The Future of an All-American Corporation: ExxonMobil in the Era of Net Zero

This paper examines how ExxonMobil, an International Oil Company (IOC) emblematic of the oil and gas industry’s global reach and controversial history, has responded to challenges to its future viability emanating from global efforts to reduce carbon emissions and transition to a low-carbon economy. Focussing on the corporation’s strategies, as well as its “narratives” and “visions”, the paper examines how ExxonMobil has presented itself in the past and how it is projecting itself into the future. One twentieth-century narrative is of IOCs as pillars of (capitalist and democratic) Western civilisation, ensuring that the hydrocarbons on which the industrialised world’s material well-being depends keep flowing. Another narrative casts “Big Oil” as neo-colonial villains, controlling global energy markets for the benefits of the West while contributing to political corruption, economic exploitation and conflict elsewhere. Looking ahead, IOCs have been cast as veritable dinosaurs in a changing world, bound for extinction, but also as resilient actors central to our “petro-market civilization”. ExxonMobil is a central actor in this story, and how it seeks to reconcile these narratives and visions about their past and future to ensure its survival as the energy transition unfolds is the key problematic the paper seeks to understand.