Energy Majors: US Supermajors vs FTSE Oil Giants

When oil slid back towards 60 dollars a barrel earlier this year, it exposed just how differently the world’s biggest oil companies now run their capital‑return machines. U.S. supermajors largely kept buybacks steady. Their FTSE‑listed peers quietly reached for the dial.

OilPrice reports that with Brent around 60–70 dollars, ExxonMobil and Chevron chose not to cut share repurchases when they released Q4 2025 results, reiterating their planned pace of buybacks through 2026 “assuming reasonable market conditions". In contrast, European majors signalled a willingness – and in some cases a need – to trim shareholder returns. TotalEnergies guided a reduction in buybacks to 750 million–1.5 billion dollars per quarter in 2026, down from 2 billion previously. Analysts cited by the Financial Times expect BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Equinor and Eni to cut buybacks by 10–25%, with UBS projecting an average 25% reduction across the group and HSBC seeing Equinor slashing annual repurchases from 5 billion dollars in 2025 to 2 billion in 2026.

Shell sits at the centre of this shift. An Argus interview with the company’s CFO last year highlighted that Shell can maintain its pledge to return 40–50% of cash flow to shareholders even in a sub‑50‑dollar environment by flexing capex and costs, with a $20–22 billion capex budget that can be pulled back if needed. By Q1 2026, Shell had trimmed its quarterly buyback from 3.5 to 3.0 billion dollars while simultaneously raising its dividend 5% to $0.3906 per share and mounting a $16.4 billion bid for Canada’s ARC Resources. A recent LinkedIn analysis notes that both Exxon and Chevron maintained buybacks and dividends in Q4 despite price pressure, while BP and TotalEnergies reduced buybacks and focused on debt paydown.

Behind these choices sit different approaches to the energy transition and policy risk. U.S. majors have leaned harder into shareholder yield and disciplined hydrocarbon investment, with relatively slower diversification into low‑carbon assets and less direct EU climate-policy pressure. European and UK-listed groups, including the FTSE oil giants, face more explicit decarbonisation expectations from regulators and investors, pushing them to balance cash returns with capex on renewables, gas and low-carbon businesses. Global Witness points out that BP, Shell and TotalEnergies still generated “surging” profits in Q1 2026 and paid a combined 10 billion dollars to shareholders since the Iran war began, even as environmental groups attack those returns as "obscene".

For investors, this leaves a clear trade‑off in 2026. U.S. supermajors offer more stable buyback trajectories and a purer upstream/downstream earnings mix, but they carry higher long‑term transition risk if policy tightens faster than expected. FTSE‑listed oil giants offer slightly higher policy and execution risk around the transition and buyback flexibility, but their willingness to pull levers on capex and capital returns may give them more room to adapt if oil prices stay volatile and regulatory demands intensify.