On Thursday, some quarterly figures from the oil majors started coming in – and they are mostly negative. Royal Dutch Shell reported a staggering $18 billion quarterly loss, made worse by a $16.8 billion write-down on a range of its assets. The huge loss came after earning $3 billion in the second quarter of 2019 and reporting a profit of $2.7 billion in the first quarter of this year. When excluding the write-down and other one-off items, Shell eked out a net profit of $638 million. The $16.8 billion write-down was expected, and even came in at the lower end of the range it offered in June. Even so, the number is stunning, with impairments related to LNG, lower crude oil prices and lower refining margins. The company’s gearing ratio – a ratio of net debt-to-capital – rose to 32.7 percent, up from 28.9 percent at the end of […]