Exxon vs. Obama

One afternoon earlier this year, Rex ­Tillerson, the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., and Barack Obama, then president-elect, laid out very different visions of America’s energy future. With the days counting down to his inauguration, Obama told a crowd at George Mason University of his plan to double U.S. production of renewable energy by 2012—“to finally spark the creation of a clean-energy economy,” he said, to screams from the students in the audience. That pledge was a small part of a broad alternative-energy push that has swept into the White House along with Obama.

The energy giant is building an oil rig that can reach depths never before tapped.
Nearby, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Tillerson, a lanky Texan with a thick drawl and slicked-back silver hair, celebrated the earth’s “continued abundance” of oil, noting that humans have consumed barely a third of the planet’s available petroleum reserves. Oil and natural gas, he said, in a story line that Exxon Mobil has perfected over decades, will continue to supply nearly 60 percent of the world’s energy needs for the next 20 years. “Let’s be realistic,” Tillerson scoffed, when asked about Obama’s green-energy visions. “Let’s don’t fool ourselves!”

For years, critics have skewered Exxon Mobil for funding skeptics of global warming, claiming that its corporate denial campaign has endangered the planet. The world’s largest private energy corporation now must confront a different sort of climate change—the one in Washington. The question: Can Exxon Mobil survive Barack Obama?

The new president decries not just America’s dependence on “foreign” oil—the battle cry of politicians everywhere—but America’s dependence on oil, period. And he believes Exxon Mobil in particular, and Big Oil in general, is a key part of the problem. “I want to be clear,” Obama said shortly after taking office. “We have made our choice: America will not be held hostage to dwindling resources, hostile regimes, and a warming planet. We will not be put off from action because action is hard. Now is the time to make the tough choices.”

Yet if the energy landscape is transforming before our eyes, you wouldn’t know it from looking at Exxon Mobil or listening to Rex Tillerson. As the rest of the world stampedes to alternative energy and a popular new president rallies for it, the largest investor-owned oil company—the one with the biggest profit in history last year and $31 billion of cash in the bank—is standing stubbornly still. In 2008, Exxon Mobil spent about $26 billion on oil and gas development, plus another $32 billion buying back its own stock; spending on renewable-energy research amounted to a measly $4 million.

It probably shouldn’t be a surprise that the company’s prospects for the next decade or two are starting to look shaky. Exxon Mobil’s output and conventional reserves are declining, along with its share price, which is down about 17 percent since the beginning of 2008. In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are pouring their hearts, their souls, and billions of dollars into solar, wind, and electric-car investments, some in the clean-tech crowd have dubbed Tillerson the T. rex of the hydrocarbon age.

The nickname is fitting. Critics see Exxon Mobil itself as a hulking dinosaur that mastered the earth in one era but appears increasingly maladapted in the current one. “They’re dinosaurs, absolutely,” said Fadel Gheit, an influential oil analyst for the investment firm Oppenheimer & Co., when we sat down in his Manhattan office last summer, as oil prices were soaring. “They epitomize peak-oil theory: They can’t grow production. They can’t grow [conventional] reserves. They need to ask themselves, Where will they be in 50 years? What will they do when oil is gone? They need to reinvent the company.” With oil prices down, Gheit is more sanguine but adds in an email: “A national energy strategy is a must and three decades overdue, and the environmental issue must be a part of it. Exxon and all other energy producers and consumers must recognize that and cooperate in fixing the problem before it gets a lot worse.” ( View an interactive feature comparing Exxon Mobil's stance on peak oil to other industry leaders.)

By refusing to seriously invest in a world beyond oil, Exxon Mobil marks itself not merely as politically incorrect but as a company that seems oddly indifferent to the business risks of its intransigence. It seems increasingly likely that Obama and Congress will slap a price on carbon in coming years that could put oil at a competitive disadvantage to such carbon-free energy sources as wind, solar, and biomass. That could reduce demand for crude, sharply cutting its price.

The Obama administration wants to create incentives to put a million plug-in hybrid cars on U.S. roads by 2015. IBM’s Institute for Business Value says that by 2020, the number of globally manufactured automobiles powered by gasoline alone will plunge to 65 percent of the total from 95 percent today. Right now, Exxon Mobil isn’t built to live in that kind of future.

