Gabriel G. Tabarani
Who runs the global oil industry? For most of the twentieth century the answer was obvious: the “Seven Sisters,”* a tight cartel of Western giants that monopolized everything from drilling rigs to gas stations. They perfected the art of vertical integration, controlling oil from the wellhead to the pump, leaving producer states with scraps. But the Seven Sisters’ empire was cracked open by two revolutions: first, the Soviet Union’s decision to nationalize its oil after 1917 and export it on its own terms; then, the birth of The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the wave of nationalizations in the 1960s and 70s that gave producers a seat at the table.
Fast forward to today, and the picture looks very different. The Sisters have not disappeared, but they now share the stage with a new breed of actors: national oil companies. No one illustrates this better than Saudi Aramco. With a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion and first-half 2025 profits topping $50 billion, Aramco isn’t just an oil company—it’s an empire disguised as a corporation. It produces more crude than almost anyone, but more importantly it has copied and expanded the Sisters’ old playbook. It refines, ships, and markets fuel on nearly every continent. It churns out plastics and synthetic rubber. It owns pipelines, petrochemical complexes, and stakes in Asian refineries. When analysts talk about “vertical integration,” Aramco might as well be the dictionary entry.
This makes Aramco the anchor of what the professor of political economy and global development at the University of Exeter, Adam Hanieh, calls the “East-East hydrocarbon axis”—the dense flows of crude and refined products that now bind the Gulf and East Asia more tightly than ever. China, Japan, and South Korea are no longer just buyers; they are partners in massive joint ventures that lock in demand for decades. In this corridor, Aramco’s reach sometimes surpasses ExxonMobil or Shell, both of which look like regional players by comparison.
And yet, despite the rise of these new titans, the United States still sits at the system’s center. Washington’s dominance is not measured simply in barrels produced, though America is now the world’s largest producer. It is measured in the soft power of the dollar, the hard power of aircraft carriers, and the institutional muscle of Wall Street. Oil is still priced in dollars. Gulf sovereign wealth funds remain tethered to U.S. markets: Abu Dhabi’s fund alone keeps more than half of its portfolio in dollar assets. And the American arms bazaar continues to flow: between 2020 and 2024, one-fifth of all global arms sales went to the Gulf, with three-quarters of Saudi Arabia’s weapons imported from the United States. That is not just defense; it is the glue of a strategic relationship in which oil and security are inseparable.
China, by contrast, offers trade, investment, and technology but not protection. It cannot fly jets over Riyadh or guarantee sea lanes through Hormuz. The Gulf monarchies know this, which is why their relationship with China looks like an economic embrace but a military arm’s-length handshake. They are hedging—deepening their petrochemical partnerships in Asia while still underwriting America’s defense contractors and treasuries.
What this creates is a peculiar kind of multipolarity. Aramco reigns supreme in scale. The United States rules in finance and firepower. China locks in consumption and infrastructure. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell cling to their North Atlantic heartlands, still powerful but no longer unrivaled. None of these poles can fully disentangle from the others. Gulf crude flows east, but Gulf money flows west. Chinese refineries run on Saudi oil, but the revenues are parked in Manhattan.
The industry’s greatest irony is that just as these blocs consolidate their grip, climate change is turning their triumph into a trap. The very infrastructure that secures their power—pipelines, LNG terminals, petrochemical complexes—is hardwiring fossil fuels into the global economy at the precise moment emissions must plummet. Projects like the Belt and Road or the India–Middle East–Europe corridor are celebrated as the arteries of future trade, but in practice they are veins pumping hydrocarbons into the mid-twenty-first century. What looks like dominance today may look like self-inflicted obsolescence tomorrow.
Even petrochemicals, touted as the next growth frontier, are showing cracks. Tariffs have sparked gluts, prices are sagging, and profit margins are shrinking. Aramco, Exxon, and Sinopec alike are being squeezed. Some analysts whisper about looming consolidation. For all their size, even giants can stumble when demand projections and political headwinds collide.
So who really dominates the global oil industry? The truth is nobody holds unchallenged sway. Aramco is the heavyweight champion, but it boxes in a ring built by the United States and increasingly shared with China. Western majors are still wealthy, but no longer imperial. What exists now is not the hegemony of the Seven Sisters but a tangled web of interdependence: Gulf crude tied to Asian consumption, Asian growth tied to Gulf capital, Gulf capital tied to American finance, and all of it tied to a fuel that threatens the climate system itself.
The question, then, is not simply who dominates, but for how long. If climate disruption accelerates, if regulations bite harder, or if renewables finally scale up, the vertical integration that made Aramco and Exxon so mighty could turn into a stranded monument to a fading age. The true future dominators may not be those who extract the most barrels, but those who can pivot fastest—using oil’s enormous rents to build the foundations of a post-oil economy.
Until then, the global oil industry is less a throne occupied by a single ruler than a precarious three-legged stool. One leg in Riyadh, one in Washington, one in Beijing. For now, it holds. But how long before it tips?
- The “Seven Sisters” were a cartel of major oil companies—Esso (Exxon), Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Gulf Oil, Shell, and BP—that dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-20th century until the rise of nationalized oil-producing countries.
This article was originally published in Arabic on the Asswak Al-Arab website
