I am not sure that I agree with the article. The reason the oil giants are making so much money is that they do own a lot of oil. But it is true that at some point, they will have exhausted what they now own, and will have to buy more than they have, and when that happens, you will probably start to see oil companies lose money. May be a couple of years off though.
No, the reason oil companies make so much is VOLUME. Very little of the worlds reserves is owned by oil companies.
How did you come to that conclusion?
Most people don't understand how the oil business works.
In most of the world, oil is not private, it is owned by the government. In fact private ownership of "strategic" assets is usually not allowed outside the US.
But most governments loot their own government oil companies as you can imagine, so they don't have the investment capital or expertise to develop their own fields. So they put a field out for bid. Several oil companies from around the world will bid to develop it. The winner is the one that offers the best up front money and the highest percentage of the take.
The winner, who might be an American and might not, will then pay the host government a large amount of money up front for the right to operate in that field. They then put up all the money to pay for exploration, all the money to pay for the drilling, all the money to pay for construction of pipelines and other infrastructure (roads, bridges, potable water plants, sometimes whole towns, whatever it takes). The host government puts up nothing.
The oil company, once they start producing, then gives the host government their share of the oil revenue, and then pays a tax on their own share of the revenue. They are generally allowed to recover their up-front costs over "x" years, and then continue to operate for "y" more years.
At the end of the contract, the field and all of its infrastructure reverts to the control of the host government. They may elect to operate it themselves through their own government oil company, or put it out for bid again.
The amount of money the foreign oil company makes is always the share agreed during a competitive bid against other oil companies. They get a cut, in other words, and they have to put up all the investment capital and do all the work and pay all the employees to get it. Its not free money. The host government owns the oil. They get their share for nothing up front.
Even in the US, where private oil is allowed, most of the new oil is on federal land. Offshore oil is federal. Again, its competitive bid, the winner is the one who offers the most money to the owner, which is the US government.
American oil companies buy over 75% of the oil they refine on the open market.
Nationalization of their overseas reserves and the inability to develop new reserves in the USA have resulted in a constant decline in the reserves Big Oil controls.
Not "own" in any traditional sense of the word. There's no oil production I'm aware of that doesn't involve the payment of royalties to underlying governments. Also in many cases the oil companies don't own the mineral rights.
As for "so much money" the oil company are making, any such judgment has to be put into a meaningful context. Eleven billion dollars is a lot of money, but 120 billion dollars is a lot of sales.
Providing the nominal dollars without the context is incomplete to the point of being misleading.