ExxonMobil at Barclays Conference: Strategic Growth and Emission Reduction

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) presented its strategic plans at the Barclays 39th Annual CEO Energy-Power Conference 2025. The company, led by Jack Williams, outlined ambitious goals for growth and emission reduction, balancing positive earnings projections with the challenges of integrating new technologies and acquisitions.

Key Takeaways

• ExxonMobil projects a 10% annual earnings growth through 2030, with a $20 billion increase in earnings and $30 billion in operating cash flow.
• The company emphasizes organic growth, supported by technology and scale, aiming for an 18% annual return for shareholders.
• Cost reductions of $13 billion have been achieved, with a target of $18 billion by 2030.
• ExxonMobil is investing in carbon capture and sequestration, with significant growth expected from the U.S. Gulf Coast system.
• The company remains committed to shareholder returns via dividends and share buybacks.

Financial Results

• ExxonMobil expects a 10% annual earnings growth, leading to $20 billion in earnings growth by 2030.
• Operating cash flow is projected to grow by $30 billion in the same period.
• Shareholders are anticipated to receive an 18% annual return, combining earnings growth, a dividend yield of over 3.5%, and share buybacks.
• The company is currently repurchasing shares at a rate of $20 billion per year, with plans to continue this pace.

Operational Updates

• In the Permian Basin, ExxonMobil is running over 30 rigs and aims to double resource recovery through technological advancements.
• Guyana’s resource is estimated at 11 billion oil equivalent barrels, with 700 million barrels produced so far.
• Downstream projects include a steam cracker in China and a resid upgrade in Singapore.
• New product lines, Proxima and Carbon Materials, are expected to contribute significantly by the mid-2030s.

Future Outlook

• ExxonMobil is focused on meeting global energy needs while reducing emissions, leveraging technology to enhance resource recovery.
• Long-term growth is targeted through investments in LNG in Mozambique and Papua New Guinea, and new product lines.
• The energy outlook suggests oil and gas will remain over 50% of the energy mix by 2050, with oil demand expected to flatten.

Q&A Highlights

• The company’s M&A strategy remains consistent, with the successful integration of Pioneer highlighting potential value creation.
• Technology integration, including AI, is enhancing drilling, seismic processing, and supply chain optimization.
• ExxonMobil is confident in sustaining profitable growth through structural cost reductions and strategic investments.

ExxonMobil’s comprehensive strategy for growth and emission reduction positions it for continued success. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Barclays 39th Annual CEO Energy-Power Conference 2025:

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Good morning. My name is Betty Jiang. I cover The U. S. Integrated and E and P space.

I just want to welcome everyone to Day two of the Barclays thirty ninth Energy and Power Conference. I am delighted to have Jack Williams for ExxonMobil to be our next speaker. Jack, you have been with Exxon for over thirty eight years. And during that time, I’m sure you have seen how the company have evolved. And as we were talking last night, the company is more laser focused on cash flow growth than ever before.

So with that, I will have you start with some prepared remarks and Great. Then I’ll go into Q and Thanks,

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Betty. Appreciate it. Really good to be here with all of you all today and spend a few minutes talking about our company. I’m looking forward to it. Cautionary statement here, I’ll be making some forward looking statements during our session.

Just a few slides real quick. I’m only going to take a few minutes and let Betty have some questions. But just a little introduction ExxonMobil and what we’re about and what we’re focused on right now. Starting with the AND equation that you’ve most likely heard us talk about before, which is producing the energy the world needs and also reducing emissions at the same time. And we just published our new global outlook.

It’s on our website, if you’re interested. And it kind of doubles down on that NAND equation and makes the point makes the case for both needs. The world does continue to need a lot more energy as we look out to 2050 and we are not meeting our climate aspirations. So we need more emissions reduction as well. Looking to ExxonMobil and our opportunity slate, it’s really in my time with the company, I’ve never seen an opportunity slate like we have today.

