A string of dismal results put into sharp focus just how challenging the past year has been for Big Oil, with the prevailing theme being the bigger the company, the bigger the bleeding. BP announced full-year losses of $5.7bn under the leadership of CEO Bernard Looney, who deserves a special hand for having risen to such a position despite the obvious challenge. This was a mere bagatelle compared to the net annual loss of $22.4bn notched up by ExxonMobil, the first annual loss in a history going all the way back to John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.
The market for crude was initially clobbered in March as supply wars kicked off between Saudi and Russia, just as demand collapsed, with the pandemic spreading across the world and governments reacting with lockdowns and travel bans. By April things had got so weird that US crude prices traded below zero, causing mass consternation across the industry and a rather different reaction among the group of Essex traders who filled their...
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