The Oil Business and the State

The Oil Business and the State
Author: Øystein Noreng
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-10-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000467155
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National oil companies are big business with about 80 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and they are crucial to the world’s energy supplies. They are giants, some of the world’s largest companies, measured by market capitalisation, cash flow and investment. Little is known about their modus operandi, how they make decisions about investment and production or about relations with their government-owners. However, it is known that they conduct business with a political mandate, often with multiple long-term objectives, broadly defined and hard to quantify. Unclear mandates give national oil companies leeway to pursue their own distinctive interests, apart from those of the government-owner. As investors, governments are less zealous than private investors. They generally observe multiple objectives, not only return on capital. Therefore, the senior management of national oil companies enjoy more discretionary power and consider longer time horizons than their counterparts in the private sector. The Oil Business and the State explains the practice of state ownership in a capital-intensive industry with high risks and high return, and how these companies act in a market with imperfect competition. This book looks to give readers more insight into the oil industry, into the background of oil exporting countries as well as the economic and political challenges confronting them, including problems of state ownership. The book discusses wider consequences of China replacing the United States as the world’s leading oil importer. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of international business, management history, corporate governance, political economy and economic development of oil-rich countries.

Oil and Governance

Oil and Governance
Author: David G. Victor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1035
Release: 2011-12-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139502883
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National oil companies (NOCs) play an important role in the world economy. They produce most of the world's oil and bankroll governments across the globe. This book explains the variation in performance and strategy for NOCs and provides fresh insights into the future of the oil industry.

Oil in the Deep South

Oil in the Deep South
Author: Dudley J. Hughes
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 310
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780878056156
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Prevented the oil and gas from crossing into adjoining states. This is the first book to document the history of the petroleum business in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. It records a statistical and chronological summary and highlights the many people and companies involved in the oil industry during its early days in this region. After too many discouraging years of exploration, success finally came in 1939. The big payoff was the discovery of the Tinsley Oil Field.

The Oil Curse

The Oil Curse
Author: Michael L. Ross
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2013-09-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691159637
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Explaining—and solving—the oil curse in the developing world Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. What explains this oil curse? And can it be fixed? In this groundbreaking analysis, Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth—and how they can turn oil from a curse into a blessing. Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries' oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats—and twice as likely to descend into civil war—than countries without oil. The Oil Curse shows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones. It also warns that the global thirst for petroleum is causing companies to drill in increasingly poor nations, which could further spread the oil curse. This landmark book explains why good geology often leads to bad governance, and how this can be changed.

Oil, State and Industrialization in Iran

Oil, State and Industrialization in Iran
Author: Massoud Karshenas
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1990-09-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521383516
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An examination of the problems of economic growth and structural change in oil-exploring economies which focuses on the experience of Iran. The author argues that oil income can make a substantial contribution to industrial growth, subject to the adoption of appropriate policy measures.

The Extraction State

The Extraction State
Author: Charles Blanchard
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0822987775
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The history of the United States of America is also the history of the energy sector. Natural gas provides the fuel that allows us to heat our homes in winter and cool them in summer with the touch of a button or turn of a dial—when the industry runs smoothly. From the oil crisis of the 1970s to the fall of Enron and the California electricity crisis at the turn of the century to contemporary issues of hydraulic fracking, poorly conceived government policies have sometimes left us shivering, stranded, or with significantly lighter wallets. In this expansive narrative, Charles Blanchard traces the rise of natural gas and the regulatory missteps that nearly ruined the market. Beginning in the 1880s, The Extraction State explains how the New Deal regulatory compact came together in the 1920s, even before the Great Depression, and how it fell apart in the 1970s. From there, the book dissects the policies that affect us today, and explores where we might be headed in the near future.

Blowout

Blowout
Author: Rachel Maddow
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0525575499
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All “A rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today.”—The New York Times Book Review In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, revolutionaries in Ukraine raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Vladimir Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Subterranean Estates

Subterranean Estates
Author: Hannah Appel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2015-06-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0801455391
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"Oil is a fairy tale, and, like every fairy tale, is a bit of a lie."—Ryzard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs The scale and reach of the global oil and gas industry, valued at several trillions of dollars, is almost impossible to grasp. Despite its vast technical expertise and scientific sophistication, the industry betrays a startling degree of inexactitude and empirical disagreement about foundational questions of quantity, output, and price. As an industry typified by concentrated economic and political power, its operations are obscured by secrecy and security. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the social sciences typically approach oil as a metonym—of modernity, money, geopolitics, violence, corruption, curse, ur-commodity—rather than considering the daily life of the industry itself and of the hydrocarbons around which it is built. Subterranean Estates gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to instead provide a critical topography of the hydrocarbon industry, understood not solely as an assemblage of corporate forms but rather as an expansive and porous network of laborers and technologies, representation and expertise, and the ways of life oil and gas produce at points of extraction, production, marketing, consumption, and combustion. By accounting for oil as empirical and experiential, the contributors begin to demystify a commodity too often given almost demiurgic power. Subterranean Estates shifts critical attention away from an exclusive focus on global oil firms toward often overlooked aspects of the industry, including insurance, finance, law, and the role of consultants and community organizations. Based on ethnographic research from around the world (Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Oman, the United States, Ecuador, Chad, the United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iran, and Russia), and featuring a photoessay on the lived experiences of those who inhabit a universe populated by oil rigs, pipelines, and gas flares, this innovative volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of this multidimensional world.

American Hegemony and World Oil

American Hegemony and World Oil
Author: Simon Bromley
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1991
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9780271007465
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This volume provides a new theoretical framework for understanding both the development of the international oil industry and the role played by oil in the emergence of US postwar hegemony. As such, it directly addresses contemporary developments in international relations theory and the recent debates over the character and longevity of United States hegemony. While providing a narrative account of the oil industry from its origins in the nineteenth century through to the present, the main focus of American Hegemony and World Oil is an analytic treatment of the postwar period. Drawing widely on political economy, international relations and the recent literature on the state, the book offers a comprehensive study of the connections between United States hegemony and the international oil industry. The book begins with a critical discussion of theoretical approaches in political economy, international relations, and state theory which have informed discussions of the oil industry. Bromley goes on to survey the early emergence of the industry and its interwar consolidation, the ordering of the postwar industry under United States leadership, and the crisis of the 1970s. The book ends with an examination of the post-OPEC restructuring and the current strategies of the US, Japan, Europe, OPEC and the USSR. This book will be of interest to students of political economy, international relations, and political sociology.