Very, very deep, long pipeline. We’ll talk some about have The Street plans out to 02/1930, lined out in terms of earnings and cash flow growth, but even beyond 02/1930, we have a lot of opportunities, all based on these competitive advantages and capabilities that we have as a corporation that we’ve been really focused on making sure that we’re leveraging to the fullest. As I said in 02/1930, firm plans looking at 10% annual earnings growth, dollars 20,000,000,000 of earnings growth over that time period, 30,000,000,000 of operating cash flow growth over that time period and then again, setting ourselves up for continued growth beyond 02/1930. And we like to think we have a pretty good track record in terms of delivering on that. Over the last five to seven years, we came out in 2017, 2018, ’19 period, talked about a lot of investments.

Those have kind of manifested themselves and we’ve seen a lot of cash flow growth and earnings growth over the past number of years, five year leading TSR on the basis of that. And the result is a lot of startups that have already happened and then some that are coming up and starting up this year as we speak. On the right hand side is a list of the 10 start ups that we have planned for this year and I’m pleased to say seven of them already in start up operations right now and the other ones are all on track. So a lot of growth coming this year in total of these projects that’d be $3,000,000,000 of earnings capacity that we’d see in 2026. And what that generates, that’s kind of a good down payment, if you will, on our 2,030 story that you see on the left hand side of the chart.

And that’s just we’re showing the consensus for our growth out to 2030 and our competitors, and you can see the leadership position that we have. If you think about share in ExxonMobil and the benefits, what I’ve been talking about is this 10% earnings growth after 02/1930, the organic growth that we plan to deliver and have, again, concrete plans in place, some of which come from those 10 projects that I showed in the last page. But we also have a dividend, a competitive dividend yield in the 3.5 plus range. And then we’ve we’re currently buying back shares at a pace of $20,000,000,000 a year this year and we’ve thought we forecast that for next year as well and that would translate into the number shown. So when you add all that up, it’s an 18% annual return expected between now and 02/1930.

So an exciting we think a very exciting future for the near term and then long term beyond that as we think about beyond this 2030 time period, we have a lot of LNG investments, we have a lot of new technology coming on. So So we have a lot of visibility beyond 2030 as well. So with that, Betty, I’ll turn it back over to you, and we can talk about a few questions.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Great. Thank you for that. So maybe starting with the global energy outlook, which you mentioned you guys just put out. Over since last year, we have seen more macro volatility, more geopolitical tension. And then the top of the drawer is AI, where we need more and more electricity demand.

How is Exxon’s energy outlook incorporating some of these changing dynamics? And along that line, I know Exxon plans very long term. So is there any implication on your planning focus areas?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes. So the energy outlook, which we now call the global outlook, because we go beyond just energy, we talk about emissions as well. There’s not a tremendous amount of change year on year. We if we look at that, you see oil demand flattening and people talk about a peak. We don’t really see a sharp peak.

We see more of a flattening. But as you look out to 02/1950, oil and gas are still over 50% of the energy mix. And we’ve talked about you’ve heard time and time again talking about depletion mechanisms and how much you have to invest just to stay flat. So that to continue to grow a little bit beyond that, it takes a lot of investment, continued investment in oil and gas. As we think about the you think about 1,500,000,000 more people on the planet by 2,050, 25% energy growth supporting a doubling of GDP and importantly, growing living standards in the developing world.

And one of the stats that we talk about in the Global Outlook this year that I find quite sobering is that if you think about kind of meeting basic human needs, you’re talking about utilizing about 50 MBTU a day of energy per capita. The developed world is triple that. But there’s half the world that doesn’t meet that 50 MPDU threshold, half the world that doesn’t have enough energy to meet basic living standards. So a long way to go, a lot of energy use in terms of raising up people’s quality of life and in terms of meeting that economic growth and more people on the planet after 02/1950. So clearly, a case to be made for more energy.

