![COLUMN | Put your money where your mouth is: examining the investment trends of BP, Chevron, Eni and TotalEnergies [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-01-19%2Fig0s53y5%2FUntitled.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
Actions speak louder than words.
There’s a quotation from George Orwell's novel 1984, which reads, “The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Looking at global events today, this warning against the bold falsehoods of authoritarian regimes, which lie even in the face of the strongest evidence, seems apt. However, at the same time, there is a good case for ignoring what chief executives say and write, and simply focusing on what companies their countries invest in.
It is capital investment that determines strategy – not speeches at corporate town hall meetings, videos on social media, or glossy advertising and public relations campaigns. Ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears online, and look at changes to the balance sheet.
Remember "Beyond petroleum," BP's slogan to highlight its efforts to transform itself away from the oil and gas business, backed by a beautiful green sunflower logo?
Well, that rebranding was introduced in the year 2000. And guess what? Last week, BP announced that it would write down its renewables businesses by US$4 billion to US$5 billion in its end of 2025 financial results, taking its cumulative write-downs on what it calls its “transition business” in the past two years to about US$20 billion. Twenty billion with a B.
Beyond belief!
BP is in no way beyond petroleum, as oil and gas remains its only reliable income earner, both upstream, downstream and in trading. BP remains a British petroleum company at its core in terms of management, headquarters and its stock market listing, even if its focus in the beleaguered North Sea has faded, and the onshore Wytch Farm field in the south of England is now owned by Perenco.
BP spun off its wind energy business into a new joint venture with Japan’s Jera, imaginatively named Jera Nex BP, and it has been trying to sell half of Lightsource, its solar business, for nearly a year.
One of Jera Nex BP's Irish Sea windfarm projects was recently cancelled when its partner EnBW pulled out. Additionally, BP has also cancelled several of its own hydrogen projects, including a hydrogen and carbon capture project in Teesside in north-east England, as well as the Duqm Green Hydrogen project in Oman and a proposed hydrogen hub in Pilbara in Western Australia.
So, this week we look at what trends are being signalled by the capital spending and investment decisions of big players in the offshore industry.
After ExxonMobil's CEO correctly said that Venezuela was “uninvestible” in its current condition, US President Donald Trump got oil trader Vitol to sell several tanker loads of confiscated crude and funnelled the US$500 million proceeds to a bank account in Qatar, putting them beyond the reach of Venezuela's creditors.
Ironically, these creditors include both ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, which have outstanding and uncollected arbitration awards for the nationalisation of their previous investments in Venezuela, against which the oil sale funds could be seized if these were banked in New York.
According to Reuters, ConocoPhillips is trying to recover US$12 billion from the Venezuelan Government after former President Hugo Chavez nationalised its Venezuela assets, whilst ExxonMobil is trying to recover US$1.65 billion. The Financial Times estimates that Venezuela owes over US$150 billion, probably much more, including over US$10 billion to China and US$60 billion on bonds that are in default. This debt is twice the size of the Venezuelan economy.
This is an almighty debt mess that will need resolution before plans to pump up oil and gas production can realistically progress, as the creditors will move to seize any earnings from Venezuelan oil and gas exports, hence Trump's decision to place the funds in Qatar.
After being told by ExxonMobil that the company was not interested in investing in Venezuela, the American President then turned his attention to Chevron, the second largest American energy company, and the sole American company still active in the country.
Chevron currently produces about 240,000 barrels per day (bpd) in joint ventures with the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA, in-country, around 150,000 bpd net to Chevron. Chevron exports Venezuelan oil to the USA under an authorisation that exempts it from sanctions on the country, which remain in place despite the abduction of former President Nicolas Maduro.
So, you would expect the American company to be at the forefront of efforts to invest in Venezuela. Instead, Chevron's investment priorities seem to lie elsewhere, and spending in Venezuela would either come at the price of investing less elsewhere, or on taking on new debt to invest in high-cost, heavy oil projects in a US$60 per barrel oil price environment.
