has never really recovered from the financial fallout of the Macondo disaster.