ExxonMobil

ExxonMobil, created by the merger of Exxon Corporation and Mobil Corporation on November 30, 1999, is the world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas company, when measured by revenue. The company is a direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil company, and the largest of the six privately owned super oil companies in the world, the others being BP/ PLC, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Total SA. It had a daily production of 3.921 million BOE (barrels of oil equivalent) in 2008. However, this is only 3 percent of world production, and several state-owned oil companies such as the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, the National Iranian Oil Company, and Petroleos de Venezuela are far larger. In fact, ExxonMobil is only the 17th largest oil company in the world. When ranked by oil and gas reserves, it is 14th in the world with less than 1 percent of the total.

The company holds exploration and production acreage in 38 countries and conducts production operations in 23 countries around the world. ExxonMobil has interests in 37 refineries, and fuels and lubes marketing activities around the world. It is also the largest global refiner, manufacturer of lube base stocks, and supplier/marketer of petroleum products and has a combined daily refining capacity of 6.3 million barrels with a resource base of 73 billion oil equivalent barrels (OEB). It also manufactures and markets commodity petrochemicals such as aromatics, olefins, and a wide variety of specialty petrochemicals and it also has interests in electric power generation, chemicals, and coal and minerals. ExxonMobil spends more than $700 million every year in new research including nanotechnology, synthetic lubricant catalyst research, biomedical services, and hydrocarbon-based fuel cells. It markets fuels and lubricants under three brands: Esso, Exxon, and Mobil.

ExxonMobil's interest in nanotechnology stems from the broader challenge that oil companies face—the need to replace dwindling supplies of oil and gas, and to deal with pollution. Worldwide energy usage in oil equivalents is about 200 million barrels per day. About 80 million are oil, the rest are coal and natural gas. It is estimated that in the next 30 years energy supply will need to double just to meet the steadily increasing consumption in the industrial world and a moderate amount of catching up by the poorer countries. Yet oil supplies have steadily gone down. Since 1999, the world's five largest international oil companies have replaced only 82 percent of the reserves that they've consumed.