Oil majors now have incentive to focus on alternatives to wells

Reuters is reporting that Marathon Oil Corp "said on Tuesday it agreed to buy Canada's Western Oil Sands Inc. for about $5.56 billion, giving the U.S. oil company a foothold in one of the world's most promising streams of new crude oil."

In my post Why major oil companies aren't making new finds I presented information from an oil industry expert which seems to indicate that the major independent oil companies have very limited prospects for new finds of traditional oil fields. Based on that the purchase by Marathon makes great sense, and I would be surprised if the other majors listed below do not follow suit with investments in alternative sources of petroleum such as shale, tar sands and coal. Oil can be extracted from all three of those sources, and given current oil prices the extraction processes should be economically viable.


BP...British Petroleum
CVX...Chevron Corporation
COP...ConocoPhillips
E... Eni S.p.A.
[XOM...Exxon Mobil Corporation
TOT...TOTAL S.A.