Exxon Mobil pumps more oil and natural gas more profitably than any other company. In 2007, its profitability, or in companyspeak, return on capital employed, exceeded that of Chevron, its closest rival, by almost 40 percent. One reason for this is its laserlike focus on oil—and a deep organizational aversion to anything that threatens the bottom line. Climate change? Overblown, Exxon Mobil has long claimed, bolstering its skepticism with a well-funded public-relations campaign to cast doubt on the causes and consequences of global warming. Peak oil? No way are we running out, assures Tillerson, who insists that the earth has plenty of hydrocarbons left to burn. Renewable energy? Pipe dream, the company asserts, not worthy of serious investment by an oil giant. “We’re not in that business,” Tillerson said flatly at the company’s annual meeting in 2007. “We’re in the business of oil and gas.”

Exxon Mobil’s 25-year “Outlook for Energy,” an internal planning document, takes the trends of recent years and projects them forward, modeling the company’s worldview in a neat line that shows global energy consumption rising 1.2 percent a year for decades to come. By 2030, the world will use almost 40 percent more energy than it did in 2005, Exxon Mobil predicts. It says fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal—will continue to meet about 80 percent of demand and will emit 28 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they do today. In Exxon Mobil’s forecast, renewables—wind, solar, and biofuels—will supply just 2 percent of the world’s energy needs by 2030. With the company seeing such a minuscule market for renewables, Tillerson has publicly proclaimed, “We haven’t found an alternative to invest in.”

The energy giant is building an oil rig that can reach depths never before tapped.
Critics wonder if that comment will one day occupy a special place in corporate infamy, alongside other legendary scoffs. In the mid-19th century, Telegraph Co., the ancestor of Western Union, monopolized the national telegraph system. But when Alexander Graham Bell and his business partner offered to sell Bell’s telephone patents to Telegraph, executives there couldn’t be bothered by the “idiotic” technology. A Telegraph Co. committee reported its findings about Bell’s telephone proposal to company president Chauncey DePew: “Technically, we do not see that this device will be ever capable of sending recognizable speech over a distance of several miles.” And then there was Ken Olsen, founder and longtime president of mainframe-computing pioneer Digital Equipment Corp., who, in 1977, famously sniffed, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

“Look at Ford,” says Peter Schwartz, an author and business consultant who headed scenario planning for Shell in the 1980s. Just a decade ago, Ford Motor had an environmentally friendly CEO in William Ford Jr. Yet without regulatory pressure to produce more fuel-efficient cars, the company “missed the window to adapt,” Schwartz says. “The question now for Exxon Mobil, given its scale, is will it adapt in time?”

Some Exxon Mobil shareholders worry that time is running out—an astounding notion given the company’s outsize profits. Members of the Rockefeller family—descendants of founder John D. Rockefeller—say they think that the Tillerson way is a case of corporate tunnel vision that is as reckless as it is skewed.

John D. Rockefeller’s great-granddaughter Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, a development economist at Tufts University, confronted Tillerson and the board at the company’s most recent annual meeting, in Dallas. Goodwin, 64, described what she sees as a potentially cataclysmic flaw in two of Exxon Mobil’s fundamental business assumptions. The company’s management, she said, assumes that developing economies will continue to grow rapidly and that this growth will drive increasing demand for fossil-fuel energy sources, ignoring the fact that such changes will cause climate shifts that will hit developing countries particularly hard. “These assumptions cancel one another out,” Goodwin argued, as Tillerson and his board listened patiently.

Goodwin’s resolution, which called on the company to investigate these “internal contradictions” and to take a leadership role in developing sustainable energy, garnered votes from approximately 10 percent of those Exxon Mobil shareholders who voted. Another Goodwin-supported proposal, to replace Tillerson with an independent, nonexecutive chairman, garnered 40 percent. Undeterred, the company’s opponents are still circling.

In his campaign for the presidency, Obama mentioned Big Oil in general and Exxon Mobil in particular dozens of times, and not a single reference was friendly. His choice for energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize winner on the vanguard of alternative-energy research.

During the election campaign, Obama openly mocked Tillerson’s company. “It’s a game where lobbyists write check after check, and Exxon turns record profits, while you pay the price at the pump and our planet is put at risk,” the new president railed during the primaries. He also inveighed against windfall oil profits, singling out Exxon Mobil several times as a corporate predator. “They are not going to give up those profits easily,” said candidate Obama.

In addition to Chu, Obama has packed his administration with other hawks on climate change, including Harvard University physicist John Holdren, the new White House science adviser, who has lambasted Exxon Mobil for funding climate-change skeptics.

