There was a flurry of news reports about CEOs of the world’s largest energy companies this week. This has been an ongoing controversy for the past several years, but has gotten a lot more attention since global oil and gas giants — as well as coal traders — boasted record-breaking profits from extremely high energy prices in 2022.

Find some of the headlines from this week below:

• “ExxonMobil and Chevron CEO pay three times higher than European peers” [Upstream]
• “BP takeover is both appealing and daunting” [Reuters]

The global oil and gas industry is revealing a change within the industry itself.

Big-time mergers and acquisitions (M&A) seem to be popping up in the news on a weekly basis. For instance, the Chevron-Hess merger deal seeks to compete with Exxon’s top position in global oil markets and US shale production.

In the end, all eyes are going to be on Exxon’s highly-anticipated disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the company’s climate impact.

Exxon’s executives told the SEC on May 2023 that: “It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE.” Thus, ExxonMobil indicated that it is getting pessimistic on the world’s path to the so-called Net Zero Emissions (NZE) 2050 scenario.

Read more updates about the global energy markets and energy transition strategies in the publication Areas & Producers.