INTERVIEW: OIL

Big Profits, Big Worries in Oil Fields
Jad Mouawad, March 3, 2007 (NY Times)
- Oil companies have made super profits the last few years thanks to record high oil prices. Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, earned $17 billion in 2006. But oil is harder to find and more expensive to produce. David J. O’Reilly, 60, Chevron’s chairman and chief executive, spoke recently about the challenges big oil companies face…

- [The oil out to meet the world’s growing demand]…is not in easy-to-get-to places or easy-to-recover places. We are accessing more molecules through technology. The Gulf of Mexico…keeps coming back…Technology allows us to go further and find oil in places we never thought we could…
- One of the issues is offshore access in the United States… The Norwegians…British…Dutch…Danish…produce oil offshore…There are many areas of our offshore that have not yet been explored…
- [Chevron runs an ad about the rate of oil consumption being higher than new discoveries] to draw people’s attention to the fact that…this is not an unlimited resource…you will see a clear message for the need for the public to be more energy-efficient and to treat conservation as a value…And it’s not just oil and gas: it’s nuclear, it’s coal, it’s renewables…they all have a role to play. It takes leadership…
- [The United States does not] have an energy policy. We have discussions…There are multiple answers. There doesn’t have to be a fight about this. It is too important…

- [Competition for scarce resources is] the wrong answer. It’s a very simplistic answer…the best energy security is when the globe is secure…broadly…in an energy way. If you have any one of the major players on the demand or supply side that feels threatened or isolated, I think it’s a bad thing for the globe. We are interdependent…
- The U.S. industry, at times, has played a bigger role [in the energy world and]…in the global economy. Companies like ours are bigger than we were 10 years ago, and much bigger than we were 50 years ago, but we’re a smaller piece of the total global energy pie, because that global energy pie has grown so much bigger and there are so many more participants…