The oil majors are at a crossroads and there are growing signs that their business model can no longer last. The combined effects of cheap oil, the increasing difficulty in expanding bookable reserves, and ever-tightening environmental regulation on “unburnable carbon” leave the largest oil companies not only with few growth opportunities, but also with the prospect of being forced into decline. For decades, the largest oil companies pursued a business model that relied upon perpetual growth of finding and booking new oil reserves. According to a recent report from Chatham House, there is strong evidence that this model has reached its limits, amidst signs of “growing shareholder disillusion with a business model rooted in assumptions of ever-growing oil demand, oil scarcity and the need to increase bookable reserves, all of which increasingly lack validity.” Since most of the world’s oil reserves are under the control of national […]