Oil: BP Decimating Oil Exploration Team

In a previous blog post, I tossed out the idea that we could see an oil supply crunch sometime in 2023 - 2025 due to a lack of investment spending. I listed the following data on oil and gas investment spending from IEA (May 2020): 

2010: $425 billion 
2011: $460 
2012: $533 
2013: $540 
2014: $577 
2015: $507 
2016: $458 
2017: $470 
2018: $478 
2019: $483 
2020: $347

The IEA argued that if investment spending stayed at 2020 levels for the next 5 years, daily supply of oil would be almost 9 mb/d lower in 2025. Based on forecasts by Wood Mackenzie, it appears that 2021 is a lock to have even lower investments than 2020.

If investments stay low in the next few years, it appears that BP will be one of the corporations driving it .Reuters (Jan 24) reports:

Its geologists, engineers and scientists have been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, company sources told Reuters, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney.

. . . Looney is driving the exploration budget even lower, to around $350 to $400 million per year. That is around half of what BP spent in 2019 and a fraction of the $4.6 billion spent on exploration in 2010. 

Their $4.6 billion would only represent 1.3% of the 2020 investment spent of $347 billion worldwide spend so not exactly like the oil industry is going to miss the fact that BP is shifting strategies from oil to climate change energy. Yet, if other Big Oil corporations head in this same direction, it'll just make it all the tougher to get oil investments back to a level that IEA feels won't result in a dramatic drop in oil production.