The other view is that the business of big oil is to capture scarce resources. It’s about squeezing as much as you can out of the wrinkly tube. Oil companies are custodians of wasting assets: it’s all about reserves, who owns the barrels and the price, monetary or political, to acquire more of them.
Suddenly the debate over what oil companies are about is becoming shrill — and not only because the supporters of peak oil theory are getting more noisy. Whether or not the global oil industry has reached maximum output at some 85-90 million barrels per day, the stock market seems to have lost its ability consistently to price risk in the oil sector.
timesonline
