The federal government is investigating Exxon Mobil for how it values its oil reserves and how it expects its business to be affected by climate change, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating the energy giant in August, according to the report. The company is being investigated for not changing the valuation of its oil and gas reserves in the wake of plummeting prices during the last two years.
Exxon Mobil is the only major oil and gas company that does not revise the value of its oil and gas reserves in times of lowered prices, the paper reported.
The company also is being investigated for how it figures climate change — and how governments around the globe are reacting to the warming of the globe — will affect its business, according to the report.
A spokesman for the SEC declined to comment on the report or confirm the investigation Tuesday afternoon. Exxon Mobil did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Exxon Mobil has been under pressure since last year’s publication of a story by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times reporting that the company knew burning fossil fuels would cause global temperatures to rise and worked to bury that science.
Exxon Mobil has denied those reports.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey have opened state investigations into whether Exxon Mobil defrauded its investors by burying knowledge of global warming. Those investigations are, in turn, the subject of a federal investigation by a House committee.
The investigation by the SEC is looking into how Exxon Mobil “calculates the impact to its business from the world’s mounting response to climate change, including what figures the company uses to account for the future costs of complying with regulations to curb greenhouse gases as it evaluates the economic viability of its projects,” the Journal stated.
