They are 7.... and they are not dwarfs

An interesting article, via Cara's blog, on 7 regional oil powers rising and shaping the landscape. Definitely worth the read for free marketeers and for the applied economists. The public float of Gazprom has shown an almost undeterred ascent in value over the last year. Read more below...
 

The article is in Financial Times and can be found here. The excerpts are below:

"...
The new Seven Sisters: oil and gas giants dwarf western rivals

By Carola Hoyos

Published: March 11 2007 21:23 | Last updated: March 12 2007 17:46

When an angry Enrico Mattei coined the phrase “the seven sisters” to describe the Anglo-Saxon companies that controlled the Middle East’s oil after the second world war, the founder of Italy’s modern energy industry could not have imagined the profound shift in power that would occur barely half a century later.
Ask the expert: The new Seven Sisters

Nader Sultan, former chief executive of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, and Carola Hoyos, the FT’s chief energy correspondent, answer your questions on the implications of the shift in power to oil and gas companies from the emerging world. Send your questions now.



As oil prices have trebled over the past four years, a new group of oil and gas companies has risen to prominence. They have consolidated their power as aggressive resource holders and seekers and pushed the world’s biggest listed energy groups, which emerged out of the original seven sisters – ExxonMobil and Chevron of the US and Europe’s BP and Royal Dutch Shell – on to the sidelines and into an existential crisis.

The “new seven sisters”, or the most influential energy companies from countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, have been identified by the Financial Times in consultation with numerous industry executives. They are Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, CNPC of China, NIOC of Iran, Venezuela’s PDVSA, Brazil’s Petrobras and Petronas of Malaysia.

Overwhelmingly state-owned, they control almost one-third of the world’s oil and gas production and more than one-third of its total oil and gas reserves. In contrast, the old seven sisters – which shrank to four in the industry consolidation of the 1990s – produce about 10 per cent of the world’s oil and gas and hold just 3 per cent of reserves. Even so, their integrated status – which means they sell not only oil and gas, but also gasoline, diesel and petrochemicals – push their revenues notably higher than those of the newcomers..."


"...
Jimmy Carter, who as US president during the oil shocks of the late 1970s passed the most sweeping energy legislation in the country’s history, says in an interview that energy insecurity is “still a major issue and will be increasingly a crisis situation in the years to come”. The present situation differs from the one he tackled in one main respect: “Today we are experiencing on a global basis competition from China and India that I didn’t know when I was president.”



The biggest of those competitors is CNPC. It has a solid foothold in China’s large reserves, owning 88 per cent of PetroChina. But it is its rapid push to secure international reserves that makes it so powerful.



Backed by Beijing’s feverish quest to secure the energy it needs for China to develop, CNPC has fanned out across the globe into about 20 countries from Azerbaijan to Ecuador. It has pumped more than $8bn into the oil industry of war-torn Sudan, when concerns over human rights deter others in the industry from involvement with Khartoum. “CNPC are the rule makers on access to new reserves in new markets and they are changing the competition for resources, services, capital and markets,” says Mr West.

Nor is CNPC the only company changing the rules in the race to secure assets. Smaller national oil companies such as Petrobras and Petronas are also keeping international energy executives awake at night...."

So, sell Google buy Gazprom? Energy economy instead of "ethereal" knowledge one? Scarcity instead of abundance determines the path of economy?