And then as I said, we’re not meeting our mission’s goals and we have some thoughts on how better to do that, but we definitely need to make more progress on that area as well. And so that is the basis of our long term plans. That’s what we’re looking at and that’s why we’re continuing to invest heavily in oil and gas, but also continuing to invest in lower emissions technologies as well.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: And we definitely need Exxon to be doing all of that. Maybe pivoting more to the company level, the M and A has been a big topic. And do you think that over the last quarter, probably more explicitly last quarter, the Exxon is taking more of a proactive stance on M and A and that you are seeing opportunities across business units or business segments. My question is what’s driving that view? Do you think there is a widening value gap between what Exxon can do versus the rest of market?

Or is it more driven by the macro volatility that’s creating these opportunities?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes, it’s a good question, Betty, and it has been a topic as of late. And just to clarify, nothing’s fundamentally changed about how we’re approaching M and A and thinking about M and A. I would say, one development is that we’re very proud of the Pioneer merger acquisition. We thought that went very, very well. We continue to increase our synergy expectations as a result of that.

The Pioneer employees coming into organizations are working out really, really well, a welcome addition, bringing in a lot of capability. So we’re very pleased with that acquisition. And so some of the comments are just reflecting the fact that we’re really, really pleased with where we are with that. But when you you kind of hit on it, Betty, when you think about it, fundamentally, for value to be created in an acquisition, to bid to bring more get more value out of the businesses and assets than the current owner is currently getting. And when you think about these competitive advantages, capabilities that we’ve been building up, scale and technology and integration, execution excellence and everything our people are bringing and the deep capabilities with these central organizations that we have in project management and technology and operations and supply chain and trading, we do feel like we can bring a lot of additional value in assets.

So when you we’ve been really, really focused in the last decade or so on building up these capabilities. And when we think about assets out there, we think we can we have a array of possibilities because of what we could bring, the value that we can bring to these assets. And so the only thing we’re saying is that we have a lot of organic. I showed you those 10 start ups. We have a lot of organic opportunities, continued growth in the Permian Basin through beyond 02/1930, running over 30 rigs there and bringing a lot of technology there.

The Guyana development and our fourth FPSO out there and more coming on. And then on the Product Solutions side, we’ve bought a big steam cracker in China, the big Singapore is an upgrade project. We’re looking at more U. S. Gulf Coast upgrades.

We have more technology and new product lines with Proxima and Carbon Materials. So we have a lot of organic and that’s fundamentally what we’re building our plans on is all organic opportunities. And as I said earlier, we have a very, very good slate of those. However, we’re just acknowledging there’s another tool in the toolbox that is acquisitions. And when you can bring more value and you can bring more value out of assets and businesses in the current owner, that’s open for us as well.

And that’s really the only thing. But fundamentally, nothing’s really changed other than the fact that we’re very pleased about the Pioneer transaction.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Right. We do hear a lot about the upstream. But I guess, from the value creation standpoint, it’s across upstream and downstream. So when you think about the portfolio, do you want to lean more? Or is there a balance between upstream and downstream chemicals areas?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes. It’s a good question. The and of course, I’ve been on both sides because I spent a large part of my career in the upstream early on in the last eleven years on the management committee, eight or nine of those have really been more on the product solutions side, the chemicals and downstream side. And we don’t have a formula on how much downstream, how much chemicals, how much upstream. And if you look over our history, it’s varied quite a bit over time.

And but we do want to make sure that we are we have businesses that we are we have advantages in, that we have fundamental advantages and we’re continuing to invest in and grow. And whether those are across whether those are in chemicals, whether those are downstream, whether those are upstream, we’re going where the best opportunities are. But when we do find where there’s a business where we’re not able to continue to invest, then that would be something we’d look divesting. And a good example of that would be the Saniprene business in our chemicals portfolio that we invested several years ago. It was a good business.

But the problem was we needed to keep investing in R and D and that to keep it developing and the opportunities just weren’t competitive with the rest of our slate. So we ended up divesting that asset. And so that’s what we’re continuing to look at is keeping that mix fresh and making sure that we really have competitive advantages in all the businesses that we’re choosing to continue to participate in and then making those investments and fulfilling those advantages. So it would not surprise me to see between upstream, downstream chemicals that changing over time and that’s perfectly fine.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Great. Maybe doubling down the upstream story a bit. You highlighted the synergies with Pioneer. It was a big claim when Exxon said you think you can double resource recovery in the Permian. And there’s a lot of question around how do we get there?

