It’s not just deep in the heart of Texas where President Donald Trump will visit this week, but deep into the state’s oil patch. The Permian Basin.
He will take part Wednesday in a roundtable discussion with supporters and also be part of a fundraising luncheon in Odessa, Texas.
POLITICO reported the president will also tour the Double Eagle Energy Oil Rig in Midland, where he’ll deliver remarks on “restoring energy dominance in the Permian Basin” in Midland.
Trump’s speech comes at the close of a rough second quarter for the oil and gas industry as Covid-19 ravaged companies’ finances. Exxon Mobil and Chevron will announce their earnings later this week, but if they’re anything like what came out of pipeline company KinderMorgan and oil service companies Schlumberger on Friday, expect something approaching a bloodbath.
“To say that these are unprecedented times for the American economy is an understatement and particularly for the energy business,” KinderMorgan CEO Richard Kinder told investors Friday after announcing the company had lost $637 million during the quarter compared to the year before.
Schlumberger announced Friday that it lost $3.7 billion during the second quarter and would cut more than a fifth of its 105,000-person workforce in response to the dramatic dive that oil prices took amid the Covid-19 outbreak and still haven’t fully recovered from.
The big oil majors are expected to report severe losses of the same scale as the three months leading up to July — the worst the industry had experienced in decades thanks to the economic lockdowns caused by the pandemic. Exxon, for its part, warned earlier this month that it would likely report its second straight quarterly loss as oil demand tanked.
Oil companies‘ CEOs have been warning that the only way for their industry — and others — to stage solid recoveries is if the coronavirus pandemic comes under heel. So far the federal response to the outbreak has been less than solid, however, meaning that the industry’s pain, while now perhaps less than it had been in previous months, will still last awhile.
Source: POLITICO