Oil industry awash in record levels of cash

Keeping the oil flowing
Not all of the proceeds from the surge in oil prices has gone straight to the industry’s bottom line. As oil prices rise, so do oil companies' costs. For starters, they pay royalties to governments that lease the rights to drill -– a payment that ranges as high as 18 percent in the U.S. Domestic oil producers also pay taxes of about 40 percent, according to Gheit. So as the price of oil rises, so does the bill for royalties and taxes.

Oil producers also have to spend money to keep oil flowing from aging fields, by drilling more holes in the ground to squeeze fewer and fewer barrels out of the same fields. The cost of these oilfield services, everything from drilling rigs to pipelines, has risen by as much as 50 percent over the past five years, according to Gheit. So the cost of maintaining existing levels of production is now consuming more than half of the industry’s annual capital outlays, most of which used to go to discovering new oil fields.

That means a smaller portion of oil industry profits are being put to work to find more oil. One big reason is that finding promising areas to develop new reserves has become increasingly difficult. In part, that's because the bulk of the world’s oil reserves sit in the ground controlled by authoritarian regimes. The higher the price of oil goes, the easier it is for those regimes to maintain power and the less they need to turn to outside oil companies for investment, said A.G. Edwards futures analyst Bill O’Grady.

“Foreign investment brings in foreigners and their ideas,” he said. “OPEC countries and Russia have worked vigorously not let that happen.”

Despite pledges to increase output, most OPEC countries are pumping at full capacity already. And if oil prices are headed higher, those countries with the ability to boost output now have little incentive to do so if they wait and get more money for the same oil in the future.

As a result, Western oil producers have been forced to look for new reserves by shopping for other oil companies that have already found and developed deposits of oil and natural gas. As oil prices have risen, so has the value of another oil company's reserves. The current bidding war between Chevron and China’s state-owned CNOOC is just the latest example.

But none of that investment in other oil companies is increasing the world’s supply of oil. And without new discoveries, the price of oil will likely continue to rise.

"Basically, it's musical chairs, and every time you have fewer and fewer companies,” said Gheit. “The people who are slicing pie among themselves -- the number is shrinking, but the pie itself is not growing. The pie is shrinking."

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