World Oil and Gas market

Contents

Introduction

Market fondamentals

        1) Analysis

2) Driving forces of the supermajors

3) Who are the major players in the world oil and gas market?

Company profiles

Saudi Aramco at glance

Saudi Aramco’s strengths and weaknesses

BP at glance

BP’s strengths and weaknesses

Maurel & Prom at glance

Maurel & Prom’s strengths and weaknesses

Conclusion

List of Tables and Figures

Table 1 : The top 10 oil companies

Table 2 : Top World Oil Producers, 2011 (Thousand Barrels per Day)

Figure 1 : World energy consumption, 1990-2035

Figure 2 : Shares of proven Oil Reserve holders/location, 2010

Figure 3 : Shares of world oil supply by region, 2011

Figure 4 : Shares of world oil production by Type of company, 2010

World Oil and Gas market

Introduction:

The world is growing; growing in terms of energy need. Countries and especially China require more and more energy. However, in a worldwide context where energy becomes more and more coveted, where geopolitics is of importance, oil and gas companies are in charge of securing national interests to get access to resources. Because of an extreme competition in the sector, countries need to use their political and economical powers. This explains why relationships between States and oil companies are very strong.

The energy is at the heart of international relations, whereas some States established energy strategy, oil and gas companies evolve in that sphere of interest.

We decided to choose a worldwide business to get focus on, in order to get a large range of data. We eventually decided to describe the oil and gas market by picking up two large companies (Saudi Aramco and BP) and a mid-size company (Maurel & Prom). The first company is a national Saudi oil company, the second is a British international private firm (the supermajor BP) and the third is a France’s oil company.

To do so, we used a companies’ panel (10), and read their financial report. We also used several reports from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and obviously the 2012 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

We chose these companies because State-owned companies are nowadays dominating the market. Four of the world’s ten largest oil companies are government-owned companies. Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), NIOC (Iran) and PdVSA (Venezuela) are all the biggest due to they have control over substantial petroleum reserves in their home countries, which means that they are the most likely to maintain their positions.  For CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation), the situation is slightly different as China is a net importer of oil but the company has heavily invested in Central Asia and in Africa.

 The six other companies form what is called the "Supermajors". They are the result of the intensifying concentration trend of the 1990s. While they cannot compete with state-owned companies in terms of reserves, they are crucial to the oil industry and have a significant share of the global production and, more importantly, of the global refining capacity. The ten groups may be direct competitors. They are also partners in some of their activities. They often form consortiums when it comes to exploring and setting up costly production facilities. To do so they gain shares in several projects across the globe.

Along all these companies, there are several mid-size companies evolving in the same field and some times benefitting from some stakes in oil-producing licenses with the supermajors. However, their core business is to take risks in several underestimated licenses for once fully producing selling them to other actors. Their limited size is as much strength as a weakness.

Market fondamentals

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