PARIS (Reuters) – TotalEnergies announced on Wednesday its intention to continue its share buybacks by maintaining them in 2025 at a level of two billion dollars per quarter while the group revised upwards its growth prospects in hydrocarbons.
The oil and gas company, also very present in renewable energies, added during an investor day organized in New York that it planned to increase its dividend by at least 5% next year taking into account of its share repurchases amounting to $8 billion carried out in 2024.
The return to its shareholders should therefore exceed 45% of its cash flow (operating cash flow or CFFO) in 2024, compared to 46% in 2023.
Thanks to the launch of six major projects this year – in Brazil, Suriname, Angola, Oman and Nigeria – TotalEnergies now expects production growth of around 3% per year in hydrocarbons by 2030, mainly in liquefied natural gas (LNG), instead of 2% to 3% per year over the period 2023-2028 previously.
The group specified that this growth would be greater than 3% in 2025 and 2026 thanks to the start of several high-margin projects (Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Iraq, Uganda, Argentina, Malaysia, Qatar).
It also underlined having “de-risked” in 2024 the exposure of its LNG sales portfolio to spot prices by signing long-term contracts, mainly indexed to Brent, while strengthening its upstream gas integration in the United States thanks to two acquisitions of low-cost assets.
TotalEnergies also confirmed that its electricity production would exceed 100 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2030, 70% of which would be based on renewable energies, which would represent nearly 20% of its energy production by this horizon.
The group continues to target net investments of between 16 billion and 18 billion dollars per year over the period 2025-2030, of which around five billion will be devoted to “low-carbon energies”, while emphasizing that it has the possibility of reduce them by two billion “in the event of a sharp drop in prices”.
“Thanks to this clear and disciplined investment policy” and an anticipated growth in its free cash flow of $10 billion by 2030, its board confirmed its policy of returning more than 40% of cash to shareholders. flow “through the cycles”.
On the Paris Stock Exchange, TotalEnergies shares gained nearly 3% at 1:20 p.m. GMT in a context of a sharp rise in crude oil prices linked to tensions in the Middle East.
(Reporting by Benjamin Mallet and America Hernandez; edited by Blandine Hénault)
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