Crude Futures National Oil Companies from the Global South in a Decarbonising World

National oil companies (NOCs) hold the majority of global reserves, account for a large share of current production, and provide fiscal revenues that many of the most hydrocarbon-dependent economies in the Global South cannot yet do without. Whether and how these firms reconvert or diversify will make or break the energy transition. Yet they remain strikingly understudied. Most of the available literature has focused on privately owned supermajors, a handful of NOCs from high-income nations such as Norway or the Gulf countries, or isolated case studies framed in financial terms. Crude Futures begins to address that gap.

The report brings together the proceedings of the inaugural seminar of the S-OIL project, held at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao in March 2026. S-OIL is a five-year ERC Advanced Grant research project, led by TNI Associate Fellow Daniel Chavez and co-hosted by TNI, examining the changing role of national oil companies in low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The seminar brought together scholars, oil industry veterans and trade-union strategists from three world regions for two thematic panels that mapped the analytical terrain the project will traverse over its duration.

The first panel takes up the question of whose transition is at stake and on what terms. Contributors engage the contested meanings of just transition, the structural conditions under which decarbonisation either reinforces or disrupts existing inequalities, the failure of climate finance to reach the most vulnerable places, and the difficult question of state power and public ownership. Their exchanges refuse easy resolution: the report presents genuine disagreement, including over whether current dynamics constitute a transition at all and over what role national state enterprises can credibly play.

The second panel moves from analytical frameworks to concrete cases. Each panellist brings distinct institutional positions and regional vantage points to questions of sovereignty, geopolitics, labour, and the limits of market-led decarbonisation. The distinction between "oil-producing" and "oil-extracting" countries captures a tension that runs through much of the discussion, between the developmental imperatives that have historically sustained the oil industry and the civilisational transformation their phase-out would require.

The report concludes with Daniel Chavez's closing reflections, which situate these debates within the project's theoretical framework, rooted in Marxist political economy, the concept of uneven and combined development, and Erik Olin Wright's criteria of desirability, viability and achievability, and insist on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities as the necessary basis for any serious engagement with fossil fuel phase-out in the Global South.

Crude Futures is the first output of a project that will produce comparative case-study research, an international database, a data-driven outlook simulator, a documentary film and a photo-exhibition, academic journal articles and several books over five years. The report is copublished open access by the University of the Basque Country and the Transnational Institute.