Petroleum Industry Structural Transition

The oil industry has experienced long periods of remarkable stability, interrupted only by brief discontinuities which have yielded new company patterns. The First World War eliminated Germany’s access to the Middle East’s oil resources and left the international oil industry in the hands of British, French, and US interests until the 1973 Yom Kippur war. The early 2020s signal a restructuring of the oil industry’s pattern; particularly, the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war may trigger extensive changes. Market forces drove the twentieth-century transition away from coal; oil was cheaper, more convenient, and cleaner. Although some governments, such as those of Germany and the United Kingdom, then took measures to protect coal industries slowing the shift, in the twenty-first century, governments are increasingly pushing for a move away from oil, accelerating the shift. Energy availability and prices are as much the product of regulations, taxes, and subsidies, which relate to political intentions, as they are of market forces, which mean relative costs. The oil share of the world energy market is in decline, but the volumes extracted and consumed continue to rise, as well as the business figure and the industry turnover. Demand is moving to Africa and Asia; China is the world’s largest oil importer. The international oil industry is no longer dominated by the United States and European multinationals; Chinese, Russian, and Saudi companies are increasingly important. The US dollar is no longer the only petro-currency; the Chinese yuan holds a rising place in the oil trade. China is the major market for Gulf oil, and it would prefer to develop comprehensive bilateral economic ties to eventually conduct trade in yuan. The issues being raised today concern money as much as security, with the possibility of a petro-yuan challenging the petro-dollar. Oil is the world’s most traded commodity; any large-scale move into yuan represents a risk for the US dollar and therefore the ability for the United States to project power around the world. The important question to ask is to what extent oil trading in yuan would enhance China’s and even Russia’s positions as global powers.