David Sandalow of the Brookings Institution, formerly part of Obama’s transition team for energy policy, published a book last year called Freedom From Oil: How the Next President Can End the United States’ Oil Addiction, in which he argued for a massive federal push to put millions of electric-powered cars on U.S. roads. Obama took up that cause in February’s stimulus bill, which offers tax breaks for buyers of flexible-fueled and hybrid-electric cars and commits billions of dollars for heavy-duty-battery research and development. “The future of the auto industry is electrification,” says Sandalow. “The only question is how quickly.”

Every investment at Exxon Mobil, whether it’s $100,000 or $100 million, must pass a rigid review. This rigor gives Exxon Mobil its edge over rivals, one company executive says. Tillerson’s predecessor, the legendary Lee Raymond, who was chairman and CEO from 1993 through 2005, would openly mock other oil companies for writing off billions of dollars of shareholder capital from bad investments.

Brilliant but famously headstrong, Raymond set the tone for Exxon Mobil’s attitude toward climate change and alternative energy, and its all-encompassing embrace of fossil fuels. After the oil shocks of the 1970s, he ran Exxon’s nuclear and renewable-energy units—relatively small enterprises within the company’s universe—and then dumped the businesses when oil prices fell again. For years, the last remnant of Exxon’s renewable-energy portfolio was an early-generation solar unit on the roof of its Universe of Energy pavilion at Epcot Theme Park in Walt Disney World.

The energy giant is building an oil rig that can reach depths never before tapped.
Housed in a large hexagonal building near Epcot’s signature golf-ball-shaped Spaceship Earth attraction, the Universe of Energy showed a short film and animatronic scenes celebrating energy in all its beneficence, with nary a smokestack or Middle Eastern army in sight. “En-er-gy, you make the world go round” went the theme song’s refrain. Visitors traveled through the exhibit’s auditoriums and dinosaur displays in sections of theater seating that served as small vehicles for the journey; at the end, the sections would reassemble to form a complete theater. The wizardry was hugely popular in its time, even if the solar panels on the roof, which purportedly helped power the ride, were a prop. “They were mostly for show,” says a former Exxon Mobil official familiar with the project. “They provided very little juice.” (Disney maintains that the panels provided as much power as its promotional materials claimed.)

Veterans of other oil companies say they’ve actually endured scorn from senior Exxon Mobil executives over the years for talking up renewables. In 2007, when ConocoPhillips helped found the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a business lobby supporting controls on greenhouse-gas emissions, Exxon Mobil executives “were furious at us,” says one senior ConocoPhillips official. BP, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips have all diversified into renewables to varying degrees. BP is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of photovoltaic cells. Shell is a major wind-power producer. Chevron has substantial geothermal operations, and ConocoPhillips is investing heavily in biofuels, including diesel made from animal waste. That leaves Exxon Mobil as the last significant holdout for a future staked almost entirely on oil and gas.

The problem for the company and the industry it leads is that no one knows where the new hydrocarbons will come from. The most accessible petroleum deposits—in places like Alaska, Texas, Mexico, and the North Sea—are in mature fields that are in steady decline. New discoveries in these regions are possible, but they generally lie deeper or in more remote areas and will require expensive drilling technology to become productive. And, as the stalemate in Alaska shows, even knowing that the energy is available doesn’t mean the pipeline will be built to get it to market. (See “Pipe Dreams”) The upshot: Exxon Mobil’s production volume is dwindling. Its output of oil and natural gas plummeted 6 percent in 2008, with declines reported in the first three quarters. The drop reflected production dips at several North American fields, partly as a result of hurricanes, as well as Venezuela’s expropriation of certain Exxon Mobil operations. The company was also hit by shrinking draws from joint-production projects around the world. Under the terms of such contracts, which account for about 20 percent of Exxon Mobil’s production, higher oil prices translated into fewer barrels allocated to Exxon Mobil. That’s because the contracts are structured so that Exxon Mobil recoups its initial investment rapidly and then receives profits more gradually. In other words, ironic as it seems, high oil prices actually eroded Exxon Mobil’s medium- to long-term value, analysts say. Hence the company’s sunken stock price, even before the market crash, despite the record profit.

Yet Tillerson keeps upping the ante on oil and gas. Last year, he boosted Exxon Mobil’s exploration and development budget by 25 percent, to $125 billion over the next five years. The company’s sole public commitment to alternative-energy research is a 10-year, $100 million grant to Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project. And it turns out that only 40 percent of that money will fund renewable-­energy work. (Nearly 30 percent of the funds are going into tinkering with fossil fuels.) Tillerson is spending considerably more money trying to rebrand Exxon Mobil as a technology company, albeit one focused on better ways to pull oil and gas out of the ground.

