Committed to innovation, growth, integration, and efficiency.

Developing innovations

Innovating to drive our success

Technology is the foundation of ExxonMobil’s business and a key enabler to grow shareholder value. Our ongoing commitment to innovation, along with our proprietary technologies, provides a unique competitive advantage that:

• Reduces costs
• Improves efficiencies
• Creates new high-value products
• Maximizes our return on projects

Our focus on innovation is not new: For more than 135 years, we have pioneered the science that enables innovative technologies such as the lithium ion battery, high-octane gasoline, 3D seismic imaging, and many others. These transformational discoveries changed our industry and the world, helping make modern society possible.

Improving operational performance

Our research programs are improving performance by:

• Reducing costs
• Enhancing output
• Minimizing environmental impacts

For example, we have developed technologies that reduce corrosion by enabling the dehydration of natural gas inside pipes rather than in costly towers. These technologies are expected to reduce near-term offshore project costs by more than $750 million.

We also recently developed a high-manganese “super steel” for our Kearl mining operations that will likely save hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the asset.

In partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, we are exploring the use of reverse osmosis through synthetic molecular membranes to reduce the amount of energy required in our manufacturing operations.

If brought to scale, this breakthrough could reduce:

• Annual industry CO₂ emissions by a level equivalent to the annual energy-related emissions of about 5 million U.S. homes
• Global energy costs by up to $2 billion a year

Advancing energy sources and products

In the Upstream, our capabilities in subsurface definition and development are enabling us to find more oil and natural gas, and then recover more from the reservoirs we find. For example, we developed proprietary software with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications that quadruples the number of processors used to model complex oil and natural gas reservoirs, improving exploration and production results. Thanks to this innovation, we can simulate how hydrocarbons flow through the subsurface and plan where to drill new production wells in record time. Analysis that took weeks can now be completed in a single day.

Our proprietary seismic imaging technology helps us see opportunities in the subsurface that others cannot. We successfully applied this on discoveries in the Black Sea and offshore Guyana.

In the Downstream, technology is enabling us to expand our product offerings to meet today’s market demands. In Rotterdam, we are building a new, best-in-class hydrocracking unit that will use proprietary technology to create high-value, ultra-low-sulfur fuels and lube basestocks. This is just one example of our investments in new proprietary technologies - roughly $12 billion of projects that are expected to yield returns of more than 20 percent.

Our Chemical business also benefits from research and development, particularly in the area of innovative product development. We developed and commercialized a polypropylene product that enables packaging manufacturers to produce rigid packages (such as plastic food containers) that result in:

• Thinner walls, without sacrificing toughness
• Reduced package weight
• Minimized cost
• Less material usage

We are also working to identify advanced biofuels - a promising technology with the potential to increase energy supplies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We announced a breakthrough in our research with Synthetic Genomics, Inc., involving modification of an algae strain that doubled its oil content without significantly inhibiting the strain’s growth - a key milestone in potential scalability of the technology.

Investing for growth

Growing shareholder value with a world-class portfolio

ExxonMobil sees opportunity in a rapidly changing energy landscape. We are making advantaged investments across our world-class portfolio of businesses.

Our focus on leading-edge technologies, coupled with industry-leading financial capacity, has enabled us to develop our best investment portfolio in decades. These investments leverage our integrated businesses and world-class operations to capitalize on opportunities across the entire value chain.

High-impact new opportunities

In the Upstream, ExxonMobil is pursuing high-quality exploration and production projects, including:

• Guyana: We hold more than 11 million acres offshore, where we have made six discoveries to date. Additional leads have been identified, and exploration and development activities will continue throughout 2018.
• Brazil: We acquired interest in the more-than-2-billion-barrel Carcara field. We also captured 10 exploration blocks in bid round 14, including acreage with significant potential in the pre-salt play, one of the fastest-growing deepwater plays in the world. Exploration and development activities are planned to begin in 2018.
• U.S. Permian Basin: In 2017, we added nearly 275,000 net acres to our position through a series of acquisitions and acreage trades, bringing our total Permian resource base to more than 9 billion oil-equivalent barrels. Our Permian position now delivers lower-cost production, which is available as feedstock to our U.S. Gulf Coast refineries and chemical plants.

