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By focusing on major international oil companies (IOCs), this paper examines the balance of power in the oil industry in the current decade, which, unlike the previous two cooperative decades, can be characterised as 'conflictual'. In this decade, due to their weak relative bargaining power, the IOCs have generally been unsuccessful in bargaining with oil-exporting countries and national oil companies (NOCs). As a result, we are witnessing the return of the obsolescing bargain. Various factors endow oil-exporting countries and their NOCs with increased bargaining power vis-à-vis the major IOCs. High oil prices, increased industry competition, the lack of alternative investment options for IOCs and an increasingly hostile political climate in many oil-exporting states, translate to weaker bargaining power and unfavourable outcomes for IOCs. Their future as viable business entities is further compromised by the changing policy and regulatory environment in response to global climate change. By examining the strategies that major IOCs have adopted and may adopt to deal with systemic changes in the international oil industry, this paper proposes that to ensure the majors' long-term survival and viability, home governments should assume partial control of major IOCs and thus transform them into NOC-IOC hybrids. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several authors have analyzed the oil and gas industry's response to the climate change challenge. However, this literature has given little attention to one key technological strategy, CO2 capture and storage (CCS). This paper offers comparative case studies of the development of CCS strategies in BP, ExxonMobil and StatoilHydro. Thereby, it adds to the literature on the climate change strategies of oil companies - and the wider discussion of corporate environmental strategies - in two ways: First, by painting a more complete picture of the climate change strategies adopted by the companies. Second, by helping to illuminate a crucial issue: Whether or not corporate environmental strategies have any significant impacts on society and the environment. The comparative analysis shows that the involvement of oil and gas companies in CCS activities - ranging from general policy statements and lobbying governments about regulatory issues, via R&D efforts to large-scale commercial deployment - was for a large part driven by their overall approach to the climate change problem. Their involvement in CCS activities was in turn consequential, because oil and gas companies control key technologies, expertise and strategic project opportunities for CCS. Their decisions about how to use these resources have been important to the fate of attempts to establish CCS as part of the portfolio of practically available and legitimate mitigation options. The paper concludes that oil companies' climate strategies have had a significant societal impact by affecting the process of institutionalization of a new mitigation option for climate change, and associated technological "path creation". ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s the Standard Oil Company faced the hostility of the left-wing Mexican Revolutionary government, which eventually expropriated the company's properties in 1938. As nationalist rhetoric increased before 1938 in Mexico, Standard Oil explored new fields in Colombia, a country ruled by the foreign- business-friendly, right-wing Conservative Party. The Colombian Conservative Party had given very generous concessions to foreign multinationals, and Standard wanted to couple this political climate with the potential of the Colombian oil fields. In contrast with Mexico, during the first three decades of the twentieth-century, Colombia had enjoyed remarkable political stability. Escaping from nationalism in Mexico, however, Standard Oil faced a different kind of nationalism in Colombia, as the Conservative government ceded to the pressure of the opposition union-friendly Liberal Party's demands. Finally, the right-wing government of Venezuela showed to be the friendliest one towards Standard. However, the company did not trust the stability of the dictatorship and off-shored its refining activities. The paper compares Standard Oil's reaction to growing nationalism in two different political environments, and the way this affected its corporate strategy in both countries. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]