With the steep rise in oil prices over the past four years, a new group of companies has risen to the fore. National companies, from Saudi Aramco, to Russia’s Gazprom and Venezuela’s PdVSA control about 80 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and 50 per cent of gas reserves, and have become increasingly important as resource nationalism has resurfaced as a global phenomenon.
The multinationals that have traditionally dominated oil and gas operations are shut out of some of the world’s most prolific hydrocarbons basins, notably in Saudi Arabia, which expects to entrench its position as the global swing producer of oil by expanding output over the next years. International oil companies everywhere are struggling to pump more from maturing fields elsewhere and are increasingly under pressure from governments, such as Venezuela and Russia, to accept harsher economic terms.
