Some books are easier to read than others. I came into this book Private Empire, ExxonMobil and American Power, with a large degree of skepticism, even though the book was recommended by The Economist. In the back of my mind I feared this was going to be yet another piece of crappy liberal activism that trashed ExxonMobil. I came out of this book with a lot of respect for business writer Steve Coll, who painted a picture of ExxonMobil with nuance and a deep understanding of the industry, and at the same time crafted a story that is highly readable to the average person.
Some years ago, over on SeekingAlpha, I published quite a few articles on upstream oil and gas companies, including seventeen articles on ExxonMobil, and I readily understood most of the terminology, particularly on the financial side, that Coll had to use to explain some of Exxon’s challenges from the late 80s to 2010.
It was very interesting to see how oil industry executives saw the world in the 1990s, and just how radically different the energy industry is seen now. For example, when former CEO Lee Raymond quipped in the 90s that new reserves would have to be found in increasingly politically unstable places because the reserves in the developed world were maturing and declining, I found myself writing in the margins just how wrong that prediction was.
ExxonMobil, and many other big oil companies during this period in time, struggled replace its oil reserves in a time of increasing ‘resource nationalism’ by looking further and further afield for new projects to develop; often in Africa or countries in the former Soviet Union. The irony is, as the major oil companies scrambled to do this, in the late 2000s, major technological advances in fracking, deepwater drilling and oil sands mining would suddenly and dramatically open up huge oil and gas reserves in North Dakota, Texas, the Athabasca oil sands and various locations in the Deepwater.
These discoveries would turn the existing oil paradigm on its head, although in 2012, when this book was written, that was not yet a foregone conclusion.
On a personal note, I typically read stories and history books from times well before I was born, and therefore have no actual personal memory of the events. I was born in 1983, and this book covers the time span of 1990-2010 roughly, which covers the time from when I was in elementary school to my mid-twenties. A lot of the events Coll wrote about triggered a medley of memories from me, from grade school, to high school, to university and then my early twenties, which caused me to reflect on a lot of things going on in my life in parallel. It’s difficult to see the world change day-by-day, but when you read about the last twenty years in some tour-de-force story like this one, the totality of it really hits.
Anyway. Coll weaves together personalities, characters, geographies, finance and intrigue into a highly-relatable story; not an easy feat when writing about an amorphous corporation. I really recommend this book.
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