Give me some examples of international companies that use oil.?

Question

I need to write a report on the oil industry and need to find out about all those companies that use oil.

Answer 1

Every company on the planet directly or indirectly uses oil. I would imagine that you are looking for companies that directly use oil.

Crude oil is sticky brown or black hydrocarbon that is pumped from the ground. By itself, it's not very useful as it cannot be directly used for many applications. Crude oil is a very long hydrocarbon chain, which is then broken down into smaller molecule chains - each with their own properties. For example, gasoline, diesel, propane, butane, naptha, kerosene, bitumen and fuel oil are all refined directly from oil. There are hundreds of other compounds derived from crude oil - primarily used in chemicals, but are used in thousands of other applications (e.g. plastics, synthetic rubbers, epoxy compounds, fertilizers). There are lots of byproducts that are also useful. For example, hydrogen - as in the kind that is used in fuel cells - is most easily and cheaply obtained by refining it from oil. The study of the entire chemistry chain is called "organic chemistry".

So who uses oil? There's the upstream guys, who go find and drill for oil. These guys probably aren't counted as users. Next down the chain are the "producers", who extract the oil. They then pay someone to transport the oil, either by pipeline or ship. The producers then send it to "refiners". Producers are often integrated, so they often own the refineries - but not all the time. Producers are going to be typically the "oil majors" like Exxon Mobile, Royal Dutch Shell, Saudi Aramco, Chevron, et cetera. The downstream guys are going to be the consumers of derivative products.

These are going to be the key industries (and who owns them)
1) Consumer automotive (oil majors, independent stations, lubricant companies)
2) Jet kerosene suppliers (airports)
3) Bunker fuel (ports)
4) Chemical (very wide customer base, but some example include Dow, BASF, Bayer)
5) Plastics companies (literally thousands and thousands of companies).
6) Construction companies (bitumen and asphalt companies)
7) Propane/butane companies (barbeque cannister companies, heating gas companies)
8) Ethane/Methane (natural gas companies)
9) Electricity (many electric plants are fuel oil fired or powered by natural gas - which can be refined from oil).
10) Heavy industry (e.g. steel is a heavy user of fuel oil to refine steel).
11) Consumer industry (i.e. almost everything you see has oil derivatives in it). Let's take my desk. The first thing I see is a jar of pens. The ink in my pens is oil based, the plastic housing it is oil based, the pigment in the pen is oil based. The metal on pen clip used oil derivatives. The metal can it is housed in used oil. The adhesive for the label on the sticker that I'm too lazy to take off of it is based on oil. The paper in the sticker might use oil to cook the paper pulp to make the paper. You get the point... everything uses oil.