The final months of 2020 were a tough end to a tough year, according to BP’s chief executive. But Bernard Looney’s verdict on the worst financial year in the industry’s history is a devastating understatement. It was a period marked by thousands of job cuts, battered dividend policies and record multibillion-dollar losses.
The crushing decline of the oil industry during the Covid-19 pandemic may be unprecedented, but it is also a foreseeable outcome for fossil fuel producers in the years ahead. The race to create clean-burning biofuels and hydrogen to propel aircraft and seaborne tankers is gaining pace. At the same time, electric vehicles are accelerating into the mainstream.
A green transport future is arriving faster than even the most optimistic environmentalists had hoped, and fossil fuel executives had feared.