Posted on 03/31/2008 8:39:51 AM PDT by thackney
The performance and strategy of Exxon Mobil Corp. is a good place to start in grasping the twilight years of the investor-owned oil sector that has dominated the extraction of petroleum resources since the industry began in the 1850s.
Putting aside the Valdez debacle of 1989, Exxon has been the best-managed of the oil majors.
Exxon has avoided the faked-reserve scandals that have plagued rival Royal Dutch/Shell PLC, the Alaskan pipeline ruptures and fatal refinery explosions that forced out the CEO of BP PLC, and thoughtmore than twice before committing to its multibillion-dollar bets on gargantuan offshore oil-production platforms, heavy-oil projects in Athabasca, and signing production contracts with the state-owned oil agencies that control about 90 per cent of the world's petroleum reserves. The same state-owned agencies who have an unsettling habit of ripping up those contracts — as in Russia, Venezuela and Kazakhstan, among other countries — to demand a heftier share of output when oil prices skyrocket, as they have in recent years.
As the industry's most consistently successful player, Exxon's dilemmas offer a disturbing forecast for a business in decline. For a variety of reasons, but mostly shifts in geopolitics, it's increasingly easy to imagine a world not too far off in which Exxon and its investor-owned peers have given way to ascendant state-owned resource giants, at least in the "upstream," or exploration and development part of the industry, traditionally the most lucrative end of the business, compared with "downstream" refining and distribution activities.
Exxon is the world’s largest investor-owned oil firm, and produces more oil than any OPEC nation apart from Saudi Arabia and Iran. On staggering 2007 revenues of $404 billion (U.S.), Exxon posted earnings of $40.6 billion, the biggest annual profit in the history of capitalism. The market capitalization of Exxon, which began life as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey, has more than doubled over the past five years, to half a trillion dollars.
Thus ends the good news.
Exxon's production dropped 2.4 per cent last year, a fate shared with its biggest investor-owned peers. (Shell's production slumped 4 per cent.) On the exploration side, Exxon failed to replace 24 per cent of its production with new reserves, its worst "reserve ratio" showing in three years. With reserves increasingly difficult to find, drawing Exxon and its rivals into more costly, remote and politically volatile regions, Exxon has seen its failure rate of exploratory wells searching for commercially viable pools of oil or natural gas rise to 46 per cent, up from 36 per cent in 2006.
Exxon's production cost per barrel soared 18 per cent last year, following a 13 per cent rise the year before. The company in March committed to a 20 per cent increase in spending on exploration and refinery upgrades, to more than $25 billion, or an industry record of $68 million per day. But that hike will do little more than cover the spiralling cost of everything from drilling rigs to engineers.
At a March 5 conference with analysts in New York, Exxon unveiled an impressive number of new exploration and production projects, a dozen of which are set to begin this year alone. Exxon hopes to bring new fields into production in the Middle East, Africa and Russia by 2012; recently brought a large offshore Angola field into production; and is adding to its network of enormous liquefied natural gas (LNG) operations in Qatar.
But Exxon will be fortunate if its new projects make up for declining production at its aging fields in the North Sea and Alaska.
Not that Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s CEO, is the least bit apologetic about that scenario. The average Fortune 500 CEO who promised investors zero volume growth through 2012 would soon be looking for a new job. But this is the conservative oil business, whose executives recall the $10 per barrel crude of the late 1990s as if it was yesterday. And no oil major has been more disciplined in capital spending than Irving, Texas-based Exxon.
As Tillerson explained to analysts early this month, Exxon doesn't set a volume target and strive to achieve it, the way Procter & Gamble, Apple Inc. and Toyota Motor Corp. do. Instead, it calculates the likely payoff from a potential project, factoring in setbacks like skilled-labour shortages and soaring rig-crew costs, and places its chips accordingly. Which means passing on potentially high-volume plays vulnerable to Venezuela-type expropriation.
