• ExxonMobil on Friday posted a better-than-expected $9.2 billion second- quarter profit based on rising oil prices and volume gains from its purchase this year of shale oil firm Pioneer Natural Resources. Exxon delivered a $2.14 per share profit that beat analysts’ estimates on oil production and pricing gains that offset refining weakness.
• A U.S. circuit court this week sided with a Louisiana rubber manufacturer and the state in denying a request from the Environmental Protection Agency to hold the facility to a tighter deadline to comply with limits on a toxic compound.
• General Motors is changing the way it rates the performance of its salaried employees in the U.S. in a move to better reward high-performers and put pressure on low-performers to improve or leave.
• Chevron Corp. is relocating headquarters to Houston from California after repeatedly warning that the Golden State’s regulatory regime was making it a tough place to do business. The move announced Friday will end the company’s more than 140 years of being based in the largest contiguous U.S. state.
• Some leading U.S. shale producers are planning to pump more oil this year than originally projected, a sign national supply could exceed the modest growth expectations many companies had pledged.
• Shares in U.S. oil producer Hess suffered their largest daily percentage drop in 20 months on Thursday on fallout from the lengthy new delay to its proposed sale to Chevron.
• Occidental Petroleum said Colombia’s Ecopetrol will not buy a stake in shale oil producer CrownRock after the U.S. company said last month they were in talks for a potential stake sale. Last year, Occidental agreed to buy the closely held, Texas-based company, CrownRock, in a $12 billion cash-andstock deal that closed on Thursday.
• Washington state launches a rebate program for low-income residents to lease or purchase electric vehicles. World
• So far this year in the EU, wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels. Renewable energy met 50% of EU’s power needs while fossil fuels met 27%, an Ember analysis found.
• Some of the world’s biggest truckmakers, including Volvo and MAN, are reworking combustion engines to run on low-emission hydrogen instead of polluting diesel, a quicker low-cost fix to their energy transition challenge that may give the dying technology a fresh lease of life.
• Electric cars are about to get a whole lot more eco-friendly thanks to Volkswagen and its battery manufacturer PowerCo. In early July, Volkswagen Group announced PowerCo’s major agreement with Quantum-Scape, which produces solid-state batteries for EVs.
• Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Ecopetrol SA are gearing up to plumb the depths of Colombia’s Caribbean waters in search of natural gas and oil. The plan is to drill the Komodo-1 well before the year is out in seas roughly 3,900 meters (close to 13,000 feet) deep. That’s equal to about 10 Empire State Buildings.
• Albemarle Corp. is shutting half of its current processing capacity in Australia and is putting the expansion there on hold amid a deepening price slump for lithium, a key ingredient in rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles.
• In the first three months of 2024, renewable energy supplied a record- breaking 58.4% of all electricity generated in Germany. That’s the highest percentage since the country started keeping track in 2018.