Though several TV and print ads feature what the company’s website calls its “revolutionary” separator “breakthrough” for hybrid- and electric-car batteries, these emphasize the company’s technological advancements, not any commitment to an alternative-energy future.

The image dovetails with one of senior management’s periodic big-think reviews. A few years ago, top executives made a thorough review of Exxon’s energy outlook from 1975. Company forecasters had nailed the demand side in their 30-year forecast; energy consumption, as they predicted, closely tracked global economic growth. But they had wildly overestimated the speed at which prices would rise. The reason: “We missed the growth of technology,” says an executive who participated in the review. “We missed how rigs would go from 50 feet of water to 5,000 feet”—enabling drillers to capture more oil at lower depths—“how horizontal drilling would require fewer offshore platforms, and how the cost of finding oil would fall.”

Roughly two-thirds of Exxon Mobil’s reserves are made up of conventional oil, gas, and liquid natural-gas projects. However, Exxon Mobil’s future resource base—what experts call the opportunity pipeline—is much more tenuous. These undeveloped deposits amount to the equivalent of about 50 billion barrels. Exxon Mobil owns the rights to these but doesn’t plan to exploit them for another five to 10 years. Conventional oil and natural-gas fields make up a mere quarter of that total.

The bulk of the company’s future barrels lie in hard-to-access fields deep beneath seawater, in the Arctic, and in nearly impenetrable geological formations in Colorado and elsewhere, requiring extensive drilling and massive infusions of chemicals and freshwater to flush them out. These reserves are truly the bottom of the barrel in terms of the world’s hydrocarbon supplies, viable only in a regime of high energy prices and lax environmental restraints. Much of Exxon Mobil’s untapped natural gas, for example, is the so-called sour type, laden with toxic chemicals that are expensive to remove. And by far its single-biggest undeveloped deposit is the Canadian tar sands, the hydrocarbon muck found beneath northern Alberta’s vast boreal forest. Exxon Mobil and others are making plans to mine the region’s bitumen sand on an immense scale—with grim ramifications for the environment, near and far. Last year, were it not for newly reported reserves of 1.1 billion oil-equivalent barrels of Canadian bitumen, Exxon Mobil’s proved reserves would have significantly declined.

The energy giant is building an oil rig that can reach depths never before tapped.
Separating the bitumen oil from the sand and clay that surrounds it requires a huge influx of energy in the form of heat and steam. Canada is burning vast amounts of natural gas for the job. The result: Every barrel of crude from tar sands releases three to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a barrel of oil produced conventionally. The process also sucks up enormous quantities of fresh­water and spews it out as tailings waste into giant lake beds of toxic sludge.

“We’re exchanging a clean-burning fuel”—natural gas—“for a dirty fuel, and we’re using freshwater to do it,” says Philip Weiss, an energy analyst with Argus Research Co. In a statement, Exxon Mobil disputed that the tar sands projects are environmentally damaging. “The oil-sands industry currently accounts for only 4 percent of Canada’s total emissions,” according to the company.

Inside Exxon Mobil, senior management sees its own “corporate social responsibility,” as Tillerson put it at last year’s annual meeting: satisfying the world’s insatiable appetite for oil and natural gas. Tillerson also frames this mission in moral terms: What right do Western environmentalists have to push basic amenities like electricity and car travel beyond the reach of millions of people just emerging from poverty in the developing world? “Who are we to say, ‘We’ve got ours; you can’t have yours’?” says a recently retired Exxon Mobil executive.

Since taking over for Lee Raymond in 2006, Tillerson has softened his predecessor’s combative stance on global warming, but he certainly hasn’t replaced it. The company acknowledges that temperatures and greenhouse-gas levels are both rising, but Tillerson has said he isn’t convinced that there’s a causal link between the two. Still, recognizing the risks, Exxon Mobil now says it’s willing to entertain greenhouse-gas restrictions, as long as these efforts are on an equal footing with “other important world priorities, such as economic development, poverty eradication, and public health.” Tillerson has recently expressed a preference for a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade system because he says a straight tax would be more efficient.

