French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies will award all staff a one-month salary bonus, as it looks to share record profits made through the year to Q3
The Paris-headquartered energy major reported adjusted earnings of $9.8 billion (£8.5bn) for Q3 2022, marginally surpassing its previous record of $9.7bn in the last quarter and beating analyst estimates.
The group also confirmed it paid $600million (£518.3m) in a windfall tax to the UK.
The continuation of stellar results led the group to declare an exceptional one-month-salary bonus to all global employees, including 2,353 based in the UK.
“In a context marked by an average Brent price of $100/b and an increase in gas prices exacerbated by Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine, TotalEnergies leveraged its integrated model, particularly LNG, to generate results in line with previous quarters,” noted chairman and chief executive Patrick Pouyanné.
Adjusted EBITDA rose slightly to $19.4bn (£16.8bn), while sales revenues reached just under $65bn (£56.1bn).
Mr Pouyanné also pledged to maintain the group’s shareholder return policy, targeting a 35-40% cash flow payout beginning this year. Share buybacks have so far amounted to $5 billion to the end of Q3.
It will also implement a Q3 dividend of €0.69/share, and set the ex-dividend and payment dates for the interim special dividend of €1/share in December 2022.
However, he also noted the impact of a new $3.1bn impairment related to the group’s Russian operations, adding to the $7.6 billion of impairments already booked in the first two quarters.
Following this impairment capital employed by the group in Russia stood at just over $6bn as of the end of Q3, with the group hanging on to stakes in major LNG projects and a share in Russian firm Novatek – even as other energy players jettison their local ventures.
Unplanned outages
The company’s E&P businesses posted adjusted net operating income of $4.2bn and cash flow of $6.4 billion, though production declined by 5% on Q3 2021 to around 2.67 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.
This was largely due to unplanned shutdowns at Kashagan, TotalEnergies said, while other tail offs were caused by the end of operating licenses for Qatargas 1 and Bongkot North in Thailand, and its effective withdrawal from Myanmar.
Adjusted income and cash flow for E&P also sank, “mainly due to the impact of Energy Profits Levy in the United Kingdom for $0.6 billion,” TotalEnergies said.
Both sales and production of LNG slid during the quarter too, owing to maintenance on Ichthys LNG in Australia, outages at Freeport LNG and a decrease in gas supply to NLNG in Nigeria for security reasons.
Meanwhile, the group’s clean energy portfolio increased by some 12.5GW during the period, thanks mainly to its acquisition of 50% of Clearway Energy Group in the US.
Looking ahead, TotalEnergies said it expects Q4 production to reach around 2.8 million boepd, due to a reduction in planned maintenance and the re-start of Kashagan.
It also pledged to accelerate its transformation strategy with net investments of around $16bn in 2022, one quarter of which would be in “decarbonised” energies.