What is Exxon seeing? What do you think the market or the industry is underappreciating from Exxon’s technology edge over the peers?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes. It’s really it is a pretty aspirational goal. I will readily admit that. I think we all readily admit that. And Darren will readily admit that, who gave us gave the challenge to the organization.

And but so we’ve absorbed the goal and aspiration. And as usual, when we have clear marching orders on what we want to go do, we get after it and start working on it. And we’ve been working on it for a number of years. This is not a new aspiration. It’s been around for six, seven, eight years that we’ve been working on it.

And we’re kind of steadily adding to the technology portfolio. We talked a lot about lightweight proppant and what a great example of leveraging the full corporation in terms of that additional recovery mechanism. But we have we’re spending $1,000,000,000 a year in R and D and we have one of the big things when we formed these central organizations in the corporation was we formed one technology organization. We had our talents technology talents divided amongst several different technology organizations, brought all that together to where we could really put a corporate prioritization easily put a corporate prioritization on the portfolio. And we put more focus on how can we we have this massive unconventional resource base.

How can we get more out? Because if you take a 7% recovery to 8%, 9%, 10%, much less than we can take it to 14%, that’s big additions. Small incremental change on what’s a very low recovery on a very big resource, a lot of oil in place gives you a lot more resource. So we think we thought it’s definitely worthwhile to be spending a lot of our resources working on that. And so when you think about the double recovery, we don’t have a silver bullet.

We’re not saying we have this one technology that’s going to double recovery. But we have last we reviewed, I saw, call it, a couple of dozen different technologies that we’re working on that we think collectively certainly has a potential to double recovery. Now will all those work out as we hope? Probably not. But when you look on a risk basis, it’s substantial and what we think we can deliver.

And I can’t talk about all the individual ones today, there’s just a lot of things we’re working on in addition lightweight proppant, I think, was something that people didn’t see coming in terms of using Petcoke in that mechanism. But we had some of our quite frankly, our folks that were downstream researchers kind of connect the dots there. So it’s a really good example of integration and we’re continuing to bring those types of ideas to this resource. So still ways to go and we recognize it’s an aspirational goal, but we think we’ve got a lot of opportunity there.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Expect to see continued steady improvement from here. So in contrast, though, I’ll say, the Guyana resource has been kept at 11,000,000,000 barrels for a while. And Newham market think that number is too conservative. And then despite the technology innovation, four d seismic infill drilling. So can you just speak to the conservatism there?

Or what’s the upside could we see from the gas Sure.

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Well, first thing I’d like to say is 11,000,000,000 barrels is a lot of oil. That’s a lot of resource. So we’re quite proud of $11,000,000,000 oil equivalent barrel resource in Guyana. And to put that in perspective, we produced about 700,000,000 to date. So a long way to go in Guyana to recover that 11.

And so we’re kind of simultaneously focused on, number one, getting good economical development plans in place to produce the full 11,000,000,000 barrels of resource that we see, which certainly goes beyond the developments that we have in place now that we’ve announced. And then also looking to continue to explore and add on to that. So unlike the Permian, the recovery got our conventional reservoirs and the recovery rates are much higher in the base case. So this is really about exploration. This is really about finding more.

And we have most of the resource in the Stabroek Block is focused that we’re developing is focused on the Southeast portion of it. So there’s still exploration running room out to the West and Northwest that we have yet to really fully exploit. But we feel like we have we don’t feel like we do have fiduciary responsibility to update the 11,000,000,000 barrels if we have any updates. And so we will and we have not to date. And it’s not for lack of trying.