On December 3, 2025, Chevron announced its 2026 capital budget. Flush from the acquisition of Hess, there were some impressive numbers as the company intends to spend US$18 billion or more on new capital projects, with America receiving more than half of the spending:
“Total U.S. spend is anticipated to be about US$10.5 billion, more than half of the 2026 capex budget. Upstream is expected to be approximately US$17.0 billion. Nearly US$6 billion is expected for US shale and tight assets that include Permian, DJ and Bakken, underpinning anticipated US production of more than two million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Global offshore capex is expected to be approximately US$7 billion, primarily supporting growth in Guyana, Eastern Mediterranean and Gulf of America.”
Guyana's Stabroek Block is the jewel in the crown for Chevron, producing low cost, low tax, light crude in a peaceful country where offshore production is expected to continue ramping up to close to 1.3 million bpd by 2030 as additional floating production units (FPSOs) are added by the field operator ExxonMobil.
Six FPSOs are expected to be operating offshore Guyana by 2027, and nine by 2030. So, cutting investment in Guyana after its hard-fought battle to acquire Hess, taking control of Hess' 30 per cent stake in the Stabroek Block is not an option for Chevron.
As Reuters reported on Friday, Chevron has taken a binding, final investment decision to expand production at Israel's Leviathan offshore natural gas field. This involves spending around US$2.4 billion to expand the field, including drilling three extra subsea wells, and augmenting the gas treatment facilities on the Leviathan production platform.
Chevron will foot just under 40 per cent of the costs in line with its stake in the field, where it partners with NewMed Energy. Chevron aims to increase total gas delivery to Israel, Egypt and Jordan from the Leviathan field to around 21 billion cubic metres (bcm) by 2030. The field currently produces around 12 bcm of gas annually.
Chevron continues to focus further investment in other countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. At the end of last month, Upstream reported that the company and its partners had approved the budget for front-end engineering and design work on the Aphrodite deepwater gas development offshore Cyprus.
Russell Searancke wrote that a 2026 budget of US$112 million for the Aphrodite development had been authorised by Chevron and its partners, NewMed Energy and Shell. NewMed said the greenlight represented, “a critical milestone on the path toward a final investment decision, expected in 2027”.
Upstream noted that the approved development plan for Aphrodite features a floating production facility to treat the gas that would then be exported via a subsea pipeline to Egypt’s gas transmission system.
As we shall see below, Egypt is hungry for gas. It is not in the interests of either the Israeli or the American Government for there to be power outages or persistent brownouts in Cairo, which could result in political instability.
So, something will have to give if Chevron is to invest meaningfully in Venezuela. It will not be Guyana, and it will not be Israel nor Cyprus that faces capex cuts. The company is unlikely to ramp up debt on high-cost, heavy oil projects in Venezuela without materially higher oil prices.
So, either US shale investment gets slashed, which would make a lot of offshore players and environmentalists happy, but a lot of American red state voters very unhappy, or the company just makes a few token investments in Venezuela to keep the White House happy, but does not meaningfully spend to boost production there in the short term.
I think we can all guess what it will be.
Chevron is not the only international oil company putting its money where its mouth is in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean. Italy's Eni is progressing its plans to develop Cronos, a deepwater gas field in Block Six in Cypriot waters.
Eni intends to install a floating control unit above the field in 2,000 metres of water, and then tying back the production from the subsea wells to the existing Zohr field, which is around 100 kilometres away across the Egyptian maritime boundary in 1,450 metres of water. The Cronos gas would then be co-mingled with Zohr gas and piped ashore to the Damietta LNG plant, which Eni also operates in Egypt in the Nile Delta.
The final investment decision for Cronos is expected later this year, with first gas also scheduled in 2030. Cronos is estimated to contain 85 bcm of gas but Block Six also contains the undeveloped Zeus and Calypso gas discoveries, potentially doubling the recoverable gas reserves.
Once Cronos is successfully in production, adding production from those reservoirs becomes considerably cheaper and easier for Eni.
This is the same model that Eni has used in Indonesia, where it is progressing the Gendalo-Gandang gas project in the Kutei basin, offshore Indonesia. This involves developing 56 bcm of gas reserves in the Ganal production sharing contract through subsea wells tied back to Eni’s existing Jangkrik production unit.
