Sunday, May 23, 2010

What Do We Mean When We Blame Big Oil?

Notwithstanding the disaster developing in the Gulf of Mexico over the explosion of the leased rig by BP, I hear so many people blame the big oil companies for jacking up gasoline and heating oil prices. This chart may come as a shock but even the big oil firms are small potatoes when compared to government operations. In this article from the Wall Street Journal it points out that Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corp., National Iranian Oil Co., PetrĂ³leos de Venezuela, Petrobras (Brazil) and Petronas (Malaysia) are all larger than ExxonMobil, the largest of the multinationals by a wide margin. These players are the ones really controlling market prices.

Collectively, multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world's oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production.

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