So we’re continuing to work on that. We’re continuing to, again, optimize the 11,000,000,000 know we have and make sure we can most economically extract that 11 being equivalent barrels and then also look to continue to add to it. So we’re not done exploring on that block and we’ll continue to work on it. But right now 11 being equivalent barrels is the best number we have for our resource system in Guyana, and we’re quite proud of it. It’s a big number.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: It’s a big number. And it’s not just about the resource step, but it’s also about execution. It’s quite impressive that how consistently Project is able to bring online under budget ahead of schedule. So the execution has been really great. Can you speak to what organizationally has changed or that’s enabling that type of track record and AI integration with what you’re seeing with the advancement there, how are you integrating that to enable you to do even better?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes. I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about projects. Because on the I have product solutions reporting to me. I also have global projects reporting to me and supply chain. And so I’ve been around the projects business for quite a while.

And we formed this Global Projects organization back in 2018. Before that, we had a couple of different project organizations. And boy, have we seen the advantages of that. It’s been really differentiating in terms of the ability to take on these big projects and be able to execute them consistently, deliver big projects on time, on budget. And it’s been it’s one thing to have these great opportunities, it’s the other thing to actually deliver them.

And we’ve been able to do both, I think largely because we have a very, very capable and very differentiated, unique lower projects organization that could take on these big things. I mean, were building these big boats in Guyana and building a world class steam cracker in China and this big resid upgrade project in Singapore and multiple other projects all simultaneously. So not many companies have the capability to do that many big projects and successfully, and we think it’s providing a tremendous amount of advantage. So very happy we have that organization. I think it’s a great example of leveraging the scale of the corporation, putting all that capability in one organization and letting them execute all the projects on behalf of the whole organization.

And we’re like I said, we’re seeing tremendous benefits from that. One thing they’ve done in terms of AI is we’ve and we’ve had this for many, many years, a knowledge management database. We’re putting all the lessons learned from all the projects we’re executing, big and small, all of them in one large database. And we’ve been doing that for a number of years, well before people were talking about AI. And leveraging that data, AI would allow us to leverage that even more.

So we’re kind of set up. I mean, a lot of as you know, a lot of the advantage of AI is to determine how good your data set, how good is the data that AI model is learning from. And we have some great data that’s built on the world’s largest project database. And so we’re very optimistic that’s going to make a big difference longer term. It just could make us that much more productive and that much better in terms of making sure that we’re leveraging every single lesson, every single bit we’ve learned in the past and bring that to every single project we do.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Do you think AI integration can be transformative?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: I think so. I mean, think it’s very early innings of AI. The way we’re approaching it is we have a technology organization and in the technology organization is our information technology organization or IT organization. And so we’ve put all that in one organization looking enterprise wide. And so we’re focused more on kind of the effectiveness abilities of AI, not necessarily the efficiencies and being pretty focused and disciplined on how we’re on the big things we’re looking at.

But Olivier was up here earlier talking about drilling. I think there’s big opportunities in drilling. We’re certainly looking at that. We’re looking at exploration, seismic processing, those kinds of things, supply chain optimization. So we have a half a dozen or so things where we’re looking at enterprise wide, where we think we can make the kind of first entrees.

But longer term, you have to think it’s going to make a big difference in terms of the productivity.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Great. In your prepared remarks, you mentioned it’s not just the next five years, but it’s Exxon that’s also looking into the 2030s. A big differentiation is the capital you’re allocating for the next generation of projects. Can you talk through the project selection process? And where do you see the best opportunity that differentiates Exxon beyond 2030s?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes. I can, Betty. And one of the things about that is that the timeframes that we’re dealing with are incredibly long. And so you’ve got a project like Mozambique, it’s been out there for a number of years, been working on it for a number of years optimizing and got lots of partners, lots of deals. But it is a huge resource in a very geographically advantageous area for LNG and technology in the markets.

And that is one where We recognize there’s a long road ahead. We’ve got still got a lot of work to do, but that would be one we’d be bringing on post 02/1930, should it go forward and we have every expectation and hope that it will. Another LNG project is Papua in Papua New Guinea that would also be a post 2030 startup. And again, those both of these projects that we’ve been working on for a number of years, it just takes a number of years to work through all the issues and get to the final startup on these big projects. So on the upstream side, I think you also got continued growth in the Permian based on technology and based on that increased recovery we talked about.

