Big Oil, Bigger Oil

Though oil companies like BP are the target of popular anger—private companies with selfish profit motives harvesting environmentally suicidal energy—the biggest oil companies are state-owned. “The biggest by far is Saudi Aramco, with the ability to pump 12.5 million bpd and boasting more than 260 billion barrels of proven reserves, much of it easily recovered for less than $3 per barrel. Aramco doesn’t venture outside its borders; it doesn’t need to. But there are other breeds of national oil companies (NOCs), like China’s trio of CNPC, Cnooc and Sinopec that actively reach out to buy assets around the globe, and have already been named as eager acquirers of BP assets.”