**ABERDEEN, 15 July 2026.** Five of the world’s largest energy companies have sold, exited or downgraded their offshore wind businesses since early 2025, according to analysis of operator filings published today by GEN Intel.
All of it was disclosed publicly at the time, in capital markets days, business plans and quarterly results. GEN’s argument is that most of the supply chain serving those companies never saw it.
Brazil is where the gap shows up worst. Petrobras filed for ten offshore wind areas with the environmental regulator IBAMA in 2023, totalling around 23 GW, and studied a 14.5 GW portfolio with Equinor and TotalEnergies. Shell held six Brazilian offshore wind projects. Equinor had nine and TotalEnergies eight.
One of them is going ahead: a single turbine of around 18 MW off Sao Joao da Barra, which took the first offshore wind preliminary licence ever issued in Brazil in June 2025. Fugro began geotechnical survey work in April, running the job out of Rio das Ostras with laboratory analysis at Pinhais. Petrobras calls it a pilot and has put the remaining offshore wind spend into research and development rather than projects. Everything else has been deferred to after 2031, shelved, or put up for sale.
Kenny Dooley, Founder and Managing Director of GEN, said the disclosure record was what prompted the analysis.
“At Equinor’s Capital Markets Day in June, Anders Opedal got asked about the 10 to 12 GW renewables target and said they had known for several years they weren’t going to get there. I’ve no reason to doubt him. But it stayed on the slides the whole time, and people in our membership hired against that target. Qualified products against it. A few of them opened offices,” he said.
The individual disclosures set out the scale.
Equinor dropped its 2030 renewables target and its carbon storage target of 30 to 50 million tonnes a year on 16 June, and cut power to 10 percent of capital expenditure. Organic capex falls from around $13bn in 2026 to about $9bn in 2027, with the reduction coming mainly out of the power segment. Growth to more than 20 TWh by 2030 now comes mainly from projects already under construction. The company had already trimmed a 2020 ambition of 12 to 16 GW and a stated intention to become an offshore wind major. Ten days after the Capital Markets Day it left the Japanese offshore wind market and closed its Tokyo office, having already pulled out of Vietnam, Spain and Portugal.
Shell put more than $1bn a year into solar and wind between 2021 and 2024, running at 12 to 15 percent of its capital expenditure. It is now selling the offshore wind portfolio in a process expected to exceed $1bn, with Rothschild and PJT Partners advising and the sale likely to run next year. Around 20 percent of Shell’s capital employed, in Downstream and Renewables and Energy Solutions, currently earns a negative return.
TotalEnergies has agreed with United States federal authorities to hand back its offshore wind concession, taking exceptional provisions against the leases, and told investors in April that offshore wind is not investable in the US because of permitting timescales and subsea cable costs. It is leaving small projects in Denmark. It received $928m from the US government for renewable energy investments, of which its own share was $550m. Low carbon capital expenditure holds at around $4bn a year, and it is developing 2 to 3 GW of battery storage in Germany, having farmed down half of it to Allianz.
BP got there first and went furthest. Its 2020 strategy under Bernard Looney had promised a twentyfold expansion of renewables and a 40 percent cut in oil and gas output. In February 2025 Murray Auchincloss reset it, lifting oil and gas investment to around $10bn a year through 2027 against total capital expenditure of $13bn to $15bn. The offshore wind business, a 9.7 GW net pipeline covering Morgan and Mona in the Irish Sea, Oceanbeat East and West in the German North Sea and leases off Scotland and the US east coast, went into JERA Nex bp, a 50:50 venture with Japan’s JERA holding around 13 GW of potential capacity and up to $5.8bn of partner funding to 2030. Auchincloss described it as keeping a capital light model for shareholders. The onshore wind business was put up for sale. In October the venture closed its US operations, let its American team go and abandoned the 2.5 GW Beacon Wind project between Cape Cod and Long Island, saying it saw no viable path to develop it.
The five are not acting for the same reasons, which GEN says matters commercially. Shell has a returns problem. TotalEnergies has a problem with the United States specifically, and is still building in the UK, Germany and France, which it picked because they have limited onshore renewable capacity. Petrobras blamed the Brazilian grid rather than the wind, citing a renewable oversupply that complicates balancing for the national system operator and the absence of an offshore regulatory framework. Equinor has said it will not proceed where the returns are not there. BP decided the whole thing belonged off its balance sheet.
United States policy sits behind several of the decisions. Federal authorities paused new project leases in late 2025 and rewrote tax credit timelines, and both BP and TotalEnergies cited permitting and cost when they left.
The projects still have buyers. RWE and infrastructure investors including Brookfield are positioned to pick up the portfolios coming up for sale, and Equinor remains a 10 percent shareholder in Orsted.
The money has also gone somewhere else in energy rather than out of it. Pertamina is lifting geothermal development spending from $84m in 2025 to around $2bn across 2026 to 2029, taking capacity to 1.4 GW by the end of 2029 across 17 named projects including Ulubelu at 10 MW next year, Lahendong at 15 MW in 2027 and Hululais at 110 MW in 2028, with a further 19 projects and 530 MW under a partnership with PLN Indonesia Power. Petrobras has committed $9.7bn to decommissioning and well abandonment over five years, is chartering 40 support vessels and building 20 coastal vessels and 18 barges at a further $2bn. Equinor has committed to 6 to 8 new subsea tie backs a year on the Norwegian shelf through to 2035, at break even prices below $35 a barrel and payback inside two and a half years, with 60 percent of its capital expenditure going to the Norwegian continental shelf.
GEN’s advice to members is to check the stage a project has reached before spending against it. Projects in execution are continuing. Projects at feasibility or conceptual stage carrying a major’s name are the ones now at risk, and in Brazil that describes almost the entire pipeline.
The analysis draws on GEN Project Atlas, GEN’s global projects and events database, which holds each announcement as a dated record traceable back to the operator’s own filing.
## About GEN
Global Energy Network is a B2B energy media, intelligence, membership and events business with offices in Aberdeen, Stavanger and Perth, and a fourth office opening in Kuala Lumpur in September 2026.
GEN Intel is its intelligence division, publishing a weekly report suite and quarterly sector specials. GEN Project Atlas is GEN’s proprietary global projects and events database, sourced to operator filings, regulators and named trade press.
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