McDermott: Trends in Offshore Oil & Gas - GineersNow GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 021, McD | Page 20

Technology Unseat Oil and Gas Firms
in World’s Most Valuable Companies
It’s an expected change as Information Technology advances.
The world around us relies heavily on energy.
Being a key component of manufacturing and
production, energy needs to be secured for
affordable supply to consumers, while reducing
environmental impacts. This is what petroleum
engineering is all about.
In a narrower sense, petroleum engineering is
concerned with the design and development
of methods for extracting oil and gas from
deposits below the Earth’s surface. This
field deals with the activities related to the
production of hydrocarbons, which can either
be crude oil or natural gas. It is this study that
evaluates petroleum resources.
Petroleum engineers usually design equipment
to extract oil and gas in the most profitable
way, develop means to force out oil by injecting
water, chemicals, gases, or steam into an oil
reserve, and evaluate the production of wells
through testing and surveys. It is also the
duties of petroleum engineers to use computer-
controlled drilling or fracturing, and make sure
that oil field equipment are installed, operated,
maintained properly. The field overlaps
with many of the engineering fields such as
mechanical, chemical and civil engineering.
In 2006, ExxonMobil was hailed as the most
valued company at $362.5 billion, together
with a few more oil and gas companies like
conglomerate General Electric (no. 2 at $348.5
billion) and BP (no. 5 at $225.9 billion) in the top
five, followed by Royal Dutch Shell at sixth (at
18
Oil Gas Leaders • May 2017
$203.5 billion). One technology company was
included at no. 3 valued at $279 billion, which
is Microsoft; and leading bank Citigroup, no. 4
at $230.9 billion. That trend gradually changed
until ten years later, only ExxonMobil among
other oil and gas companies managed to land
in the top 5 most valuable public companies.
The world of technology headed the 2016 list.
In a span of 10 years, Apple was able to climb
its way to the top, with Alphabet, Microsoft,
Amazon and Facebook just behind. Their
market capitalization can be found in this chart.
This is thought to be the first time that
technology firms dominated the world’s most
valuable companies list. But why not? With
the flourish of smartphones, social media,
virtual reality and artificial intelligence, and the
advancement of renewable energy in most
countries, it might be difficult for another oil and
gas company to top the list.