Well, I’ll be the devil’s advocate here, but it’s worth looking into whole R&D expenses, rather than alternative energy, which, for the life of me, I’d NEVER invest in personally. Would you ask Bumblebee Tuna to invest in Greenpeace?
We’re still paying for the low gas prices of the 90’s, because exploration got scaled back so hard die to smaller profit margins at the time. It will be years before new infrastructure to access more remote sites gets developed at a rate we can live with. Something’s got to give, anyhow.
“Well, I’ll be the devil’s advocate here, but it’s worth looking into whole R&D expenses, rather than alternative energy, which, for the life of me, I’d NEVER invest in personally. Would you ask Bumblebee Tuna to invest in Greenpeace?”
The analogy kind of fits. However, private investors in the information age are building the competing product/market whether big oil decides to or not. A better analogy would be like in the movie Other People’s Money where Danny Devito describes buggy whips and how the last company who made buggy whips was probably the best damn buggy whip maker. Their are many viable options to make our own oil that have been tested and refined for the last 30 years. Right now, the short play looks like big oil is better to invest in refineries and offshore drilling but the long-term forecasting of the alternative market would need to be factored in and bit by bit and big oil will be forced to adopt new technologies and support it of have lots of buggy whips and no buyers.
“We’re still paying for the low gas prices of the 90’s, because exploration got scaled back so hard die to smaller profit margins at the time. It will be years before new infrastructure to access more remote sites gets developed at a rate we can live with. Something’s got to give, anyhow.”
Very true. If I can hire fantastic economists as board advisors for my smaller business to conduct market research and financial simulations then big oil can do the same. To me their strategy suggests milking their market for all it is worth now and figuring out the long-term strategy later. If this is true, this is poor executive management and at this is passed on as pain to all of America.