Big Oil Companies Have Already Become Dinosaurs

[BADecker]

Big Oil Companies Have Already Become Dinosaurs

It's been a tough couple of years for Big Oil. Battered by plunging prices, the oil majors have seen their profits sink and their prospects darken. BP lost $3.3 billion in 2015; Shell lost nearly $7.5 billion in the third quarter of 2015 alone, its biggest loss in a decade. Even mighty ExxonMobil saw its profit shrink by half in 2015 from the previous year. The usual oil company response to a period of shrinking profits is to rein in new drilling, cut costs, and wait for prices to rise again. And recent months have seen a modest recovery in oil prices.

But a new report from the influential U.K. think tank Chatham House says the old playbook isn't going to work this time. The problems go way beyond rock-bottom oil prices, and they are unlikely to vanish in a hoped-for recovery. The oil majors, the report says, "cannot assume that, as in the past, all they need to survive is to wait for crude prices to resume an upward direction. The oil markets are going through fundamental structural changes driven by a technological revolution and geopolitical shifts," and the business model that has worked for the last quarter-century is broken.

Read more at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601471/big-oil-companies-have-already-become-dinosaurs/.

[kryptqnick]

Well, the world is changing really fast, what to say. Nowadays the globalization processes make big companies dissolve in the variety of different small ones. According to Manuel Castells, capital can't be controlled by specific people or companies. It becomes more and more depersonalized because the abilities of many people became a lot stronger and connections between them shouldn't be left without consideration.

[BADecker]

Essentially, Big Oil is waiting for the price to go up before they sell to the people. But they almost have to. Why? Because the cost of refining leaves them little or no profit (maybe a loss) if they don't get enough $$$ at the pumps.

One of the major differences this time is alternate energy.

In addition, if they sell less, there is less tax money for government. This means that government might put pressure on them to refine and sell.

[RealityTruth]

Electric cars will make big oil almost obsolete. Who would want to buy a campfire with wheels when you can have a 90% energy efficient EV with sports car type of features?

[abacus]

Funny to see how, in this game shifting, the peak oil theory has vaporized too.

It isn't anymore on the radar and everybody stopped talking about it... 

[Racey]

One day in the not to far off future, oil will be one dollar per barrel.

Or maybe sold using the Syrian pound or even Dinars, no currency should have a monopoly on oil, it should be fairly traded and not through manipulated prices.

[arbitrage001]

Long term oil price is still pointing up in usd term.

[Batmanvsduecare]

Anyone thinking the oil age was going to last forever is an idiot.
It was clear from the beginning that we will be developping alternative sources of energy, as fossil fuels are finite, and if it wasn't for the atomic bomb and Chernobyl, nuclear energy would have been the first to make the oil prices go down. Now we have solar power, wind power and many other new sources of energy thanks to developments in science and technology. Oil was just a phase, it had its time, now we need to move on and so should the oil companies. They should invest in new technologies and take advantage of their current capital holdings to shift to the new era of energy.