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The supermajors are moving into power generation, tempted by forecasts of a looming surge in demand. Yet there is a twist: the temptation is natural gas generation. Wind and solar—typically described as green or clean power—are turning into a fiasco for Big Oil.
Chevron and Exxon both recently said they were planning to venture into the exciting—and quite profitable—field of electricity generation. Speaking at a Reuters event in New York, Chevron’s head of the New Energies division said that it has been in talks for the supply of natural gas to power generators for a year. But not just any power generators. Chevron is talking with generators that supply electricity to data center operators.
“It fits many of our capabilities – natural gas, construction, operations, and being able to provide customers with a low-carbon pathway on power through CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage), geothermal, and maybe some other technologies,” Jeff Gustavson said.
Exxon, meanwhile, said this week that it planned to invest between $28 and $33 billion over the period 2026-2030 to boost its output of crude oil and natural gas by 18%—even as the IEA predicts demand for crude and gas both would peak before 2030. It will also seek deals with data center operators to supply them with, in its own words, lower carbon energy.
Carbon capture is a marked feature of these two supermajors’ plans. Big Tech is a fan of low-carbon energy, but it has recently admitted that energy—the kind that is generated from solar panels and wind turbines cannot secure the kind of electricity supply it needs for its data centers. So the oil and gas industry has stepped up to provide the kind Big Tech needs: round-the-clock, reliable power, complete with emissions scrubbing, as it were.
Not everyone got the memo about supply reliability, however, so Google has struck a deal with a company called Intersect Power to build data centers on the sites of solar installations combined with battery storage. The price tag of the deal is $20 billion. The first project under that deal should be operational in two years, Intersect said.
While Google spends $20 billion to install millions of solar panels and batteries to power its data centers, across the Atlantic Big Oil is moving away from wind and solar, and electricity in general. Shell’s stated ambition to become the world’s largest electricity company from a few years ago is now nothing but a bitter memory. BP’s plan to live up to the latest rebranding effort by its marketing department that said BP shall henceforth mean “beyond petroleum” is back to oil and gas, and not even hiding it. Europe’s Big Oil is moving on after what increasingly looks like a major failed experiment.
The Financial Times reported earlier this week that BP and Shell had spent a combined $18 billion over the last five years to pursue their low-carbon electricity goals. The pursuit, however, failed to result in any material gains or advantages for the companies, so now both are shifting away from low-carbon electrons.
Both have recently made statements to the effect that they will be curbing their presence in wind power. Shell sold its retail electricity distribution business in Europe last year, and BP sold its U.S. onshore wind power operations. The two are still active in solar, the FT report notes, and also in EV charging. Wind, however, has proved too risky and not profitable enough, as even the biggest pure-play wind operators have discovered over the past couple of years. In the annals of industry history, this period would probably go down under the heading “Mistakes were made”.
“They wrongly got into a mindset of saying [they would not face] cost inflation in our supply chain, there’s not going to be cyclicality and the government’s always going to be supporting and underwriting us. All three of those have come home to roost in a negative way,” one investment banker, whom the FT did not name, told the publication.
It is quite surprising to see companies such as BP and Shell make all these wrong assumptions simultaneously, but perhaps that fact highlights the appeal of government-subsidized business. It appears to have become so strong that the supermajors forgot about the risks—and there was, of course, the activist pressure.
The phenomenon of activist investing has been around for centuries, but climate activist investing is a new form. Commonly known as ESG investing, the movement has played a central role in Big Oil’s transition plans and their bet on low-carbon electricity generation as an alternative to its core business of extracting oil and gas from the ground. Everyone thought the transition would make them more money. It didn’t. So BP and Shell are doing the sensible thing: falling back on the business that does make money—which the U.S. supermajors already knew and which they keep exploiting in full.