And then there’ll be some further Guyana development post 2030 as well, we certainly hope. So we got a lot to work on the upstream. And then you look at the Product Solutions side post 02/1930. I really think these new products we’re talking about recently, Proxima and our battery anode, the graphite that go into lithium ion batteries, it’s going to increase the battery charging by 30%, the capacity by 30%, can make a big difference. So those two combined should be material earnings in the mid-2030s, A little bit of earnings before 2030s, but really kind of moving in.

And by the end of the latter half of the 2030s, those two combined, Proxima and the Carbon Materials venture combined could be the same size as Energy Products is today, our big fuels is today. And these would be kind of units that would be in the refining parts of our integrated manufacturing facilities. They’d be units in those facilities later on. And so big opportunities there and it’s a really good example of leveraging the technology organization and being able to connect dots that others can’t connect. So Proxima would be the feed stream for Proxima would be an element that goes into gasoline today.

Connecting back to our global outlook, we do see oil we do see gasoline demand declining in the latter half of the outlook, so about 25% lower in 2050 than it is today. Now that does not translate into oil demand because oil goes into a of things other than gasoline. But we’d be pulling molecules out of that stream and putting them into a completely different use, into automotive light weighting of automotive deals, infrastructure, coatings and wind turbine blades. So we’re taking gasoline molecules and turning them into wind turbine blades. So it’s very perspective there.

And I think those are just by the 2030s, I would expect that this carbon materials venture is going to spin out some other things as well because we’re continuing to do research there. So it’s just basically our view is the world’s going to be long carbon. What can we do with that carbon? We have a lot of carbon through our manufacturing facilities and how can we capture that and utilize that in other ways. And our teams have a lot of really clever ideas, two of which we’re monetizing now and others which we’re continuing to work on.

So a lot going on in the 2030s. One thing we didn’t talk about, Betty, is a low carbon solution space and CCS. So CCS and this U. S. Gulf Coast end to end carbon capture and sequestration system that we have in place is going to be continuing to grow throughout that whole time period and generating stable cash flows and good earnings.

So that would be another contributor as well.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: Yes. Truly believe in the CCS potential from Exxon just given the infrastructure you have on the Gulf Coast. Maybe putting that all together, profitable growth is a big mantra for Exxon, dollars 20,000,000,000 earnings growth, 30,000,000,000 cash growth by 02/1930. Do you how high is the confidence for you to sustain that level of being able to through cycle returns and the sustainability of that cash flow beyond 02/1930?

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Yes. We have pretty good confidence based on all the advantages we talked about earlier. And it’s in that vein that we also throw in M and A as well a potential opportunity. And when you talk about long term growth and so forth, we just mentioned that that’s another opportunity we have. But the plans we have are generating a lot of cash flow growth.

And one additional tailwind, I haven’t mentioned either that I need to is the structural cost reductions that we’ve been generating. So when you’re generating top line revenue growth and you’re generating operating cost reduction simultaneously, that’s a fantastic it’s the rubber band deal on the margin. That’s a fantastic tailwind for generating earnings growth and we’re doing both. We’re doing both simultaneously. We generated $13,000,000,000 of structural cost reductions to date on the pathway to $18,000,000,000 by 02/1930.

And so that’s another real help there. But we’re continuing to and so we’re going to exit 2030 having generated a lot of operating cash flow, a lot of free cash flow, but also with a strong pipeline of investments underway to generate earnings beyond that as well. So to us, it’s around continuing to invest based on the strengths we have, continuing to reward our shareholders with dividends and to the extent possible share buybacks as well, continuing to focus on the cost side of the equation as well. And we think that’s a winning formula for success long term.

Betty Jiang, Analyst, Barclays: And that’s a very strong position. And we’ll end it there. But thank you so much, Jack,

Jack Williams, ExxonMobil: Thank for the you, all.

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