Royal Dutch Shell said it will write down $US15 billion to $US22 billion in the second quarter, as the company gave investors a wider glimpse of just how severely the coronavirus crisis has hit Big Oil.

The pandemic left no part of the energy giant's sprawling business unscathed. Shell lost money from pumping oil, fuel sales fell and shipments of everything from liquefied natural gas to petrochemicals suffered.

The lockdown-induced slump has permeated through the entire industry, which is reassessing both the value of its assets and longer-term business models. Shell's large LNG business, which is central to its vision of the future of energy, is seen taking the biggest hit.

"We see material downside for second-quarter earnings," Banco Santander SA analyst Jason Kenney said. Despite a possible weaker performance relative to its peers, the Spanish bank still sees potential upside in the stock, as the bad news was largely anticipated.

The drop in demand comes as little surprise. Oil majors' earnings took a beating in the first quarter, and the companies warned that things would only get worse as the full impact of the pandemic started to be felt in March. Despite a recent rebound in consumption in some of the worst-hit countries, resurgent waves of the virus show the recovery remains fragile.

Oil-product sales volumes will be 3.5 million to 4.5 million barrels a day in the second quarter, down from 6.6 million a year earlier, driven by a "significant drop" in demand because of the pandemic, the oil major said Tuesday in a statement ahead of quarterly results on July 30.

Shell also flagged that its upstream unit, traditionally the company's core business, will suffer a loss in the second quarter. The division, which is responsible for pumping oil across the world, will take an impairment charge of $US4 billion to $US6 billion, mostly from North American shale and Brazilian assets.