“The write-downs will get worse into the end of the year as companies complete their end-of-the-year SEC filings,” Sankey said. “The market still looks very over-supplied with oil and we’re in peak demand season globally.”

Pessimistic Outlook

Exxon Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson was among the first oil-industry bosses to shrink spending as the crude rout began taking shape more than a year ago. After cutting the budget by 9.3 percent in 2014, this year’s reduction may exceed the original 12 percent target, the company disclosed during an April 30 conference call with analysts.

Tillerson, an Exxon lifer whose 10th year as CEO began in January, has been pessimistic about the prospects for an imminent oil-market rebound. On April 21, he told a Houston energy conference that the supply glut and low prices will persist “for the next couple of years” at least.

Those remarks proved prophetic: international crude prices that rose 45 percent between Jan. 13 and May 6 have since tumbled 21 percent, inaugurating the second oil bear market in 14 months.

“Chevron was a disaster; Exxon was a disappointment,” Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. In New York who rates the shares of both the equivalent of a hold and owns each. “A rising tide lifts all ships, but when the tide goes down, all ships go down.”

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