Big Oil has trouble finding new fields

These should be the best of times for Big Oil.

Petroleum prices have tripled in five years, and gasoline prices reached record heights last summer. International oil companies are making the kind of money most capitalists can only dream of.


Chevron Corp. is expected to report a record annual profit today, topping $17.5 billion. And that’s less than half of what Exxon Mobil probably made last year. Exxon earned $39.5 billion in 2006 – the largest annual profit for any American company, ever – and will report its 2007 results today, as well.

And yet, for an industry awash in income, Big Oil faces serious long-term threats. Its profit and its very future are under pressure, both at home and abroad.

The large, global companies commonly known as Big Oil – companies such as Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell – are having a hard time finding enough new oil fields to replace the petroleum they pump out of the ground. And the fields they’re finding are in hard-to-reach places like the bottom of the sea, where drilling and pumping costs far more than it does on land.

San Francisco Chronicle