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

TOWARDS THEFDRUSBPBP 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 , Churchill and Stalin had carved up the world into spheres of influence, the American president slipped away onto a 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.Building on the long-standing exploitation of Persian reserves by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now ), the Saudi-American alliance formed the axis of oil that led Western majors to look longingly first to the Persian Gulf, then to other distant longitudes. For decades the world’s five biggest private-sector oil companies—America’s ExxonMobil and Chevron, Britain’s and Shell, and France’s TotalEnergies—have drilled from South America to Siberia. Now a swirl of geopolitical, economic and environmental factors is leading these “supermajors” to increasingly look not east and west but north and south.