National Oil Companies and the World Oil Market: Should We Be Worried?
State-owned oil and natural gas companies, such as Saudi Aramco, Petróleos de Venezuela and China National Petroleum Corp., own 73 percent of the world's oil reserves and 68 percent of its natural gas. They bankroll governments across the globe. Although national oil companies superficially resemble private-sector companies, they often behave in very different ways.
Oil and Governance: State-Owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a new book commissioned by Stanford University's Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, explains the variation in performance and strategy for such state-owned enterprises. The book, which Mark Thurber co-edited and contributed to, also provides fresh insights into the future of the oil industry and the politics of the oil-rich countries where national oil companies dominate.
Though national oil companies have often been the subject of case studies, for the first time multiple case studies followed a common research design, which aided the relative ranking of performance and the evaluation of hypotheses about such companies' performance. Interestingly, some of the worst performing of these operations belong to countries quite unfriendly to the United States. Mark will also discuss the industrial structure of the oil industry, and the politics and administration of national oil companies. One result of the dominance of this structure for oil markets is that high prices often lead to lower supplies and low prices lead to increased production -- the opposite response of private companies.
To view seminar video, click here.
This is apart of the Weekly Energy Seminar series managed by the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.
NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center
Mark C. Thurber
Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall East, Rm E412
Stanford, CA 94305
Mark C. Thurber is Associate Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University, where he studies and teaches about energy and environmental markets and policy. Dr. Thurber has written and edited books and articles on topics including global fossil fuel markets, climate policy, integration of renewable energy into electricity markets, and provision of energy services to low-income populations.
Dr. Thurber co-edited and contributed to Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Global Coal Market: Supplying the Major Fuel for Emerging Economies (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is the author of Coal (Polity Press, 2019) about why coal has thus far remained the preeminent fuel for electricity generation around the world despite its negative impacts on local air quality and the global climate.
Dr. Thurber teaches a course on energy markets and policy at Stanford, in which he runs a game-based simulation of electricity, carbon, and renewable energy markets. With Dr. Frank Wolak, he also conducts game-based workshops for policymakers and regulators. These workshops explore timely policy topics including how to ensure resource adequacy in a world with very high shares of renewable energy generation.
Dr. Thurber has previous experience working in high-tech industry. From 2003-2005, he was an engineering manager at a plant in Guadalajara, México that manufactured hard disk drive heads. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.S.E. from Princeton University.
