The majors are refusing to loosen their purse strings while the outlook for crude prices remains uncertain. Most expect their capital expenditure (capex) to come in below previous guidance this year. And all of them maintain conservative oil price planning assumptions for 2017. “We are planning on a $50/bl oil price next year,” Shell's chief financial officer, Simon Henry, says. “And we are building the portfolio to be robust at anything above $50/bl.” Shell has set an organic capex budget of $25bn for 2017, $4bn lower than this year and at the bottom end of the $25bn-30bn range that it outlined in June. “The reduction is all in the upstream. A lot of it is driven by the fact that we are finishing projects,” Henry says. “Each of the projects not only delivers new cash generation, but we stop spending capex on them.”
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