Big Oil — a group that includes Shell Plc, TotalEnergies SE, BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp — is raking in historic amounts of cash, but the windfall isn’t being invested in new production to help displace Russian oil and gas. Instead, executives are rewarding shareholders — setting the world up for an even tighter energy market in the years ahead.
The West’s five biggest oil companies together earned $36.6 billion over and above their spending in the first quarter, or about $400 million in spare cash a day. It was the second-highest quarterly free cash flow on record and enough to relegate billions of dollars of Russia-related writedowns to mere footnotes in their recent earnings reports.
