Liam Denning, Columnist

Exxon Lost 6 Billion Barrels, Which Sort of Matters

Blithely shrugging off the sudden disappearance of a country’s worth of oil and gas requires ignoring context of roughly similar scale.

February 25, 2021 at 3:17 PM UTC

By Liam Denning

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Darren Woods, chairman and chief executive officer of Exxon Mobil Corp., seeming to wonder where his barrels went.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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Six billion? Six shmillion.

Exxon Mobil Corp.’s annual filing with the SEC, which dropped late Thursday, reveals the company debooked 6.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent in 2020, or almost 30% of its proved reserves. That’s a lot of oil and gas gone.