Energy Majors Exit Russia: BP, Shell, Total, Exxon & Equinor Write-Offs

The Great Exit of 2022

The speed of the corporate retreat from Russia was unprecedented. BP fired the starting gun on 27 February 2022, announcing it would offload its roughly 20% stake in state oil champion Rosneft — a relationship that had defined BP's Russia strategy for more than a decade. Equinor and Shell followed within days, and ExxonMobil confirmed it would exit the Sakhalin-1 project.

For an industry built on multi-decade reserve commitments, walking away from billions in producing assets was extraordinary. But the reputational, legal and sanctions risk of staying had become, in Equinor's words, "untenable." The charges that followed were among the largest single-event impairments in the sector's history.

Who Wrote Off What

⚠ Figures are approximate, rounded, and based on company filings and news tallies (Interfax sector total; BP 6-K filing). Charges were spread across multiple quarters of 2022. Not investment advice.

BP, Exxon and the Biggest Charges

BP's exit produced the largest headline number. Its first-quarter 2022 results carried a net pre-tax charge of roughly $24 billion, of which about $13.5 billion represented the full carrying value of the Rosneft investment and the balance covered foreign-exchange and other related items. The decision wiped BP's equity-method income from Rosneft off future statements at a stroke.

ExxonMobil's charge was smaller in dollar terms — about $4.6 billion against its 30% operator stake in Sakhalin-1 — but politically charged, because Russia subsequently moved by decree to transfer the project to a new domestic operator, effectively expropriating foreign holders. Exxon's case became a textbook example of how stranded Russian assets could not simply be sold for cash.

TotalEnergies, the Laggard

France's TotalEnergies wrote off roughly $14.8 billion across 2022, the second-largest charge after BP, tied principally to its stake in listed Russian gas producer Novatek and to the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 development. The charges were recognized in stages: an Arctic LNG 2 impairment early in the year, then successive write-downs on the Novatek holding as sanctions bit and the company eventually deconsolidated the stake.

Unlike BP and Shell, Total did not announce a clean break. It kept its Novatek shareholding longer, continued some LNG-related activity, and argued that maintaining gas flows served European energy security. Campaigners and some French politicians criticized the stance as too slow, making Total the most scrutinized of the Western majors on Russia.

Why Share Prices Held Up

For all the eye-watering numbers, the Russia write-offs did not crash the majors' valuations. The charges were overwhelmingly non-cash impairments — accounting reductions to the book value of stranded assets — rather than money flowing out the door. At the same time, the 2022 energy-price shock drove crude and gas to multi-year highs, lifting the majors' underlying earnings to record levels.

The net effect was that headline annual profits remained strong even after the impairments, and most major share prices rose over 2022 rather than fell. In market-capitalization terms the Russia exit was a balance-sheet event, not a valuation collapse — a sharp contrast to Gazprom on the other side of the trade, whose loss of the European market hammered both its earnings and its market value.

Aftermath and Recovery Hopes

Years on, the exits remain largely irreversible. Stakes that were impaired in 2022 — BP's Rosneft holding, Exxon's Sakhalin-1 interest, Total's Novatek shares — were either frozen, sold at deep discounts to Russian buyers, or seized. Periodic reports of preliminary talks to recoup some value have surfaced, but no broad cash recovery has materialized, and any future return would depend on a sanctions-relief scenario that does not currently exist.

The episode reshaped how the sector prices political risk. Long-life reserves in adversarial jurisdictions now carry a visible discount, and boards weigh stranding risk far more heavily than before 2022. For the majors, the lesson of the Russia write-offs was less about the dollars lost in one year than about the durability of assets in a country that could turn hostile overnight.