With good reason, BP announced with considerable fanfare the Russian partnership it struck earlier this decade, since it would account for about one-quarter of BP's total reserves. BP's share of its flagship Russian project has been repeatedly reduced, ceded to its Russian state-owned partner, following Kremlin accusations against BP of everything from fraud to environmental degradation – charges that mysteriously disappear once BP consents to a lower share of output, only to recur, accompanied by police raids on BP's Russian offices, when the Putin/Medvedev regime clamours for still more. Exxon was spared the water torture treatment in Venezuela, where the Chavez regime simply expropriated properties once Exxon's technology had brought them into production.
Given the potential for devastating reversals, Exxon doesn’t see itself on a mission to ensure energy security in North America or elsewhere. The shareholders come first, last and always.
"It really goes back to what is an acceptable investment return for us," Tillerson told the analysts.
Last year, Exxon spent more money buying back its stock – $36 billion – than on reinvesting in the business. Since replacing his similarly unsentimental predecessor, Lee Raymond, in January of last year, Tillerson, 55, has raised capital spending just 18 per cent against a 75 per cent jump in expenditures on share buybacks.
That gambit increases earnings per share, but obviously doesn't add a drop of oil or gas to the firm's reserves in order to sustain the business. Yet Shell and Chevron Corp. also are furiously buying back their stock, at a rate that will see Exxon and Chevron retire all of their stock by about 2024. It comes down to this: buying back the company's stock is a far more certain bet on increasing investor returns than operating a new deep-water drilling program.
In the past, consolidation has been the industry’s response to declining reserves. Companies simply bought oil on the stock market rather than drilling for it, which accounted for the late-1990s merger wave that brought Amoco and Arco into the BP fold, the merger of Exxon with Mobil Corp., the amalgamation of French giants Total and Elf, and the creation of ConocoPhillips Co., among other combinations. The Canadian oil patch would be especially vulnerable to a future takeover trend: the total 2007 revenues of Calgary's eight-largest Canadian-owned firms was $97 billion, about 19 per cent of Exxon's market cap.
But mergers don't add to global oil supply. The merger rationale was that firms with a more substantial "critical mass" could better afford to undertake ever costlier megaprojects. That notion went out the window when the likes of Exxon Mobil learned that even the world's largest corporation can be stripped of its assets by the likes of Hugo Chavez. Indeed, all of the "super majors" created in the last merger wave have been forced to surrender production under contracts with producing nations by which those nations gain a larger share of output as crude prices increase.
Example: Chevron Corp. was producing almost 2.7 million barrels of oil a day in 2002 when it acquired oil giant Texaco. Last year, Chevron's daily production was 2.6 million barrels a day, making a hash of Chevron's 2002 expectation of increasing the combined firms' volume by 3 per cent by 2006. Like its rivals, Chevron lost output under production-sharing contracts with oil-producing nations, and was hit with an unfavourable contract revision dictated by Venezuela.
Which suggests that the petroleum industry of the future will belong to the state-owned enterprises. After working in some cases for decades with the investor-owned giants, state oil firms have accumulated enough of the required technology to forsake joint ventures and go it alone. They have every incentive to do so in those many oil-producing nations in which oil and gas are the sole, or largest, source of export revenue, no longer to be shared with investors in companies based in London and Houston.
It's beginning to look like the investor-owned sector's long-term plan is to phase itself out of business, becoming a glorified annuity that returns outsized dividends to a dwindling number of investors from a dwindling reserve base. As early as 2001, oil analyst Charles Maxwell of Weeden & Co. of Greenwich, Conn., told Bloomberg News, the investor-owned oil majors will no longer be able to increase their production.
"They'll be in liquidation," he said.
An apt expression for an industry running out of juice.
State oil firms are set to dominate the industry in years to come:
China National Offshore Oil
China Petroleum & Chemical
OJSC Gazprom (Russia)
OAO Lukoil (Russia)
OAO Rosneft Oil Co. (Russia)
Oil & Natural Gas Corp. (India)
PetroChina Co. Ltd.
Petrüleo Brasileiro (Petrobras)
Petrüleos Mexicanos (Pemex)
Petrüleos de Venezuela
Saudi Arabian Oil Company
Statoil ASA (Norway)
The sad part is that the state owned firms will be looked at like a cash cow and will become even less efficient as time goes on. Witness Mexico’s oil company.
