Strategies of Oil and Gas Corporations. A Review of the Literature

In our paper we seek to answer the question of what the publicly available literature says about the upstream and downstream strategies of oil and gas corporations in the first decade of the 21st century. We would like to know what energy source or technology do national and international oil companies focus on in producing hydrocarbons or replacing their hydrocarbon reserves (conventional vs. non-conventional oil or gas, renewables, gas-to-liquid, coal-to-liquid, biofuels, deepwater drilling etc.). Our further question is how the geographic location of upstream and downstream assets changed between 2000 and 2010. In addition, we would like to know how international oil companies (IOCs) and national oil companies (NOCs) cooperate. We found that there is quite an extensive literature on the cooperation of NOCs and IOCs, mostly focusing on future expectations and assuming that the groups of IOCs and NOCs are homogeneous. Further, although the questions raised are of crucial importance for oil companies, there is a lack of publicly available research on how individual firms compete, how and whether their focus on different energy sources changed (e.g. from oil to gas), what upstream technology they develop and how they locate their upstream and downstream assets.