Really, Really Big Oil

Steve Coll's global tour of how ExxonMobil, the international "supermajor" and world's most profitable company, still rules.

INTERVIEW BY BENJAMIN PAUKER

In an era of global turmoil, volatile oil prices, and muscle-flexing state-owned petroleum companies, ExxonMobil still rules the roost. In an exclusive conversation with Foreign Policy, New America Foundation President Steve Coll, author of the new book Private Empire, explains how ExxonMobil has managed to exert such market dominance -- building operations in often sketchy "frontier regions" -- while still keeping its hands (relatively) clean.

Foreign Policy: How did this book come about?

Steve Coll: When I was looking at the big oil supermajors and thinking about how to write about the subject and finding my way towards ExxonMobil, one of the things that attracted me to them as a subject is that their global footprint is very evenly distributed compared to some of the others. They're not so lumpy in the Caspian or the former Soviet Union or elsewhere. They operate in more than 160 countries. In the upstream -- and what's interesting about the dilemma that all of the supermajors headquartered in the West face, but especially an American company like ExxonMobil with its enormous size -- is the huge reserve replacement challenges each year. They pump out 4.5 million barrels of oil 365 days a year, so that's a lot to find and replace on an annual basis. So if you're ExxonMobil, you look out on the world and you ask, "Where can we own oil and gas?" in an era of resource nationalism. It's not a question they asked in the 1970s when they were part of Aramco in Saudi Arabia; they owned more than they knew what to do with in the Middle East in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in the early postwar period. Now they look out into the world and say, "Where can we own oil and gas?"

Really, there are two big answers.