Falling oil and gas prices pushed French energy giant Total’s second-quarter income down 54%, year-on-year, it revealed yesterday, but foreign-exchange gains helped the company to beat analyst expectations.
The world’s fourth largest non-government controlled oil group by market value also said it would keep on investing to find and produce new resources, while also reducing costs in an industry grappling with weak energy demand and excess capacity.
Total, which in May announced plans to cut one-fifth off the cost of its UK operations in 2009 while looking to prolong the life of its wells and drill new ones, said it would tackle the tough environment by extracting billions of pounds of cost savings in coming years.
Second-quarter net profits fell to £1.47billion, against £3.18billion a year earlier. Analysts had forecast profits of £1.43billion for the latest period.
Total said its oil and gas production had fallen 7% to 2.182million barrels of oil equivalent per day, missing analyst expectations of 2.224million after Opec output cuts and production stoppages in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, Italian oil major Eni has reported a 60% year-on-year fall in adjusted net profits to £772.3million for the second quarter of 2009. In June, Eni confirmed it was considering the sale of some of its North Sea assets as part of a periodic review of its portfolio.
US oil group Chevron reported a big drop in second-quarter earnings yesterday from £3.61billion a year ago to £1.05billion this time.
Chief executive Dave O’Reilly said: “Operationally, we had another very successful quarter.
“In our upstream business, we had major project start-ups at Tahiti in the Gulf of Mexico and Frade offshore Brazil, and our company’s net oil-equivalent production increased 5% from a year ago.
“In our downstream operations, refinery utilisation was higher than in last year’s second quarter.”
Mr O’Reilly said a 79% drop in upstream quarterly earnings, driven by lower oil and gas prices, was offset only partially by improved results in downstream.
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