We are entering an age where oil is used for nothing but a weapon and means of extortion.
Our own politicians are only too happy to help that scenario along.
The news media haven’t caught up with this, but it’s unavoidably true. It’s a fait accompli. The big state owned oil companies—especially Russia—absolutely dwarf the companies that used to be known as the “majors.”
And if ANY of the three candidates for the presidency gets into office, things will predictably get much worse. Instead of going nowhere for eight years, we will start to go backwards. The lefty environmentalists will continue to attack “big oil,” McCain, Hildabeast or Muhammed Hussein will raise taxes on them and impose new greenhouse gas emission rules, and we will soon be completely at the mercy of the likes of Putin and Chavez, not to speak of the Saudis and their terrorist projects.
By the end of this year we will see a national average of $4.50 a gallon gas and over 5 bucks a gallon for diesel.
And they’ll still say that we are not in an economic downturn.
I dunno how the hell the trucking industry survives even with fuel suplements.
Don't count on that one.
We aren’t in a “downturn” because instead of letting the economy “contract” they will just print as much money as the contraction is eating up. So instead of the economy being 1/3 smaller, there will just be 1/3 more dollars out there... They will all be worth 33% less, but there is no “downturn”.
30+ years of abysmal fed and trade policy are finally coming back to haunt.
Not a bright future.
The sad part is actually that these companies would be growing if we opened AMERICAN lands and offshore blocks to exploration. Much of the outer continental shelf has not had meanigful exploration in over 30 years, and given Brazil, Angola, etc success in deepwater offshore exploration, we could have huge undiscovered reserves in our own backyrad, not subject to the whims of any gov’t but our own. Open ANWR, open Beaufort and Chuchki Seas, open MORE of the Gulf, open outer cont shelf off east and west coasts, open federal lands. That will creat American jobs, keep our money HERE, and drop the price of oil.
Agreed, it is going to take some significant changes to turn Pemex around. I suspect Petróleos de Venezuela to continue to drop production as well.
You got your state run oil companies, you got your private run oil companies. In an unstable area, your private oil companies get their property expropriated. One then needs to look at the causes of instability and see if that cannot be addressed. Can a private company, operating under a laissez faire doctrine, better head off political instability in a producing region using private-to- government influence on government or can a government run company, operating under dirigist policies, better do that on a nation-to-nation basis?
Again the question- what are the causes of instability? TV pictures of Western consumer oriented production broadcast to the communist bloc helped to end the Cold War. What do those same TV pictures do in regions with grinding, chronic poverty and endemic corruption? They generate huge unmet expectations. What will fuel a revolution faster? No revolution is built on propaganda alone. There has to be systemic breakdown to feed the propaganda.
Laissez faire is up for review. I don’t think it can withstand the total field complex interactions of society and capital any longer. There needs to be some form of dirigist interdiction, particularly in infrastructure development. With markets you have a rising living standard. We cannot extract raw material wealth from a country and not leave markets and roads to markets behind. Venezuela today; Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, etc. tomorrow.
Just bought an ‘08 Yaris.
First 300 miles...44mpg.
fine tuning it for even better though!
Not certain when to sell my 04 hemi quad-cab truck (16mpg), as I need it for few more projects at the homestead, but I'm thinking that I need to do so by the end of summer.
I bought the Yaris now because I have been watching the price of gas climb and the sales of these mpg-cars climb at the same rate. Once the car manufacturers notice the sales of these mpg-cars increase, the price will go up also. Already, there have been three articles in the local MSM rags reporting on the slump in low mpg car sales and the increase in high mpg car sales.
Remember in the ‘70’s...the Honda Civic came out with ~30+ mpg and the wait for one of them was ~3 years. Hopefully, I'm ahead of the curve.
As it stands...
The new yaris is set to save me ~$300/month in gas (at TOYAY'S prices!!) over my truck, yet the payment for th Yaris is $240/month. I suspect that in three years the car will have paid for itself.