Such statements only further infuriate the company’s critics, who say Exxon Mobil’s concerns at this juncture amount to posturing. Although an overwhelming consensus may exist among scientists that global warming is real, Exxon Mobil can point to the lack of universal agreement about the prudence of spending hundreds of billions of dollars over several decades on carbon-reduction programs to reverse the trend. The noted physicist Freeman Dyson, for example, who has no quarrel with the warming data, has suggested that it might be a more humane public policy to spend some of that money on addressing immediate problems—eliminating poverty or infectious diseases, for example—while searching for cheaper technological fixes to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Still, after intense pressure from environmental groups and some members of Congress, Exxon Mobil has stopped funding certain high-profile global-warming skeptics such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But in the most recently available financial data, the company was still plowing millions of dollars into other conservative groups that stoke doubts about climate change. “Exxon is a purveyor of carbon. We’re not ‘beyond petroleum,’ ” says one of the company’s former lobbyists in Washington. And though the curmudgeon Raymond is gone, the operative who actually built Exxon Mobil’s global-warming-denial machine, Ken Cohen, still heads the company’s large department of public affairs.

Cohen, an Exxon lawyer who emerged as a close confidant of Raymond’s after Exxon purchased Mobil in 1999, followed the tobacco industry’s playbook. According to Greenpeace, Exxon Mobil gave nearly $23 million between 1998 and 2006 to a network of conservative nonprofit groups that propagated doubts about global warming, even as climate scientists were reaching consensus on the clear and present dangers. Several of the same groups and spokespeople on Exxon Mobil’s payroll had previously taken tobacco-industry money to downplay the health dangers associated with cigarette smoke. Cohen funded the drive—regarded as “black ops” by some Exxon Mobil insiders—with special earmarks and budget lines approved from above. The project was a closely held secret within the company. “This was neither legitimate science nor legitimate charity,” says one source familiar with the process.

“It was propaganda.”

More recently, Exxon Mobil has found subtler ways to mold minds on climate change. Between 2004 and 2007, it donated $2.5 million to the American Geological Institute for Faces of Earth, a four-hour TV series on the geologic history of the planet. Though the last part of the series nominally addresses “how humans are shaping Earth,” the 43-minute program skirts the core issues of contemporary climate change. Instead, the documentary, which aired on the Science Channel in 2007 and is being sold to schools, casts man-made warming as part of an 8,000-year process dating back to the advent of the plow. It features several reputable scientists hinting at the imminent dangers of today’s heavy fossil-fuel use but repeatedly cuts away to images of natural forces such as erupting volcanoes, while the narrator’s voice redirects the discussion to geologic time scales. “There’s a lot of talk today about Earth’s changing climate in surprising and alarming tones,” the narrator says, in the film’s only direct reference to global warming. “The geologic record tells us that the climate has always cycled between cold and warm. These conditions are natural to the planet. But the geologic record also reveals that we should be in a cooling cycle. But we’re not.”

Exxon Mobil seems to be getting defter at selecting whom to fund. In one of its largest individual research grants in recent years, the company’s foundation awarded $250,000 to a pair of reputable researchers at the University of British Columbia for a project called Fuel Choices and Human Welfare. The money is being used to study the implications of fuel choices for a range of environmental and health outcomes. Replacing gasoline with diesel fuel, for example, reduces carbon-dioxide emissions but can increase air pollution.

“Anybody that tells you they’ve got this figured out is not being truthful with you,” Tillerson said at the 2008 annual meeting. “There are too many complexities around climate science for anybody to fully understand all of the causes and effects and consequences of what you may choose to do to attempt to affect that.”

Obama’s energy agenda calls for eliminating oil imports from the Middle East and Venezuela—or 27 percent of all U.S. oil imports—by 2018. Such a precipitous drop could devastate Exxon Mobil, which gets nearly 40 percent of its imported crude from the Persian Gulf region, making it the largest importer of Middle Eastern oil to the U.S. The company also sees U.S. energy consumption declining, but much more slowly than Obama wants. Obama also vows to implement an economywide cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. To seriously reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, carbon prices may need to be set high enough to push effective oil prices above $80 a barrel, which could give alternative fuel sources a big leg up, says Daniel Kammen, a University of California at Berkeley physicist who has advised Obama on energy issues.

“You can’t defeat the incumbent without fundamentally changing the rules of the game,” Kammen says.

seeing exxon mobil at this moment, with its reserves dwindling and its management under assault by shareholders, it’s hard not to compare it to Wall Street, as least with regard to the public mood. Investment banks and old-line oil companies seem equally popular with the current occupant of the White House.

Exxon Mobil “allowed itself to be seen as a villain on climate change, as a company that’s more interested in throwing up roadblocks than finding solutions,” says Elizabeth McGeveran of F&C Asset Management PLC, a London-based fund manager. “For any company in this globalizing world of ours, that type of reputation is a mistake.”

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