Eni also continues to expand its exploration in Indonesia off the eastern province of Kalimantan. Last month, the company made a significant wet gas discovery with the Konta-1 wildcat offshore, which was drilled by Ventura Offshore’s semi-submersible rig SSV Catarina. Not surprisingly, Ventura then reported that ENI then exercised its option to extend the rig for the third of four optional wells off Kalimantan.
Eni also continues to progress a number of other gas projects in Africa, highlighting its key role in diversifying gas supplies to Italy. The Italian Government is the company's largest shareholder and has sought to avoid replacing dependence on Russian gas with dependence on American LNG.
Eni's Azule Energy joint venture with BP is commissioning Angola's first non-associated gas project in the country, Eni has approved the construction of the Coral North floating LNG (FLNG) plant for installation in deepwater off Mozambique and, in a few weeks, Eni's new inshore FLNG Nguya is expected to commence gas exports from the Republic of Congo, providing capacity of up to three million tons of LNG per year drawn from the offshore Nené and Litchendjili fields in the Marine XII license.
The Azule joint venture is also drilling in Namibia in the year ahead (as is Chevron) and recently completed the construction of the Ndungo Project in Angola. The scope included the installation of rigid pipelines and subsea equipment and involved an array of offshore assets, including Saipem FDS, Shen Da Hao, Skandi Seven, and Skandi Master, which were working on the subsea infrastructure installation in Block 15/06 in 1,050 metres of water, to tie the field back to the Agogo West Hub production facilities.
Eni is putting its money where its mouth is, and that is increasingly in gas, and in Africa and Asia.
Another Africa state where Eni has taken an exploration position is Sierra Leone, where the government of President Julius Maada Wonie Bio signed a deal with the Italian player that could see a wildcat exploration well drilled in the coming years.
In a press release issued at the end of October, the Petroleum Directorate of Sierra Leone announced that it had signed a reconnaissance permit agreement with Eni covering blocks G-113, G-129, G-130, G-131 and G-132.
Fifteen years ago, now-defunct American explorer Anadarko announced a couple of non-commercial deepwater oil discoveries off Sierra Leone. Now, it finally appears that perhaps the impoverished country has a second opportunity to test the drillbit.
It is not just Eni that is taking a stake in these frontier West African basins, which many geologists expect to be geologically similar to the prized acreage off Guyana and Suriname. Last year, Upstream reported that TotalEnergies had been awarded the operatorship of four exploration permit offshore Liberia, being blocks 6, 11, 17 and 29.
Then, small Canadian listed exploration player BluEnergies announced last Thursday that it had entered into a joint study and application agreement with TotalEnergies to examine the prospectivity of the Canadian company's acreage in Liberia, Sierre Leone's southerly neighbour. BluEnergies shares have risen a mind-blowing 240 per cent in the last year as interest in Liberia has increased.
Under the agreement, TotalEnergies will fund seismic data reprocessing by Norwegian player TGS covering 6,167 square kilometres of original 3D seismic data that had first been acquired by TGS in 2013. Additionally, TotalEnergies will fund new seabed data acquisition comprising multi-beam/backscatter, heat flow survey, and subsequent data studies and interpretation in BluEnergies' Liberian blocks 26, 30 and 31, which are adjacent to TotalEnergies' recently awarded blocks. BlueEnergies has a 35 per cent participating interest and TotalEnergies has a 65 per cent participating interest in these three blocks.
When Michael Jackson sang Liberian Girl, you came and you changed my world in 1989, he was probably not thinking of the exploration potential of the West African country, unlike BluEnergies shareholders.
So, ignore the hype and follow the money. If and when Total and Eni announce new wildcat wells in Sierra Leone and Liberia, we will know that these are advancing further up the exploration radar and there are serious targets for drilling.
Ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears on social media and instead look at the flow of investment. Also remember the two other key quotes from 1984:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
And, most depressingly of all, the Party's slogan:
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”
The manipulation of language and thought is central to the Party's control over the populace in the novel. Do your own research, think critically, and definitely try to avoid any jackboots stamping in your face, which was Orwell's grim image of a totalitarian future.
