Liam Denning, Columnist

Big Oil Relocates to a Different Planet

The cash flows of Exxon and Chevron recall the glory days, but the companies are remaking themselves for a more constrained, lower carbon future.

February 1, 2022 at 4:29 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.

Moving headquarters.
Photographer: James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images

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When Exxon announced in 1989 it was leaving midtown Manhattan for new headquarters in the Dallas suburbs, Stanley Grayson, New York’s then deputy mayor for finance and economic development, offered this bon voyage:

What else would you expect a New Yorker to say? Three decades on, Exxon Mobil Corp. is on the move again, shifting its home south to Houston. And while some of what Grayson said was flat-out wrong, Big Oil was indeed under a cloud in the late ’80s — and is again today.