ConocoPhillips

By its own account, revenue comes mainly from selling crude oil, with natural gas, natural gas liquids and other products such as bitumen and liquefied natural gas making up the rest, sold mostly in one-time transactions priced against external market indices rather than prices it sets itself, and generated mostly within the United States. It has recorded a profit every year CompanyGraph has recomputed from its financial statements.

Scale in this kind of business usually comes from replacing and adding production through large, multi-year capital projects, such as the Willow project in Alaska and new liquefied-natural-gas capacity in Qatar and on the U.S. Gulf Coast that the company's own disclosures point to, rather than from lighter-weight expansion; CompanyGraph's own analysis of its financial history also shows revenue compounding upward over recent years while gross profit and net income have moved the other way year over year. It is one of the larger companies CompanyGraph maps as running this kind of system, so this way of scaling is a common structural position within that population rather than a distinctive one.

By its own account, it depends first on its own and joint-venture reserves for the hydrocarbons it sells, supplemented by third-party and spot-market purchases, and on outside-controlled gathering, processing, transportation and pipeline capacity, specialized equipment and, at its Surmont oil sands operation in Canada, steam and outside-sourced diluent to prepare bitumen for transport. It also names joint-venture partners who operate or hold votes over shared projects, and outside contractors, service providers and third-party cloud and information-technology providers, as dependencies in its own disclosures.

By its own account, its buyers are other businesses rather than individual consumers, including gas and power utilities, large industrial companies, other oil and gas companies, distribution companies and marketing firms that resell what it produces, with long-term liquefied-natural-gas agreements naming Sinopec and Kansai Electric Power Co. as buyers from its Australian joint venture. Its own disclosures also show that a single customer relationship, such as one pipeline company, can be large enough on its own to be a meaningful share of consolidated revenue.

The company describes its own position as being among the world's leading exploration-and-production companies by production and reserves and among the larger providers of liquefied-natural-gas liquefaction technology by installed capacity, pointing to its geological and engineering research, experience, portfolio-management analysis and safe operation of its properties as what it competes on. CompanyGraph cannot confirm that these capabilities are hard for others to copy: it maps a large number of other companies running the same underlying kind of system, so this is structurally a common position rather than a rare one.

By its own account, most of what it sells moves through commodity contracts shorter than a year, priced against external market indices the way most commodities are, which structurally leaves buyers free to move between suppliers rather than bound to this one. Set against that, its disclosures also point to a smaller part of its business running on much longer-dated agreements, including contracts that extend to the end of a field's producing life and liquefied-natural-gas sales agreements that commit specific international buyers for a very long term, binding those buyers and volumes far past what a typical commodity sale would.

In its own risk disclosures, the company names failing to replace the reserves it produces as one of the first limits on its growth, alongside political and regulatory hurdles, long project lead times, permitting and construction delays, limited access to processing and transport capacity, diluent availability, and competition for materials, equipment, services and skilled people. This matches a general pattern CompanyGraph looks for across businesses built on extracting a resource that depletes with every unit produced, where continuing to produce depends on continually replacing what has been taken out, though that broader pattern is applied across this kind of business generally rather than measured specifically for this company beyond what it discloses itself.

By its own account, the risks it names first are sustained or volatile low commodity prices and the possibility of failing to replace the reserves it produces, and its disclosures show that a single customer relationship can be large enough on its own to matter at the consolidated revenue level, that some production and projects run through joint ventures where outside partners control operating decisions or hold votes it does not fully control, and that it depends on outside-owned gathering, processing, pipeline and diluent-supply capacity to reach market. Its own disclosures also show legal and political exposure tied to specific jurisdictions, including contamination and erosion claims, a federal decommissioning order, and an unresolved effort to collect on an arbitration award over assets expropriated in Venezuela.

Its own filings name the regulators and statutes it operates under, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, European and Canadian carbon-pricing and emissions regimes, and the permits, production-sharing contracts and exploration licenses each operating country requires, alongside disclosed exposure to government sanctions, tariffs and possible restrictions on exporting the oil and gas it produces. By its own account, the pressures it names first are volatile or prolonged low commodity prices and the risk of failing to replace what it produces, followed by competition and the cost of reducing its own operational greenhouse-gas emissions.