Koch Industries will exit the oil and fuels trading business to focus on “other, more customer-oriented trading activities,” a spokesperson for Koch Minerals & Trading, a division of the industrial conglomerate, said, as quoted by Reuters.
Bloomberg reported that the company was going to expand in metals, maritime transport, and natural gas related products, citing a letter by company executives.
Last November, Reuters reported that Koch was laying off people at the oil and fuels trading division. The layoffs were being made in the United States and other locations of the company around the world.
Besides oil and fuels, Koch Industries trades in natural gas, metals, and other commodities.
The conglomerate began to shrink its presence in oil several years ago, when it sold oil sands operations to Canadian Cavalier Energy. The company was following in the footsteps of international energy majors, which staged an exodus from the oil sands industry amid tightening regulations that put a burden on costs and ease of doing business in the area.
In the years prior to the asset sale, Koch blamed the former Alberta NDP government for the regulatory uncertainty that, the company said, forced it to suspend a planned S$601-million project in the oil province.
Even earlier than that, Koch said Canada’s signing of the Kyoto Accord on emissions reduction was the reason for it to abandon another project, Fort Hills, which would have sucked in some $2.6 billion in investments. Fort Hills is now Suncor’s property and is operating, despite the Kyoto Accord.
Meanwhile, Koch Industries has been investing in electric cars. By 2022, the company had made at least 10 investments in electric cars and batteries, a Wall Street Journal report revealed at the time, despite the owners of the conglomerate also being active in funding organizations opposing climate change policies and themselves opposing the tightening of environmental regulations in the United States.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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