Some interesting oil industry statistics - Page 2
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LARGEST OIL COMPANIES
Compiling a list of "largest oil companies" is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. The state-owned national oil companies operate differently from the traditional businesses we are accustomed to in the US. Also, should they be ranked by assets, by reserves, by production, or by revenue? These categories give similar, but by no means identical, lists. And are we talking about oil, or gas, or both, or oil equivalent? The following table offers one ranking, based mostly on information from the Oil & Gas Journal in 1999. For merged companies such as ExxonMobil, I added the values for the predecessor companies. State-owned companies are marked with a star*. Public companies like ExxonMobil only hold about 18% of the world's oil reserves; the rest is owned by nations or state-controlled companies. Source. Largest oil & gas producers in the U.S.
Million barrels per year, 1998 | |
The largest non-state-owned companies are ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron-Texaco. Those four companies spent more than $50 billion in capital and exploratory costs in 1998. BHP (Australia) would be next ($23 billion in assets), followed by the US companies on the list below. But there are many additional state-owned (or partly state-owned) companies that are larger than Conoco, including YPF (Argentina), Petrobras (Brazil), Elf Aquitaine (France), Total (France), ENI/AGIP (Italy), Norsk Hydro (Norway), Statoil (Norway), Repsol (Spain), Sonatrach (Algeria), Chinese Petroleum (Taiwan), and Nippon Oil (Japan), as well as those on the list above.
There are more than 200 US Oil companies with more than $1,000,000 in assets. What's an oil company? Do you count just oil producers, or include exclusively refining companies? What about natural gas companies? It is difficult to keep track of all the mergers, but below left is one list by assets, as best as I could determine it from their on-line Annual Reports or other sources. Thus this info is probably 2004 data. For up-to-date information, the Oil & Gas Journal publishes all sorts of data about the top 200 oil companies. For another way of looking at it, below right is a list of the top 11 companies as ranked by estimated 2002 worldwide Exploration & Production spending, according to the Solomon Smith Barney survey. The 11 companies on this list planned to spend more than $63 billion that year.
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Source of the following data (PDF from EIA)
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