Liam Denning, Columnist

Exxon’s New Roadmap: Flat Ground and Dragons

The oil giant adjusts to lower prices, but still struggles to model disruption.

March 4, 2021 at 2:00 PM UTC

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.

Here there be windmills.
Photographer: Picturenow/Universal Images Group Editorial/Getty Images

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The day after Exxon Mobil Corp.’s 2020 analyst day, where it mapped out its next five years, Russia put a match to the map. Then Covid-19 stomped on the ashes. By the end of the year, Exxon was fending off an activist campaign.

In truth, investors sold off the stock that day last March even before OPEC+ ruptured and the pandemic took hold. They just didn’t like Exxon’s high-spending ways. This year’s effort, hosted virtually on Wednesday, was Exxon’s attempt to redraw the map. And it did a good job — albeit leaving a lot of space marked “here be dragons” around the edges.