Our Upstream growth opportunities are geographically diverse and will yield attractive returns, even in a low-price environment. To achieve this, we apply industry-leading capabilities, key technologies, and proprietary practices that improve drilling performance, reduce field development costs, and deliver operational efficiencies.

Capitalizing on LNG expertise

Our global LNG position is unmatched in the industry. We have interest in 17 LNG trains around the world, with net interest capacity of 22 million tonnes annually.

We enhanced our leading LNG position with two major deals in 2017:

• InterOil Corporation acquisition. Provides access to multiple discovered fields and additional exploration acreage in Papua New Guinea. These high-quality assets, coupled with growing resource discoveries on existing acreage, provide a foundation for a low-cost, multi-train expansion of existing LNG facilities.
• Entry in deepwater Area 4 block offshore Mozambique. Contains an estimated 85 trillion gross cubic feet of natural gas in-place. This resource will support an ExxonMobil-led, multi-train LNG development, with potential capacity ultimately exceeding 40 million tonnes per year.

Extracting additional value

In the Downstream, we are investing in technology and facilities to produce higher-value products to meet the growing demand for enhanced fuels and premium lubricants. Capturing a larger share of these growing markets enables us to realize higher overall margins from our existing sites.

In 2018, two new units will begin operating:

• A coker unit at our Antwerp refinery. This will upgrade high-sulfur fuel oil into various forms of cleaner-burning diesel and distillates.
• A hydrocracking unit in Rotterdam. Using our proprietary technology, it will produce high-value, ultra-low-sulfur fuels and Group II lube basestocks.

We announced an expansion at our Singapore refinery to produce the company’s EHC Group II basestocks, which are used across a range of industries. Completion is anticipated in 2019.

We are also enhancing our ability to handle light crude from the Permian at our refineries in Baton Rouge and Baytown.

Investing to meet chemical demand

Global demand for chemicals continues to create opportunities for value growth. To meet that demand, we are investing more than $10 billion over the next five years in both new and expanded facilities on the U.S. Gulf Coast, leveraging logistically advantaged oil and natural gas to create the chemical building blocks for end products used around the world.

At our Singapore chemical complex, we are expanding capacity with our recent acquisition of Jurong Aromatics. We are starting up new facilities that will manufacture higher-performance products. These enhancements to our complex enable us to better serve the major growth market in the Asia Pacific region.

Leveraging integration

Leveraging integration to grow value across businesses

ExxonMobil’s integrated approach proves the adage, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

Our Upstream, Downstream, and Chemical businesses work together to create additional value by sharing knowledge, technology, expertise, and best practices across business lines. This collaboration leads to:

• Better-informed decisions
• More efficient operations
• Greater flexibility in responding to changing market conditions

Portfolio spans the value chain

Our U.S. operations demonstrate how integration drives value.

Upstream businesses produce oil and natural gas in the Permian and other basins.

Volumes are transported via our midstream assets to our refineries and chemical complexes along the U.S. Gulf Coast and in the Midwest.

There they are upgraded to higher-value fuels, products, and feedstocks through the fuels, lubricants, and chemical value chains.

By maximizing integration across the full value chain, we are able to capture incremental value at transfer points or when short-term market opportunities develop. We can take advantage of logistics flexibility to ensure no value is lost to third parties. Simply put, we are uniquely positioned in industry, capturing an additional $700 million of earnings per year through integration.

We also leverage our global knowledge and expertise to inform investment decisions in each business line. For example, insights from our Upstream teams helped guide expansion plans and project designs for our U.S. Gulf Coast chemical facilities - growth supported by the integration with our rapidly growing production in the Permian.

