Oil demand is going to continue to grow as population grows.
— Rex Tillerson
Natural gas obviously brings with it a number of quality-of-life environmental benefits because it is a relatively clean-burning fuel. It has a CO2 footprint, but it has no particulates. It has none of the other emissions elements that are of concern to public health that other forms of power-generation fuels do have: coal, fuel oil, others.
In conventional oil and natural gas production, you always produce a lot of formation water, and it's crummy water. It's real salty. It's got heavy metals in it. It's got bad stuff in it.
By the year 2040, the world's population is likely to increase by about 2 billion people, with also projected economic output will be up about 130 percent versus the year 2010.
The size of the resource prize has to be large to support the risked capital that has to be put in place. The Arctic is one of the few places left where we believe those opportunities exist.
You know, oil prices from 2007, on the strength of a very robust global economy and a very robust emerging China, many of you will recall, ramped up to near $150 a barrel. Then we had the financial - U.S. financial collapse. Oil prices collapsed all the way down to $40 a barrel.
If you ask the average person on the street about U.S. energy and U.S. oil in particular, our situation, most Americans would say, 'Oh, we're energy poor; we don't have enough oil; we don't have enough natural gas.'
Experience tells us that a good foundation is critical for success in the Arctic and elsewhere. ExxonMobil's Sakhalin-1 project with Rosneft is an example where we have put this experience to work.
Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around - we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.
There are still hundreds of millions, billions of people living in abject poverty around the world. They need electricity. They need electricity they can count on, that they can afford. They need fuel to cook their food on that's not animal dung.
When coal came into the picture, it took about 50 or 60 years to displace timber. Then, crude oil was found, and it took 60, 70 years, and then natural gas. So it takes 100 years or more for some new breakthrough in energy to become the dominant source. Most people have difficulty coming to grips with the sheer enormity of energy consumption.
