Oil prices are up, gas prices are up—and so are the pay packets for shale’s top earning executives.

A new report from Alvarez and Marsal, a consultancy, finds that wages for executives at U.S. oil firms are largely back to pre-pandemic levels. Some executives, though far from all, were forced to take a pay cut as the sector’s finances crumbled during last year’s crash.

“As the economy continued to recover and the price of oil and other commodities increased, many [exploration and production] companies have announced a return to pre-pandemic levels of compensation,” says the report, which analyzed pay at 64 of the largest exploration and production firms.

The report found that the average total CEO pay in 2021 will be $6.47 million compared to $6.7 million in 2019. However, the pay for the top 25% of earners over that time has jumped to $13.3 million in 2021 from $12.4 million in 2019, according to the report.

Executive pay will be watched closely by shale’s shareholders for any signs that the industry is slipping back into old free-spending habits after a round of pandemic-forced austerity.

The industry has come under heavy criticism from investors in recent years for lavishing rich pay packets and generous perks on its executives even as their companies racked up big losses and shareholders were hit by large drops in share prices.

Beyond the topline pay figure, among the largest shifts in industry pay has been separating CEO pay from output growth. Many investors argued that pinning CEO pay to pumping ever more crude fuelled the industry’s growth-at-all-costs business model, which undermined its finances.

The report found that 47% of companies surveyed are using production or production growth in determining executive pay, compared to more than 80% in 2019.

But some executives are now incentivized to keep spending down and dividends high. Scott Sheffield, CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, told Financial Times recently that he would make more money from dividends on shares in his own company, than in pay.

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The industry’s fortunes have turned this year as high oil prices and tight spending controls have led to bumper profits and surging equity prices. The XOP Oil and Gas Exploration and Production ETF, a fund of U.S. producers, is up around 80% so far this year after a miserable 2020, outpacing the S&P 500’s 16% rise.

The promise of continued fiscal discipline and sky-high commodity prices is luring some investors back. But institutional investors, which are under intense pressure to drop fossil fuels from their portfolios, have been slow to return.

The industry has tried to coax back some of those institutional investors with promises to tackle emissions and other ESG issues.

Part of that, the Alvarez and Marsal report points out, is increasingly linking oil executive pay to ESG metrics like emissions reductions.

Around two-thirds of companies have ESG incentives in place for executive bonuses, with most of those accounting for between 10% and 20% of overall annual pay.

This article is an excerpt of Energy Source, a twice-weekly energy newsletter from the Financial Times. 

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