Oil firms are caught in a squeeze play

Investor-owned oil majors like Exxon will no longer be able to increase their reserves, say analysts, because of new attitudes in oil-producing nations

The performance and strategy of Exxon Mobil Corp. is a good place to start in grasping the twilight years of the investor-owned oil sector that has dominated the extraction of petroleum resources since the industry began in the 1850s.

Putting aside the Valdez debacle of 1989, Exxon has been the best-managed of the oil majors.

Exxon has avoided the faked-reserve scandals that have plagued rival Royal Dutch/Shell PLC, the Alaskan pipeline ruptures and fatal refinery explosions that forced out the CEO of BP PLC, and thoughtmore than twice before committing to its multibillion-dollar bets on gargantuan offshore oil-production platforms, heavy-oil projects in Athabasca, and signing production contracts with the state-owned oil agencies that control about 90 per cent of the world’s petroleum reserves. The same state-owned agencies who have an unsettling habit of ripping up those contracts