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Today, though, prices at the pump in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, are approaching those record 1981 levels for the first time. The company now called ExxonMobil turned a profit of $39.5 billion last year (on sales of $365.4 billion), more than any other corporation ever. Yet it isn't making nearly the investment in finding new oil that...
Last year ExxonMobil spent $19.9 billion looking for oil and improving its refinery, pipeline and pumping capacity. The company predicts that its capital and exploration spending will average more than $20 billion a year for the next five years. That's not spare change, but adjusted for inflation, it's only about 60% of what Exxon and Mobil together spent in 1981. Tellingly, it's also a lot less than what ExxonMobil handed over to its shareholders last year--$29.6 billion in stock buybacks and $7.6 billion in dividends...
...just ExxonMobil. Oil-field-services provider Baker Hughes keeps a monthly tally of how many rigs are active around the world, and the rig count peaked at 6,227 in December 1981. In April of this year it was just 2,836. But ExxonMobil is the most cautious of the lot. Slightly smaller rival Shell spent 25% more on capital and exploration in 2006, and the other oil majors spent more than ExxonMobil relative to their size. The Dallas-based industry leader still reports that its oil and gas reserves are growing. But recent gains have been modest, and most...
...Predictably, government-by-lobbyist has produced some scandals. Philip Cooney, an oil lobbyist who worked in the White House, got caught editing the science out of global warming reports; he's now back at ExxonMobil. Steven Griles, an energy lobbyist who became deputy interior secretary, was a one-man extraction-industry conflict-of-interest machine at Interior; the inspector general described his tenure as an "ethical quagmire," and he's now awaiting sentencing in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal...
Just ask Shell or Yukos or Ukraine. Don't even mention it to ExxonMobil. When he's not skating, Medvedev is deputy chairman of Gazprom's management committee and general director of Gazpromexport, Gazprom's export arm, which accounts for 80% of the revenue of the world's second largest energy company and supplies a quarter of Europe's natural gas--and 100% of Belarus'. Medvedev's remark hit home for his fellow hockey buff and adversary--the forward who had tripped him up so uncouthly, also known as the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko. On a tense New Year...