Business | The energy majors’ new map

Where on Earth is big oil spending its $150bn profit bonanza?

BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies are increasingly looking to their backyards

Image: Vincent Kilbride
|New York

TOWARDS THE end of the second world war Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a fateful gathering of world leaders that helped determine the course of geopolitics for decades. No, not the Yalta summit. Immediately after FDR, Churchill and Stalin had carved up the world into spheres of influence, the American president slipped away onto a US Navy vessel to meet quietly with Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia. In return for protection of the Sauds’ sovereignty in the Holy Land, the monarch agreed to grant American oil firms access to his country’s petroleum.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Big oil’s new map”

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