Integration at ExxonMobil is a competitive advantage that enables us to improve returns by responding quickly to changing market conditions. This level of flexibility is difficult to replicate.

Growing value and capturing savings

Nearly 80 percent of our refining capacity is integrated with chemical or lubricant manufacturing facilities. At these sites, we capture savings by:

• Sharing resources
• Using interconnected facilities
• Coordinating operating practices

Integration also increases margins by allowing us to direct feedstocks to the highest-value products. In our Baytown manufacturing complex, lubricants and chemicals integration contributes more than 70 percent of earnings.

In Singapore, we have an integrated facility with a state-of-the-art steam cracker that produces chemicals directly from crude oil - an industry first. We can also process a range of liquid and natural gas feedstocks at the site, optimizing them for maximum value. In response to growing Asian demand for premium products, we recently added world-scale Mobil 1 lubricant blending facilities.

At the LaBarge natural gas field, extensive Downstream experience has been applied to implement a multivariable control system at the Shute Creek treating facility, increasing production and improving the purity of products. Multivariable control allows the plant to run closer to capacity and specification limits by optimizing across several operational parameters simultaneously.

Shared knowledge and capabilities

At our proposed joint venture project with SABIC near Corpus Christi, Texas, we are planning to use an approach our Upstream has implemented with great success in several projects around the world. We are constructing portions of the new facility at other locations and bringing them on site fully built. This process significantly speeds up construction, while also reducing costs by more than $1 billion.

Cross-functional sharing enables our project management professionals to influence and learn from large, complex projects, while strengthening our capabilities and providing flexibility for support of future activities. It also supports standardization and efficiency, ensuring best practices are broadly shared.

Our Houston campus brings together nearly 10,000 of our employees, fostering improved collaboration, creativity, and innovation, and accelerating the discovery of new resources, technologies, and products.

Maximizing asset value

Maximizing asset value through operational excellence

Innovation enables us to invest in high-quality opportunities to enhance our asset portfolio. Integration helps us maximize returns across the Upstream, Downstream, and Chemical businesses. Our relentless focus on operational excellence enables us to get the most out of each and every facility, every hour, every day.

Safety is good business

A safe company is a well-run company. Achieving safe and environmentally responsible operations across a global enterprise requires a significant commitment from everyone at all levels of the organization. Success in safety is the result of a disciplined, rigorous approach, which also helps drive more reliable operations and improves financial results.

In 2017, we had the fewest recordable injuries in our company’s history. Our focus on identifying and eliminating high-potential-consequence events is making a difference. We also continued to achieve outstanding process safety performance, driven by a cross-functional initiative that brought together expertise from all parts of our businesses to build a unique, integrated approach to process safety.

Our operational guidelines enable field personnel to better understand the most critical safeguards and focus their efforts accordingly. Thanks to this strategy, we have sustained fewer operational upsets and releases to the environment, and we continued to exhibit strong process safety performance in 2017.

Maximizing capacity and minimizing downtime

We apply the same attention, focus, and commitment to reliability as we do safety. Fewer reliability upsets reduces the potential for safety incidents. Reliability is also a key driver to profitability. Maximizing asset uptime and productivity leads to improved output and higher margins.

Introducing a multivariable control system - a technology originally used in Downstream operations - and removing bottlenecks at our PNG LNG facilities have enabled us to increase production 20 percent above the original facility capacity.

Our Upstream, Downstream, and Chemical businesses are among the industry leaders in reliability.

Project development and execution excellence

Our project management skills - safely staying on time and on budget - are a major competitive advantage, especially in complex environments.

With proven systems and processes to guide the planning, design, and execution of projects, we reduce costs and cycle times by:

• Using phased developments to capture value sooner and apply learning-curve benefits
• Leveraging the use of existing infrastructure
• Deploying innovative techniques and technologies
• Leveraging our project management experience across all businesses to ensure the best people are leading our efforts, and transferring their knowledge and skills to others in the organization