Unlike Integrated Oil Companies (IOCs) such as BP(BP), Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A, RDS.B), TOTAL (TOT) and others, National Oil Companies (NOCs) are majority-owned by the state. For example, the Norwegian government is the largest shareholder in Statoil (STO), the country’s largest oil company. The state owns 67% of all outstanding shares of Statoil. Some consider NOCs to be better than IOCs since the ownership interest lies with the states and they are able to use revenues from NOCs to offer many social benefits for everyone in the country.

The following 11 NOCs appeared in the PFC Energy’s Top 50 list for 2009:

1. Petro-China(PTR)
China

2. Petrobras(PBR)
Brazil

3. China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.(SNP)
China

4. Gazprom (OTC: OGZPY)
Russia

5. Rosneft Oil Co
Russia

6. CNOOC (CEO)
China

7. Statoil (STO)
Norway

8. ONGC Ltd.
India

9. Ecopetrol (EC)
Colombia

10. PTT
Indonesia

11. JSC Gazprom Neft (OTC:GZPFY)
Russia

Recently the Insurance Journal published an interesting article on oil spills and some of the issues that are ignored in the mainstream media when discussing BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill.

From the article:

“The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is not simply a random accident. There will be more of these spills to come, as the days of easy oil are over, says an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

“BP and other oil companies have tried to portray this spill as an accident or an aberration, but in fact there are spills on off-shore and on-shore sites around the world, increasingly,” says Bret Gustafson, PhD, associate professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences. Gustafson teaches a course on “Oil Wars: America and the Cultural Politics of Global Energy.”

A rig sank off the coast of Venezuela in May. Last October, a rig spilled oil for two months into the Timor Sea off of Australia. There are recurring spills in virtually every oil region, such as the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon and Nigeria.

“These environmental and public health catastrophes are almost always accompanied by corruption and violence tied to oil activities,” Gustafson says. In the United States, which is more of a consumer than producer of oil, we are generally ignorant about this reality of oil until something like this comes home to roost.”

Rest of the piece can be found here.