NEW SEVEN SISTERS ALL NATIONALS

Posting from the Petroleum History Institute's annual oil history symposium in spectacularly gorgeous downtown Long Beach, CA, this story seemed like an obvious choice.

The New Seven Sisters: Today’s Most Powerful Energy Companies
Nicholas Vardy, March 28, 2007 (SeekingAlpha via Yahoo Finance)

WHO
The OLD Seven Sisters: Standard Oil of New Jersey, Royal Dutch Shell , Anglo Persian Oil Company, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of California, Gulf Oil and Texaco; The NEW Seven Sisters: Saudi Aramco , Russia's Gazprom, CNPC of China, NIOC of Iran, Venezuela's PDVSA, Brazil's Petrobras and Petronas of Malaysia.
As designated by Italian energy magnate Enrico Mattei.

WHAT
Today’s titans, a whole new group of key global oil and gas companies selected recently by the Financial Times, are largely state-owned companies from the emerging world. The still extant descendants of the OLD Seven Sisters are ExxonMobil and Chevron in the U.S., England’s BP and Europe’s Royal Dutch Shell. They produce only about 10% of the world's oil and gas and hold just 3% of its reserves.

WHEN
The International Energy Agency [IEA] calculates that over the next 40 years, 90% of new energy supplies will come from developing countries.

WHERE
These National oil companies are largely from the emerging world and developing countries.

WHY
The FT ranked them on the basis of resource base, level of output, company's ambition, scale of their domestic market, and influence in the industry. The New Seven Sisters control about one-third of the world's oil and gas production and reserves.

QUOTES
- “With 25% of the world's oil reserves and with nearly triple the capacity of any other group, Saudi Aramco is the world's largest and most sophisticated national oil company.”
- “The poster child of irresponsible profligacy is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela who spends two-thirds of PDVSA's profits on his populist social programs. The result? PDVSA's production capacity has fallen from 3.4 to 1.5 million barrels per day since 1999. In Iran, NIOC cannot boost its oil production or fix its refineries because its profits go toward keeping gas at 40 cents per gallon for Iranian consumers.”
- “The IEA estimates that the world is falling 20% short of making the investment needed to ensure adequate energy supplies for the next 25 years.”