By Sebastine Obasi, with Agency report

Despite announcing a billion-barrel discovery off the coast of Niger Delta, Nigeria, ExxonMobil Corporation, weekend, said it might be facing the biggest reserves revision in its history as production sank to a 7-year low and profit slid amid a prolonged slump in energy markets.

The company stated that about 3.6 billion barrels of reserves in the Canadian oil sands and the equivalent of another 1 billion oil-equivalent barrels in other North American fields, might be in jeopardy if the average energy prices seen during the first nine months of 2016 persisted.

That would equate 19 per cent of Exxon’s reserves and would be the largest de-booking since the 1999 merger that created the company in its modern form.

Exxon’s accounting has prompted a United States Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, investigation into whether the company should have written down assets as a result of the oil slump, a person with knowledge of the matter said last month.

“The fact is that everyone else has recorded charges and they have not created a red flag,” said Brian Youngberg, an analyst at Edward Jones & Company in St. Louis, Missouri. “In the big picture, it doesn’t mean those reserves won’t eventually get produced.”

Exxon pumped the equivalent of 3.81 million barrels a day during the quarter, below the 3.99 million average of five estimates from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. It is the lowest production level since 2009.

“We are fully complying with the SEC request for information and are confident our financial reporting meets all legal and accounting requirements,” Exxon’s spokesman, Alan Jeffers, said at the time, regarding the SEC investigation.

Exxon has been curbing outlays for drilling and new oil and gas installations to conserve cash for dividend payments that consumed $9.2 billion during the first nine months of this year.