OH...BTW...new, it is listed at $11,350 (same as the not-so SmatCar. This is with virtually no options. With 5-spd (best mpg!) PWR windows/lock/mirror pkg, fogs, keyless, it'll run ~$12,700 (+tx/tg/lic)...see edmunds.com for better idea..YMMV
Never thought, I'd buy a tiny thing like this as I laughed at RL’s “in a Yugo” parody, but here I am.
According to the information presented in this article, Exxon/Mobil posted earnings of $40.6 billion on revenues of $404 billion in 2007 -- a return of about 10%. This was the largest annual profit in the history of capitalism, in a year when commodity prices were at historic highs, and this kind of profit generated all kinds of nonsensical calls from elected officials and political candidates here in the U.S. for massive taxes on these "obscene profits." You've got people and politicians in this country complaining about profits that represent a 10% return on investment in the best year of the industry's history. And these same people and politicians are complaining about "price gouging" in a retail industry where profit margins are razor-thin, and where the typical retail operation in many parts of this country is owned by a recent immigrant with a small staff working long hours at near-minimum wages.
You know what this tells me? It tells me that oil exploration/extraction/transport/retailing is a miserable business prospect. In fact, it seems to be tailor-made for state-owned operations in Third World sh!t-holes where wages are extremely low, environmental regulations are non-existent, and where the bribes and favors paid to a small number of elite leaders are actually very LOW compared to the cost of doing business here in the U.S.
Commodities are crashing now. This morning’s wisdom is obsolete and no longer has relevance.
This BBS needs a posting category for prophecy so we can easily identify the 99% who are wrong and decide who gets the annual Chicken Little Award.
ANOTER one who gets it!
If you or I dont like the price..then do something about it. Quit driving so much, take a bus/train/plane, or buy a fuel saving car/vehicle.
I’ve yet to see a person slow down on the interstate..have you?
BTW. We have owned VW diesels since 1983. over 50 MPG on the highway and the new ones are as snappy as any car out there.
And the rest are first starting to catch up to VW.
The primary rule of politics is react, never act.
Only when the problem is a crisis will the politicos react
slow down on the freeway?
Not many slowing down. No.
That was my first step to saving money in my hemi...slowing down. That added 2-3 mpg.
I had a deposit on a smart car. Not so smart really though. Yeah, great mpg, but can’t carry two people plus anuything else. The Yaris was the next best solution....cheapest cost and most mpg of any other non-hybrid car. The plus is it has a kind of euro look that I can tweak and customize.
There are many who refuse to give up their big cars. heck, I’m even reluctant to sell the Hemi truck, because I’m spoiled by it. But $600+/month in gas (at today’s prices, mind you!) is too much. Heck, that’s too a large % of take-home pay. I had to cut that expense down.
Truth is...we’ll all be driving those smaller cars sooner rather than later. When gas is $4.50/gallon, many will be forced to re-think as they spend 25-30% of their income on gasoline. Then, these little cars will be MORE expensive and less available than they are now, as the laws of supply and demand kick in.
IIRC an article posted ~2 months ago discussed the EPA guidlines for all US auto manufacturers that will raise the fleet average for mpg and thereby raise the cost of all cars as the technology to develop the higher mpg would be incorporated into all the model’s base prices. And IIRC that averaged out to something like +$2,000 per car. So, in time, I believe it will cost more of an initial investment to save the gas money.
AAA reported that gas will be $4/gal by the end of summer and so far, their gas price forecasts have been fairly accurate. In my truck that would make my monthly gas bill go to nearly $700/month...$5/gal would be $800/month. Pretty soon we’re talking about REAL money! I’m planning ahead, because gas isn’t gonna get cheaper and public transportation isn’t getting better, or more desirable.
Not trying to be a legalist here and dictate what others should do. These are just my rambling thoughts.
I don't mean this in a derogatory way toward oil companies, just as an interested investor. Any like-minded Freepers care to suggest the right time to get OUT of oil/energy companies?
Oil companies get more dollars when other companies/countries decrease production. Not when they decrease themselves.
Look at it this way. Would GM make higher profits if it only manufactured TWO pickup trucks next year?
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