Bloomberg: Big Oil Goes Looking for a Career Change

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Bloomberg) -- For most of the past century, Big Oil executives found it pretty easy to explain to investors how their businesses worked. Just locate more of the commodities that everyone needed, extract and process them as cheaply as possible, and watch the profits flow.

That’s all over now. The change has been so profound that the chief executive officer of BP Plc recently found himself hyping the profit potential of another commodity. “People may not know—BP sells coffee. We sold 150 million cups of coffee last year,” Bernard Looney said in an interview in August, referring to beverage kiosks attached to the company’s fuel stations. “This is a very strong business. It’s a growth business.”

Perhaps it was tongue-in-cheek, or a way for the leader of the world’s fifth-largest international oil company to emphasize a relationship with consumers. But it’s clear Looney and other oil bosses are struggling to sell their plans for a future in which the world wants more green energy. Last year, for the first time in history, solar and wind made up most of the world’s new power sources, according to BloombergNEF. If the margins on cappuccinos look good right now, that’s an indication of how hard it will be for Big Oil to rapidly ditch its winning formula of drilling, pumping, and refining while spending its way into renewables.

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What is the future of Big Oil without oil? At the extreme of this approach are the pathways sketched out by BP and Italian oil group Eni SpA. These companies claim that in the next decade they will come to resemble a cross between a slimmer version of a traditional oil company and what’s today more like a utility (with, yes, a coffee-selling convenience store chain for drivers of electric vehicles). As the legacy business fades, the theory goes, investments in renewable electricity, biofuels, and EV charging points will pay off.

If in the past the biggest names of the industry were known as “international oil companies,” the new jargon describes this approach as creating “integrated energy companies.” Michele Della Vigna, the top oil industry analyst at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., expects to see oil giants attempt the same all-in strategy as before. “We believe the coming decade will see them integrating vertically in gas, already evident, and in power,” he says.

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"All the companies are swimming in the same water of energy transition,” says Yergin, “but they are adopting different strokes to get to the other side.”

The answer from BP is far more radical than from Chevron. But even the smaller steps by American supermajors are remarkable by the standards of a conservative and slow-moving industry. Chevron’s last update to its shareholders in July highlighted an oil project, a deal to buy fuel stations, and investment in solar power. It looks like the end of an era.

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The difference this time around is that most top oil executives are adamant there’s no going back. “Our transformation is irreversible,” says Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni, the sort of comment that’s widely echoed by his peers. Most senior executives simply don’t believe hydrocarbon prices will ever come back to the above-$100-a-barrel days for any sustained period. And the social, and investor, pressure to tackle climate change is unlikely to abate.

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