By America Hernandez
(Reuters) -TotalEnergies will cut its annual capital expenditure by $1 billion, it said on Monday, as the French oil major sought to soothe investor fears over slow asset sales and rising debt at a meeting with investors in New York.
The reduction in capex, to around $15–17 billion annually between 2027 and 2030, is part of a drive to save $7.5 billion, it said in a statement. The group also said last week it plans to reduce quarterly buybacks as it adapts to lower oil prices.
“We can do the same growth but with less capex and opex,” CEO Patrick Pouyanne told investors.
Shares fell about 2% in European afternoon trading.
SOLAR SALE IS ONE OF SEVERAL
Earlier on Monday, Total said it would raise $950 million from the sale of a stake in a U.S. solar portfolio. As other energy majors reduce renewables spending, Total has bucked the trend by continuing to build wind and solar projects, then selling minority stakes to raise cash that it invests in natural gas assets to grow its portfolio as global demand rises.
Under the solar deal, investment company KKR will take 50% of six utility-scale solar assets and 41 distributed generation assets, mostly in the United States. Total will keep the remaining half of the 1.4-gigawatt portfolio, with an enterprise value of $1.25 billion.
Pouyanne has said the solar sale is one of several meant to raise $3.5 billion by year-end, to offset more than $3 billion in acquisitions that have contributed to a more than doubling of Total’s debt in the first six months of 2025.
The French major also announced on Monday it would purchase a 49% stake in Continental Resources’ upstream gas fields in the U.S. state of Oklahoma, for an undisclosed sum.
STRUGGLE TO SELL ASSETS
Last week TotalEnergies sold an oilfield stake to Shell for $510 million, but two other deals are in jeopardy.
An $860 million divestment of Nigerian oil assets fell through last week as buyer Chappal Energies failed to raise enough money.
In July, the sale of Total’s West of Shetland gas assets in Britain for an undisclosed sum also fell apart, after would-be buyer Prax Group went bankrupt.
Total’s gearing – a measure of net debt to equity – has leapt to 18% from about 8% in the first six months of this year. That figure rises to 28% when including $8.9 billion in leases and 9.75 billion euros ($11.37 billion) of hybrid debt. Quarterly earnings hit a four-year-low this summer.
Analysts at RBC described the changes announced on Monday as modest, adding that Total may find it a challenge to keep gearing below 20% unless commodity prices stay close to current levels.
Brent crude is trading below $70 per barrel, a 40% drop since 2022 when Total initiated its $8 billion annual buyback scheme.
(Reporting by Alessandro Parodi in Gdasnk, America Hernandez in Paris and Shadia Nasralla in London; Editing by Matt Scuffham and Barbara Lewis)
